The Pedestrian (2003) Reviews

• Bad.

  Yablo2005-02-22

  I don't care where this was shot or how nice the director was to his students. This movie is plain bad. Gordon Currie gives one of the least involving performances I've seen in a long time as a totally unconvincing as a foot fetishist traffic light controller guy. A great deal of that fault can lie with writer/director Trevor Cunningham; he actually gives Currie lines like 'Excuse me, I have to go powder my nose.' Currie also has a scene where he masturbates in front of some sort of a shoe-shrine that he has created from shoes by mail. I have no idea why this scene was included in the film. Nor do I fully understand the scene where he dresses up like Pulp Fiction's The Gimp to spy on his pseudo-girlfriend having a drink with a brutally developed shoemaker. The film isn't worth exploring much more beyond goofy minutiae like that. It's an endless collection of poorly acted, poorly lit scenes that go on and on or stop abruptly. And the ending betrays pretty much everything that came before and uses a terrible, but inevitable, ploy where Currie's character uses his connections as a traffic light operator to stop the woman he loves from leaving town on "the only road that leads to the airport." Yeeeeeeeeeees. I respect how difficult it is to put a production together and I admire the mere fact that this film exists. That's pretty much all I admire. For a much better Canadian film about foot fetish, try Harry Killas' short 'Babette's Feet', which I believe in available on iFilm.