Film Review: "Radiant City" Fails To Shine

"Among the many documentaries at this year's Vancouver International Film Festival is an 86 minute feature that takes on one of the most important issues before our cities: suburban sprawl. The distractingly named Radiant City was jointly written and directed by feature director Gary Burns (Kitchen Party, A Problem With Fear), and CBC radio talking head Jim Brown, both of Calgary -- Canada's largest city by area, and a place that knows something about sprawl.

The [film's] critique of suburbia here is generic, maybe too much so, with the film-makers rounding up a squad of talking heads, planting them beside freeways, in schoolyards, and alongside real estate billboards that could be anywhere, then letting them rip.

Among Radiant City's opinionizers are American urban journalist William (sic)Howard Kunstler, Calgary architecture school head Marc Boutin, even the terminally over-exposed Toronto philosopher of everything, Mark Kingwell.

Pointedly, the film does not show the too-cute, mock-New England Calgary suburb of Mackenzie Towne -- for which he and wife Elizabeth Playter-Zyberk provided the initial idea fifteen years ago. If the future of suburbia is mild versions, like Mackenzie Towne, of New London, Connecticut or other faves from Duany and Zyberk's student days at Princeton, we are in real trouble indeed."