PREMIERE.COM'S MOVIE REVIEW (posted 4/13/07)

Everything's Gone Green exists in that familiar Douglas Coupland Never-Never Land populated by twentysomethings facing cubicle farms, McJobs, ambitions vaguely stilted, and shoddy romances revealed under quasi-Ikea lamps. There's a whole genre of recent movies about middle class North American folks going through quarter-life (as opposed to mid-life) crises — Garden State, Lonesome Jim, Elizabethtown, even Me and You and Everyone We Know — but who better to try his hand at it than the writer who named the zeitgeist with 1991's Generation X? Green, the first feature Coupland's written, doesn't really make any innovations to the Almost 30-Underachievers genre, but it's an endearing, solidly-crafted example.

Ryan, played sweetly by Paulo Costanzo, is a cute-but-kinda-dorky perpetually bemused 29-year-old desk jockey fired from his anonymous office gig when the HR folks discover he's been writing bad poetry about how much he hates his job. The very same day, his girlfriend leaves him, and his post-nuclear family is thrown into turmoil over a lost lottery ticket. Before the week is out, the ticket situation has landed him a job writing (and taking photos) of winners for the supermarket lottery magazine. By this point, the film has fully lifted off into the slightly surreal blue-skies-and-irony of Douglas Coupland World ™. Just as in his excellent recent novel, JPod, Ryan's dad is a restless Boomer forced into early retirement. Also shades of JPod, Mom 'n' Dad jovially join the pot-growing business. And just as in many Coupland books going back to Generation X itself, dead-end office jobs, wistful almost romances, and pop culture figure prominently. Here we even have the requisite jangly indie rock soundtrack (cf. Garden State) whose titles could serve as chapter headings when this movie hits DVD: Jason Collett's "Hangover Days," Final Fantasy's "The CN Tower Belongs to the Dead," Andre Ethier's "Little Saddy."

Just about halfway through the film's spritely hour-and-a-half stroll though Ryan's life — especially director Paul Fox's surprisingly sumptuous vistas of Vancouver cityscapes as Ryan drives around thinking, encountering a beached whale, moving house, &c. — some semblance of a forward-moving plot kicks in. Ryan reluctantly gets involved in helping his crush, Ming's (the very good Steph Song) suspiciously well-off boyfriend launder money through the lottery winners. But that's not were the movie's heart is; its heart is in Coupland's bittersweet Vancouver meander through a banal-but-slightly off-kilter life that's not what our guy ever imagined "when I grow up" would be like.

—Jessica Letkemann