Excellent adaptation.

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

The acting in this movie is really good.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

In Calender, Egoyan succeeds in capturing how recollection and enlightenment meet in order to have an understanding of personal memory and collective consciousness, it goes on to show our inherent inclination towards struggling against the erasure of personal and cultural traumatic human history. The collapse of bonds with Armenia, this national umbilical cord can be seen as a reproduction of essential element of trauma of the Armenian people which is their violent separation from their homeland and their families at the beginning of the twentieth century.Language is a very important element of this film, Egoyan cleverly refuses subordinating other languages to the global hegemony of English by not using subtitles and leaving other languages untranslated, doing so he is also able to preserve the otherness of languages and cultures and give them a voice when they might otherwise be silenced. More importantly, Egoyan having lived as an immigrant in Canada, reproduces in the viewer who does not understand them a feeling of alienation and disorientation. This sensation is a crucial part of the Egoyan aesthetic, it allows him to create a crisis of meaningfulness from which new meanings, and new ethical orientations can be generated. The film's otherness is also in its accented nature, his film's language is not that of a native speaker, it comes from certain looks, styles and music as well as themes of absence, loss, love, abandonment, alienation, obsession and seduction. Egoyan has said that" one of the advantages of working with the Armenian language or Armenian culture is that it is for most people, not something that can easily be identified, and that allows me the luxury of being able to treat it almost on a metaphorical level".For the photographer in Calender whatever he does is bound with economy, he is constantly insisting on the presence of capital in numerous occasions. To Him the pagan temple looks like a bank, he thinks the guide is talking about the history of the place just to ask for more money in the end, he even asks one of the escorts how much her children cost her and tells the other who is an exotic dancer about his experience of putting money in dancer's dresses.Throughout the film there are repeating scenes of the photographer having dinner with different women, the narrative of these scenes always remains the same. For Egoyan repetition does not function monolithically as a mechanical and numbing recuperation of sameness. Rather, repetition may depict a sense of poetic indifference that discloses in an accumulative way, to indicate the least apparent yet most determining drives of the subject.

Not Atom Egoyan's most 'story-driven' film, but his best from a purely aesthetic/cinematic perspective. His use of non-linear chronology, repeated scenes that slowly give way to understanding, and long drawn out takes that let you really start to feel the moment (how many viewers start to notice the slight differences in the various sheep, or look for their birthdays on the pages of the wall-calendar?) puts this film close to the level of Tarkovsky, Angelopolous, Bresson, etc.While "Exotica" and "The Sweet Hereafter" are, understandably, his better known films (and good ones at that), "Calendar" works even better as the full realisation of theme and emotion using all the elements of cinema working in conjunction.

After watching Egoyan's film several times, and being of a resident of Toronto, a city which trumpets its multi-cultural populace, I picked up on some references in Calendar which maybe others would not have.At one point, the Driver (Adamian), says his two Armenian-descent Canadian passengers (Egoyan and Khanjian) could not properly raise children anywhere but in Armenia. It's an instant dismissal of the fact that the passengers come from a different country; in the Driver's mind, since their ancestry is Armenian, they are Armenian.Later, the Photographer gives uncomfortable answers to his Translator wife as to why he's not moved by his subject matter--the old churches of Armenia. He states that he finds the churches interesting to the eye, but also that he feels little reverence for them culturally or historically. She seemingly cannot fathom why he would feels so; but also doesn't she seem to understand that her husband is Canadian, not Armenian.The most telling references come the end of the film where the Photographer and his final Guest talk about living in a new country. He tells of his difficulties when he, as a child, moved to Canada from Armenia and had difficulty in learning English. The Guest sympathizes with Egoyan, implying that she went through a similar experience, saying she "considers herself Egyptian"--yet BORN and RAISED in Canada! (It's also interesting to note that Khanjian, the Translator, speaks Engish with an accent. The Photographer speaks urbane, Toronto English.) Calendar revolves around the issue that the couple's trip to Armenia provokes a strong response in Khanjian's character, so much so that she discards her country and her husband.Consider the final scene with the Driver: he jokingly acts like a KGB official, and takes the couple's passports.

This is a wonderful little film that I recently saw on a friend's recommendation, knowing virtually nothing about it except that I'd immensely enjoyed Atom Egoyan's "Exotica" and "the Sweet Hereafter". "Calendar" is not nearly as tragic as those two films; it concerns itself with the sadness of the disintegration of a relationship, but there is a subtle comedy to the film as well. The film is an experiment with a very specific, rigid, yet somehow apt structure: the film has twelve segments, one for each page of a beautiful calendar hanging by its photographer's phone. Laced into this structure is the story of the photographer and his wife's trip to Armenia, and the conflict that arises out of their different reactions to being in the land of their ancestry. It's all very well-told, and even though there is an element of inevitability, reinforced by the structure, the film never really strays into the realm of predictability. Finally, there are moments when the film seems to toy with breaking the sanctity of the fourth wall. This goes beyond the fact that the photographer and his wife are actually played by Mr. Egoyan and his wife. It's impossible to describe briefly and without spoiling the humor, though. If you're intrigued, check it out! You'll be glad.