Adding star power one voice at a time
In Focus by Richard Crouse
November 07, 2008

Would you spend money to see an animated movie starring Nicole Jaffe and Henry Corden? Probably not, because you’ve never heard of either of them.

Oh, but you’ve heard them.

Jaffe voiced Velma on Scooby Doo, while Corden vocalized for Fred Flintstone. Their voices are familiar, but not well-known enough for the producers of big budget cartoons like Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa, opening in theatres this weekend.

“If they were doing a half-hour Flintstone show today, they’d still go with me,” said Corden in 1999, “but for a motion picture, even an animated one, they'd go with a celebrity to play Fred, because they need to sell the picture.”

Big-name actors who made their bones in live action have become the norm in modern animation.

Madagascar redux features everyone from Ben Stiller to Jada Pinkett Smith. Somewhere Nicole Jaffe is standing in a bank line waiting to cash her unemployment cheque.

In the old days, Disney frequently used celebrity voices to augment their cartoons — remember Sebastian Cabot in The Jungle Book? — but the trend kicked into overdrive when Robin Williams’s hyperkinetic jabbering stole the show in Aladdin.

It was a tour de force performance and Williams’s star power helped push the box office past $200,000,000, an animated film first.

Marquee actors like voice work for the same reason I like doing my radio show — the hours are good and you don’t have to shave.

Marlon Brando was so taken with the easy money of voice acting he suggested doing the role of Superman’s Jor-El in voice-over, with his onscreen character portrayed as a glowing, levitating green bagel. That one didn’t pan out but he took further audio-only roles, including his final gig performing an old lady voice in the unreleased Big Bug Man.

Other star turns haven’t been so ignoble. Jeremy Irons was positively Shakespearean as The Lion King’s Scar and Orson Welles thrilled a generation of tweens as the voice of planet-gobbler Unicron in Transformers: The Movie.

But too often the big names offer little other than recognizable voices, and that can work against the part they’re playing.

Can you hear James Earl Jones as Mufasa without thinking of Darth Vader? Me neither.

It boils down to bucks —David Schwimmer’s Melman the Giraffe will put more bums in seats than Henry Corden. It’s not about talent, it’s about money. “I hate it but I understand it,” Corden said.

– Richard Crouse is the author of Son of the 100 Best Movies You've Never Seen and film critic for CTV's Canada AM.

Bond knock-offs a genre themselves
In Focus by Richard Crouse
November 14, 2008

This week, you can’t throw a steel-brimmed hat without hitting a billboard or poster for Quantum of Solace. Daniel Craig’s mug is so omnipresent, it’s impossible to get a quantum of relief from his stern but handsome mug.

It seems the whole world has gone Bond crazy, but this is nothing new. James Bond — and whoever is playing the super spy — has always been big news, but there is only so much of him to go around.

That’s why enterprising filmmakers have frequently retooled the Bondian formula of guns, girls and gadgets to attract new audiences.

During the late 1960s wave of Bondmania, Dean Martin staggered through a quartet of spy spoofs based on the literary character Matt Helm, giving new meaning to the advertising tagline “America’s Loaded Weapon.”

Since then, the Bond knock-off business has boomed and 007 wannabes in all shapes and sizes have blossomed. There’s adolescent Bond in Agent Cody Banks, a version for teens called xXx (“Now I know what xXx stands for: Xtremely Xcruciating Xperience” raved one critic) and parodies like Get Smart and Austin Powers.

Wilder still is Operation Kid Brother. In a blatant attempt to satisfy audience’s need for all things Bond in 1967, producers cast Sean Connery’s younger brother Neil as a plastic surgeon and hypnotist recruited by Her Majesty’s Secret Service to thwart the evil crime syndicate Thanatos. He’s called into action, the movie explains, because “his brother is out on a routine mission.”

Wow, perfect casting! Except Neil can’t act. The film flopped so badly it could have been the reason bargain bins were invented, and Neil soon returned to his former job as a plasterer. But Operation Kid Brother does have its pleasures.

Bond alumnus Bernard Lee and Lois Maxwell ham it up alongside From Russia with Love’s Bond girl Daniela Bianchi, and Thunderball villain Adolfo Celi. Better than that is the soundtrack by Ennio Morricone, which unlike the rest of the film, is on par with a real Bond film.

The Connery name will always be associated with Bond, and while Neil (thankfully) retired soon after Operation Kid Brother, other Connerys had a harder time letting the character go.

Sean revived his Bond after a 12-year layoff in 1983’s Never Say Never Again and as a voice in video games — and his son, Jason Connery, played 007’s creator in The Secret Life of Ian Fleming.

– Richard Crouse is the author of Son of the 100 Best Movies You've Never Seen and film critic for CTV's Canada AM.

Bringing the undead to life on the big screen
In Focus by Richard Crouse
November 21, 2008

This week audiences will travel into another dimension: A dimension where vampires and humans fall in love; where bloodsuckers feed on animals instead of people.

They’ll take a journey to a wondrous land where a series of books can become a movie blockbuster. They’re about to cross over into the Twilight zone.

Twilight, for the uninitiated, is Buffy’s worst nightmare. It’s the first in an insanely popular series of books about seventeen-year-old Bella Swan who moves to Forks, Washington and finds her life in danger when she falls in love with ninety-year-old vampire Edward Cullen.

The books are required reading for every teenage girl on the planet and now those undead literary characters are coming to life on the big screen in what will undoubtedly be the weekend’s number one film. Vampires, despite Buffy’s best efforts, are hot again.

Until recently vampire movies were stuck in a rut, duller than a blunt wooden stake. Too often they relied on the age-old conventions of the genre — bloody fangs, holy water and black velvet capes — while every other horror icon was given a makeover.

28 Days Later gave us fleet footed zombies and Ginger Snaps suggested an alternate werewolf back-story but vampires were stuck in gothic Bela Lugosi Land.  The undead were reinvented for the series True Blood, but until recently interesting revisions of the vampire story at the movies were as rare as baked garlic at Dracula’s Diner.  

That’s what makes Twilight and a new film called Let the Right One In so refreshing. The latter is a Swedish movie about Oskar, a bullied twelve-year old boy who finds love and revenge through Eli, a pretty but peculiar girl who is also a vampire.

Relocating the story from Transylvania or a giant gothic castle to a snowbound Stockholm suburb blows the cobwebs off of the traditional vampire tale. The setting is bright white, stark without a gargoyle or coffin in sight.

It’s a curious backdrop for a horror movie and the otherworldliness of the setting adds to the disquieting aspects of the story.  

So if Twilight is sold out your local theatre this weekend, check out Let the Right One In, or, dig a little deeper and blow the dust off of DVD copies of Tobe Hooper’s Lifeforce or The Hunger (David Bowie and Catherine Deneuve as elegantly wasted vamps) or even Blacula for a different take on the vampire myth.

Politicians on film: ‘Yes we can!’
In Focus by Richard Crouse
November 28, 2008

This year may go down in the history books as the year politics became hip again. Barack Obama’s “Yes we can!” vigor reignited America’s political passion, helping to break a forty-year-old Election Day turn-out record and actually get people under the age of seventy to tune into Meet the Press.

That excitement has infected Hollywood as well. This year sees three high profile political biographies hit theatres: W., about the life and wild times of George W. Bush; the soon-to-be released Frost/Nixon; and this week’s limited release Milk, starring Sean Penn as the first openly gay man elected to public office in the USA.

Hollywood has often looked to politics for inspiration. Anthony Hopkins’s portrayal of rubber-cheeked Tricky Dicky in Nixon was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar, as was Raymond Massey’s take on the 16th president in Abe Lincoln in Illinois, and James Whitmore as Harry Truman in Give ’em Hell, Harry.    

Wild in the Streets, a 1968 counter-culture cult film about Max Frost, a multi-millionaire rock star with plans to take over the government, is one of the wilder political “what-if” films.

Frost’s scheme begins with staged riots on the Sunset Strip. Next he spikes Washington’s drinking water supply with LSD and while D.C.’s powerbrokers are hallucinating he gets them to pass a law lowering the age limit for all elected offices to 14. Soon he wins the Oval Office, immediately imprisoning everyone over 30 in concentration camps where they wear dark robes and are perpetually stoned on LSD.

Max’s plan just might land him in trouble, however, when the next generation adopts the new slogan: “We’re gonna put everybody over 10 out of business.”    
Seen through today’s eyes the film is little more than a fun, druggy artifact from the freewheeling sixties, but at the time its message was taken seriously by some in the establishment. At 1968’s Presidential Convention the Mayor of Chicago hired security to protect the city’s water supply from being laced with LSD.

Other unconventional political films include Whoops Apocalypse which sees America’s first female president, played by M*A*S*H’s Loretta Swit, try to avoid World War III and 1964s Kisses for My President which focuses on the tough job of First Husband as he puts a masculine spin on the role of First Lady, hosting women’s groups and garden parties.

A fireball, but no aliens in the Prairies
In Focus by Richard Crouse
December 05, 2008

Recently a giant meteor lit up the Canadian prairie sky. “It was really bright. We weren't really sure what happened ... got up to look out the window, and all of a sudden, we heard this rumbling,” said one witness.

If this happened in a movie, a nerdy lab-coated scientist would say something like, “No telling what kind of meteor it is or what goes on inside of it … it’s been gathering the secrets of time and space for billions of years,” before giant bugs or aliens hatch from the mysterious rock, bringing intergalactic mayhem with them.

Next week a massive fireball will bring Keanu Reeves crashing to earth in The Day the Earth Stood Still, a remake of the 1951 sci-fi classic. In it he plays Klaatu, an ambassador from an extraterrestrial confederation who arrives with a simple message for the people of the third rock from the sun: “If the Earth dies, you die. If you die, the Earth survives.”

All in all, fireballs are usually bad news.

Remember Cloverfield? After a burst of light from the sky illuminated lower Manhattan, a colossal creature resembling a giant sweaty salamander with the mumps laid waste to the city.

In The Day of the Triffids meteors do double dastardly duty. First, a colorful meteor shower attracts worldwide attention, but the light from the shower renders most of Earth’s population blind. Next, spores from the meteors turn into plant-like space aliens. That development leads to my favorite-ever line in a meteor movie.

“Keep behind me,” says hero Tony Goodwin. “There’s no sense in getting killed by a plant.”
Movie meteors aren’t always bad, however. Robert Townsend wrote, directed and starred in Meteor Man about a meek Washington, D.C., teacher who develops superpowers after being hit by a glowing green meteor. Using his newly found abilities he cleans up the streets after a drug lord moves into his neighborhood.

So far there haven’t been any reports from the prairies of alien spores, superhuman behavior or giant beasts terrorizing Brandon, Man., but if movie science is to be believed anything is possible.

According to Paul Frees in The Monolith Monsters you never know when the meteor will make itself known. “Meteors!” he says. “Another strange calling card from the limitless regions of space — its substance unknown, its secrets unexplored. The meteor lies dormant in the night — waiting!”

– Richard Crouse is the author of Son of the 100 Best Movies You've Never Seen and film critic for CTV's Canada AM.

Academy Awards’ no-nunsense films
In Focus by Richard Crouse
December 12, 2008

If Meryl Streep earns an Academy Award for her performance as the formidable Sister Aloysius Beauvier, a nun who confronts a priest after suspecting him of abusing an African American student in Doubt, she will join a short but prestigious list of actresses who have won gold playing nuns.

The first to win an Oscar for portraying a sister was Jennifer Jones in 1943’s The Song of Bernadette; next, Susan Sarandon won for playing Sister Helen Prejean in Dead Man Walking.

Nuns have a long cinematic history and everyone from Ingrid Bergman to Mary Tyler Moore to Eric Idle has donned a habit for dramatic effect. Nuns have flown, sung and even been shipwrecked with Robert Mitchum on a Pacific Island, but my favorite big screen nun is Sister Assumpta in The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys.

The title sounds ripped from the headlines, but is actually taken from a 1994 novel by Chris Fuhrman.

Set in the early 1970s, the film revolves around a group of teenage boys obsessed with comic books. Their ringleader, Tim, played by Kieran Culkin, is a prankster who schemes to get revenge on Sister Assumpta, a joyless, strict nun with a prosthetic leg played by Jodie Foster.

Learning most of what they know of the world from the superhero adventures written by Stan Lee, they believe there are only two types of people — heroes and villains. Sister Assumpta falls into the latter category and becomes the subject of a “blasphemous” comic book drawn by the boys featuring the evil motorcycle-driving Nunzilla.

The guys imagine themselves as the heroes who do battle with Nunzilla’s sisterly minions. Once the comic book is discovered the boys are expelled from school, assured by Sister Assumpta that not only are they not welcome at school anymore, they likely won’t be welcome in Heaven either.

Foster’s Sister Assumpta spits hellfire in every sentence. She plays the sister as a strict disciplinarian who truly believes she is doing the best to save her students from damnation. Her peg leg is just a physical manifestation of her rigid personality. It’s something different for Foster, who pulls it off with aplomb.

For more adventurous viewers, there are nunsploitation movies. Sometimes called Convent Erotica, these movies are not for the easily offended and have titles like Killer Nun and Behind the Convent Walls. Watch them, but don’t forget to say ten Hail Marys afterwards.  

– Richard Crouse is the author of Son of the 100 Best Movies You've Never Seen and film critic for CTV's Canada AM.

Where there's a Will people
In Focus by Richard Crouse
December 19, 2008

Will Smith is the world’s biggest movie star: Nobody can touch him. Cruise jumped the couch, Clooney’s movies don’t make any money and Hanks appears to be in semi-retirement. Only Johnny Depp comes close and he is a distant second.

Last year Big Willie took home $80 million and became the first actor to have eight consecutive movies break the $100 million mark at the box office, but despite all that success a couple of key qualifiers have eluded his grasp.

His home is probably beautiful, but no movie star abode is complete without an Oscar or Golden Globe on the mantle. Cruise has three Globes, Clooney an Oscar and Tom Hanks could start a petting zoo with all his Academy Awards.

Smith has none but it’s not for lack of trying.

He’s best known for playing cops and agents but in his first big screen role, Six Degrees of Separation, he played a gay con man who claims to be the son of Sidney Poitier. The movie earned an Oscar nod for co-star Stockard Channing but nothing for Will’s risky performance.

He says that movie taught him to be totally committed to his roles, adding that he now regrets taking Denzel Washington’s advice not to kiss a man on-screen.

“It was very immature on my part,” he says. “I was thinking, ‘What are my friends in Philly going to think about this?' This was a valuable lesson for me. Either you do it or you don't.”

In subsequent films, the ones that made him a star, he developed the tools that came to define his on-screen persona; the cocky tilt of the head and hipster charm. Those tricks win over audiences but don’t win awards.

Then along came a pair of films that put him on the serious-actor-grid, The Legend of Bagger Vance and Ali. Bagger Vance earned poor reviews and even worse box office, but the Michael Mann film about the legendary fighter gave Smith his first Oscar bait lead role.

For the next few years he seemed content to rule the box office, but two collaborations with Italian director Gabriele Muccino — The Pursuit of Happyness and Seven Pounds, in theatres today— have brought him closer to the award’s circle.

“Gabriele Mucchino,” Smith says, “is able to help me create characters that are much different from what I would do on my own.”

Pundits called their first collaboration Pursuit of an Oscar Nomination and you can almost sense him groping for the award in Seven Pounds, but I fear he doesn’t stand a chance this year against Sean Penn, Mickey Rourke and Frank Langella.

He may just have to settle for world domination and leave the awards for the poor folks.

– Richard Crouse is the author of Son of the 100 Best Movies You've Never Seen and film critic for CTV's Canada AM.

Movies that take you beyond the mat
Richard Crouse, for metro canada
26 December 2008

The great irony of good wrestling movies is that real, honest-to-God wrestlers rarely ever star in them. This week Mickey Rourke gives a tour-de-force performance in The Wrestler as Randy the Ram, an over-the-hill wrestler; a once famous athlete capable of packing Madison Square Gardens, now a raggedly collection of shin splits, aching bones and broken spirit that should earn him an Oscar nod. Aha, you say. Rourke used to be a boxer. Isn’t that the same thing? Well, according to director Darren Aronofsky not so much.

“It’s easy to think it was easy for Mickey to do this because of his experience in the ring but I think it was twice as hard because he had to unlearn everything,” he said. “In boxing the whole game is to hide your emotions and moves.

“When you do a punch in wrestling you want people in the bleachers to see it happening three minutes before it comes. So for Mickey to ham it up like that when he was taught to move as a boxer was a real challenge.”

Rourke is perfect for the role; his face looks like he’s been beaten up by an angry plastic surgeon, and his slouching walk belies years of extreme physical abuse. But not all actors to play wrestling’s “faces” and “heels” have been so well cast.

Flesh, a little known John Ford film from 1932, sees Wallace Beery — former silent movie and musical theater star — play a waiter-turned-wrestler who discovers his wife is having an affair. Even stranger casting than that was spindly Henry Winkler — The Fonz — as an unemployed actor who becomes a wrestling star (alongside Herve Villechaize) in the comedy The One and Only. Then there’s Blood & Guts a 1978 film which sees aging wrestler Danny O’Neil, played by William Smith, wear a silver 10 gallon top hat in the ring.

To get the real deal on wrestling check out Beyond the Mat, a documentary from comedy writer and wrestling fan Barry Blaustien. His behind the scenes look at the pro circuit and its stars works on an almost Shakespearean level, revealing the tragedy, rage, humor, violence, intrigue, hucksterism and real human stories of the sport.

It’s a movie that should be placed alongside Pumping Iron and When We Were Kings as movies that uncover the private side of sports entertainment. We all know wrestling is fake, but after seeing Beyond the Mat it seems a little more real.

– Richard Crouse is the author of Son of the 100 Best Movies You've Never Seen and film critic for CTV's Canada AM.

What came first Tom Cruise or the smile?
Richard Crouse, for metro Canada
2 January 2009

Valkyrie looks like a standard issue Tom Cruise movie with the usual explosions, intrigue and wild action. The missing key element is his megawatt smile. His Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg is so stern faced he makes the expression challenged Buster Keaton seem riotously animated by comparison.   

If Helen of Troy was the face that launched a thousand ships then Tom Cruise has the smile that sold a million movie tickets. Wide and toothy it stretches the full breadth of his face as a pearly-white physical manifestation of his movie star charisma. Like Jimmy Durante’s nose Cruise’s grin is his most distinctive feature and the focus of his public persona.

In the beginning it lit up his face with the optimism of a young man for whom things came easily. The smile debuted in a Risky Business scene where he recruits clients for his new business. There it was a charming non-aggressive symbol of his self-assuredness.

The eighties saw the lopsided grin become a pop culture icon. It shone from the cockpit of his Top Gun F-14, gave Paul Newman’s baby-blues a run for their money in The Color of Money and reflected off the Stoli bottles in Cocktail. In each of these films the smile is 90% of the performance.

Post-Cocktail Cruise seemed to realize that serious actors don’t have gleaming smiles. A series of tight lipped Oscar-bait performances followed—Rain Man, Born on the Fourth of July, A Few Good Men and The Firm—which kept the smile under wraps.

Cameron Crowe was the first director in almost a decade to realize that the smile is Cruise’s strongest suit. In 1996’s Jerry Maguire the smile is a romantic tool, revealing both heartbreak and earnestness.

The smile’s most natural performance to date is in Magnolia. As the inspirational guru of the “Seduce and Destroy” technique Cruise handed in the best performance of his career because he understood the character’s innate charisma.

The villain characters of The Last Samurai and Collateral show the smile’s emotional range. The smile is still there, but now it’s menacing. For example Vincent, the hit man in Collateral, uses an ominously icy smile when he’s about to hurt people.

In one form-or-another the smile has been front and center in all of Cruise’s biggest hits. It’s a distinguishing mark that became a trademark and without it Valkyrie just doesn’t feel like a Tom Cruise blockbuster.

– Richard Crouse is the author of Son of the 100 Best Movies You've Never Seen and film critic for CTV's Canada AM.

Walking down the aisle: Weddings are a movie staple, can define tone of film
Richard Crouse, for metro Canada
January 08, 2009

Since the beginning of filmed entertainment, 25,367 weddings have been portrayed on the big screen.

OK, I just made that number up; it’s probably way more than that. It seems the only thing people enjoy more than going to a wedding is seeing a wedding on the big screen. At least that’s what the producers of this weekend’s Bride Wars are banking on.

Weddings are a movie staple and as Katrina Onstadt pointed out on cbc.ca, they can define the tone of the whole film. “(A) movie that starts with a wedding will always be gloomier than that which ends with one” she wrote.

It’s an astute observation. Comedies tend to build up to the big ceremony while dramas often use the walk down the aisle as a starting point for conflict. The elaborate wedding sequence that kicks off The Deer Hunter is the opening salvo in a movie Roger Ebert called “a progression from a wedding to a funeral.” Once again, the going gets grim after the I dos.

Probably the most famous wedding in film history, though, is one that never gets to the vows. The wedding scene at the end of The Graduate is a classic but the scenes that make it memorable weren’t shot as originally planned.

Director Mike Nichols originally intended for Benjamin (Dustin Hoffman) to loudly bang on the church windows to disrupt the wedding between his love, Elaine (Katharine Ross), and her intended, but in rehearsal the windows rattled so ominously someone panicked and yelled, “Everybody out!” Hoffman suggested spreading his arms out and cautiously tapping on the glass with open hands. “The clincher,” Hoffman said, “was the reviews all saying this was Benjamin’s Christ moment. It was a fix. That’s all it was.”

In a subtler, but equally memorable, moment, Elaine and Benjamin dash from the church, laughing, fleeing convention toward an unsure future. Then, suddenly, they stop laughing as though the consequences of their actions have just sunk in. It’s a powerful moment that caps a terrific movie, but again it wasn’t planned. As they shot the scene Nichols was so overbearing the two actors instinctively clammed up and sober expressions appeared on their faces. In post-production, Nichols liked their transition from cocky confidence to uncertainty so much he kept it in.

Ironically, when the film opened in Portugal censors felt the ending set a bad example for kids and clipped the last few minutes. That version ended with Elaine obeying her parents and marrying the blonde frat boy. Portuguese audiences may have missed the whole point of the movie, but at least were treated to the thing most paid to see — a big wedding scene.

Richard Crouse is the author of Son of the 100 Best Movies You’ve Never Seen and film critic for CTV’s Canada AM.

The evolution of 3-D
Richard crouse, for metro canada
16 January 2009

Hollywood hotshot Jeffrey Katzenberg thinks 3-D movies are the future of big screen entertainment. New eye-popping pictures will be, he says, “the single most revolutionary change since colour pictures.” He’s not alone. George Lucas is converting the entire Star Wars saga into 3-D and Maple Pictures is releasing My Bloody Valentine 3-D this weekend, a remake of the 1981 slasher classic, but with effects that appear to pierce the screen.

This isn’t the first time Hollywood has looked to 3-D to help fill empty theatres. June 1915 saw the first screening of 3-D films before a paying audience but the results were less than boffo.

Since then 3-D technology has greatly improved — the shimmering lake effect replaced by effects that broke the fourth wall — but audiences have yet to fully embrace the experience. In the past the problem was the uncomfortable cardboard glasses that made the wearer resemble a member of Devo dressed for Halloween, but audiences likely would have accepted the dorky glasses if the movies had been better.

The novelty of props flying off the screen wears thin when there’s no story, something director André De Toth realized. Perhaps it’s because he only had one eye and couldn’t see the 3-D effects he used in House of Wax that he concentrated on plot rather than flashy effects. The resulting movie about a wax museum proprietor whose subjects look a little too lifelike earns the ultimate stamp of approval for a 3-D flick — it’s enjoyable in 3-D and 2-D.  

The best known 3-D films generally are in the horror genre but there are 3-D films of all shapes and sizes.

In 1895 L’arrivée du train, a crude one minute 3-D film of a train gliding past the camera’s lens and pulling into a station was so realistic it caused unsophisticated audience members to run from the theatre in a panic. Nobody ran from the theatre when Kiss Me Kate debuted, but because the 3-D run of the film was limited, those seeing it in 2-D were perplexed when actors repeatedly threw things at the audience.

To sum up the enduring appeal of 3-D Katenberg paraphrases an old cliché.

“There is that old cliché that a picture is worth a thousand words,” he says. “Well, a 3-D picture is worth 3,000 words.”

Richard Crouse is the author of Son of the 100 Best Movies You’ve Never Seen and film critic for CTV’s Canada AM.

Saving Brendan Fraser
Richard Crouse, for Metro Canada
23 January 2009

Critics used to love Brendan Fraser. Early on Roger Ebert called him “subtle and attuned” and Barbara Ellen in The Times raved that he was “a revelation — so measured, suave and intrinsically watchable.”

That was then. This is now.

Lately the tone of his reviews has taken a turn. “Noticeably uninvolved” and “worn out” are just two descriptions of his current work in movies like The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor. One blogger even wrote, with simple hatful eloquence, “His face makes me angry.”

I thought of this as I watched Inkheart. A big budget fantasy adventure, it encapsulates everything that’s wrong with Fraser’s career. It’s another forgettable performance in an unremarkable movie that allows the premise and the CGI to overshadow everything else. According to avclub.com in recent years this guy has spent so much time in front of a green screen “his children probably have traces of CGI in their DNA.”

Of course Fraser would counter that he’s not making films for the critics, but judging by the gross of the last Mummy movie, he’s not making them for audiences either. But let’s put the snarkiness aside for a moment and remember a time when Fraser was actually considered a real actor. Years before he discovered the financial benefits of emoting in front of a green screen he made small, interesting character driven films.

For example in Gods and Monsters Fraser played Clay Boone, a young straight ex-Marine who forms a bond with James Whale, the elderly gay director of Frankenstein played by Ian McKellen. Fraser’s take on Clay is complicated but sympathetic as he forms a platonic relationship with the older man who becomes the father figure he never had. In this film Fraser holds his own against the masterful McKellen.  

The Quiet American sees Fraser as Alden Pyle an idealist who must learn to deal with moral ambiguity. Again his work is well crafted and thoughtful.

Further acting high points include the image obsessed District Attorney in Crash and Journey to the End of Night’s Paul, a degenerate gambler who double-crosses his father and tries to run off with the cash.
Not since Orson Welles voiced commercials for a frozen pea company has one actor squandered his talent so flagrantly, so let’s remember Fraser for the good ones—the ones listed above and also 1997’s Still Breathing—and hope that he gets over his green screen addiction sooner rather than later.

Richard Crouse is the author of Son of the 100 Best Movies You’ve Never Seen and film critic for CTV’s Canada AM.

Rom-com: Lights, camera, lock lips
In Focus by Richard Crouse
January 30, 2009

More than any other film genre romantic comedy suffers from a bad case of predictability. How many times have we seen two unlikely people beat the odds to become a happy couple by the time the credits roll? Dorky Harry meets beautiful Sally. Pretty Woman of the Night seduced by suave rich guy.

It’s déjà vu all over again.

The trick to making a good rom-com is to make the journey — how the characters wind up locking lips at the film’s end — interesting.

New In Town, the latest from Renée Zellweger does this by moving the action out of New York, where all great romantic comedies are set, to Minnesota.

This location twist is often used in the most common type of romantic comedy, the trademarked Drew Barrymore rom-com. On film Drew has fallen in love in Hawaii (50 First Dates), Boston (Fever Pitch) and everywhere in between.

The breakdown for a Barrymore romance is simple. Act One sees the quirky couple meet. Sparks fly. Act Two has the pair falling in love under unlikely circumstances. Things go great until a confrontation leads to separation. Act Three contains the Grand Gesture. He or she, depending on the movie, moves heaven and earth to win the other back. Insert happy ending.

Barrymore, of course, isn’t to blame for the state of rom-coms. Neither is Kate or Reese. They’re just mimicking an age old formula.

Trouble in Paradise, an Ernst Lubitsch classic from 1932, follows the structure and it could be argued that Shakespeare was the architect of the rom-com.

So why, after half a millennium, do romantic comedies still thrill audiences? I think it’s primal. Deep down we all love a happy ending and while real life relationships might not always work, it’s assured that when Harry meets Sally, it will be forever. That kind of certainty, no matter how unreal, keeps us coming back for more.

– Richard Crouse is the author of Son of the 100 Best Movies You've Never Seen and film critic for CTV's Canada AM.

Stop-motion magic
In Focus by Richard Crouse
February 06, 2009

The textbook definition of stop-motion animation is “to make a physically manipulated object appear to move on its own.”

That’s too mechanical a description for an art form where artists like Ray Harryhausen and Henry Selick create unique worlds on film one frame at a time. At its best stop motion has a timeless quality and otherworldly charm born from the old fashioned process that brings it to the screen. It’s handmade with a level of craftsmanship and soul that not even the most skilled programmer working on the most advanced computer can imitate.

“I think stop motion creates a dream quality,” said Harryhausen. “If you try to make fantasy too real with CGI you bring it down to the level of the mundane.”

There’s nothing mundane about Harryhausen’s 1957 masterwork 20 Million Miles to Earth.

The special effects wiz made his name on this film with his beautiful rendering of the Ymir, an outer space creature brought back to Earth by the first manned flight to Venus.

In the film’s most striking sequence the baby creature, looking like the love child of a bodybuilder and a dinosaur, hatches from a gooey space egg. In a masterful scene the infant rubs its eyes and gets acclimated to his strange new world. Its King Kong meets E.T., showcasing Harryhausen’s trademarks — beauty, compassion and imagination.

It’s one of the films that sparked the imagination of Tim Burton, who once joked that Harryhausen was so good he got more personality out of puppets than most directors could get from real live actors.

Burton confirmed his love of stop motion when he hired Henry Selick — who’s beautifully twisted tale Coraline opens in theatres this week, to direct The Nightmare Before Christmas. The story of the mayor of Halloweentown who kidnaps and impersonates “Sandy Claws” to bring his own brand of goodwill to the world is a wonderfully warped story that is plays like an offbeat Rankin/Bass production.

Even stranger, but just as intriguing is The Cameraman’s Revenge, a 1912 film about a jilted husband whose revenge involves filming his wife and her lover and showing the result at the local cinema.

All characters are played by animated insects and the results are so realistic one critic wondered if Starevich taught bugs to perform for the camera. It’s a bizarre, beautiful artifact from one of the pioneers of the art form.

– Richard Crouse's Movie Show can be seen every Sunday at 6:30 pm on the E! Channel.

Oscar speeches: Shorter is better
In Focus by Richard Crouse
February 13, 2009

Hand me now already the statuette award.” With those dipsy doodle words Emil Jannings became the first Academy Award winner for Best Actor. It was a short and sweet speech which set the template for other loopy acceptance speeches to come—well, except for the short part.

Oscar speeches range from funny (“It couldn’t have happened to an older guy,” said 80-year-old George Burns of his Sunshine Boys win) to inflammatory (Michael Moore’s, “Shame on you Mr. Bush! Shame on you!” outburst) to bizarre (“I am so in love with my brother,” cooed Girl, Interrupted Best Supporting Actress Angelina Jolie) to heartfelt (“You like me!” yelped Sally Fields, “You really like me!”) and egotistical (“I would like to thank my colleagues,” intoned composer Dimitri Tiomkin, “Brahms, Bach, Beethoven, Richard Stra­uss”) but to make a really successful speech there just are four basic rules:

1. Keep it short: The show is long so you’ll be a hero if you keep your speech under 45 seconds. Take the lead from Jane Fonda, Best Actress for Klute, “There's a great deal to say,” she said, “but I’m not going to say it tonight.”

2. Give Thanks: No man or woman is an island, so you have to thank someone (unless you are screenwriter Donald Ogden Stewart who said “I am happy to report that I am entirely and solely responsible for the success of The Philadelphia Story”), but know where to draw the line. Find a happy medium somewhere between Jon Landau who thanked a laundry list of 45 people after Titanic’s Best Picture win and William Holden’s simple “Thank you” after he nabbed Best Actor for Stalag 17.

Also, remember to thank really important people. Don’t be like Hillary Swank who thanked everyone on the planet except her husband Chad Lowe when she won for Boys Don’t Cry.

3. Be memorable: This may be the biggest audience you’ll ever play to so say something unforgettable. More people remember Cuba Gooding Jr.’s exuberant Jerry Maguire speech than any of the movies he’s made since then and De Niro made headlines when he accepted his Best Actor Award for Raging Bull by thanking Jake LaMotta, “even though he’s suing us.”

4. Be Coherent: It’s an exciting moment, but don’t get rattled unless you want to see yourself all over the Net the next day sputtering nonsense. Jonathan Demme must regret using the word “uh” 40 times in his rambling acceptance speech for The Silence of the Lambs, and who knows what Laurence Olivier was thinking when he delivered a head-scratcher of a speech about “the first breath of the majestic glow of a new tomorrow” that left everyone in the audience baffled.

If every winner adhered to these few simple rules Oscar night could be a zippier, fun-filled affair instead of, as Johnny Carson joked, “Two hours of sparkling entertainment spread over four hours.”

– Richard Crouse's Movie Show can be seen every Sunday at 6:30 pm on the E! Channel.

Don’t mess with speeches, readers say
In Focus by Richard Crouse
February 20, 2009

It seems everyone has a favorite Oscar speech. Last week I wrote a column suggesting four ways to streamline the speeches and give the behemoth Academy Awards broadcast some forward momentum. The response from readers indicates the speeches are one element of the show they would rather not see tampered with. Cut the musical numbers, shorten the opening monologue, kill the Price Waterhouse tribute — but don’t mess with the speeches. “The Academy Awards are about four things,” wrote Andrea from Toronto. “The shoes, the dresses, the jewelry and the speeches.”

It’s funny, I thought they were about the movies, but then again, the red carpet’s “glam cams” before the ceremony get more eyeballs than the show itself, so I guess Andrea has a point.

Some like emotional speeches. Gary in Halifax says his favorite Oscar moment came when Russell Crowe accepted best actor for Gladiator. “If you grow up in the suburbs of anywhere,” the actor said, wearing his grandfather’s MBE on his lapel. “A dream like this seems kind of vaguely ludicrous and completely unattainable, but this moment is directly connected to those imaginings. And for anybody who’s on the downside of advantage, and relying purely on courage, it’s possible.”

Others said they liked funny speeches. Brian in Toronto wondered which Oscar acceptance speeches made me laugh.  I immediately thought of Geoffrey Rush, who accepted the best actor award for Shine with the words, “This is for all the people who were happy to bankroll the film as long as I wasn’t in it,” but settled on Paul Williams, the five-foot-two Best Song winner who said, “I was going to thank all the little people, but then I remembered I am the little people!”

Most agreed with me that the “thank yous” are an important component of any acceptance speech, but suggested that less is always more. Jen927 said that winners should just follow the lead of Julia Roberts and simply thank “everybody I’ve ever met in my entire life.”

The final word on Oscar acceptance speeches came from Claudio’s Blackberry who reminded me of host Danny Kaye’s 1952 joke, “The Academy asks that your speech be no longer than the movie itself.”

Amen to that.

– Richard Crouse’s Movie Show can be seen every Sunday at 6:30 p.m. on the E! Channel.

Video game films have evolved
In Focus by Richard Crouse
February 27, 2009

If someone told my 13- year-old self that Hollywood was going to make a film out of my favorite video game I would have been perplexed. I loved Pong, but couldn’t imagine that it would make an exciting movie. Tetris maybe, but not Pong.

Times and technology certainly have changed. The prehistoric blips of light that characterized the video games I played have been replaced by games with storylines and three-dimensional characters called avatars. With improved quality came a proliferation of video game movies like this weekend’s Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li.

Video game movies get a bad rap — critic Nick Schager called House of the Dead an “astonishingly idiotic piece of entertainment”— but not all of them are, as another critic said, “as bad as getting your eyelid caught on a nail.”

The first video game movie was 1982’s TRON, about a hacker abducted into computer world. While it wasn’t directly inspired by a game storyline, the idea came when director Steve Lisberger played my beloved Pong.

“I realized that there were these techniques that would be very suitable for bringing video games and computer visuals to the screen,” he said. “And that was the moment the whole concept flashed across my mind.”

Since then dozens of games have made the leap to the big screen. Mortal Kombat (released in 1995) only scores 24 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes but this Christopher Lambert movie about three martial artists whose skills will decide the fate of the world topped the box office for three weeks, features lots of great cheesy dialogue like, “You can look into my soul, but you don’t own it,” and has some good fight scenes.

Brotherhood of the Wolf director Christophe Gans and Oscar winner Roger Avary transformed the Konami Silent Hill game into an effective Grand Guignol shockfest. Avary’s script kept the game’s theme of survival while adding a story about a woman’s somnambulistic daughter who gets lost in a ghost town called Silent Hill. Gans top loads the film with so many surreal images Roger Ebert said it looks “more like an experimental art film than a horror film,” but the result is a strangely unsettling thriller.

Hardcore gamers will have already seen those adaptations, but fear not, there are some interesting sounding movies on the way. 28 Days Later scribe Alex Garland is penning Halo, and Tom ‘The Sum of All Fears’ Clancy is involved in bring Splinter Cell to the big screen.

Now if only we could pair my favourite filmmaker with my other favourite video game. Imagine: Martin Scorsese’s Tetris!   

– Richard Crouse's Movie Show can be seen every Sunday at 6:30 pm on the E! Channel.

Canada on cutting edge of creepy
In Focus by Richard Crouse
March 06, 2009

Canadians enjoy being scared. The remake of Friday the 13th has pulled almost $4 million out of our collective pockets since opening at number one four weeks ago and My Bloody Valentine 3-D raked in another $3 million recently. This weekend a homegrown horror, Pontypool, the story of a language-based virus that turns people into bloody crazed zombies, hopes to match those numbers.

Canadians, it seems, not only like being scared at the movies, we also like making horror movies. The first Canuck film widely distributed in the United States was The Mask, a low budget 3-D thriller about an archaeologist who believes he is cursed by a mask that causes him to have weird nightmares and even murder people.

The Mask was a cheapie knocked out to cash in the 3-D craze started by movies like House of Wax. Although it missed that movement by a few years it may have inadvertently started a new trend. Since the release of The Mask, which used the tried-and-true 3-D but coupled it with experimental electronic music to heighten its spooky effect, Canadian filmmakers have taken traditional horror concepts and made them their own.

Take for instance Ginger Snaps, the 2000 werewolf story starring Katharine Isabelle as a young girl who morphs into a werewolf. It adroitly plays against the usual horror movie conventions when it comes to portraying teenagers.

The nubile scream queens of Final Destination and Urban Myth are nowhere to be found. Ginger and sister Brigitte are late-bloomers, goth girls who are entering adulthood and experiencing all the traumatic transformations that go along with it. The film’s best piece of dark teenage humour is the use of menstruation as a metaphor for turning into a werewolf.

How many hack comics have joked about the beastly effects of PMS? Ginger Snaps takes those jokes one step further in a wickedly humorous allegory. It’s funny, feminist horror. Other examples of distinctive CanCon horror include Black Christmas, a movie shot in Toronto that set the template for most of the slasher films of the 1980s and ’90s; Cannibal Girls, an early horror comedy, and I could write an entire article on David Cronenberg’s work alone.

So why does Hollywood North have such a unique take on horror? I asked Pontypool screenwriter Tony Burgess.

“Horror fans are always seeking newness and originality and that’s what keeps good horror culture working hard,” he said. “In Canada, films tend to have much smaller budgets than in the States, and that means originality has to be found in the story elements as opposed to buying a giant kit of tricks. It’s the old cliché about imagination thriving under restrictions.”

– Richard Crouse's Movie Show can be seen every Sunday at 6:30 pm on the E! Channel.

Strange awakenings on screen
In Focus by Richard Crouse
March 13, 2009

According to Wikipedia the definition of coma is “a profound state of unconsciousness.” They can be caused by head trauma or any number of phenomenon and they are, as The Smiths sang in their Top 20 hit Girlfriend in a Coma, “really serious.” They are also an unlikely inspiration for all manner of pop culture confections from pop songs — both Guns ’N Roses and Stone Temple Pilots have sung about them — to this weekend’s Miss March, a comedy about a twenty-something who comes out of a four-year coma to find his high-school sweetheart has become a centrefold in Playboy magazine.

The most famous movie to use a coma as a plot device is 1978’s Coma. In this medical thriller Geneviève Bujold is Dr. Susan Wheeler, a surgery resident at Boston Hospital who uncovers foul play after her best friend is scheduled for a routine procedure but instead slips into a coma and dies.

Determined to discover how her friend expired she digs into the hospital’s medical records only to discover dozens of cases of patients who have passed away under similar, mysterious circumstances. Her investigation leads to uncovering the nefarious secret of Operating Room 8.

On the lighter side, a German movie called Good Bye Lenin! sees a Socialist woman wake up from a long coma. East and West Germany have reunited and the world she knew is gone.

After doctors tell her son that any shock to her system could be fatal he takes pains to make her comfortable by recreating her beloved East Germany in their house. It’s a touching film about a son’s love for his mother, but also an energetic satire about the fall of the Berlin Wall.    

Quentin Tarantino used a coma as a way to introduce the Uma Thurman character in his revenge epic Kill Bill. Shot and left for dead at her wedding, The Bride (Thurman) wakes up four years later determined to get bloody vengeance on everyone who double-crossed her. This is a good example of a movie using the “Sleeping Beauty” effect whereby recovery from a comatose state is instantaneous and absolute. In truth, after laying in a coma for years, The Bride would require massive physiotherapy to even begin to bring back the muscle tone required to wage holy hell on her enemies.

Not everyone is happy about the portrayal of comatose patients in movies. One doctor, Eelco Wijdicks of the Mayo Clinic, is pushing for more realism. A recent study published in Neurology magazine showed 39 per cent of viewers would allow portrayals of coma victims on film to influence their decision making should a relative ever become comatose.

“This mispresentation in both U.S. and foreign moves is problematic,” he said.

For a more realistic look at comas check out the drama Reversal of Fortune or, better yet, have a look at Liz Garbus’ documentary Coma which explores the mysteries of the injured brain and its ability to heal by following four coma survivors over the course of a year.

– Richard Crouse's Movie Show can be seen every Sunday at 6:30 pm on the E! Channel.

Buddy movies a favourite
In Focus by Richard Crouse
March 19, 2009

The new issue of Vanity Fair says Paul Rudd may become “this generation’s Jack Lemmon.” It’s a particularly astute observation given the release of this weekend’s I Love You, Man, a buddy comedy co-starring Rudd and Jason Segel. They play an odd couple; BFFs with nothing in common except friendship.

If that set-up sounds familiar, it should. Lemmon was a buddy film pioneer and his popularity helped establish the genre as a top Hollywood moneymaker. As The Odd Couple’s Felix Unger he had the classic buddy picture one-liner, “I’m a neurotic nut, but you’re crazy,” a joke that wouldn’t be out-of-place in the third act of I Love You, Man.

Without Lemmon bouncing wisecracks off a mismatched on-screen pal in The Odd Couple, Buddy Buddy and even Grumpy Old Men, there may never have been a Planes, Trains and Automobiles, Pineapple Express or Swingers.

There is an argument to be made that buddy comedies have always been a Hollywood staple.

It could be said that Abbott and Costello or Laurel and Hardy were making buddy comedies long before Lemmon and Tony Curtis donned dresses and camped it up in Some Like It Hot, but for my money the Billy Wilder film about two musicians who witness the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre and flee the state disguised as women sets the template for the modern buddy movie.

The basic formula is there — colliding personalities, wisecracks and comic conflict between the two actors — but more important than any of that is the chemistry between Lemmon and Curtis. Even though every buddy picture relies on tension between the leads, sparks have to fly between them or the whole thing will fall flat. Brett Ratner, director of Rush Hour, calls great chemistry between actors “an explosion in a bottle” and says it’s crucial to the success of any buddy pic.
Since Some Like It Hot, producers have paired up a laundry list of actors searching for the perfect mix. Lemmon and Walter Matthau were journeymen of the genre, co-starring in six buddy pictures ranging from the sublime — The Odd Couple — to the ridiculous — Grumpier Old Men.

Other less iconic one-off on-screen pals include Danny DeVito and Arnold Schwarzenegger as fraternal twins separated at birth in Twins, Blazing Saddles’ Gene Wilder and Cleavon Little, and Greg Kinnear and Pierce Brosnan as a down-on-his-luck businessman and a has-been assassin in The Matador.       

There are as many kinds of buddy movies as there are kinds of buddies, so why have the movies endured and prospered over the years?

Maybe it’s because they make good date movies. Perhaps men like them because they’re about male bonding and women like to see how men behave when they’re not around. “It’s amazing how different things are when guys are with guys and guys are with women,” says Barry Levinson, director of the classic male bonding film Diner.  

Richard Crouse’s Movie Show can be seen every Sunday at 6:30 p.m. on the E! Channel.

Who’s afraid of carnivals?
IN FOCUS BY RICHARD CROUSE
March 26, 2009

I find amusement parks disturbing; the grinning clown faces, the creepy organ music, the suspicion that the games are rigged.

I always feel like their bright sunny facades are hiding dark secrets. In this weekend’s Adventureland, a new coming-of-age comedy set at a seedy carnival, rancid corndogs and fixed games are the extent of the ominous goings-on but despite the movie’s tame portrayal of carnival life I can’t shake my (possibly irrational) fear of fun fairs.  

Apparently I’m not alone.

Filmmakers have set hundreds of stories on fairgrounds and usually somebody is up to no good, but often the action is a little more extreme than cheating at a ring toss.   

An all-star cast, including Henry Fonda and George Segal, headlines 1977’s Rollercoaster, a compact thriller about a terrorist who is blowing up rollercoasters at amusement parks all over the country. The film is most memorable for its use of the Sensurround process — speakers were placed around the theatre to make your seat shake as the rollercoaster blasted by.

In Westworld, amusement of a different kind can be found at Delos, an adult amusement park split into three sections, Medieval World, Roman World and Westworld, a cowboy themed funland where rich tourists pay $1,000 a day to interact with robots. In this western setting paying customers can do whatever they like to the robots — befriend them or kill them — and all goes well until a computer glitch allows the automatons to fight back. No one is laughing at this amusement park. Directed by Michael Crichton, he riffed on this idea twenty years later, replacing the robots with dinosaurs in 1993’s Jurassic Park.    

Two other movies represent the extremes of amusement park movies. In the campy Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park, the painted rock band must thwart an evil scientist who is cloning humans in his laboratory, hidden deep inside the bowels of an amusement park.

On the other hand Carny, the 1980 Gary Busey film, is so realistic in its look at life on the fair grounds you can almost smell Bozo the Clown’s greasepaint.  

The king of carnival movies, however, is Freaks, a 1932 oddity deemed so disturbing one critic suggested it was only for the “morbidly curious and the psychically sick.” The film’s production manager said most of the preview screening’s audience ran out of the theatre.

“They didn’t walk out,” he said, “they ran out.” What kind of movie could draw this kind of fire from critics and audiences? How about a melodrama that featured real, honest to goodness sideshow performers who unleash a sadistic and nightmarish fury on a pair of circus entertainers who betrayed them?

Bombs! Gun slinging robots! Vengeful sideshow acts!

Think about that on your next trip to the amusement park.

Richard Crouse’s Movie Show can be seen every Sunday at 6:30 p.m. on the E! Channel.

Fanboys... and girls
IN FOCUS BY RICHARD CROUSE
April 3, 2009

I first became aware of fanboys when the hoopla surrounding the release of the original Star Wars hit the 6 o’clock news. The idea of fandom wasn’t new to me but the level of obsession was. I saw footage of people lined up outside theatres; camping in tents to be the first ones through the doors on opening day and it seemed like every fan with an old toilet roll or two had made a light saber or a replica of Darth Vader’s helmet. Those Star Wars supporters opened my eyes to the level of radical fanboy behavior later described as “mindless paroxysms of adoration” in the pages of Fandom Confidential.

Although the term “fanboy” wasn’t officially recognized by the Merriam-Webster Dictionary until last year, as a group fanboys (and girls) have wielded considerable power in Hollywood for the past decade.

King Fanboy, Harry Knowles of the Ain’t It Cool website, went from obscurity to Entertainment Weekly’s “101 Most Powerful People in Hollywood” list and fanboy opinion on the internet actually brought about changes to the script of Snakes on a Plane. With that kind of power it isn’t surprising that these film fans have become film subjects.

Fanboys, a new movie about four childhood friends who break into George Lucas’s ranch to get a first look at The Phantom Menace, is just the tip of the iceberg.

The most famous fanboy movie is 1999’s Trekkies, a documentary focusing on Star Trek subculture. Narrated by Denise (Tasha Yar) Crosby it introduces us to extreme enthusiasts like the dentist whose Star Base Dental office is modeled after a starship and Barbara Adams who showed up to serve on the Whitewater jury dressed in a Starfleet uniform. “I am an officer in the Federation universe 24 hours a day,” she says.

On a different note is We Are Wizards, an upbeat exploration into the cult of Harry Potter, specifically the genre of wizard rock tribute bands who play Potter inspired power pop. Bands Harry and the Potters and The Hungarian Horntails bang out songs like Wizard Rock Heart Throb and I’m a Dragon and I Don’t Care, and while the music is often more passionate than good, the film offers up an interesting glimpse into a little known subculture.

There are many other crazed fan movies—The Dungeon Masters profiles Dungeons and Dragons fanatics; there’s the self-explanatory The Achievers: The Story Of The Lebowski Fans and Cinemania about a community of fervent film aficionados—but the one thing they all have in common is the passion of fans who have found a way to most enjoy being a fan and become involved with the object of their obsession.

Richard Crouse’s Movie Show can be seen every Sunday at 6:30 p.m. on the E! Channel.

Careers on suicide watch
In Focus by Richard Crouse
IN FOCUS
April 09, 2009

Two things in the last 24 hours have gotten me thinking about movie stars who seem determined to throw their careers away.

First, I saw a picture of Lindsay Lohan slumped over in the backseat of a limo. With a tangled mess of flame coloured hair obscuring her face, the former A-lister looked, to put it mildly, a little worse for the wear and tear.

Secondly, I saw Two Lovers, a new drama starring Joaquin Phoenix as a depressed man torn between two women. Watching his work made me wish he would go to the barber, get a shave, stop his infantile flirtation with becoming the new Vanilla Ice and get back to doing what he does best — create interesting, layered characters for the big screen.

Both are accomplished stars — he’s a two time Oscar nominee and just four years ago she won the Superstar of Tomorrow award — and both have recently been added to a long list of Hollywood actors who, through personal temperament, ego or bad management, have allowed their careers to swirl down the drain.

The most cheerless flameout of recent years has to be Tom Sizemore. After a string of arrests, failed drug tests (one involving a prosthetic penis) and a self-marketed amateur porn tape, the once formidable star of Strange Days and Saving Private Ryan has sunk so low even Paris Hilton denies having a one-night-stand with him.

Rupert Everett told the New York Times Magazine that defining his sexuality was career suicide as a leading man. “I wanted to be a movie star,” he said. “I had a difficult set of circumstances to deal with, particularly for a movie career. Being gay. It just doesn’t work.” Times have changed since 1997 when he came out, (just ask Ian McKellen) but the damage to Everett’s career was already done. I’d further suggest making horrible movies with Madonna (remember The Next Best Thing? Its 17 per cent rating at Rotten Tomatoes says it all) was the postscript on his career suicide note.

As difficult as it is to see once promising careers evaporate, like everything in this ever shifting world not even career suicide is permanent.

Just a few years ago Tom Cruise looked like he was, as Film Threat wrote, “a man on a career-suicide mission,” but even after the one-two punch of bad publicity following his couch gymnastics on the Oprah show, insults to Brooke Shields and the release of the fetid Lions For Lambs, Cruise bounced back. He was welcomed back by a Golden Globe nomination for Tropic Thunder, his first major award nod in five years.

Joaquin, Lindsay, Tom and Everett take note.

– Richard Crouse’s Movie Show can be seen every Sunday at 6:30 p.m. on the E! Channel

High school days, there and back
In Focus by Richard Crouse
IN FOCUS
April 17, 2009

In 17 Again a mysterious angel asks Matthew Perry if he would be happy turning back the clock, literally going back in time to high school. “Of course I want to live in the past,” he says, “it was better there.”

Was it really, Matthew?

Often Hollywood romanticizes high school, forgetting that for 98 per cent of us it was a gruelling experience. Here’s a list of keywords that popped up when I let my mind drift back to the dark days of secondary education: acne, the strap, swirlies, girls that didn’t look like Vanessa Hudgens or Ashley Tisdale, smelly lockers, pop quizzes and bullies who thought wedgies were the funniest thing since Woody Allen discovered neurosis.

You couldn’t pay me to relive my teen years, but for decades Hollywood screen writers have been fixated on sending people who survived high school (and all the torments listed above) back into the fray as a way of re-examining their lives.

17 Again gets considerable mileage from Zac Efron (as a 37 year-old man in a teenager’s body) trying to navigate the treacherous waters of high school life. Of course in the end he does alright, because, well, he’s Zac Efron and anyone so impeccably coiffed, so perfectly sculpted is probably going to be able to sidestep the pitfalls of hallway culture, but it’s not always easy heading back to class.

Take for instance Back to the Future. When Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) time travels 30 years from 1985 to 1955 he accidentally prevents his parents from meeting, and jeopardizes his own future. Worse than that, he has to deal with bullies who stuff him in the trunk of a car and the mind-bending idea that his future mother “has the hots” for him.

George Burns doesn’t have it much easier in 18 Again. After swapping bodies with his teenaged nephew (Charlie Schlatter) he discovers how tough the younger man has it in school — he’s bullied by his schoolmates and track coach and ignored by the girl of his dreams. Based on Burns’ 1980 country hit single I Wish I Was 18 Again, this one is more punishing than spending Saturday detention with Emilio Estevez.

It’s not all high school horror, however. In Vice Versa, (another of the age switcheroo movies from the late 1980s along with Big, 18 Again and the atrocious Like Father, Like Son) father and son Judge Reinhold and Fred Savage’s minds magically enter each other’s bodies, causing them to swap identities.

This time the father (in his son’s body) uses his business smarts to outwit school yard bullies and finish an exam in only three minutes.

Now that’s the way to go through high school.

– Richard Crouse’s Movie Show can be seen every Sunday at 6:30 p.m. on the E! Channel

In Focus by Richard Crouse
IN FOCUS
April 24, 2009

Mark Twain understood basing stories on real events wouldn’t necessarily mean a tale couldn’t have its own flights of fancy.

“Truth is stranger than fiction,” he said, “but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; truth isn’t.”

In simpler terms he means that just because something is far fetched doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. For example, if a screenwriter came up with the colourful idea that a homeless man, dressed like a superhero was a musical genius who believed Beethoven was the “leader of Los Angeles” you’d scream “Codswallop!” That is until you see the real life account of Nathaniel Ayers, subject of The Soloist, in theatres this week.

What did Ayers, a schizophrenic man with a larger than life personality, think of Jamie Foxx’s portrayal of him? He was, said Mr. Ayers, “a good Nathaniel.”

Another real life character, John Wojtowicz, who robbed a bank to pay for his lover’s sex change operation, earned $7,500 for the movie rights for his outlandish story. The resulting movie, Dog Day Afternoon, only got 30 per cent of the facts right, Wojtowicz said, but he added that “Al Pacino’s performance has to be called ‘out of sight…’ his characterization was flawless.”

Of course some movies don’t even get 30 per cent of the story right.

Who could forget Morgan Freeman as Joe Clark, Lean on Me’s tyrannical high school principal? On screen armed with a bullhorn and determination he led the rowdy students of New Jersey’s Eastside High School to their highest test scores ever. It was an inspirational movie, but the real life story isn’t quite as stirring. Screenwriters kept the extraordinary aspects of Clark’s story — his use of bullhorns in class and penchant for extreme discipline — but inflated his accomplishments. Despite his notable efforts, test scores didn’t go up.

When asked about the exaggerations in the “based on a true story” account of his life Clark said, “It’s entertainment. And the design of entertainment is to make people happy. There’s enough sadness in one’s life. Once in a while you must extract a reasonable facsimile of glee, as factitious as it may be.”

Sometimes, in the “design of entertainment” the words “Based on a True Story” are completely meaningless. In its opening credits Fargo claimed to be a true story, but it’s actually not. Why make claims to realism then? “If an audience believes that something’s based on a real event,” said co-director Joel Coen, “it gives you permission to do things they might otherwise not accept.”

Mark Twain would have understood.

– Richard Crouse’s Movie Show can be seen every Sunday at 6:30 p.m. on the E! Channel

Full Power to Superhero Spin-Offs
In Focus by Richard Crouse
IN FOCUS
May 1, 2009

Just as Maude spun off from the sitcom All in the Family superhero characters have often left the safety of the ensemble to strike out on their own. This weekend Wolverine leaves the comfort of Professor Charles Xavier’s School for Gifted (read: Mutant) Youngsters to headline his own movie, X-Men Origins: Wolverine.  

It’s not uncommon for television and movie characters to appear in spin-offs, but why does the comic book world seem to spawn more ancillary projects than any other genre?

“Because superhero movies are based on strong characters with rich histories it's almost impossible to fit all the most compelling aspects of these heroes and their key stories into one film,” says watchtowerpodcast.com comic book expert Jeff Moss. “That’s especially true in the case of ‘team’ stories. Even some of the peripheral characters in the X-Men universe have deep back-stories that would make for great movies.”

Among the first of those deep back stories producers tried to exploit sprung from the phenomenally successful Christopher Reeve Superman movies. 1984’s Supergirl is the story of Superman’s cousin Kara Zor-El, (Canadian Helen Shaver in her big screen debut), who leaves her isolated Kryptonian home to reclaim the powerful Omegahedron orb (which can infuse an artificial structure with life) from the evil witch Selena (Faye “I'm considering nothing less than world domination” Dunaway). Unlike its male oriented predecessors it was a critical debacle, but grabbed the number one slot at the box office on its opening weekend nonetheless.

Another female superhero spin-off didn’t even fare as well as Supergirl. Elektra, an offshoot from the 2003 movie Daredevil, should have been a slam dunk for star Jennifer Garner. Coming off the success of her butt-kicking secret agent series Alias, she should have aced the role of Elektra, an international assassin whose dispatches enemies with a deadly dagger but audiences stayed away. On its opening weekend it ranked 5th at the box office and only earned a 34 % rating on Metacritic.

Catwoman, Halle Berry’s Batman spin off, was an even bigger disaster, even ranking on Roger Ebert's list of most hated films. Berry acknowledged the film’s failure when she accepted the Golden Raspberry for Worst Actress. “I want to thank Warner Brothers. Thank you for putting me in a piece of sh**, God-awful movie…”

The ultimate superhero spin off and comic fan geek-out, however, is yet to come. The Avengers, featuring an all-star line-up including Hulk, Iron Man, Thor, Ant Man and Captain America, already has a confirmed released date of May 4, 2012.  

“The idea of a team movie with so many great actors--Hugh Jackman, Robert Downey Jr., and Ed Norton—reprising their roles is too cool not to get excited about,” said Moss.

– Richard Crouse’s Movie Show can be seen every Sunday at 6:30 p.m. on the E! Channel

Lights, camera, upper cut
James Earl Jones played Jack Johnson, the first African-American world heavyweight champion in The Great White Hope.
In Focus by Richard Crouse
IN FOCUS
May 08, 2009

I’m not a boxing fan but I once paid $25 to watch a pay-per-view Mike Tyson fight. It was the mid 1980s and Iron Mike was one of the most famous and controversial men on the planet; a beast who won 26 of his first 28 matches by knockout — 16 in the first round.

Wondering what all the fuss was about I paid my cover charge and watched as the undisputed champ strut into the ring, sized up his opponent and laid him out, unconscious on the floor in less than thirty seconds.

I know $25 for less than a minute of entertainment may sound pricey, but it was a riveting thirty seconds and even now, more than twenty years later, I can remember the look of devastating determination on his face as he massacred his challenger.

It’s an expression that runs across his (now tattooed) face several times in the fascinating new documentary Tyson. The film is a raw, revealing look at this troubled but fascinating man.

“It’s like a Greek tragedy,” he says of the movie, “only I’m the subject.”

Tyson is just the latest boxer to get the big screen treatment. Audiences can’t seem to get enough of stories about the “sweet science” and the individual struggles of these modern day gladiators.

Everybody knows Rocky, Cinderella Man and Raging Bull but digging a little deeper reveals splendid movies that aren’t as well known.

Somebody Up There Likes Me stars Paul Newman (stepping in for James Dean who died just before filming began) as real life middleweight champion of the world Rocky Graziano. The fighter is portrayed as a tough kid from New York’s “lower East Side where both sides of the tracks were wrong” whose violent and callous ways are changed by the redemptive power of the love of a good woman.

It sounds a like a mushy love story — and in fact, inspired Sylvester Stallone when he was writing the Adrian storyline in Rocky — but the fight scenes are brutal and authentic.

Also worth a rental is The Great White Hope based on Jack Johnson, (played by Darth Vader himself, James Earl Jones) the first African-American world heavyweight champ, who ruled the ring from 1908 to 1915. Good fight scenes bolster this powerful look at the racial hostility that plagued Johnson’s career and it’s likely the only boxing movie written in the poetic style of free verse.

There are plenty of others; top of my list are Requiem for A Heavyweight and The Harder They Fall. Both are excellent, and both provide way more than thirty seconds of entertainment for your money.

– Richard Crouse’s Movie Show can be seen every Sunday at 6:30 p.m. on the E! Channel

Courting controversy
IN FOCUS by Richard Crouse
15 May 2009

Catholic League boss William Donohue doesn’t want you to see the sequel to The Da Vinci Code. In a booklet titled Angels & Demons: More Demonic than Angelic, he accuses director Ron Howard of “smearing the Catholic Church.” He’s not alone. Hindu scholars have condemned the movie for “playing with the sentiments of the faithful for mercantile greed” and Vatican officials were purportedly considering a ban of the film.

Howard, usually the most non-contentious of Hollywood directors, seems to be treading on Oliver Stone territory here. He shot back at Donohue in the Huffington Post. “Let me be clear,” he wrote, “neither I nor Angels & Demons are anti-Catholic,” but deep down I think he knows a little uproar can be good for business.

History shows us that movies have courted controversy since the very beginning.

The 1896 film The Kiss rode reviews like, “The spectacle of the prolonged pasturing on each other’s lips was beastly enough in life size on the stage but magnified to gargantuan proportions … it is absolutely disgusting,” to the top of the box office.

Half a century later, another Howard, this time Howard Hughes, directed a movie thought to be so salacious that its “assault on decency” saw several theatre owners arrested for unspooling it.

Completed in 1941, The Outlaw was such a hot potato it didn’t see general release until 1946.

Officially the film is about Doc Holliday and Billy the Kid’s feud over a woman called Rio, but informally it’s about something else entirely — star Jane Russell’s chest. Hughes was so smitten with Russell’s deep cleavage he showcased it in the film and even had a special cantilevered bra designed to enhance the appearance of her 38D bust.

The emphasis on her breasts was too much for the Hollywood Production Code Administration, who demanded changes to the film.

Hughes balked, becoming the first American filmmaker to defy the Production Code and use the resulting hullabaloo to lure audiences into theatres.

The thing that binds all of these movies is controversy. Without it we may never have heard of The Kiss, The Outlaw or even Angels & Demons. In fact, Ron Howard should be dropping Donohue a thank-you note for all the free publicity his campaign against the film has generated.

After all, it was essayist William Hazlitt who said, “When a thing ceases to be a subject of controversy, it ceases to be a subject of interest.”

– Richard Crouse’s Movie Show can be seen every Sunday at 6:30 p.m. on the E! Channel

Skeletons in superstar’s closet
In Focus by Richard Crouse
IN FOCUS
May 22, 2009

If not for the success of Twilight, a movie called Little Ashes about superstar surrealist Salvador Dalí’s relationship with poet Federico García Lorca would likely have languished on the shelf, never to be seen in theatres.

So why is it coming to some theatres this weekend? Well, Little Ashes stars a pre-Twilight Robert Pattison as Dalí in a role decidedly different from the one that made him a star and the film’s producers are hoping to cash in on his newfound popularity.

Pattison joins the list of actors to have films come back from the dead to haunt them. Matthew McConaughey and Renee Zellweger purportedly took legal action to prevent the re-release of a skeleton from their collective closets, Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation and if Nicole Kidman didn’t try and buy up all the copies of BMX Bandits, she should have.

In 1979, Madonna starred in the erotic thriller A Certain Sacrifice as Bruna, a Lower East Side local rooming with three love slaves who help her get revenge on a man who attacked her. Shot on a budget of $20,000 US, the film was forgotten until 1985 when it was released on VHS to coincide with the release of Like a Virgin.

Unhappy about this relic from her past popping up, she screamed obscenities at director Stephen Jon Lewicki, called the film “mediocre” and her performance “second rate.”

Lewicki declined the singer’s $10,000 buyout to keep the film off video store shelves and became a millionaire on the film’s proceeds.

Sylvester Stallone had a similar experience. As a starving actor, he appeared in a sexploitation movie called Party at Kitty and Studs. “I played Studs, who posts a sign on a bulletin board inviting people to come to a party,” he told Playboy.

“About ten people show up and they do a lot of kissing and necking, and that’s about it.”
He says he was literally a starving artist when he made the film. “I mean, I was desperate. That’s why I thought it was extraordinary when I read in one of the trade papers that I could make $100 a day. And the fact that I had to take off my clothes to do it was no big deal.”

Years later when offered the chance to buy the rights and keep the movie out of the marketplace Stallone said no and since then has developed a sense of humour about his embarrassing porn legacy.

When asked about “remake fever” in Hollywood, he said: “My real dream is that the highest-priced actor working today has the huevos to remake the classic Party at Kitty and Studs.”

– Richard Crouse’s Movie Show can be seen every Sunday at 6:30 p.m. on the E! Channel

Respect, or die
In Focus by Richard Crouse
IN FOCUS
May 29, 2009

In Drag Me to Hell director Sam (Spiderman) Raimi returns to his horror roots, reviving a dormant fright genre — the curse film.

There was a time on the big screen when old crones and evil wizards terrorized movie goers with spells, and I don’t mean the cute and cuddly curse of Shrek, I mean heavy hexes like the Maloika and Voodoo juju.

In 1996 a film based on a novel from Stephen King’s alter ego Richard Bachman called Thinner offered a supernatural alternative to Weight Watchers. The story centred on Billy Halleck (Robert John Burke), a sleazebag lawyer charged with vehicular manslaughter after running down an old woman.

The obese legal wiz beats the charge in court, but a far worse verdict awaits him outside the courtroom. Minutes after he is set free a 106-year-old gypsy named Tadzu Lemke (Michael Constantine) touches him, whispering the word “thinner” in his ear.

From then on, Halleck sheds pounds faster than you can say “Jenny Craig.” Using all his lawyerly skills of persuasion he convinces Lemke to lift the curse, but the resolution has tragic consequences for those around him.

A different kind of curse was unleashed in the 2003 Japanese J-Horror film Ju-on: The Grudge. The movie is only occasionally scary, but the idea of a curse, born of great violence, that continues to grow like a virus and visit terror on everyone who comes into contact with it, is undeniably creepy.

Probably the only curse film to be deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” by the United States National Film Registry is Walt Disney’s animated Beauty and the Beast. The story begins with an old beggar woman asking a handsome but spoiled prince for shelter against the bitter cold.

Repulsed by her appearance he refuses her request and payment of a rose. She warns the prince not to judge people by their appearances but he is unmoved. Unmoved, that is until she lays the kavorka on him, turning him into a hideous beast.

The curse, she says, can only be lifted if “he could learn to love another, and earn her love in return” by the time his twenty-first birthday came around and the last petal of woman’s enchanted rose fell to the ground.

Despite their differences in topic and setting these movies all boil down to one universal theme: Lack of respect has consequences. Think of that the next time a 106 year-old witch asks for a favour.

– Richard Crouse’s Movie Show can be seen every Sunday at 6:30 p.m. on the E! Channel

Kids’ shows in the key of Krofft
In Focus by Richard Crouse
IN FOCUS
June 05, 2009

Without Sid and Marty Krofft the ’60s and ’70s would have been much less colorful. The brothers produced trippy Saturday morning kids’ shows like Sigmund and the Sea Monsters, Lidsville and H.R. Pufnstuf. They were mind-bending romps with wild fluorescent puppet characters that looked like hip castoffs from McDonald’s-land and a psychedelic sensibility that had more to do with Reefer Madness than Captain Kangaroo.

Not that I knew that at the time. Later when I realized H.R’s surname was pronounced “puffin’ stuff” the hallucinogenic humor of the show made (slightly) more sense.

The Kroffts were best known for their insane puppet shows, but among their other credits were fantasy series like Land of the Lost, which gets the big screen treatment this weekend. If it’s a hit expect more shows from the Krofft vault to make the leap to theatres.

“I think a number of our titles are conducive to film,” says younger brother Marty, “Like Lidsville, Electra Woman and Dyna Girl; I know there is a big star that wants to be Electra Woman.”

This isn’t the first time the Kroffts have dabbled in film. In 1970 the brothers produced a theatrical version of the H.R. Pufnstuf television show. Simply titled Pufnstuf, it centred around Jimmy (Jack Wild), his magical talking flute, Freddy, and Jimmy’s old foe Witchiepoo (Billie Hayes) who tries to steal the flute and win the Witch of the Year Award.

It’s not Dostoevsky, but Witchiepoo and her Vroom Broom is worth a search on YouTube. (If they bring Pufnstuf back to the big screen Marty already knows who he wants to play Witchiepoo. “How great would Johnny Depp be as Witchiepoo?” he says.)

If Pufnstuf was Cheech and Chong for kids their next movie was John Waters-lite.

Shot in 1978, Side Show is a demented little flick that didn’t see the light of day until 1981. Directed by William Canon Conrad this strange piece of celluloid is a murder mystery set against the backdrop of a circus.

The Kroffts and Conrad almost outdo Tod Browning’s Freaks, bringing together a collection of actual side show performers to add a sense of eccentric authenticity to the picture.

Side Show was a flop, but that didn’t slow down the brothers. They have been producing television and movies for almost five decades with no end in sight. As Disney chief Michael Eisner said, “The Kroffts always have one more show in them.”

– Richard Crouse’s Movie Show can be seen every Sunday at 6:30 p.m. on the E! Channel

Someone please stop Eddie Murphy
In Focus by Richard Crouse
IN FOCUS
June 12, 2009

Eddie Muphy’s cinematic nadir in Norbit may have cost him an Oscar for Dreamgirls, columnist Richard Crouse says.

Eddie Murphy infuriates me. It hasn’t always been that way. Twenty years ago his movies put a broad grin on my face. I loved his silly giggle in Beverly Hills Cop, his version of Greatest Love of All in Coming to America, and the “My mother was like Clint Eastwood with a shoe...” routine from Delirious is one of the funniest monologues ever, but that was when Eddie and I were both much younger.

Now an Eddie Murphy movie is as welcome as a case of gingivitis. That makes me angry. He may be the biggest, most talented star in Hollywood who consistently makes the worst movies. Don’t get me wrong, nobody hits a home run every time, but Murphy’s recent batting average is worse than most.

He’s never been consistent, but in the old days for every stinker like Vampire in Brooklyn he’d make two others that were drop dead funny. Of late though, he’s been stuck in Vampire in Brooklyn mode, trying to suck laughs out of increasingly thin scripts.

Let’s look at the good, the bad and the ugly on Murphy’s filmography.

The good:  In Dreamgirls Murphy gives the kind of performance that he’s only hinted at in other films. As R&B singer James (Thunder) Early — imagine 1966-era James Brown — he blows the doors off, digging deep and creating a memorable character who is as magnetic as he is repulsive.

The bad: Haunted Mansion. It’s a comedy! No! It’s a mystery! Nope, it’s a love story, a ghostly tale and an adventure story. It’s all of those things and less. Mostly it’s a big screen ad for a Disney theme park ride.

The ugly: With so many to choose from — Meet Dave, The Adventures of Pluto Nash, for example — it’s hard to decide but I’ll pick Norbit because it’s the movie that cost Eddie his Oscar. He was nominated for Dreamgirls but had the misfortune to have Norbit open in theatres the week Academy voters were casting their ballots. Any goodwill he accumulated with Dreamgirls evaporated when Oscar tastemakers got a load of him dressed as an aggressive 300 pound woman and the award went elsewhere.

The worst part is, I think he knows the movies stink. He recently told Extra “I have close to fifty movies and it’s like, why am I in the movies? I’ve done that part now.”

Why indeed Eddie, why indeed.

– Richard Crouse’s Movie Show can be seen every Sunday at 6:30 p.m. on the E! Channel

Hunter Gatherers in the Movies
In Focus by Richard Crouse
IN FOCUS
June 12, 2009

Q: What do Charlie Chaplin, Rachel Welch and Brendan Fraser have in common?

A: They’ve all played cavemen (or should that be cavepeople?) on film.

Like Heinz products, movie Neanderthals come in many varieties. This weekend’s Year One sees odd couple Michael Cera and Jack Black as the latest big screen hunter-gatherers, but they aren’t the first. Not by a long shot. Ever since film was first threaded through cameras the prehistoric world and its inhabitants have been a popular topic.

Silent film comedians started the furry pelt fashion trend. In His Prehistoric Past Charlie Chaplin falls asleep on a park bench and dreams he is a caveman dressed in skins and a brown derby hat. It’s a simple story that amused audiences in 1914 but can’t be considered essential viewing today, even for Chaplin fans.

Flying Elephants, a silent Laurel and Hardy comedy about prehistoric courtship, gets its name from a sequence showing three animated airborne pachyderms (drawn by Walter ‘Woody Woodpecker’ Lantz.)

More elaborate, and much funnier, is Three Ages, the Buster Keaton funny which sees him as a suitor in three historic eras beginning with the Stone Age. In one memorable scene Keaton bare backs a brontosaurus, introducing the Alley Oop movie fiction of cavemen and dinosaurs existing together.

The most famous caveman-dinosaur movie has to be One Million Years BC. According to science the last dinosaurs became extinct roughly 65 million years BC, and homo sapiens didn’t exist until about 200,000 years BC, but it wasn’t the history aspect of the film that drew in the teenage boys. They lined up to see the cool special effects and Rachel Welch, who, in her skimpy fur bikini had a special effect on many in the audience.   

Another popular troglodyte sub genre is the Unfrozen Caveman Movie. Eegah! The Name Written in Blood is a cheesy but charming b-movie starring the 7’2” Richard Kiel (better known as Jaws from Live and Let Die) as a love sick Neanderthal in love with a modern woman. More popular but less charming is Encino Man, a 1992 comedy about two geeky teenagers from Encino, California who discover a caveman (Brendan Fraser) preserved in a giant ice cube. Even less enticing was the TV sequel, 1996’s Encino Woman.

Caveman movies may not always be cinematic masterpieces—Robert Vaughn called Teenage Caveman, his 1958 flick, the “worst movie ever made”—but have remained a popular genre with audiences and filmmakers alike.

– Richard Crouse’s Movie Show can be seen every Sunday at 6:30 p.m. on the E! Channel

The Soderbergh experience
IN FOCUS Richard Crouse
26 June 2009

Critically acclaimed director Steven Soderbergh says all his films “feel commercial” when he’s making them. His latest, The Girlfriend Experience, is now in limited release.

You’d be hard pressed to find a movie fan that hasn’t seen the Steven Soderbergh films Traffic, Erin Brockovich and at least one of the Ocean’s movies.

A little more eclectic, but still popular are The Limey and Out of Sight, two of the director’s box office near-misses. Mainstream films like those, though, comprise only a fraction of the director’s resume.

Since his breakout film Sex, Lies and Videotape in 1989, Soderbergh has directed 19 films (including  The Girlfriend Experience, in theatres now), but only a handful — usually the ones starring George Clooney or Julia Roberts—could be called blockbusters. Many others have, however, languished.

Here’s a couple of the director’s deserving films that didn’t set the box office ablaze.

Soderbergh said that “all attempts at synopsizing (Schizopolis) have ended in failure and hospitalization.”

With health card in hand, here goes: Schizopolis is a surrealistic look at two people who can’t communicate. As the level of emotional detachment increases so does the weird stuff.

There’s an exterminator (David Jansen) who only speaks in non sequiturs and near the end Soderbergh’s character (he’s a triple threat here as actor, writer and director) only speaks in overdubbed Italian, Japanese and French.

Even the director acknowledges that this is an eccentric film, noting that the only people who ever ask him about it are “the ones with the crazy look in their eyes when I go to festivals.”

1993’s King of the Hill is more accessible but still made less than $1.5 million at the box office. Based on a 1972 memoir by A.E. Hotchner, it’s the story of a 12-year-old boy surviving and thriving on his own during the Great Depression.

One IMDB contributor called this “the best American film of the nineties,” while another wrote “Spielberg, eat your heart out, this is a real feel good movie.”

Rent it for its unsentimental storytelling and great performances, particularly from Adrien Brody who plays the main character’s surrogate big brother.

Other interesting Soderbergh movies still waiting to grab an audience are the Spalding Gray monologue film Gray’s Anatomy and the suspense story Kafka, but no matter how odd or how low budget these films are, don’t get the idea Soderbergh doubts their commercial appeal.

“When I’m making them,” he says, “they all feel commercial to me. It’s no joke. If I’m making a movie for a million bucks, I feel like this thing could blow up. It’s happened before.”

– Richard Crouse’s Movie Show can be seen every Sunday at 6:30 p.m. on the E! Channel

Dinosaurs, as you like them
In Focus by Richard Crouse
METRO CANADA
July 03, 2009

Movie dinosaurs come in all forms. As screen characters — from Jurassic Park’s terrifying T-Rexes to the cute and cuddly baby dinos of this weekend’s Ice Age: The Dawn of the Dinosaurs — they are as versatile as they are extinct.

Just as varied are the methods used to bring the prehistoric behemoths to big screen life.

The first film dinosaur was a pen-and-ink creature seen in a fanciful 1908 British film called Prehistoric Man. In it a caveman sketch comes alive and threatens its creator. The artist survives by drawing a picture of a dinosaur, which also comes to life and eats the prehistoric man.

Another of the original celluloid dinosaurs was Gertie the Dinosaur. Released in 1914, the film featured 10,000 hand-drawn images to animate the tango-dancing Apatosaurus.

After Gertie, pen and ink animated dinosaurs remained popular for the next seventy years in everything from 1915’s Stone Age Adventure to 1988’s Land Before Time.

The word dinosaur means “fearfully-great lizard” so it makes sense that lizards have frequently subbed for their vanished cousins on celluloid.

A 1914 film called On Moonshine Mountain tried to pass off geckos as dinosaurs while 1940’s One Million B.C. dressed up lizards with cardboard fins for a more “realistic” dinosaur appearance. D.W. Griffith tried for a more menacing look, using an alligator dressed up as a dino for his two-reeler Brute Force, which described the great beasts as “one of the perils of prehistoric apartment life.”

Other methods of crafting on-screen dinos include the old “man in a rubber suit” trick (pioneered by cheapo producer Roger Corman in Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet but perfected by Toho Studios in the Godzilla films) and the wondrous stop motion animation of Willis O’Brien (The Lost World) and Ray Harryhausen (The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms) but the biggest and baddest show biz dinosaurs sprung from the mind of Steven Spielberg (and the computers of his animators).  

Even though Jurassic Park’s binary code velociraptors and triceratopses weren’t biologically accurate and didn’t exist during the Jurassic days (most didn’t live until the Cretaceous period) they were the loudest and proudest dinos the movies had ever seen.

Hundreds of films have featured dinosaurs and audiences never seem to tire of them, but why?

“Perhaps people’s fascination with prehistoric life has something to do with bridging fantasy with reality,” offers Harryhausen. “They are connected with the shadowy key to our mysterious origin.”

– Richard Crouse’s Movie Show can be seen every Sunday at 6:30 p.m. on the E! Channel

Before Brüno came Buster, Charlie ...   
In Focus by Richard Crouse
FOR METRO CANADA
July 10, 2009

Many regard Sacha Baron Cohen’s brand of humour as envelope pushing absurdity that rides the thin line between bad taste and very bad taste.

For instance, in Borat, the titular character says he came to America with “a jar of gypsy tears to protect me from AIDS.” As if that wasn’t squirm inducing enough, he topped it off with jabs at Jews, homosexuals, the American way-of-life and the good people of Kazakhstan.

That movie ruffled more than a few feathers upon release in 2007, and that outrage now seems to be spilling over to the release of his new film.

In Brüno, which hits theatres this weekend, he plays a campy fame-seeking fashionista who wants to be “the biggest Austrian superstar since Adolph Hitler.” Rashad Robinson of GLAAD told the New York Times that while the movie’s satire is “well-meaning,” it’s also “problematic in many places and outright offensive in others.”

As un-politically correct as the results of Cohen’s modus operandi to expose homophobia are — he extracts embarrassing, often racist or downright stupid reactions from people not in on the joke — he is simply following in the cinematic tradition of using irreverent humour to hold a mirror up to society.

Silent comedians Buster Keaton, the Keystone Cops and Harold Lloyd infused their work with social commentary, using slapstick to highlight man's struggle to survive in a swiftly changing society.

Charlie Chaplin’s most famous character, the perpetually down-on-his-luck Tramp, was a metaphor for “the lowest of the lower classes,” a comparison that became even more poignant with the advent of the Depression.

Moving forward, director Sam Wood laced his screwball comedy The Devil and Miss Jones with comments on labour unrest and class distinctions, while Tim Robbins’ mockumentary Bob Roberts was a caustically comic piece on running for Senatorial office and Monty Python members redefined irreverence with their two looks at organized religion, The Meaning of Life and The Life of Brian.

Whether or not Brüno will accomplish the goal shared by Wood and the members of Monty Python — that is to make audiences examine their own fears and prejudices — remains to be seen, but David Kilmnick, CEO of the Long Island Gay and Lesbian Youth thinks it can’t hurt.

“It’s important in life when you’re dealing with the daily struggles of inequality that you take a second to sit back and laugh,” he says. “That’s always been the medicine for those who’ve been oppressed.”

– Richard Crouse’s Movie Show can be seen every Sunday at 6:30 p.m. on the E! Channel

His amazing, technicolour career
In Focus by Richard Crouse
FOR METRO CANADA
July 17, 2009
 
Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s name could easily have ended up on the same roll call as Mindy Cohn, Adam Rich and Jim J. Bullock.

After five years of pulling silly faces as Tommy on Third Rock from the Sun it seemed like he would to join the cast-off-second-bananas-from-pop­ular sitcoms” club and next be seen on a rehab or reality show.

Then something interesting happened. He became one of the most remarkable actors of his generation.

Following the sitcom and a self-imposed two year retirement from acting (to attend Columbia) Gordon-Levitt came back with a vengeance, vowing only to do “stuff that I think is good.”

His choices haven’t exactly lit the box office ablaze — that may change with the release of his latest film, 500 Days of Summer — but turns in Mysterious Skin and Manic proved him to be a charismatic, fearless, big-screen presence.

In the modern-day film noir Brick, Gordon-Levitt uncovers an underground drug ring while investigating a murder. He’s a high school loner with a knack for hard-boiled dialogue.

“I’ve got all five senses and I slept last night,” he says to a school yard bully. “That puts me six up against the lot of you.”

He gives an unhinged performance that seemingly channels both Raymond Chandler and The Breakfast Club — totally unique and totally entertaining.

In The Lookout, he went further, deepening his work, creating a person whose character has been shattered.

At the film’s beginning he plays the guy you love to hate: He has a rich father, a beautiful girlfriend, good-looking friends and a fast car.

Life is perfect until a car accident leaves him with severe brain damage. When a charismatic former friend (Matthew Goode) manoeuvres him into taking part in robbing the bank where he works as a janitor, Chris thinks he is taking steps toward controlling his life. He doesn’t realize he’s being manipulated until it is too late. It’s a subtle, well-crafted performance that is always interesting.

Less seen (unless you frequent film festivals) is Uncertainty, just one of the eight films he’s shot in the last two years.

The movie, based on the different directions life can take at the flip of a coin, features improvised dialogue and stellar acting. Keep an eye open for it should it ever earn a theatrical or DVD release. 

Somehow, as one writer noted, Gordon-Levitt has “defied the clichéd fates that befall most underage actors when they grow up,” and audiences are all the richer for it. 

– Richard Crouse’s Movie Show can be seen every Sunday at 6:30 p.m. on the E! Channel

Meet the real rat pack
In Focus by Richard Crouse
FOR METRO CANADA
July 24, 2009

Popular culture has frequently paid homage to the lowly rodent. Remember Muskrat Love, Captain & Tennille’s ode to arvicoline amour?

“Rubbin’ her toes,” they sang, “Muzzle to muzzle, anything goes.” The rodentia rock roundup doesn’t stop there, though.

The Chipmunks had a chart topper with Witch Doctor, Frank Zappa named not one but two albums — Weasels Ripped My Flesh and Hot Rats — after little furry creatures, and even Michael Jackson rode to the top of the charts on a rat’s back with the tune Ben, possibly the only love song to a rat ever released.

Rodents certainly have left their mark on the pop charts and in movie theatres. This weekend G-Force hopes to do for guinea pigs what March of the Penguins did for tuxedo clad furry birds.

G-Force is just the latest in a long line of movies with rodents in featured roles. Who could forget Mr. Gopher, the burrowing terror from Caddyshack? (Did you know the movie’s gopher “voice” is made up of the same dolphin sound effects used on Flipper?)

Or Rizzo the Rat, the streetwise New Jersey puppet from The Muppets Take Manhattan and possibly the only kid’s character named for Enrico (Ratso) Rizzo, a character in the X-rated Midnight Cowboy.

Those fuzzy actors, along with Despereaux Tilling, Fievel Mousekewitz and the gang from Once Upon a Forest have sold loads of tickets, but likely none would have made much of an impression if not for the pioneering work of the world’s most famous rodent, Mickey Mouse. Created in 1928 by Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks, Mickey is one of the most recognizable movie stars in the world. He’s an Oscar winner with 175 movies, shorts and videogames on his CV; and was the first cartoon character to have a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Mickey’s fame endures, but why? “We felt that the public, and especially the children, like animals that are cute and little,” said Walt Disney. “When people laugh at Mickey Mouse, it’s because he’s so human.”

– Richard Crouse’s Movie Show can be seen every Sunday at 6:30 p.m. on the E! Channel

These extraterrestrials are so G
In Focus by Richard Crouse
IN FOCUS
July 30, 2009

This is turning into a banner year for family friendly aliens. Recently, Reese Witherspoon and a team of misfit monsters successfully saved our planet from a gang of G-rated extraterrestrials in Monsters vs Aliens and in Race to Witch Mountain a cab driver learned that not all space invaders are “little green people with antennas.”

Later this year the cute and cuddly animated aliens of Planet 51 will be invaded by an astronaut from Earth and in this weekend’s Aliens in the Attic a group of kids protects their vacation home from creatures from outer space.

E.T.s in kids’ entertainment are nothing new. The futuristic animated utopia of the Jetsons, featuring aliens galore, originally ran on Saturday morning television in the early ’60s, but has since been spun off into comics, games, a short-lived 1980s TV series, television movies and a 1990 feature film imaginatively called Jetsons: The Movie.

Around the same time The Jetsons were on the small screen, a movie The Monster Times called “the worst science fiction flick ever, bar none” was entering theatres. Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, released in 1964, is a no-budget wonder which ping-pongs from so-bad-it’s-good right back to bad again. Cinematically it may be the biggest Christmas turkey ever, but its crazy story, about Martians kidnapping Santa so their little green kids can get some presents just like human children, is a guilty pleasure.

The ’70s and ’80s were a particularly fertile time for kiddie “take me to your leader” movies. Of course there were the original three Star Wars movies, E.T. (and the shameless E.T. rip-off Mac and Me) but looking past Lucas and Spielberg reveals other, not as well-known alien movies for the rugrats.

Invaders from Mars, from Texas Chain Saw Massacre director Tobe Hooper, sees a teenage hero (actress Karen Black’s real life son Hunter Carson) enlist the help of a school nurse (played by his mother) and the Marines to prevent aliens from assuming human form and taking over his hometown.  

Finally, also worth a look is Explorers, a 1985 kid’s flick starring Ethan Hawke and River Phoenix as BFFs whose dream of intergalactic travel comes true when they build a homemade spaceship, complete with a Tilt-a-Whirl cockpit. It was the feature film debut for both Hawke and Phoenix and while it isn’t groundbreaking sci-fi, it’s a fun film for the whole family.

Richard Crouse’s Movie Show can be seen every Sunday at 6:30 p.m. on the E! Channel

A feast-ful of films
In Focus by Richard Crouse
FOR METRO CANADA
August 07, 2009

The Food Network has a corner on small screen cuisine. Bobby Flay and Paula Dean simmer, sauté and sizzle twenty-four hours a day, bringing restaurant style cooking to the home chef.

Food plays a role on the big screen as well. Who could forget The Godfather’s “leave the gun, take the cannoli” scene or Annie Hall’s clumsy attempt to cook a lobster? But there’s food in movies and then there’s movies — like this weekend’s Julie & Julia — that make you want to eat something more delicious than a bucket of buttery popcorn from the concession stand.

Jane Austen was on to something when she wrote, “Good apple pies are a considerable part of our domestic happiness.” Everybody loves pie and never have baked goods been as appetizing as they are in Waitress, the last film from director Adrienne Shelly.

Keri Russell plays Jenna, a world weary, pregnant waitress in the Deep South.

She’s also a “pie genius” with a knack for creating imaginative pastries. Mix in a handsome stranger, some gorgeous shots of the pies and you have all the fixin’s for a mouth watering romantic comedy.

On the more savoury side is Tampopo, a film advertised as “the first Japanese noodle western.”
In short (its plot splinters into many directions) the movie is about Tampopo (Nobuko Miyamoto) a widowed noodle chef, who, along with truck driver Goro (Tsutomu Yamazaki) searches for noodle perfection.

Many films, like Babette’s Feast and Like Water for Chocolate, feature food as a metaphoric central theme but none are as loving or as loopy as the singular vision of Tampopo.

The greatest food movie of all time, however, stars Stanley Tucci and Tony Shalhoub as brothers and failing restaurateurs who pin their hopes of success on one special customer who will get them the notice they so deserve.

Big Night is pitch perfect from its portrayal of kitchen life to the very real relationship between the two brothers, but it is the presentation of the food that is so appetizing.

One critic said the movie’s food photography “is so good it’s hard to resist the temptation to reach into the screen and grab a mouthful.” Amen to that. One glimpse of the movie’s amazing Timpano di Maccheroni al Ragu and you’ll want to run, not walk to the closest Italian restaurant.

To paraphrase the legendary chef Julia Child (played by Meryl Streep in Julie& Julia), “Bon appetit and happy movie watching!”

– Richard Crouse’s Movie Show can be seen every Sunday at 6:30 p.m. on the E! Channel

Director treated teens with respect
In Focus by Richard Crouse
FOR METRO CANADA
August 10, 2009

John Hughes wrote many lines that, in light of his untimely passing last Thursday at age 59, take on heightened meaning. Perhaps the most memorable comes from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. “Life moves pretty fast,” says Ferris. “If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

By all reports Mr. Hughes did his best to “stop and look around,” virtually retiring from public life in 1991 to spend more time with his wife of 39 years on their Wisconsin farm.

Although his last film as a director was 16 years ago his influence can still be felt today. Before Hughes, teen characters on film had only a passing resemblance to the real thing. There were the sanitized Disney kids, the goofy Beach Party crowd (who weren’t actually teens at all!) or the juvenile delinquents, bad girls or hot rodders of the ’50s and ’60s.

Those movies were often a lot of fun, but none had the resonance of the teen life presented by Hughes.

His films like Sixteen Candles and Breakfast Club took teens seriously and didn’t talk down to or exploit them. He understood that while many adults didn’t take teen problems seriously, teens did. He knew having no date to the prom, or worse, the wrong date, could be devastating to the teen psyche and handled situations like that in a way that had never before been seen on film. Without Hughes and that sensitivity we might not have movies like Tadpole, 13 or Twilight which treat teens realistically (well, except for that whole existence of vampires thing).

Ben Stein, who rose to fame as the deadpan teacher in Ferris Bueller, recognized the impact Hughes made. “He was the poet of the youth of America in the post war period,” he said, adding “he was to them what Shakespeare was to the Elizabethan age.”

– Richard Crouse’s Movie Show can be seen every Sunday at 6:30 p.m. on the E! Channel

Have romance, will time travel
In Focus by Richard Crouse
FOR METRO CANADA
August 14, 2009

I’d bet everyone has considered the idea of going back in time to fix a wrong or reconnect with a lost love. Of course, time travel doesn’t exist, but you wouldn’t know that from popular culture.

Cher wanted to turn back time and “take back those words that hurt you,” and on television Star Trek’s characters crossed time zones more often than a pilot’s Timex.

Time travel plays a role on the big screen as well and not just in hardcore sci-fi. This weekend’s The Time Traveler’s Wife is a science fiction romance, but the love story is foremost, the sci-fi second. Believe it or not, it’s not the only one. They’re not just motion pictures; call them emotion pictures.

In Kate & Leopold, Hugh Jackman plays a 19th century man who discovers a wormhole into 21st century New York, and also the heart of the very modern Meg Ryan. It’s a romance, but plays up on the whole fish-out-of-water situation as Leopold must try and come to grips with modern day customs.

“Are you suggesting, madam, that there exists a law compelling a gentleman to lay hold of canine bowel movements?”

Francis Ford Coppola’s Peggy Sue Got Married was played for laughs by stars Kathleen Turner and Nicolas Cage, but the underlying message is profound. Turner plays the title character, a 43-year-old woman on the brink of divorce from Charlie, her childhood sweetheart.

After fainting at her high school reunion, she awakens to find herself flung back in time; she’s returned to high school, but this time around she has a world of perspective under her belt.

“I am a grown woman with a lifetime of experience that you can’t understand,” she tells Charlie.

The humour in this underrated classic springs from real emotions. Roger Ebert summed it up when he described the time-bending first kiss between Peggy Sue and her future ex-husband.

“Imagine kissing someone for the first time,” he wrote, “after you have already kissed him or her for the last time.”

Such is the twisty-turny logic of time travel romance. Logic, however, really has no place in these stories.

The yearning to revisit the past is a romantic quest, a feeling based on emotional sentiment that defies reason.

As sci-fi writer George Alec Effinger wrote in The Bird of Time, “The past... is the home of romance.”

– Richard Crouse’s Movie Show can be seen every Sunday at 6:30 p.m. on the E! Channel

Never a dull moment with Tarantino
RICHARD CROUSE
FOR METRO CANADA
August 21, 2009

Quentin Tarantino doesn’t care if you like him or his movies.

“My films are unabashedly about myself and you’re either going to like them or go against them,” he says, “but that’s OK because I like me.”

Tarantino’s films — Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown and Kill Bill Vol. 1 and 2, to name a few — sharply polarize people. For every person who gets all aquiver at the prospect of a new picture from the Reservoir Dogs director, there’s another who thinks his movies are too long, too self-indulgent and too derivative.

Despite those criticisms, fair or not, there can be no argument that of all the brand name directors working today Tarantino is the most audacious. His films are a singular vision and this weekend’s Inglourious Basterds is no exception.

His films are unapologetically bloody, in-your-face talky and ripe with larger-than-life characters, and perhaps it’s those qualities that rub certain people the wrong way.

He refuses to play it safe and take the Michael Bay road churning out Hasbro movies. He’s told interviewers he would die to make his movies perfect, and I believe him, but I’m a fan.

Not all critics are. Writer Ryan Gilbey said Death Proof represented “a sort of embarrassment of riches, only without the riches,” and more recently the Guardian called Inglourious Basterds “an armor-plated turkey.” Everyone is entitled to his or her opinion, but I think the Tarantino hecklers miss the point.

Tarantino is a provocateur who excels when he doesn’t play nice with the audience. Unlike the vast majority of films at the local bijou, his films demand something from an audience; they demand to be noticed and argued about over coffee (or something stronger) afterward. Many films fade quickly from memory, but, like them or not, Tarantino’s don’t.

When he’s at his best—Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and Inglourious Basterds — the movies are transformative cinematic experiences, but even when he’s not in top form — say, Death Proof — his work is, as critic Peter Bradshaw said, “more interesting than the successes of dullards and middleweights churning out Identikit films by the truckload.”

Tarantino’s films aren’t for everyone, but it’s undeniable that he takes movies seriously.

So seriously in fact, that the heroine in Inglourious Basterds is a cinema owner who literally uses film to bring down the Third Reich. I love that.

Say what you will, you can never accuse Tarantino of being boring.  

– Richard Crouse’s Movie Show can be seen every Sunday at 6:30 p.m. on the E! Channel

What a long, strange trip it’s been
In Focus by Richard Crouse
FOR METRO CANADA

The video store isn’t just a place to rent the latest DVDs. Hidden among the shelves are dozens of time capsules from another age.

Want to know what made Americans laugh in the 1920s? Rent The Gold Rush. How about a look at life in postwar Italy? Check out Open City. These shelves offer row upon row of living history; moving images that bring history to life.

Perhaps no decade has been as documented on film as the 1960s. From failed attempts to present the counter culture(Skidoo and Valley of the Dolls) to more zeitgeist grabbing entries(Woodstock and Zabr­iskie Point) and newer films that try to capture the spirit of the make-love-not-war decade (this weekend’s Taking Woodstock) the films of and about the ‘60s paint a portrait of a decade of change.

Jack Nicholson claims to have watched Head, a psychedelic movie he helped write and produce, and starring The Monkees, “Like, 158 times.” Seen through modern eyes it’s hard to imagine multiple viewings of this strange movie, but there is a certain crazy charm to it.

More a stream-of-consciousness rant than an actual movie, Head is jammed full of musical numbers, film satires and references to ‘60s hot button topics like Vietnam and eastern religions.

As a movie it’s kind of a frustrating experience — Wikipedia says “even fans tend to disagree whether the film is a landmark of surreal, innovative filmmaking or simply a fascinating mess” — but it does capture the anarchic spirit of its time.  

Jack Nicholson contributed to many counter culture films, most notably Easy Rider, but his script for the The Trip is a little known gem of druggie propaganda. Directed by Roger Corman (who drop­ped acid along with stars Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda to prepare for filming) it’s a snapshot of the frontier of the drug culture of the 1960s.

Fonda stars as a bored television director who drops acid and spends the balance of the movie hallucinating. An orange becomes “the sun in my hands, man!” before the trip turns sour and he is threatened by a chair. It’s a madcap film featuring a strange sex scene with optical effects projected onto writhing bodies and loads of “groovy” dialogue.

If you weren’t there, or were there and can’t remember, these films offer a glimpse into the wild world of the 1960s.

– Richard Crouse’s Movie Show can be seen every Sunday at 6:30 p.m. on the E! Channel

Reel jobs are mean business
In Focus by Richard Crouse
FOR METRO CANADA
September 04, 2009

Next to Johnny “Take This Job and Shove It” Paycheck, director Mike Judge may be the closest thing we have to a patron saint of crappy jobs.

His 1999 movie Office Space — about company workers who rebel against their miserly boss — was recently ranked number one in a poll of best workplace comedies ever, and this weekend his film Extract details life inside a factory.

He’s the man who made wearing “37 piece of flair” on a restaurant uniform synonymous with the worst of minimum wage life. For anyone who’s ever had a job they hated — and who hasn’t? — Mike Judge is the go-to movie guy.

When he put the words “I don’t like my job, and I do’'t think I’m gonna go anymore,” into Ron Livingston’s mouth in Office Space, he was voicing a thought that has raced through all our minds at least once.

The only cinematic workplace worse than the ones Judge has conjured up has to be the real estate office in Glengarry Glen Ross. The story is simple. It shows two days in the lives of four salesmen, two of whom will be fired by week’s end if their sales aren’t high enough.

Fighting for their lives the four main salesmen — Jack Lemmon, Ed Harris, Al Pacino and Alan Arkin — redefine ruthlessness. Long John Silver wasn’t as cutthroat as these guys and the language they use would give any HR department a collective coronary. The vernacular was so rough during production the actors referred to the film as Death of a F*&@in’ Salesman.

A bit more genteel, language wise at least, is 1980’s Nine to Five. In our era of flexi-time hours the name is a bit of an anachronism, but 8:15 to 4:30 just doesn’t have the same ring. This story of sexual harassment, the glass ceiling that faced working women and a “sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot” boss spawned not only a hit single, but also a television show and a hit Broadway show.  

Hollywood’s use of the workplace as a setting is a no brainer; there’s interaction between diverse characters, which means plenty of conflict and it’s something we can all relate to.

Everyone at one time or another has had a job they hated, but perhaps the real reason we watch these movies and others like Clerks and Modern Times is that no matter what your job, someone, on film at least, has it worse than you.  

– Richard Crouse’s Movie Show can be seen every Sunday at 6:30 p.m. on the E! Channel

The versatile Ms. Clarkson
RICHARD CROUSE
FOR METRO CANADA
September 10, 2009

In the TIFF entry Cairo Time, a magazine editor played by Patricia Clarkson finds herself in Gaza falling for a man who isn’t her husband.

It’s a romantic drama about self discovery and just the kind of role we’ve come accustomed to seeing Clarkson play — serious and complicated.

Her best known work has a weight to it that seems to come naturally to her. Perhaps it is her deep voice or the fact that she’s never really played the ingénue, but I always associate Clarkson with capitol “S” serious films. According to her, I’ve got it all wrong.

“I think most people see me as much darker, more serious and possessing a certain gravitas, when I'm really quite insane,” says the New Orleans born actress.

She chalks up her onscreen image to — what else? — acting. “I go where I need to go. If I need to look glamorous or spiffy or young, or battling cancer, or a drugged-out hippie type, it hopefully will be projected in my face. That’s the beauty of acting. It’s not about hair and makeup; it’s about being malleable.”

That pliability has paid off handsomely in many of her lesser known films.

In High Art, Clarkson plays Greta, a forgotten actress who once starred in Fassbinder films. She’s a drug addict so far gone she actually falls asleep during sex. It’s a colourful, theatrical performance, but Clarkson carefully avoids the clichés of playing a junkie.

On a happier note is Simply Irresistible, a screwball romantic comedy in the vein of 1930s musicals. In this charming film, Clarkson plays Lois, a wisecracking secretary.

“If you need anything call me,” she says to her boss, “although I don’t know how to do anything except buy clothes.” She’s a decidedly earthbound character in this fantasy about a chef whose guardian angel gives her a gift that turns her food into the ultimate aphrodisiac.

Darker than Simply Irresistible is the creepy horror film Wendigo. Promoted as a cross between The Shining and Deliverance, it plays with classic horror conventions — city folks in the country pitted against psycho rednecks and the supernatural — but does so in a unique and compelling way. As usual Clarkson shines as the NYC mother thrown into a situation she doesn’t understand.

These, and her other 40 plus film credits, prove that Patricia Clarkson is as versatile as she is malleable.

– Richard Crouse’s Movie Show can be seen every Sunday at 6:30 p.m. on the E! Channel

Who’s afraid of frostbite?
In Focus by Richard Crouse
FOR METRO CANADA
September 11, 2009

Walking down Dundas Street in Toronto on a recent warm September night I was surprised to turn the corner and see a snow bank stretching an entire city block. Fighting the urge to run home and unpack my parka I continued on to discover the snow was only a promotional gimmick for the movie Whiteout, a horror film set in Antarctica and opening this weekend.

Anyone who has ever lost their mittens on Halifax’s Citadel Hill on a chilly January morning knows the terror of hypothermia but filmmakers have often used the cold as a backdrop for horror of a different kind.

Director Larry Fessenden set his global warming horror film The Last Winter in frosty Alaska although the film was shot in both Sarah Palin’s stomping ground and Iceland.

“Pure white nothingness,” one character calls it. “It looks like the last place on Earth.” The last place on earth you want to be, that is, when Mother Nature starts unleashing her evil spirits on the people who want to steal her bounty. Drill for oil, the movie suggests, and the cold will be the least of your problems.

The advertising tagline for our next cold weather horror says it all: Man is The Warmest Place to Hide. Based on the 1938 story Who Goes There by John W. Campbell, The Thing has been directly adapted for the screen twice and it has in part inspired other classics like Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Alien.

The story in John Carpenter’s scary 1982 version begins with an E.T. who crashlands on Earth and get buried under layers of Antarctic ice. Years later the creature is discovered by modern scientists who also find that it assumes the appearance of the people that it kills.

It’s hard to know who to trust when a shape shifting alien with better mimicking skills than Rich Little is in your midst.

Finally 30 Days of Night is a vampire tale set in a town near the Arctic Circle where it goes dark for thirty days a year. It’s a cool concept and the wintry remoteness of the town adds a new layer to the usual vampire story.

Evil spirits, shape shifters and vampires; in the movies frostbite isn’t the worst thing that happens in the cold.

– Richard Crouse’s Movie Show can be seen every Sunday at 6:30 p.m. on the E! Channel

Baruchel’s passion is Canadian film
In Focus by Richard Crouse
FOR METRO CANADA
September 11, 2009

Jay Baruchel attended the same high school as William Shatner, but unlike his famous alumni, or other well-known Canadians like Mike Myers and Jim Carrey, Baruchel has never turned his back on his Canadian roots.

The young Montrealer, who has a maple leaf tattooed over his heart, alternates between appearing in big budget American movies like Knocked Up and Tropic Thunder and coming home to make smaller films like Real Time and The Trotsky (featured at this year’s TIFF). I don’t mean American films that use Toronto as a stand-in for New York, but honest-to-God homegrown films made by Canadians for Canadians.

Fetching Cody, for instance, played at TIFF in 2005. Variety called it a “mix of gritty street-life drama, perky teen romance and seriocomic sci-fi time-tripping,” but that description hardly does this strange little gem justice. Baruchel is Art, a drug pusher on Vancouver’s Downtown East side. When his girlfriend Cody (Sarah Lind) drops into a coma after a drug overdose, Art uses a homemade time machine to visit key moments of Cody’s life. Ultimately he learns that the best way to save her life will be the hardest option for him to choose. It’s a cool film for those who like their romantic fantasy with a bit of grit.

Just Buried (TIFF ’07) is another dark romance; a Haligonian take on The Trouble with Harry. This time out, Baruchel plays a nervous young man who inherits a nearly bankrupt funeral home. It isn’t until he falls in love with an attractive young mortician (Rose Bryne) that he begins to realize she might have something to do with the mortuary’s upturn in business. Reviewing the movie, the L.A. Times said, “Just Buried puts ‘fun’ in funeral.”

At last year’s TIFF, Baruchel co-starred with Randy Quaid in Real Time, a dramedy about a compulsive gambler from Hamilton given one hour to live by a Zen master hit man. Here Baruchel takes an unlikable character and breathes life into him, showing how a real person can fall down the rabbit hole of excess and crime.

It’s probably easier to get laughs (and better paying as well) doing his Chewbacca impersonation à la Knocked Up in big American films, but Baruchel is determined to continue working in Canada.

“I am a proud Canadian, number one, that’s the biggest thing,” Baruchel said. “All I want to do is make independent movies in Canada.”

– Richard Crouse’s Movie Show can be seen every Sunday at 6:30 p.m. on the E! Channel.

Defendor’s stars hit the town
In Focus by Richard Crouse
FOR METRO CANADA
September 14, 2009

Who could have imagined that one of the hottest parties at this year’s TIFF would happen on the top level of a parking garage in the heart of Toronto’s trendy Yorkville district?

On Saturday night, the stars of the gala film Defendor — along with hundreds of other party-goers and scene-makers — held sway at ET Canada’s Festival Central, a glamorous “pop up club” high atop an industrial building.

The setting was a good match for the movie, which is a mix of star power — Woody Harrelson, Kat Dennings and Elias Koteas — and downtown urban grit. It’s the story of Arthur Poppington (Harrelson), a regular man whose rich inner life spills out into his regular life. By day, he’s dead-end-job-Arthur but by night, he’s the homemade superhero Defendor who combs the streets of Hamilton in search of his arch-enemy, Captain Industry.

Wearing pink wristbands (All Access!), the stars of Defendor and other celebs (including Being Erica’s Erin Karpluk; Bridget Nickerson, Miss Canada International 2010; The Guard’s Steve Bacic; and TIFF favourite Kristin Booth) walked the red carpet on their way to mix and mingle in the elegant open-air club.

Michael Kelly, who plays Arthur’s boss in the film, told Metro that now that the premiere was done, he could take some time and relax in Toronto. The former Sopranos star said, “Tomorrow I’m going to go watch NFL football at Gretzky’s, which I do whenever I’m in town, then I’m going to go to Burrito Boys and then go to Barbarian’s tomorrow night. I’ve got it all planned out. Toronto is one of my favourite spots.”

The Canadian-born New York-based (and Robert De Niro look-a-like) Elias Koteas, who plays Arthur’s rival in the film, will be spending some time with his old friend and director Atom Egoyan. “I’m going to Chloe tomorrow and we’re doing a screening of The Adjuster on Wednesday night.

“I haven’t seen it in 19 years,” he says of the TIFF film that helped launch his career. “It’ll be wild to see myself at 28-years-old with all that hair.”

Co-star Kat Dennings told Metro she loves the festival. “It’s wonderful. Torontonians really embrace film and really love it. It seems like the whole city is really energized. There’s a buzz. It’s like a hive of Canadian film bees!”

For full coverage of the Defendor party, and a look at the fêtes for Chloe and Glorious 39, check out ET Canada weeknights at 7 p.m. on Global.

– Richard Crouse’s Movie Show can be seen every Sunday at 6:30 p.m. on the E! Channel.

English reimaginings of French films popular with audiences
In Focus by Richard Crouse
FOR METRO CANADA
September 15, 2009

The most successful English language remake of a French film is Three Men and a Baby, a 1987 comedy that raked in $167,780,960 at the box office. In today’s dollars, that would be ... well, a lot of money. The least profitable remake is the Peter Falk film Happy New Year, a reworking of the 1973 movie La bonne année, which brought in a paltry $41,232. The new Atom Egoyan film Chloe, a reimagining of Gérard Depardieu’s Nathalie that debuts at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, is likely hoping to fall somewhere comfortably between the two.

English remakes of popular French films have proven popular with North American audiences, but Encore Hollywood author Lucy Mazdon wonders whether the remake “can be considered as a positive form of cross-cultural exchange or if in fact it threatens the identity of the originals.” Chloe’s mix of homage to the original plus Egoyan’s signature style ensures that it strides the line between original work and respectful remake, but not all French adaptations have been so successful.  

I don’t think anyone would argue that Richard Pryor’s The Toy, a flaccid early ’80s remake of Le jouet, improved on the original, or that Richard Gere in Breathless was anything other than a pale imitation of the effortless cool Jean-Paul Belmondo oozed in À bout de soufflé. Even the addition of authentically French actress Valérie Kaprisky in the role originally played by the iconic Jean Seberg couldn’t get this turkey out of second gear.

Not all French to English revisions are budget-bin movies, however. Terry Gilliam took on a recognized classic when he made Twelve Monkeys. The 1962 film La jetée earns a near-perfect score on IMDB and its story of life in a devastated Paris in the aftermath of WWIII is described by one contributor as “experimental, elegiac, profound, beautiful, and mysterious.” Those are big shoes to fill, but Gilliam meets the task head on in his Oscar-nominated film. Twelve Monkeys is at once a remake and a completely original work that, as Roger Ebert wrote, creates “a universe that is contained within 130 minutes.”

And finally, also worth a rent is True Lies, the James Cameron shoot ’em up, loosely based on Claude Zidi’s La totale!, the French comedy about a wife who discovers her husband works for the French secret services.

Cameron upped the flashiness of the story, but the original has many pleasures, including great dialogue and many good gags.

– Richard Crouse’s Movie Show can be seen every Sunday at 6:30 p.m. on the E! Channel.

From stage to screen
RICHARD CROUSE
FOR METRO CANADA
September 16, 2009

Suck, the new film from Canadian director Rob Stefaniuk, honours two age-old movie traditions. It’s a vampire flick that pays homage to every cinematic bloodsucker from Bella to Edward Cullen and beyond, and it features musicians in acting roles. Rock legends Alice Cooper, Iggy Pop, Moby and Henry Rollins appear in cameos.

Since sound first merged with the flickering image, musicians have traded in their instruments for a shot at big-screen fame. Some have succeeded memorably — Sinatra took home an Oscar for From Here to Eternity — while others have floundered — I’m looking at you Madonna!

Perhaps one of the most surprising performances at this year’s TIFF comes from someone most critics had written off as a person who should stick to singing or anything that doesn’t involve acting. Mariah Carey’s work in Glitter was a career killer; a performance so bad one critic wrote it made her “physically uncomfortable” to watch Mariah on the screen. At this year’s fest, however, she’s redeemed herself with a decidedly non-glittery role in the gritty drama Precious. It’s a powerful performance that is being mentioned in the same breath as Oscar.

If Mariah earns an Academy Award nod, she’ll join the exclusive club of musicians who successfully traverse the gap between music and movies.

Courtney Love didn’t make it to the Oscar stage, but she was nominated for a Golden Globe for playing Althea Leasure Flynt in The People vs. Larry Flynt. The role of a drug-addicted hedonist may not have been much of a stretch for Love, but she brought depth and interest to a character who could have been a walking cliché.

Eminem did win an Oscar, but not for his acting. He took home a best original song trophy, but most critics agreed that his take on a poor white Detroit kid using rap to improve his life was better than average. His “roughed-up urban ghetto impression of James Dean” bagged him an MTV Award, but since then he has shied away from Hollywood (except for a brief cameo in Funny People) because he doesn’t “choose to rub elbows with the whole Hollywood scene.”

Many musicians have been sucked in and spit out by the Hollywood scene, but others, like David Bowie, Tom Waits (who appears in TIFF’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus) and Dwight Yoakam, show that some musicians have staying power on the big screen.

– Richard Crouse’s Movie Show can be seen every Sunday at 6:30 p.m. on the E! Channel.

Winona prefers art of film over showbiz
In Focus by Richard Crouse
FOR METRO CANADA
September 16, 2009

It’s easy to forget that Winona Ryder has had an interesting career.

Nominated for two Oscars before her twenty-third birthday, she was an “it girl” with a collection of big hits under her belt like Heathers and Mermaids and a laundry list of A-list directors hankering to work with her. Her waifish good looks and habit of dating hot stars with names like Johnny and Matt made her a tabloid regular — but that was some time ago. Before Dec. 12, 2001, she seemed to be destined to become the next Julia or Meg, but career ambivalence — “For a long time I was almost ashamed of being an actress,” she says — and a run-in with the law slowed her momentum.

The fallout from her arrest and a four-year hiatus may have dimmed her star, but that doesn’t mean she hasn’t been doing interesting work, including a supporting role in the TIFF entry The Secret Lives of Pippa Lee. She’s not the box office draw she was, but that doesn’t bother the actress, who turns 38 next month.

“Pretty Woman turned (Julia Roberts) into an overnight celebrity rather than an actress,” Ryder said, “Now her whole career is about box-office. It’s not a burden I’d ever want to carry.”

That’s lucky for Ryder, because other than this year’s Star Trek, her movies haven’t ignited the box office — but there are some good rentals in her recent work.

In The Darwin Awards, she’s an insurance claims investigator scrutinizing the deaths of people who die while doing ridiculous things. The movie has been called a “celebration of eccentricity” — film critic speak for “quirky” — and contains witty dialogue and dark humour.

Death is the subject of another unjustly ignored Ryder film. In The Last Word, she falls for a man who makes a living writing suicide notes. This one plays like a rom-com Harold and Maude, and sits nicely alongside the noir comedy of her earlier films like Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands.  

The final entry in our Ryder triple bill is The Ten, a portmanteau comprised of stories, each inspired by one of the Ten Commandments. Ryder plays a newlywed who finds sexual liberation with a ventriloquist dummy.

Choices like these guarantee she won’t have Meryl or Angelina looking over their shapely shoulders, but they are good movies and deserve to be seen.

“Focus should be on the art of film,” she says, “not on the business of film.”

– Richard Crouse’s Movie Show can be seen every Sunday at 6:30 p.m. on the E! Channel.

A softer side of Clive Owen
RICHARD CROUSE
FOR METRO CANADA
September 17, 2009

At this year’s TIFF, tough guy Clive Owen is showing a different side of his cinematic self. He doesn’t kick, punch or shoot his way through The Boys Are Back. The only pain he inflicts here is emotional.

Based on a true story, Owen plays Joe Warr, a top sportswriter with a perfect life. He travels the world covering sporting events, has a beautiful wife and a young child. When his wife is diagnosed with cancer and succumbs to the disease after a short fight, Joe’s life is turned upside down. The existence he knew disappears, replaced by a new reality that only makes the longing for his late wife all the more acute. When a son from his first marriage arrives, he must learn how to be a father to two kids he barely knows.

The Boys Are Back shows a side of Owen we haven’t seen for a while. He’s spent the past few years on the action tip, making movies like Shoot ’Em Up and Sin City, violent films that relied on cartoon theatrics but he hasn’t always just made movies that involve shooting and killing.

In Vroom, his big screen debut, Owen plays Jake, the sauve owner of a restored 1950s Chevrolet. Unemployed and unhappy, Jake, his friend Ringe (David Thewlis) and a middle-aged divorcee played by Diana Quick hit the open road to escape the crushing burden of Thatcher-era oppression. It’s a by-the-numbers road flick, but the young Owen is already showing his soon-to-be trademarked charisma.  

More highbrow is Gosford Park, a murder-mystery period piece directed by the late, great Robert Altman. The film shows the murder from the POV of the guests and the servants. The murder, however, is a McGuffin, simply a ruse to tell a story about class distinctions in Britain. Appearing alongside every British actor in the English actor’s union, Owen plays Robert Parks, the valet to a wealthy land owner. It’s a sumptuous-looking movie, filled to the brim with fine acting and topped with a great performance from Owen.

Owen also proves he doesn’t need a gun to steal scenes in Century, another period piece that would make a great double bill with Gosford Park.

– Richard Crouse’s Movie Show can be seen every Sunday at 6:30 p.m. on the E! Channel.

Cody a celebrity in her own write
In Focus by Richard Crouse
FOR METRO CANADA
September 18, 2009

She’s been called Hollywood’s most distinctive new voice since Quentin Tarantino burst onto the scene. She walks red carpets, signs autographs and appears in glossy magazines with names like Elle and Vogue.

Her fans quote her and she’s become a brand name. She is … a screenwriter? In an industry that treats wordsmiths like hired hands and little else, she has transcended the usual anonymity that goes along with the job to become a star.

The fame that comes along with writing the Oscar-winning screenplay to Juno, the critically acclaimed series The United States of Tara and penning this weekend’s Jennifer’s Body is a bit of a conundrum for the 31-year-old Cody (whose real name is Brook Busey).

“I’m completely overwhelmed,” she told one interviewer.

“My life is chaos. I cannot even begin to explain to you how busy I am or how drained I am. My entire life is completely upside-down. I’m a professional writer and yet I have fewer and fewer opportunities to write.”

That is a problem not many screenwriters have had to face, but occasionally Hollywood catapults a writer from the shadows of their chosen profession into the glare of the spotlight.

Joe Eszterhas made headlines in 1990 when his $3 million US paycheck for Basic Instinct made him the highest paid screenwriter of all time. He’s since been eclipsed by Shane Black ($4 million for The Long Kiss Goodnight) and M. Night Shyamalan ($5 million for Signs) but his outspoken nature — in his bio Hollywood Animal he writes of his competitive streak: “The only time I’ll root for anybody to be a success is if he or she has cancer, and I know for certain that the cancer is terminal” — and party-boy lifestyle made him a legend.

A battle with cancer slowed down his wild ways but he is still outspoken in defence of screenwriters, who he says are treated like “discarded hookers ... not invited to premieres of their own movies, cheated of residual payments.”

Years before the title of highest paid screenwriter had been held by Ben Hecht, the pen behind dozens of screenplays including Some Like it Hot and Scarface.

He rarely spent more than a week on a screenplay (and never more than eight weeks) and once said, “Writing a good movie brings a writer about as much fame as steering a bicycle.”

I wonder what he would have thought of Diablo Cody’s fans.

– Richard Crouse’s Movie Show can be seen every Sunday at 6:30 p.m. on the E! Channel.

No humour lost in Great White North
RICHARD CROUSE
FOR METRO CANADA
September 25, 2009

People treat Canadian movies as a serious subject. The mere mention of Great White Northern film conjures up images of dysfunctional family dramas, stark Arctic vistas or bumbling Mounties.

Writer Kathryn Monk summed it up nicely when she wrote a history of Can Con cinema called Weird Sex and Snowshoes. The title of her excellent book puts into words what many people perceive as the state of our homegrown film industry.

We may do our fair share of serious, introspective movies but between moments of navel gazing we also make movies that make people laugh, as we’ll see in this weekend’s Trailer Park Boys: Countdown to Liquor Day.

Years before the Trailer Park Boys brought their own brand of East Coast, humour to the big screen another troupe of comedians from the right hand side of the country created The Adventure of Faustus Bidgood.

It’s a surreal comedy starring CODCO’s Andy Jones as a provincial department of education clerk who fantasizes about becoming president of People’s Republic of Newfoundland and seceding from Canada.

The film, which was the first movie produced entirely in Newfoundland with home-based cast, crew, and funding, is a little inconsistent in tone — it was shot over a 10 year span as money was raised little by little — but is a riot of sight gags and unconventional humour.

Better known is Les Boys, a 1997 Quebec-made comedy that forms the cornerstone of the most successful Quebec made film series of all time. The story, which echoes Slap Shot with a touch of Mystery, Alaska thrown in, sees a ragtag group of amateur hockey players squaring off against a Mafia boss’s team to win back ownership of their coach's bar. It’s raunchy formulaic fun that has spawned two successful sequels and a television series.

Our final Canadian comedy found inspiration from an unlikely source. Strange Brew, the Bob and Doug McKenzie (Dave Thomas and Rick Moranis) film about something rotten at the Elsinore Brewery, is loosely based on Hamlet, with the McKenzie Brothers taking the roles of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Also, according to hoser Bob it was “shot in 3B — three beers! — and it looks good, eh?”

For all the great films we’ve made in this country Saturday Night Live czar Lorne Michaels jokes a Canadian would never make a film called It’s a Wonderful Life because “that would be bragging.” He says the Canadian version would be called It’s an All Right Life. Sounds like the next great Canadian comedy to me.  

– Richard Crouse’s Movie Show can be seen every Sunday at 6:30 p.m. on the E! Channel

It’s punk, it’s power, it’s women’s roller derby
In Focus by Richard Crouse
FOR METRO CANADA
October 02, 2009

This weekend Drew Barrymore makes her directorial debut with Whip It, the story of a young girl who finds the antidote for her small town blues on the roller derby track.

Barrymore’s movie delves deep into the murky world of women’s roller derby, but it isn’t the sport’s first big screen treatment.

In the early 1970s UCLA student Barry Sandler saw his master’s thesis, a screenplay called Kansas City Bomber, become a Golden Globe-nominated movie starring Raquel Welch. She plays a single Mom roller-derby queen (Jodie Foster is her daughter) who has an affair with her boss and a skating showdown with a rival.

The 1970s were the height of roller derby’s popularity but the sport made a comeback early in the millennium. That return was chronicled in Hell On Wheels, a documentary about a women-only Roller Derby league in Austin, Texas.

Ain’t It Cool says this inspirational movie has “the kind of twists, drama, cat fights and compound fractures that only happen in real life.”

Maybe that explains why the roller derby is popular again. Sure, the action is wild and wooly and it has a punk rock attitude but its recent recognition has to do with the people and girl power.

– Richard Crouse’s Movie Show can be seen every Sunday at 6:30 p.m. on the E! Channel

Vaughn, Favreau ... and Billingsley
In Focus by Richard Crouse
FOR METRO CANADA
October 08, 2009

Everyone knows Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau are BFFs. They’ve co-starred in a number of movies and when they aren’t sharing the screen they’re sharing producing and writing credits.

They are to Hollywood what toast and jam is to breakfast. That is to say, it’s almost unthinkable to have one without the other. But just as peanut butter can spice up any slice of toast and jam, the Vaughn/Favreau recipe for success has a third secret ingredient.

The name Peter Billingsley may not ring a bell, but say the phrase “You’ll shoot your eye out,” and suddenly the image of the blonde youngster with oversized glasses and a Christmas wish for a Red Ryder BB gun comes to mind.

His portrayal of Ralphie in A Christmas Story is a classic; but that was 1983 and this is now. He’s all grown up and after making over 100 commercials and countless after-school specials he’s now a big time producer and director, most often working as the third leg of Vince and Jon’s tripod.

He produced Iron Man, Zathura and others with Favreau, and The Break Up and Wild West Comedy Show with Vaughn. This weekend he steps behind the camera to direct his two pals in Couples Retreat.

He hasn’t, however, completely from acting. One of the pleasures of the Wild West Comedy show was watching Billingsley and Vaughn re-enact a scene from the after school special The Fourth Man, a hyper-serious drama about a kid who gets hooked on steroids.

But his appearances haven’t been confined to poking fun at his earlier work. In 1993 he starred in an underrated straight-to-video sci fi/horror gem called Arcade (written by Batman’s David S. Goyer) playing a “virtual reality addict” who frees a tormented spirit from a video game. It’s a TRON wannabe, but good b-movie fun nonetheless.

The next year he wrote, directed and starred in the short film The Sacred Fire, a psychological drama about a vampire hunter.

More recently he has confined himself to bit parts in the movies he produces. Catch peeks of him in The Break-Up, Iron Man and Four Christmases.

Billingsley is one of the rare happy endings from Hollywood’s child star system.

“Pete has great ideas and he’s a really balanced, easy, smart and nice guy,” says Vaughn. “He’s really intelligent but really just respectful of people.”

Creepy, crazy step-parents
In Focus by Richard Crouse
FOR METRO CANADA
October 15, 2009

“A little more than kin,” says Hamlet, “and less than kind.”

That was Shakespeare’s eloquent way of describing his main character’s stepfather. Less eloquent is the line from 1987’s The Stepfather, “He’s just some crazy creep! He’s not my father,” but you get the idea; replacement parents have not been treated well by pop culture.  

That trend continues this weekend with The Stepfather, a remake of the underrated 1987 gem that launched Lost star Terry O’Quinn to cult celebrity. Playing a psychotic man determined to find the perfect family he’s kind of a talented Mr. Ripley type but his flair is for marrying widows and offing them when he discovers any crack in his new family’s flawless facade.

This movie spawned two sequels with diminishing results. The first follow-up, titled Stepfather II: Make Room for Daddy, was released in theatres, a third sequel, however, bypassed theatres and went straight to television leading Variety to joke, “if there’s a fourth issue, it’ll be a home movie.”

Similar in theme to The Stepfather, but way more sinister is The Night of the Hunter. Heavy-lidded tough guy actor Robert Mitchum is Harry Powell, a preacher with a complicated relationship with God. He’s also a grifter and killer who marries the widow of a man who hid $10,000 inside of one of his daughter’s dolls. Powell will stop at nothing to find that money, including terrorizing his new step kids.

Roger Ebert loves the movie, calling Powell one of Hollywood’s most unforgettable villains. And how. With the words LOVE and HATE tattooed on his knuckles and an unforgiving attitude toward sin, he is unpredictable and chilling.  

Stepfathers have had their share of screen time but stepmothers haven’t been ignored. In the imaginatively titled The Stepmother, a woman is forced to seduce her new husband’s son as part of a blackmail plot.

Stepmom from outer space Kim Basinger tries to fit in on earth in My Stepmother is an Alien despite making fifty-course breakfasts and shrinking a hundred dollar bill to miniature size when a shopkeeper asks if she has anything smaller.

On film, it seems, stepparents come in all shapes, sizes and even from different planets.

Amelia takes flight again
In Focus by Richard Crouse
FOR METRO CANADA
October 23, 2009

What do Coco Chanel, Queen Victoria and aviatrix Amelia Earhart have in common? All are women, made headlines and smashed barriers, becoming feminist icons in the process. They are also all being given the big screen treatment this year in big Oscar bait movies. Coco Avant Chanel is in theatres, The Young Victoria comes out in December and this weekend Hilary Swank plays Earhart in Amelia.

None are strangers to posthumous celebrity; Victoria has been portrayed on screen almost 100 times by everyone ranging from Glenda Jackson to Michael Palin, but Earhart, a pioneering female pilot who disappeared over the Pacific during a circumnavigational flight of the globe attempt in 1937, has enjoyed a particularly good pop culture run of late. She’s been featured in Apple Computer's Think Different ads, Buck 65 rapped about her in Blood of a Young Wolf and last year Amy Adams made her flesh and blood in Night at the Museum 2: Battle of the Smithsonian.

Academy Award winner Swank’s take on the character is the eighth time Earhart has been immortalized on screen, not counting Jane Lynch’s portrayal of her in The Aviator which ended up on the cutting room floor, but she isn’t the first Oscar winner to play the fly queen.

In Flight for Freedom honorary Oscar holder Rosalind Russell played Tonie Carter, a character based on Earhart. The film and Russell’s flamboyant performance popularized the unsubstantiated notion that Earhart's disappearance was a result of clandestine work for the U.S. Navy.

That theory was furthered by a TV movie (subsequently released as a theatrical feature) called Amelia Earhart: The Final Flight. Starring Oscar winner Diane Keaton, the movie suggested the doomed flight was financed by the navy in exchange for her reports of suspicious Japanese activity in the South Pacific.

In Close Encounters of the Third Kind Steven Spielberg suggested another reason for her disappearance—alien abduction! In the film‘s climax Earhart exits the Mothership alongside a hundred alien abduction survivors. Spielberg said this was a tribute to Earhart and others who have mysteriously vanished at sea.

Whether or not Earhart would have approved of any of these portrayals we’ll never know, but at least Swank says she tried to be respectful of Earhart’s legacy. “Any time that you play a character who was alive… you want to tell the story in a way that they would be proud of.”

Live and kicking on film
In Focus by Richard Crouse
FOR METRO CANADA
October 30, 2009

As a general rule concert movies stink. Nothing can replace the experience of seeing a live band up-close-and-personal, the energy of the crowd or feeling the spray from flying fingers on a sweat soaked fret board.

Often the only thing concert films have over a live show is the absence of a guy who looks like the Big Lebowski and smells like the inside of Cheech and Chong’s bong sitting in the seat next to you.

This week the world gets a look at the greatest concert that never was, Michael Jackson’s rehearsals for his comeback tour. Is This is It a great film? No, but like the best concert films it works because it captures a time and performance that will never be duplicated.

The best-known concert film, Woodstock, is also more than just a series of musical performances; it’s the movie that defined the hippie era.

It’s a vivid document of that wild weekend 40 years ago, so finely crafted it may be the next best thing to having been there. In fact, perhaps it’s better than the real thing, what with the hippie audience’s dubious affiliation to hygiene and the lack of port-a-potties on site.    

Less known but just as electrifying is 1965’s The T.A.M.I. Show. It’s not as flashy as Woodstock — it was shot with TV cameras by a crew from The Steve Allen Show — but contains a show-stopping performance that Rick Rubin says “may be the single greatest rock & roll performance ever captured on film.”

Simply put James Brown rocks the house. Writer Nelson George described Brown’s incredible “camel-walking, proto-moon-walking” as an “athletically daring performance” and Prince is such a fan of the footage he has it playing on a loop on his office lobby television.

If Woodstock and T.A.M.I. showed the fun, hip side of the 1960s, Gimme Shelter is the flip side. Shot during the last ten days of the Rolling Stones’ 1969 North American tour and culminating with the stabbing death of audience member Meredith Hunter by the Hells Angels as the band plays Under My Thumb, it’s a startling look at the end of the 1960s.

Also worth a look are Sweet Toronto, a 1970 doc featuring John Lennon and the Plastic Ono Band, Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, David Bowie’s July 3, 1973 “retirement” concert and Stop Making Sense, the Talking Heads live in Hollywood in 1983.

More to war than dodging bullets
In Focus by Richard Crouse
FOR METRO CANADA
November 05, 2009

Earlier this year Quentin Tarantino’s unconventional war film Inglourious Basterds played fast and loose with historical facts and raked in over $100 million US at the box office.

Now George Clooney is looking for the same kind of success with his offbeat look at modern warfare, The Men Who Stare at Goats. These films join the list of quirky genres like military sci fi, war comedies and musicals like M*A*S*H and South Pacific and even Nazi zombie films, that use war as a backdrop for the main story.

Most war movies focus on men but 1944’s musical comedy Rosie the Riveter is a lighthearted romp about the women who stayed behind, doing shift work at munitions factories.

Better known in the all-singing-all-dancing war field is South Pacific. Inspired by James Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific, the film’s love story is set amid the conflict in the Pacific islands between American and Japanese soldiers. Buoyed by the popularity of songs like Some Enchanted Evening, South Pacific ran for almost five years at the Dominion Theatre in London.

Five for Hell is a cockeyed look at American GIs during the Second World War. The story of infiltrating enemy lines to steal documents that could end the war is by-the-book, but the film certainly isn’t.

It’s probably the only war film to feature miniature trampolines as tools to storm a Nazi base, a scene, one critic wrote, that resembles “a glorious circus act.” Rent it for the trampolines; watch it for Klaus Kinski’s portrayal of the evil Nazi officer.    

Speaking of evil Nazis how about Dead Snow, a Norwegian flick about Nazi zombies? Love the advertising tagline: “Ein! Zwei! Die!”

Even stranger than undead Nazis is the Nazisploitation subgenre.  There are, alarmingly, lots of these films, but the most famous is Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS. Filmed on the set of Hogan's Heroes this is one polarizing movie. Fans of 1970s exploitation fare love the lurid storyline about Commandant Ilsa’s vicious attempts to prove that women can withstand more pain than men.

Most people don’t. One writer said, “Despite a lot of competition, this is perhaps the most poisonous thing passing itself off as a movie that I’ve ever seen.”

And finally, more traditional than Ilsa or Dead Snow, but still on the fringe, is La Grande Illusion, a 1937 French film starring Erich von Stroheim, often credited as the first anti-war movie.

No formula to make a super sequel
In Focus by Richard Crouse
FOR METRO CANADA
November 13, 2009

Everyone thinks they have the secret to making a great sequel. Troy Duffy, director of Boondock Saints 2: All Saints Day (in theatres this weekend) has a simple theory for sequel success. “Give them everything they loved about the first one inside a curveball plot they never could have seen coming.”

More scientific is a study from Cass Business School in London. They’ve devised a mathematical formula which Professor Thorsten Hennig-Thurau says takes the risk out of the sequel business. “The idea here is to put some more analytical thinking into the process,” he says.

Does this mean no more disastrously bad movies like Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde? I doubt it, but if it works, which I doubt, it might mean more Godfather II, less Psycho 4.

Sequels take a bad rap, but every now and again a good one comes along that not only equals, but improves on the original.

Toy Story II was originally a direct-to-DVD release but played so well at test screenings Pixar overhauled the film for a theatrical run. Woody, Buzz and crew became the third highest grossing film of 1999, making more money than any other animated film (including the original) to that date.

Also scoring big box office was Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Much darker than the first two this one saw the franchise mature without losing the appeal of the original films. Rolling Stone said it was the “most thrilling of the three Harry Potter movies to date” and it set an opening weekend box office record in the UK.   

Post-apocalyptic thriller The Road Warrior, the sequel to Mad Max, can not only boast a rare 100% Rotten Tomatoes rating but also earned the Ebert stamp of approval as “one of the most relentlessly aggressive movies ever made.”

On the gentler side is Before Sunset, the wonderfully romantic sequel to Before Sunrise. Set nine years after the original it sees Jesse and Celine (Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy), the two lovers from the first film, reunited for a romantic walk through the streets of Paris before he must catch a plane back to the US. Heartfelt and compelling in a way that no mathematical equation could have ever predicted (take that Professor Thorsten Hennig-Thurau!) it contains the sexiest last lines in sequel history:

“Baby, you are gonna miss that plane,” she says.

“I know,” he replies.

Overnight stars don’t have it easy — just ask Gabby Sidibe
In Focus by Richard Crouse
FOR METRO CANADA
November 20, 2009

Last year Gabby Sidibe was a full-time psychology student and part-time customer service representative. This year she’s likely to be an Academy Award nominee. Her breakout role in Precious has made her the very definition of an overnight star. “I'm just a girl from Harlem who ended up in the right place at the right time,” she says.

Director Lee Daniels saw 400 other girls for role of the illiterate teen, but despite Sidibe’s “absolute belief that I wasn't going to get it” she became the latest in a string of unknowns to make the leap from obscurity to the pages of Entertainment Weekly.   

Sidibe is enjoying the ride, making the rounds of talk shows and walking red carpets, but not every new star adjusts to fame as easily.

Jean Seberg is best remembered for the tabloid aspects of her life—the FBI investigation into her Black Panthers connection and multiple suicide attempts—but she was a great actress whose legacy includes Jean-Luc Godard’s classic Breathless.

Like Sidibe, Seberg was catapulted to stardom by beating out 18,000 other hopefuls to win the lead in a film, but unlike the Precious star Seberg had a rocky ride. During the filming of 1957’s Saint Joan she was literally lit on fire during one scene and later, when the film flopped, took the brunt of the blame. Seberg killed herself in 1979.

Australian model George Lazenby surprised everyone when he replaced Sean Connery in the Bond series, starring in 1968’s On Her Majesty's Secret Service. “When I became famous I didn't know how to handle it,” he said, “so it almost drove me crazy.” He quit (or was fired, depending on who you ask) after just one turn as Bond, a move he’s regretted ever since. “Without any doubt I should have gone back to do at least one more.”

Lazenby has become a benchmark on how not to manage a career, but even George seems successful compared to the stars of Zabriskie Point, a 1970 film that turned unknowns Daria Halprin and Mark Frechette into knowns—for a short time anyway. Halprin only made one more film and Frechette died five years later in prison.

If these cautionary tales of sudden fame weigh on Gabby’s mind, she’s not letting on. “I just want to do things that make me happy,” she says. “I just want to go as far as I can.”

Ninja films are a gold mine of great actions
In Focus by Richard Crouse
FOR METRO CANADA
November 27, 2009

If the name Shô Kosugi doesn’t conjure up images of whirling nunchucks or twirling throwing stars then your knowledge of ninja films probably doesn’t extend much further than Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Kosugi is the godfather of the modern ninja film, a Japanese martial artist who, during the 1980s, used his mad ninjitsu skills to battle every movie bad guy from evil terrorists to Mafia thugs and even possessed break dancers. When the “invisible warrior” craze petered out in the early 90s Kosugi became a star on Japanese TV and created a workout regimen called Ninjaerobics. This weekend, however, he returns to the big screen in Ninja Assassin, playing Ozunu, head of a dangerous cult that turns orphans into blood thirsty killing machines.      

The movie that kicked off ninja mania was 1981’s Enter the Ninja, a wild b-movie that features nineteen minutes of hardcore ninja action in the first twenty minutes. Kosugi is an evil ninja hired to take down a virtuous “white ninja” (Franco Nero, who didn’t do any of his own fight scenes), who is protecting a friend’s Philippine plantation. The body count is high—36 people get ninjaed, including one security guard who falls victim to the dreaded “mosquito spikes”—and even though the acting is terrible and the jokes a little flat it has, nonetheless, been described by one ninja fan as “fantastic crap.”

Probably the most outlandish of the original 80s wave of ninja flicks is Ninja III: The Domination, which features a lead character described as completely normal, aside from her “exceptional extrasensory perception and preoccupation with Japanese culture.” In this one an evil ninja attempts to avenge his death from beyond the grave, by possessing an innocent woman's body. Ninja III is packed with cool stunts—a throwing star is tossed by some very limber ninja toes—and we learn that a ninja can transfer his soul through his sword to another person.

Besides outrageous ninja action the only thing these movies have in common is stiff acting, but acting isn’t why you buy a ticket to see a movie called Rage of Honor. If you want good acting look up Phillip Seymour Hoffman, but if you want to see a ninja take on a pick-up truck and win or slice a bad guy in half (sending his legs to and his torso fro) then Shô Kosugi is your man.

Brother vs. brother a recipe for drama
In Focus by Richard Crouse
FOR METRO CANADA
December 4, 2009

In the movies often the only thing brothers have in common is a last name. Creating conflict between siblings makes good dramatic sense and it’s a practice that harkens back to the very first set of brothers. Would the story of Cain and Able have as much biblical oomph if the boys got along? I don’t think so.

So it is with Tommy and Sam Cahill, played by Jake Gyllenhaal and Tobey Maguire, in this weekend’s Brothers. In the great tradition of movie siblings they’re polar opposites; Tommy is an ex-con, Sam is a Marine Captain and former football star. You get the idea. But will Tommy go all Cain on Sam? You’ll have to buy a ticket to find out, but in the meantime here are some other movie brothers who turned out differently than mom and dad may have hoped.

Ricky & Doughboy Baker (Morris Chestnut and Ice Cube) from Boyz N the Hood are opposites, but when Doughboy takes revenge on the people who killed his brother it proves that blood, and blood shed, is thicker than water.    

In The Darjeeling Limited Jack (Jason Schwartzman) asks his brothers Francis (Owen Wilson) and Peter (Adrien Brody), “I wonder if the three of us would've been friends in real life? Not as brothers, but as people.” Good question. You couldn’t find a more diverse trio: Francis is a compulsive sad sack, Peter a bundle of manic energy and Jack a collection of jangled nerves. They may never be friends, but by the end of a road trip in India they can at least tolerate one another.

“When brothers agree,” the old saying goes, “no fortress is so strong as their common life.” But when they disagree, look out. Just ask Fredo Corleone. The Corleone boys each brought something different to the Godfather trilogy, but it is the “kiss of death” scene in part two between the kindhearted Fredo (John Cazale) and the ruthless Michael (Al Pacino) that gives new meaning to the term sibling rivalry. “I know it was you Fredo,” Michael says. “You broke my heart.” Siblings may not get along but it takes a real grim brother to order a hit on his younger brother.

In Go West Chico Marx summed up the relationship most of these on- screen brothers share.

“You love your brother don't you?” he’s asked.

“No, but I'm used to him,” he replies.

Playing Mandela: The legendary South African onscreen
In Focus by Richard Crouse
FOR METRO CANADA
December 11, 2009

Morgan Freeman has played real-life characters before onscreen, most notably in Lean on Me, but with his latest role he takes on one of the most venerated people in the world, Nelson Mandela.

“This started out with Madiba (honourary title adopted by elders of Mandela’s clan) naming me as his heir apparent,” says Freeman. “When he was asked… ‘Mr. Mandela, if your book becomes a movie, who would you like to play you?’ He said, ‘Morgan Freeman.’”

That was fourteen years ago. It took Freeman that amount of time to find and develop Invictus — this weekend’s look at Mandela’s plan to use a rugby team as a symbol of South African unity — into a film directed by Clint Eastwood. Freeman used that time to prepare, getting to know the real Mandela.

Freeman may be the latest to play Mandela on screen, but he isn’t the first.

The first major dramatization at Mandela’s life starred Danny Glover (who won an Emmy for his work) and was made in the 25th year of his 27-year prison sentence. Shot on location in Zimbabwe, the made-for-TV Mandela covers the years 1948 to 1987, focusing on not just on Mandela’s struggle for freedom but his personal life as well.

“I’m always interested in people who become symbols,” said writer Ronald Harwood, “and I’m curious to know what such people are like as ordinary men and women, beneath the trappings we bestow upon them.”

Next came Mandela and deKlerk, another made-for-television drama starring Sidney Poitier and Michael Caine. The story of how these men engineered the end of apartheid was shot in South Africa at many of the locations where the real story took place. Newsreel footage furthers the film’s feeling of historical authenticity.

There have been several other dramas based on Mandela’s life, including Goodbye Bafana, starring 24’s Dennis Haysbert, but to catch a glimpse of the man himself, check out Malcolm X.

Just months after his release from prison, Mandela played a schoolteacher in a Soweto classroom in the film’s final scene, reciting a snippet of one of Malcolm X’s most famous speeches.

A Single Man's Author, Christopher Isherwood
In Focus by Richard Crouse
FOR METRO CANADA
December 11, 2009

Christopher Isherwood was a literary rock star with a taste for booze, much younger men and both spiritual and sexual experimentation. He palled around with thinkers like E. M. Forster and Aldous Huxley and turned his exploits into a string of semi-fictionalized novels, essays and plays. His best known work remains a collection of short stories called Goodbye to Berlin, which provided the basis for the Oscar winning movie Cabaret.

This weekend, forty-five years after it was first published, another of his books, A Single Man, hits the big screen. Directed by former fashionista Tom Ford it stars Colin Firth as George, a gay English professor contemplating suicide after the sudden death of his longtime lover.

“The gay aspect of A Single Man certainly wasn’t what drew me to make the film,” said Ford. “It was its human aspect, that unifying quality.”

That human characteristic is the thing that makes Isherwood’s best work so timely and, conversely, timeless. The work of his that translated best to the screen told stories that were specific in their setting, but universal in their themes.

Cabaret, for instance, was set in the last days of the Weimar Republic in Pre-Hitler Germany and features a healthy dose of decadence and perversion, but underneath the shiny surface is a sense of desperation. Roger Ebert wrote, “the context of Germany on the eve of the Nazi ascent to power makes the entire musical into an unforgettable cry of despair.” The setting and people may be unfamiliar, but the fear of the unknown is the universal element.

Less known is Isherwood’s script for The Loved One, (co-written with Dr. Strangelove scribe Terry Southern). It is a devastating satire on the funeral business which was advertised with the tagline “The motion picture with something to offend everyone!” The movie was a little too mean spirited for audiences in 1965, but has since gained a cult following among fans of dark humor. Sharp eyed viewers will also spy Isherwood as a mourner in the funeral scene.

A more up close and personal look at Isherwood can be found in Chris & Don: A Love Story a 2008 documentary chronicling the thirty year relationship between Isherwood, his much younger lover, artist Don Bachardy and their struggles as one of the first openly gay couples in Hollywood.

James Cameron is not the only perfectionist in the film industry
In Focus by Richard Crouse
FOR METRO CANADA
December 18, 2009

In the gap between James Cameron’s last theatrical feature, Titanic, and his new film, Avatar (in theatres this weekend) Clint Eastwood directed 11 movies, Michael Bay made six and even Uwe Boll, a director so reviled an on–line petition demands he stop making films, has made 15 in the time it took Cameron to make just one.

So what’s the hold up?

Some suggest Cameron takes so long between gigs because his commitment to his projects is so intense he wants to be sure he is on the right track before camera starts to roll.

“I want you to know one thing,” he allegedly told one producer, “once we embark on this adventure and I start to make this movie, the only way you’ll be able to stop me is to kill me.”

Also, Cameron isn’t bound by the same considerations as most directors.

He wrote the script for Avatar in 1994 and was prepared to wait until special effects technology caught up with his vision.

The luxury of having time is what happens when you make the highest grossing movie in history, a fact he celebrates, wearing a t-shirt that reads “Time Means Nothing in the Face of Creativity.”

Like Cameron, Stanley Kubrick spent more time off movie sets than on. In a career that spanned 46 years he made only 13 movies but spent years developing pictures that never went into production — like Napoleon, an epic look at the life of the French Emperor that he expected to be “the best movie ever made.”

Others choose long lay-offs between projects for different reasons. Actor Casey Affleck (Ben’s younger brother) had three movies released in 2007 but nothing else scheduled until 2010. Why the break?

“To be perfectly honest, I don't really enjoy playing anybody,” he says, “except Casey Affleck lying on the couch watching the Red Sox … usually, when I’m working, I’m not really having a good time.”

Then there’s Daniel Day-Lewis, an actor whose lapses between projects makes Affleck look like a workaholic. The There Will Be Blood star routinely takes years off between films, once disappearing from the big screen for five years.

When asked why he doesn’t work more often he said, “I like to cook things very slowly. I learnt early on that I couldn’t jump from one kind of work to another. I did it a couple of times and it didn’t work.”

Your best bets for Boxing Day at the movies
In Focus by Richard Crouse
FOR METRO CANADA
December 24, 2009

Movies and Boxing Day go together like turkey and stuffing.

While everyone is returning unwanted Christmas gifts or fighting bargain hunters at the mall, it will be the perfect time to relax and catch up on flicks you missed in the hectic ramp-up to the holidays.

The multiplexes are jammed with new movies at this time of year. Go see Disney’s first hand-drawn fairy tale in 20 years, The Princess and the Frog, for the beautiful animation
Stay for the great songs and first ever African-American princess.

Also kid friendly is Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel, which sees the three furry singing stars find some competition from The Chipettes, an all-girl chipmunk group led by (the voice of) Drew Barrymore.

If singing rodents aren’t your thing, how about an all singing, all dancing movie from the usually oh-so-serious Daniel Day Lewis?

The Oscar winner stars in Nine, a musical about a film director juggling relationships with his wife, mistress, muse, agent and mother, all while wearing cool Italian suits.

If twisty-turny relationships turn your crank but an overdose of Christmas carols has put you off music for the week, you may find some yuks in watching Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin fight over Meryl Streep in the comedy It’s Complicated, or the soon-to-be-divorced couple Hugh Grant and Sarah Jessica Parker enter the witness-protection program in Did You Hear About the Morgans?.

If you have time on your hands — or simply want a break from Christmas house guests — James Cameron’s two-and-a-half-hour sci fi epic Avatar is the longest – and most eye-popping movie in current release.

Can’t make the trip to the theatre? There’s something on DVD or Blu-Ray for everyone and then some. For the kids there’s Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and G-Force, a flick about everyone’s favourite team of action guinea pigs.

Once the tots have gone to bed and grandma has had an extra sherry or two, check out Trailer Park Boys: Countdown to Liquor Day, Inglourious Basterds or The Hangover for some adult entertainment.

For the music lover in the house, there’s Taking Woodstock and the excellent guitar rock doc It Might Get Loud.
For the lovelorn, (500) Days of Summer should confirm that love can be fleeting. And for the romantics, Julie & Julia should verify that food always tastes better with someone you love.

Whether staying home or going out, there are plenty of options to help while away a lazy Boxing Day.

Bloodsuckers return to dominate the box office
In Focus by Richard Crouse
FOR METRO CANADA
January 08, 2010

Who knew there were so many fang bangers out there? The success of HBO's True Blood and the Twilight franchise is proof that vampires have risen from the dead, driven a stake through the very heart of popular culture and won over new fans in unprecedented numbers.

Never before have bloodsuckers done such boffo box office, but how can this newfound popularity be called a comeback when the vampires never went away?

No amount of garlic, it seems, can keep vampires out of the theatre. This weekend Daybreakers, a film about a world where vamps outnumber humans, joins the list of vampire films which dates back to the 1900s.

In the 101 years since audiences first sunk their teeth into a vampire movie — 1909’s Vampire of the Coast — vamps have come in all shapes and sizes. There’s The Vampire Effect, a Chinese martial arts vampire movie (guest starring Jackie Chan), Thomas Dolby’s vampire musical comedy Rockula and the self explanatory Gayracula to name just a few.
E

ven stranger than any of those is Dracula Blows his Cool, a 1979 German comedy featuring the Count as the proprietor of a disco in his ancestral castle. It’s quite awful, but worth a rental (if you can find it) to hear the disco “hit” Rock Me Dracula (Suck! Suck!).

More traditional is another German film made the same year. Roger Ebert called Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre, “the most evocative series of images centered around the idea of the vampire” since 1922’s Nosferatu.

It cannot be said that this is a particularly scary movie, but Herzog’s emphasis on slowly building tension and atmosphere rather than simply smearing the screen with blood is disquieting and decidedly eerie.

A little more rock’em sock’em is The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires, the 1974 collaboration between Britain’s Hammer Studios and the Hong Kong based Shaw Brothers Studio. Peter Cushing is vampire hunter Prof. Van Helsing who battles Dracula and six disciples in a remote Chinese village. It’s weird and wacky, but as one critic said it gets by “on sheer novelty alone.”

So many vampires, so little time. How have vampires survived when other film fads are dead and buried? Adaptability. Just as every generation has placed a hero on the pop charts, cinematic vampires have shapeshifted over the years, bending to the times.

How else can you explain Dracula Blows His Cool’s disco dancing Drac? 

End of days a mainstay on the silver screen
In Focus by Richard Crouse
FOR METRO CANADA
January 15, 2010

Whether it’s Denzel Washington dining on a meal of hairless cat in this weekend’s The Book of Eli or Knowing’s Nicolas Cage screeching, “How can I stop the end of the world?” grisly images of post apocalyptic lifestyle have recently been dominating movie screens.

Perhaps it’s the recession or the result of the anxious times we live in, but end-of-the-world stories are all the rage, but they are not new. Whether it’s nuclear fallout, an unexpected ice age or a zombie holocaust that brings about the end, filmmakers have peddled post apocalyptica for years.   

In 1959 Gregory Peck headlined a dystopian drama that set the date for the end of the world just after World War III in 1964. In On the Beach nuclear war has destroyed all life on the planet save for a small enclave in Australia, but even they will succumb once the radiation clouds drift by. “We're all doomed,” says Julian Osborne (Fred Astaire). “Doomed by the air we're about to breathe.” As doomsday dramas go this one is particularly depressing—for example people gobble up “suicide pills”—but its Cold War commentary led one contemporary writer to label it “the most important film of our time.”

Several years later the post-atomic war film Panic in Year Zero! opened with one of filmdom’s great understatements. While on a fishing trip Harry Baldwin (Ray Milland) and his family see a mushroom cloud over Los Angeles. “We've had it; haven't we dad?” says son Rick (Frankie Avalon). Well, not quite Rick, but the world as you know it is over. Made on a shoe-string, Panic in Year Zero! is notable not for its special effects—there aren’t any—but for its take on the difficult decisions Milland’s character must make to ensure his family’s survival in a world where old principles of humanity are obsolete.

Finally, to end the end-of-the-world list, fans of post apocalyptic fantasy will find a payday in the form of Rock & Rule, an animated film featuring Deborah Harry and Lou Reed’s voice work. In it the world has been destroyed and “legendary super-rocker” Mok—whose record went “gold, platinum, and plutonium in one day”—tries to use a demonic code to rule what’s left of the world.

With such a range of dystopian stories to mine it seems filmmakers could make post apocalyptic movies until the end of the world comes for real.

From the squared circle to the silver screen
In Focus by Richard Crouse
FOR METRO CANADA
January 22, 2010

You can blame (or thank, depending on your point of view) Vincent K. McMahon for movies like Mr. Nanny and Abraxas. Both starred wrestlers — Hulk Hogan and Jesse Ventura respectively — and while WWE chief McMahon didn’t write or direct either of the films, he understood the promotional importance of allowing his wrestlers to make the leap from the ring to the big screen.

It wasn’t always that way however.

Although wrestlers have been appearing in movies for decades—wrestler Lenny Montana played The Godfather’s Luca Brazzi and Tor Johnson, the Super-Swedish Angel, made 31 movies including the legendary Plan 9 From Outer Space — initially the powerful McMahon family actively tried to keep their wrestlers off the screen.

For instance, the elder McMahon, Vincent J., who originally hired Hulk Hogan, refused him permission to appear in Rocky III.
He resolutely believed wrestlers should fight, not act. It wasn’t until Vince Jr. stepped in and gave Hogan the go-ahead that the heyday of wraslin’ movies began in earnest.

After that, many of McMahon’s bigger-than-life wrestlers tried their hands at Hollywood stardom, including Dwayne Johnson, a.k.a. The Rock, who headlines this weekend’s The Tooth Fairy.

Most of the movies in the wrestler genre aren’t great—filmjunk.com called Hulk’s Santa with Muscles a “crapterpiece”—but there are a couple of notable exceptions.

One of the more prolific wrestlers-turned-actors, Canadian-born Rowdy Roddy Piper has dozens of movie credits, but his high point came in 1988’s They Live, where he delivered the now classic line, “I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I’m all out of bubblegum.” It’s his “Hasta la vista, baby!,” and is one of the great action quotes of the decade.

And while it is unlikely that WWE Hall of Famer Stone Cold Steve Austin could ever receive any kind of acting award unless he did his trademarked Axe Handle Elbow Drop on the entire Academy, he has held his own in The Longest Yard and The Condemned, and has three films coming out in 2010.

Recently Triple H, Stacy Keibler and Goldberg have all tried for acting careers, and why not? McMahon calls his wrestlers “entertainers” and The Wrestler director Darren Aronofsky asked rhetorically, “Why aren’t wrestlers in SAG? If you really think about it, the Screen Actors Guild should organize them.”

Rome stands out as one of film's greatest sets
In Focus by Richard Crouse
FOR METRO CANADA
January 29, 2010

According to Italian director Federico Fellini, “Rome is the most wonderful movie set in the world.”  A quick IMDB check reveals thousands of movies shot in the ancient city—everything from forgettable fare like The Exorcism of Baby Doll to classics like The Bicycle Thief. The latest movie to use the Eternal City as a backdrop is When in Rome, a new Kristen Bell rom com opening this weekend.

The most famous Rome scenes in cinema are arguably Gregory Peck teasing Roman Holiday’s Audrey Hepburn by putting his hand in the Mouth of Truth, which purportedly bites off the hands of liars, and La Dolce Vita’s iconic image of Anita Ekberg standing in the Trevi Fountain but for my lira the famous last scene of Fellini's Roma is the most spectacular.

The sight of a gang of motorcyclists driving through the city, past such landmarks as the Colosseum, the Capitoline Museum and the Forum, is breathtaking. Actress Claudia Ruspoli says it was an eye opener for Italians as well.

“Rome used to be a dark city; the monuments unlit,” she said. “When Fellini shot Roma that summer, the monuments were all lit and we saw them at night for the first time. Beautiful!”

A grittier vision of Rome appears in Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City. Mixing documentary footage of German troops on Rome’s streets with a fictionalized story of Italian resisters on the lam from the Gestapo Rossellini created a new film genre—Italian neo-realism—and by moving the camera outside studio walls, using real locations, available light and nonprofessional actors, provides a real life glimpse of war ravaged Rome.   

More polished than Rome, Open City is Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thief. It’s still neorealist, but where Rossellini struggled to cobble together bits of film stock to complete his film, resulting in an uneven look, Bicycle Thief is beautifully photographed. The story of a poor man searching for the person who stole his bike plays like a walking tour of late 1940s Rome.

Since then hundreds of films have shot on the streets of Rome and while the city has been kind to the movies, the movies have also been kind to Rome. Patrizia Prestipino, head of Rome’s provincial department of tourism views any film set in Italy as “free advertising” and notes that the release of movies like Angels and Demons has created a new industry in the country—movie tourism.

Nicholas Sparks reigns supreme for Hollywood tear-jerkers
In Focus by Richard Crouse
FOR METRO CANADA
February 05, 2010

There are two kinds of romance movies. There’s the standard rom com—unlikely couple meets, overcomes obstacle, gets together, breaks up, realizes they are perfect for one another, gets back together, roll credits—and then there’s the tearful romance that doesn’t work out happily-ever-after. Of the latter category author Nicholas Sparks is the undisputed king of the three-hanky drama.

The former pharmaceutical salesman has wracked up an impressive, if tearstained, list of 14 best sellers including The Lucky One and Dear John, which comes to the big screen this weekend starring the sad-eyed Amanda Seyfried.  

His best known work is The Notebook, a cross-generational love story that spent over a year as a New York Times hardcover top seller. Inspired by the story of his wife’s grandparents sixty year marriage, the novel became a 2004 movie starring Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams. The tale of love and Alzheimer’s is emotionally manipulative—writer Gary Panton called this passionate tearjerker “mushier than a mushed-up bowl of mushy peas that’s just been mushed in an industrial-strength mushifier”—but opening weekend  it surfed a wave of tears to the box office top five.

Less seen was Nights in Rodanthe, a gusher about a doctor who courts an unhappily married woman. Summed up as “the cinematic equivalent of a Harlequin novel with a pack of tissues shoved into the back cover,” the movie reunited Diane Lane and Richard Gere after joint appearances in The Cotton Club and Unfaithful.

Critics haven’t warmed to Sparks’s stories on film— A Walk to Remember only has a 27% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes—but audiences can’t seem to get enough of his weepy tales of unrequited love, lost love, mature love and love in a time of trouble. Four of his books have already been adapted for the movies, two more are being released this year and there is one each scheduled for 2011 and 2012.

How hot he is in Hollywood? Disney hired him to write The Last Song screenplay for their biggest star Miley Cyrus.

His style of romance has caught on, but don’t call him a romance writer. “I write dramatic fiction. If you go into a further subgenre, it would be a love story, but it has its roots in the Greek tragedies. This genre evolved through Shakespeare. He did Romeo and Juliet. Hemingway did A Farewell to Arms. I do this currently today.”

Creatively restless, Chris Columbus is full of surprises
In Focus by Richard Crouse
FOR METRO CANADA
February 12, 2010

At first glance, director Chris Columbus’s new film seems like a callback to his earlier work.

This weekend’s Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief is based on a popular book series about a teenager with special powers who must battle supernatural forces.

Can you say "Harry Potter?" Sure, just don’t say it near the filmmaker, who directed the first two films in the J.K. Rowling series and produced the third.

“It’s nothing like Harry Potter,” he told the New Zealand Herald. “I wouldn’t have gotten involved in a picture that was too similar to Potter. I hadn’t seen a film like this before, and that was the reason I wanted to do it.”

In fact, other than with sequels, he rarely repeats himself.

His resume as a writer (Gremlins), producer (Jingle All the Way) and director (Rent) reveals a variety of styles and topics. He’s no stranger to comedy, having helmed the Home Alone movies; no stranger to romance, as he proved with Only the Lonely, no stranger to teen fare or musicals, and in between those he’s covered most other genres.

Nestled among his blockbusters are a number of deserving lesser known titles.

In the comedy Heartbreak Hotel, he added a chapter to the mythology of Elvis Presley.

Starring Tuesday Weld — The King’s Wild in the Country co-star — and David Keith as Elvis, the movie centers on Johnny Wolfe’s (Charlie Schlatter) scheme to kidnap the singer and bring him home to cheer up his ailing mom (Weld).

It’s very silly, but Elvis fans will enjoy the sly tributes sprinkled throughout — Weld’s motel is called The Flaming Star — and a soundtrack ripe with new versions of Elvis chestnuts like That’s All Right and Hound Dog performed by David Keith and polka kings The Bavarian Village Band.  

As a writer Columbus prepped himself for eventually helming the Potter movies by penning Young Sherlock Holmes and the Pyramid of Fear.

Directed by Barry Levinson, the story of young Holmes and Watson meeting and solving a boarding school mystery is primarily notable as the first movie to feature a completely computer-generated character in the form of a knight created from a stained glass window.

Columbus is a restless storyteller who can’t be pinned down.

He’s someone who blazes his own path and tales chances.

I mean, who else would cast Uma Thurman as a snake-haired Medusa? 

The special spark of great director-actor teams
In Focus by Richard Crouse
FOR METRO CANADA
February 19, 2010
        
Last week, the Internet lit up with news that one of the great actor-director teams might reunite to remake one of their classic films.
Rumours (since debunked) had Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro set to give Taxi Driver the sequel treatment.

It seemed too good to be true — De Niro is busy overseeing the Tribeca Film Festival and Scorsese is occupied with new muse Leonardo DiCaprio — and the rumor turned out to be just that -- a rumour.

But for a tantalizing moment it seemed there might be a new film from one of the most dynamic director-actor pairings since Bogart and Huston or Mifune and Kurosawa.

Not that there are any shortage of director-actor teams. Scorsese and DiCaprio’s newest bit of teamwork, Shutter Island, opens this weekend and the latest Pedro Almodóvar-Penélope Cruz film, Broken Embraces, was recently nominated for a Golden Globe.

“I think you find, when you talk about a collaboration between a filmmaker and an actor, that it’s always evolving,” said Shutter Island producer Brad Fischer. “I don’t think it begins and ends with any one movie.”

Diane Keaton cites the evolution of collaboration with Woody Allen — they made seven films together, including the classic Annie Hall, between 1973 and 1993 — with elevating her from a “novice who had lots of feelings but didn’t know how to express herself” to someone who “can be braver and more spontaneous.”

Penélope Cruz is more effusive when discussing her mentor Pedro Almodóvar, who made her an art house darling, international star and claims to have “saved her from Hollywood.”

“He changed the way I looked at the world before I even knew him,” she says.

“There is something that works really well in our relationship that combines both our friendship and the professional side,” says Almodóvar. “We operate like lovers. So while we don't have the pleasures of sex, we don’t have the complications of sex either. We work really well as a couple who don't sleep together.”

Sometimes the director- actor relationship extends past the movie set. Four years after shooting The Life Aquatic in Italy, Wes Anderson regular Bill Murray (five films together) asked the director to deliver 10,000 Euros in cash to his former landlord.

“It’s not as weird as it sounds,” said Anderson on paying the rent a little late. “Bill can be a little weird with time.”

Movie studios have a tough time avoiding the plague
In Focus by Richard Crouse
FOR METRO CANADA
February 26, 2010

This weekend’s The Crazies, a remake of a 1973 George A. Romero film, is one of those “everyone we know is dead” movies. It’s the story of a virus that turns the inhabitants of a sleepy Norman Rockwell town into koo-koo bananas killers. In this age of big diseases with little names—AIDS, SARS—and deadly airborne germs like swine flu, bacteriological horror movies have some resonance, but they’re nothing new.

In recent years, 28 Days Later—which is kind of like The Crazies with English accents—and the Ebola-esque Outbreak have used contagious illness as a starting point for their medical mayhem, but without The Andromeda Strain, The Cassandra Crossing or the intense vision of Panic in the Streets, those movies may not have existed.

Written by Michael Crichton when he was still a medical student, The Andromeda Strain sees an outer space biotoxin destroy a small town in New Mexico. Directed by Robert Wise—also at the helm of The Day the Earth Stood Still and The Sound of Music—the movie mixes standard sci-fi with credible medical theory and contains eerie lines like, “Most of them died instantly. A few had time to go quietly nuts.”

More down to earth is The Cassandra Crossing, a big budget disease- on-a-train flick. This time it’s not an extra-terrestrial virus, but a plague contaminated terrorist starting all the trouble. Structured like a Love Boat episode, with an all-star cast that mixes and matches Sophia Loren with O.J. Simpson, it has none of Andromeda’s serious edge, but for sheer cheesy fun it can’t be beat.

Predating all of them was Panic in the Streets, a low-budget film noir set in 1950s New Orleans. In it, a doctor and policeman (Richard Widmark and Paul Douglas) have just 48 hours to track down an illegal immigrant infected with pneumonic plague and stop a possible eruption of Black Death. Made during the Cold War, the rapid spread of the infection plays like a paranoid metaphor for the proliferation of Communist ideology. Despite this subtext, director Elia Kazan said: “This isn’t very deep. It has other virtues. It has lightness of foot, it has surprise, it has suspense, it’s engaging.”

Next to jump on the bio-thriller bandwagon will be Steven Soderbergh who is set to team with Matt Damon and Kate Winslet in Contagion, a thriller focused on the threat posed by a deadly disease.

Alice is a girl of many movie faces
In Focus by Richard Crouse
FOR METRO CANADA
March 05, 2010

Will the real Alice Kingsley please stand up?

Is she the 19 year old rebel played by Mia Wasikowska in this weekend’s 3-D Alice in Wonderland directed by Tim Burton? Or the insane character of America McGee’s video game Alice? Or the martial arts instructor of a recent Syfy channel adaptation?

In fact, she’s all those people and more.

Originally written in 1865 by Lewis Carroll, the little girl who found a world of wonder down the rabbit hole, has become one of the more enduring and malleable characters of literature and film.

“The books are a kind of Rorschach test, a screen onto which people project their own ideas,” says The Mystery of Lewis Carroll author Jenny Woolf.

Alice first got the big screen treatment in 1903 in a 12-minute silent version featuring rudimentary special effects of the hero changing sizes. Played by Mabel Clark, (who was also employed on the set as a “help-out girl,” making costumes and running errands), the look of this traditional retelling closely resembles the book’s original illustrations. Out of print for many years, it’s now available as a DVD extra on the recent reissue of the 1966 Alice starring Peter Sellers.

The Sellers version, a made-for-BBC television movie, is as mad as a hatter. Director Jonathan Miller sought to boil the production down to the essentials, to dispense with the “japing and game play” of earlier versions. To that end none of the strange creatures Alice meets along the way are played by actors in animal costumes. This approach could have fallen flat, but when you have actors like John Gielgud and Peter Cook accentuating the wonderful dialogue rather than the flashy production design, it works. Add a trippy soundtrack by Ravi Shankar and some veiled drug references and you get a film that could only have been made at the height of the Swingin’ Sixties.

It’s hard to know what Alice Liddell, the young girl who inspired the movie would have thought of any of the wild and wacky versions of the story, but we do know she enjoyed the 1933 Paramount version.

“I am delighted with the film and am now convinced that only through the medium of the talking picture art could this delicious fantasy be faithfully interpreted," she told the New York Times. “Alice is a picture which represents a revolution in cinema history!”

Pierce Brosnan is much more than James Bond
In Focus by Richard Crouse
FOR METRO CANADA
March 12, 2010 

Pierce Brosnan has never been nominated for an Oscar. He has a couple Golden Globe nods to his credit and an MTV Movie Best Fight Award statuette on his shelf, but so far the heavy gold has evaded him. 

Perhaps because of his dapper good looks he doesn’t get spoken about in the same breath as Colin Firth or Morgan Freeman. Perhaps a resume dotted with films like Dante’s Peak knocks him down a peg or two in the Academy’s opinion. 

Or maybe it’s his predilection for doing shamelessly populist fare like Mama Mia and this weekend’s Remember Me (co-starring as Robert Pattison’s father) that keeps him from being taken as seriously as say, George Clooney, another genetically blessed actor, who, like Brosnan, got his big break on television.

He could have been nominated for his work in The Matador, a little seen, but critically lauded film from 2005. In it, Brosnan plays Julian Noble, a jaded hit man, or “facilitator of fatalities” who finds a confidant in a struggling businessman, played by Greg Kinnear.

Brosnan’s performance as Julian, the hit man who develops confidence problems, is a revelation. We have seen Brosnan as the slickly comic private eye Remington Steele on television, the sophisticated James Bond and even as the suave jewel thief in The Thomas Crown Affair, but until now we have never seen him in Beatle boots and a Speedo traipsing across a hotel lobby. 

His Julian is a manic creation — amoral, rude and unlike Bond, the character that has defined his career for the last decade, unshaven. 

With this one performance Brosnan entered a new phase in his career, effortlessly leaving the urbane Bond behind.  

Maybe next year he’ll finally get the recognition he deserves when the Academy gets a load of his work in The Ghost Writer. As ex-prime minister Adam Lang he embodies the role, like he was born for photo ops in front of private jets, waving to his constituents. 

It’s good work that effectively erased the image of him as a half man / half horse in the recent film Percy Jackson and the Olympians. 

Despite the odd misstep, he is an interesting actor who deserves more respect than he gets. 

If the movie gods can allow Mon’ique to go from co-starring in Beerfest to winning a Best Supporting Actress Oscar, surely they can ignore Brosnan’s silly beard in an ill-conceived Robinson Crusoe remake, or the non-thrilling thriller Live Wire and finally give him his due.

Repossessing the silver screen
In Focus by Richard Crouse
FOR METRO CANADA
March 19, 2010
          
Nobody likes repo men. Repossession agents are dream-killers who prey on people who fail to make payments or default on loans, but, sadly, in these times of economic hardship business is booming. There are even repo recruitment websites—you don’t need a formal education, they say, but a “certain level of detective skill” is considered a bonus.

But it’s not just in the real world that recovery professionals are in a growth industry. On screen repo representatives are also making a comeback. In this weekend’s Repo Men, Jude Law and Forest Whitaker play gents who specialize in reclaiming artificial organs from deadbeats who fall behind on the payments, and doing the festival circuit is Repo Chick, the sister film to Alex Cox’s much loved 1984 cult hit, Repo Man.

“The life of a repo man is always intense,” says Repo Man actor Tracey Walter. So is the movie. Roger Ebert described it as “…a little weirdo fun. It is the first movie I know about that combines (1) punk teenagers, (2) automobile repossessors, and (3) aliens from outer space.” A few years ago, a group of Los Angeles Times writers deemed the strange story the eighth best film set in Los Angeles in the last 25 years, and its odd mix of punk rock ethos and droll humor has also inspired several other artists. Terry Pratchett’s novel, Reaper Man is named in tribute and a graphic novel called Waldo's Hawaiian Holiday is a semi-sequel to the film.

The official sequel, Repo Chick directed by Cox, is awaiting release. It sees the original premise expanded to include not only cars but “boats, houses, aeroplanes, small nations… children.” Variety said its “wacky blend of leftist, anti-establishment politics, eye-searing colors, outre costumes and manic overacting… could be likened to what you would get if Michael Moore directed an episode of the Nick Jr. kiddie series, Lazy Town.”

And finally, a little more straightforward than Repo Man’s dark social satire, or Paris Hilton’s unhinged Repo! The Genetic Opera, is Repo Jake, a dirty little B-movie about a hot rod driver (Dan Grizzly Adams Haggerty) who becomes a retrieval specialist in the hopes of living a quiet life. His plans go awry when he repossesses a vicious crime lord’s car. About the best thing that can be said about this stinker is that the DVD comes with “high fidelity sound.”

Go back in movie history with these time-travelling vehicles
In Focus by Richard Crouse
FOR METRO CANADA
March 26, 2010
          
Movies are like time machines. No, they don’t physically transport viewers to another time and place but, like dreams and memories, they can take the audience back to ancient Rome or forward in time to a planet populated by giant blue people. I guess that’s why stories about time travel have been so popular on the big screen.

This weekend John Cusack stars in the latest time travel tale, the self-explanatory Hot Tub Time Machine. For Cusack, the idea of getting stuck in the 1980s doesn’t require a time machine. A star for thirty years, he says all he has to do is turn on the TV to be taken back: “Every time I flip through the cable, I have flashbacks.”

In the movie, Cusack and his buddies head back to the '80s, a decade that one of the more famous time travel movies used as a starting point.

Everyone remembers the time-travelling DeLorean from Back to the Future — chosen because its sleek futuristic look resembled a spaceship — but it wasn’t until the third draft of the script that the filmmakers decided on the famous gull-winged car. Originally the time travel device was a laser, but that concept was rejected because it wasn’t exciting enough. Then, director Robert Zemeckis considered housing the machine in a refrigerator, but nixed the idea over concerns that the movie could inspire kids to crawl into iceboxes and get trapped.

In the original script for Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, in which the titular characters bring historical figures back from history to help them with a school project, the time machine was a 1969 Chevy Van; afraid of inadvertently plagiarizing Back to the Future, the filmmakers went with a phone booth instead. 

Probably the most famous time-shifting story is H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine. In the 1960 movie version, director George Pal fashioned the look of the time machine on a sled (a idea borrowed years later for the hardware in Jean-Claude Van Damme’s Timecop), so, he said, it could slide into the future. Paying tribute to the story’s author, he affixed a plaque on the time machine that reads “Manufactured by H. George Wells.”

In 1971, when MGM sold off a warehouse of old props (including Dorothy’s Ruby Slippers), the sled time machine was purchased by a collector who used it as part of a yearly Halloween display at his Burbank, Calif., home.

Big screen adventures in NYC's seedy side
In Focus by Richard Crouse
METRO CANADA
April 09, 2010

If you’ve only ever seen New York projected onto a screen it’s understandable that you may have a skewed idea of what the city is all about. Charles Bronson made a career of showing the city’s down, dirty and dangerous side in the Death Wish films, and The Warriors didn’t exactly earn high marks from the NYC Tourist Bureau.

Even comedies frequently paint the Big Apple as a scary place. Sure, romantic comedies make the city look great, but there is a tradition of setting hapless comedic characters loose in Gotham with predictably chaotic—for instance, see After Hours, a Kafkesque Martin Scorsese trip through the mean streets of NYC—though funny results.

This weekend’s Date Night sees two of television’s funniest actors, Tina Fey and Steve Carell, as an average married couple who get pulled into New York’s seedy underbelly after a case of mistaken identity.

It’s a funny premise that breathes the same air as another 40-year-old film. Neil Simon originally planned to write the story of Gwen and George (Sandy Dennis and Jack Lemmon), an Ohio couple who experience the worst of NYC life, as a chapter in his Broadway play Plaza Suite, but as the tale grew to include a series of calamities—exploding manhole covers! Cuban protesters!—the playwright realized he needed a larger canvas and wrote it directly for the screen. The Out-of-Towners (later remade starring Goldie Hawn and Steve Martin) set the template for the indignant, put-upon NYC tourist comedy. In this story even the police sympathize with—and maybe even envy—the unlucky day-trippers.

“You folks live out of town?” asks Officer Meyers.

“Oh yes,” replies Gwen.

“You're lucky,” says the cop.

Gwen and George can’t even catch a break when they flee the city. On the plane home they get hijacked to Cuba.

King Shadov, an exiled king played by Charlie Chaplin in A King in New York has better luck, but just barely. Shot in 1957 but not released until 1973 because of its rapier jabs at American culture, the film follows a monarch who arrives in NYC only to discover his bank accounts have been drained. Broke and on unfamiliar terrain, he clashes with the American way-of-life, denouncing rock and roll, CinemaScope and Joseph McCarthy’s communist hunt. It’s one of Chaplin’s best—although lesser known— films and would make a great double feature with Date Night.

Oddball comics make good heroes, too
In Focus by Richard Crouse
METRO CANADA
April 16, 2010
    
Batman, Superman, Spiderman and Iron Man are the gold standard for comic book characters on the big screen. Between them, they have grossed a heroic amount of money, literally adding billions of dollars to box office tallies. They are the bigwigs, the VIPs of the superhero world, but there are dozens of other, lesser known, comic book characters that have made the leap from the page to the stage.   

Hit Girl, the ruthless eleven-year-old vigilante played by Chloë Grace Moretz in this weekend’s Kick-Ass, might not be a match for Batman’s bat-shaped shurikens or his box office pull, but Jeff Moss, the proprietor of Montreal’s coolest comic book shop, The 4th Wall, says her story has all the makings of a great movie adaptation.  

“For a comic to make a good movie it must have, first and foremost, good characters,” he says. “Also, if the story's not there, it's not going to make a good movie. Next up, it's got to have good visuals and decent 'Whoa' moments.”

The 1999 superhero comedy Mystery Men—based on Flaming Carrot Comics by Bob Burden—works because of the mix of story and offbeat characters. Paul Reubens, for instance, plays The Spleen, a crime fighter who uses turbo flatulence to level his enemies and Leader of the Disco Boys, as played by Eddie Izzard, neutralizes his adversaries with a can of highly flammable hairspray. It doesn’t have the all-American heroics of Superman, but Mystery Men has become a cult classic.

Bulletproof Monk, loosely based on Michael Avon Oeming’s comic book, delivers on Moss’s “whoa” moments. Chow Yun-Fat, hot off of the success of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, starred as a Tibetan monk who trains a street kid to protect a sacred scroll. Its combination of martial arts and humor didn’t score at the box office, but it makes for a good rental.

While it may seem that every comic ever written has been turned into movies—an IMDB search for based-on-comic-book returned 607 titles—not all necessarily lend themselves to the Hollywood treatment.

“Some of my favorite comics that have yet to be made into movies include Preacher, Transmetropolitan, Nextwave, and Bone,” says Moss. “All of these books have rich characters, and amazing storylines, but the sheer size of them (Bone clocks in at 1300 pages, and Preacher runs nine volumes) would require either a series of movies, or a supreme dumbing down of the stories.”

'Cool geek' sets fanboy tongues wagging
In Focus by Richard Crouse
METRO CANADA
April 23, 2010        

Zoe Saldana’s career is white hot after starring roles in Star Trek and Avatar but she is no newcomer.

She’s been a big screen regular for ten years, even appearing in the odd blockbuster like Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl and working with high end directors like Steven Spielberg, but she didn’t become a household name until last year.

The actress, who describes herself as “a cool geek who happens to dress nice,” hopes to add to her growing box office clout this weekend with The Losers, a wild action movie based on the comic book series of the same name.

She may have become a bold face name sucking up to the fanboys, but she hasn’t always played comic-book characters, giant blue aliens or iconic sci fi characters.

Early roles included a sharp-tongued aspiring dancer in Center Stage and the prim-and-proper best friend of Britney Spears in Crossroads — although she’d probably rather forget that one.

Roger Ebert said, “I went to Crossroads expecting a glitzy bimbofest and got the bimbos but not the fest,” but it was another dance role in Drumline that earned her the best notices of her budding career.  

In the time between Drumline and Star Trek, however, she made thirteen films, some big, like Pirates, some so small they barely made a blip on the screen.

For example, Haven, a complex crime drama set in the Cayman Islands scarcely made it past a festival run, but is well worth a look on DVD. Mixing and matching stories of corrupt businessmen, tax havens and romance it was too out-of-the-box for general audiences, but Saldana shines (the L.A. Times called her performance “sweet and complicated”) opposite her Pirates co-star Orlando Bloom.

Also unfairly relegated to the bargain bin was Ways of the Flesh, a 2005 medical comedy about a chief resident at a Florida Hospital who also happens to be a stand-up comedian. Saldana plays an artist whose life was once saved by the main character.

Directed by real-life doctor-turned-filmmaker Dennis Cooper, it’s a sweet and funny film about not taking yourself too seriously.

Dues paid, Saldana now stars in blockbusters, which has benefits other than the juicy paycheques. In the past she says she was often mistaken for Thandie Newton — so much so that her own mother once confused the two of them — but given her recent success, I’m guessing it’s now Newton who gets mistaken for Saldana.  

The many faces behind movie monsters
In Focus by Richard Crouse
METRO CANADA
April 30, 2010         

Bela Lugosi is the actor most closely associated with Count Dracula, but he is certainly not the only one. More than 200 others have played old toothy over the years including mister tall, dark and gruesome Christopher Lee, who played the blood sucker eleven times.

Ditto Frankenstein’s Monster. Boris Karloff owned the role in 1931, but 60 other actors have tried to fill his size fifteen platform shoes in subsequent years.

The point is, no actor has total possession over a role, no matter how well known they are for playing it.

Just ask Robert Englund.

For 26 years, he has been Freddy Krueger, purveyor of bad dreams, in The Nightmare on Elm Street series. In seven films and the television series, Freddy’s Nightmares, he played the evil offspring of a nun and one hundred maniacs. His take on the character is so loved some people even pay permanent tribute to it.

“I saw an entire magazine of Freddy Krueger tattoos,” he says. “There are thousands of people walking around America with my tattoo on them!”

He’ll always be associated with Freddy, but as of this weekend his run as the most hated man in Springwood, Ohio comes to an end when Jackie Earle Haley makes the iconic role his own in the reboot of the series.

Ironically, Haley auditioned for one of the teen roles in the original film in 1984 but the part went to his friend Johnny Depp.

As for taking on the role, Haley says, “A lot of people wish it was Robert and I get that. He’s made this character iconic and he’s iconic as well. It’s a tough thing, and hopefully when the movie comes out people will dig it.”

Haley is just the latest to fill in for a famous face. Recently, Benicio Del Toro donned the lupine face mask of the Wolf Man, but Lon Chaney Jr. (who had yak hair glued to his face during his 1941 transformation scenes) originated the role 70 years before.

Chaney is best known as The Wolf Man, but he was also one of those actors who stepped in to sub for some of the most famous monsters of filmland. In fact, he is also the only actor to have played all four of the classic movie monsters: The Wolf Man, Frankenstein’s Monster in The Ghost of Frankenstein, the Mummy in The Mummy's Tomb and Count Anthony Alucard, Dracula’s son, in the appropriately named Son of Dracula.

Is that Alfred Hitchcock in a dress?
In Focus by Richard Crouse
METRO CANADA
May 07, 2010

Iron Man 2 director Jon Favreau says the reason he cast himself in the role of Tony Stark’s bodyguard Happy Hogan is “me being selfish and me wanting to be an actor in it.”

One of his cast mates, however, thinks there might be an alternate reason. Gwyneth Paltrow, who plays Pepper Potts for the second time around in this weekend’s Iron Man sequel, wonders if Favreau has a secret crush on her. You see, in the comic book series the film is based on, Hogan and Potts become a romantic item.

“He marries this character in the comic book,” she says, “so you never know. We’ll see! If he wants to make out…”

Whatever the reason, many directors make a regular habit of placing themselves in their movies.

Alfred Hitchcock honed the art of the cameo to a science, turning up in 41 of his films.

Usually his appearances were limited to a quick hit, sometimes just as a silhouette, often as a face in the crowd, but a careful study of his films reveals the clever ways he inserted himself into the story.

The strangest cameo is one that may never have happened. In North by Northwest, Hitch can be seen missing a bus during the opening credits but fans claim there is a second cameo later in the film.

Forty-four minutes in, there is a scene with a woman in a dress speaking to the police on a train, a woman rumoured to be the director in drag.

Hitchcock was so well known for his sneaky appearances in films he even made one following his death. In Psycho II, made three years after his passing, his famous silhouette can be seen in shadow just outside of Mother’s bedroom.

The portly British director had the art of the cameo down to a science, but he’s not the only one. The usually reclusive Terrence Malick plays an unexpected visitor a thet door, credited as Caller at Rich Man’s House in his masterpiece, Badlands, and Oliver Stone can be glimpsed as the officer with a phone at the U.S. base’s bunker when it is blown up in Platoon. 

One of the most memorable but unrecognizable director cameos comes in Alien. When John Hurt looks into a transparent egg, the facehugger was “played” by director Ridley Scott’s gloved hands. 

The long cinematic road of a medieval outlaw
In Focus by Richard Crouse
METRO CANADA
May 14, 2010          

Robin Hood comes in all shapes and sizes. According to the International Association for Robin Hood Studies (yes, there is such a thing), the 700-year-old hero of Sherwood Forest has been the subject of one of the earliest Legoland building systems, the inspiration for the DC Comics superhero Green Arrow and a flour company spokesman.

On film, the notorious archer and outlaw’s depictions are just as diverse. The first American Robin Hood film was a surreal 1912 silent featuring the Palisades of New Jersey standing in for Sherwood Forest and Hood’s inner personality portrayed by animal imagery superimposed over his face.

Less strange, but still rather odd, was the Canadian cartoon television series Rocket Robin Hood. It’s most notable for its crazy theme song—“For now,” they sing, “with our Robin, we live on a star”—and cut-rate, herky-jerky animation.

In live action he’s been played by everyone from John Cleese in the time-travelling comedy Time Bandits to Frank Sinatra as Robbo in Robin and the 7 Hoods, a musical that transplanted the Robin Hood fable to 1930s gangland Chicago. This weekend, Russell Crowe takes on the role in a more traditional telling of the story from director Ridley Scott.

The most famous version of the “rob from the rich and give to the poor” legend is 1938’s The Adventures of Robin Hood with Errol Flynn. Although it’s his best known role, Flynn has said he found playing the outlaw boring, but audiences loved him and the movie’s sense of spectacle.

At the time of its release, it was Warner‘s most expensive and action packed film, costing more than $2 million and holding the record for the largest number of stuntmen ever used on any one movie. These days, the movie may have faded from the collective’s memory, but know it or not, you are probably familiar with the sound of Robin's arrow as it flies through the air. That sound effect is a favorite Ben Burtt who has recycled it in almost all of the Star Wars films.

Also well known, but not as well regarded, is Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, featuring Kevin Costner in the lead role. Not only did it feature Costner’s atrocious English accent but it pushed another, far superior, telling of the tale—1991’s Robin Hood with Patrick Bergin and Uma Thurman—off the big screen to a direct to video release.

Unleashing the beast
In Focus by Richard Crouse
METRO CANADA
May 21, 2010      

Shrek, the jolly green ogre made famous by Mike Myers, may be the most popular movie ogre, but he’s not the only one.

As the “lovable lug who showed that you don’t have to change your undies to change the world” brings Shrek Forever After to the big screen this weekend, he joins the ranks of ogres seduced by the glamour of the movies.

The Shrek series plays the ogre card for laughs — “I used to be an ogre but now I’m a jolly green joke,” he complains — but movies generally haven’t strayed from the hideous humanoid stereotype —not counting Revenge of the Nerds’s Fred “Ogre” Palowakski, of course.

So horrifying is the classic ogre portrait that in France it’s thought to be based on notorious serial killer Gilles de Rais, who allegedly murdered 200 children.  

Occasionally, ogres are given a light-hearted treatment, like Mr and Mrs. Ogre in Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits, who, when they scoop up the band of bandits in their fishing net, squeal, “Aren’t they lovely? We can have them for breakfast,” but usually they are portrayed as terrifying creatures, like the lead in the appropriately named Sci-Fi Channel B-movie Ogre.

Set in Ellensworth, Pa., 150 years after the town’s citizens made a deal with a shaman to rid their village of a deadly disease by changing the plague into the physical manifestation of an ogre — best described as the offspring of  the Yeti and Zippy the Pinhead — the movie shows what happens when the beast gets hungry and gets loose.

With the tagline “No Donkey. No Fairy Tale. Just TERROR,” you know this is the anti-Shrek.

The first film ogre was featured in the 1902 silent version of Jack and the Beanstalk. That ogre is little more than a tall man with a spiked club, but the film has some cool rudimentary special effects.

Trippier than that is the ogre in a 1974 Japanese anime retelling of the classic tale.

In that version the ogre, named Tulip, is the son of a witch who lives in a psychedelic world atop the beanstalk. What’s in those magic beans?

Shrek Forever After may (or may not) be the last Shrek film — “The door may not be locked but it’s definitely latched,” says Myers on the never-say-never Hollywood rule of sequels — but even if it is, there is no shortage of other movie ogres with stories to tell.

For video game flicks, ladies call the shots
In Focus by Richard Crouse
METRO CANADA
May 28, 2010        

Uwe Boll has made a career of adapting video games for the big screen. The German filmmaker, nicknamed “the Master of Error” for his sloppily-made pictures, brought us House of the Dead (No. 56 on IMDB’s Bottom 100) and In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale (five per cent “fresh” rating on Rotten Tomatoes) among other crimes against cinema.

One that thankfully escaped Boll’s grasp is this weekend’s Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. Despite the LA Times sweeping declaration that games don’t work as movies, Hollywood heavyweight Jerry Bruckheimer adapted Ubisoft’s hit game into a mega budget summer film.

In it, Jake Gyllenhaal plays an adventurous prince who must protect the mystical Dagger of Time while also romancing a pretty princess (Gemma Arterton).

Whether this is a blockbuster-in-waiting remains to be seen, but so far finding a good video game movie is harder than making it to level four of Ghosts ’n Goblins.

The first video game movie set the tone for many to come. 1993’s Super Mario Bros., based on the popular Nintendo game, is so awful its star, Bob Hoskins, calls it “the worst thing I ever did.” Critics  agreed.

But not all gamer movies are bargain bin-bound. Many of these movies are popular with audiences.

A recent poll revealed interesting insight into what gaming enthusiasts want in their movies.

“The X-factor in a game-to-film adaptation is a strong female lead,” said Helen Cowley, of the TV and film rental service Lovefilm. The poll is topped by films anchored by women in lead roles — Silent Hill, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider and Resident Evil, “so we’re hoping Gemma Arterton gives Jake Gyllenhaal a run for his money in the Prince of Persia,” Cowley adds.

A Star Wars-free list of sci-fi's best flicks
In Focus by Richard Crouse
METRO CANADA
June 04, 2010          

Director Vincenzo Natali doesn’t just make sci-fi movies, he’s also a fan.

"True science fiction is about ideas. It’s a mirror that reflects on the present,” he says.

His latest film, Splice, starring Sarah Polley and Adrien Brody as scientists who create a mutant child — think Frankenstein spliced with Mommie Dearest — has echoes of a recent news story about scientists creating the first self-replicating synthetic life form.

“It’s amazing how the science evolved parallel with the script,” he says.

So who better to recommend a list of must-see sci-fi flicks? “I could mention 2001, Star Wars and The Matrix, but we’ve all been there,” he says, adding “I think there are some very worthy science fiction films that aren’t so well known.”

First on his list is Stalker, from master director Andrei Tarkovsky.

“It’s about a zone in Russia that may have had some kind of alien visitation and is highly classified. There are very special people called stalkers who illegally enter the zone and can take you to a place where your wishes can come true.

“No other movie ever made is quite like it. It is one of the most beautiful films I’ve ever seen.”

Next up is The 10th Victim, a futuristic Marcello Mastroianni movie about a deadly televised game called The Big Hunt which becomes a replacement for all conflict on Earth, but at what cost?

“An Italian film made in the ’60s but way ahead of its time,” he says.

“It’s a satirical comedy, absolutely brilliantly made, filled with cool futuristic Italian design and it’s really funny. I cannot recommend it enough.”

Third is the animated La Planète Sauvage. “It takes place on a planet where humans are pets for a race of large aliens. It’s a kind of a Spartacus story against the aliens. Totally outrageous and very, very ’70s.”

In the fourth spot is Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the Jim Carrey movie Natali says is “not as well known as it deserves to be.”

“Definitely a film about ideas and definitely also a science fiction film. A very emotional film; a masterpiece.”

Lastly, it’s a double bill from Japanese director Kinji Fukasaku.

Battle Royale, Natali says, is “outrageously violent” while The Green Slime is “total cheese but actually predates Alien as a story of a spaceship that is infected by an alien life form. It’s lots of fun.”

What became of Karate Kid's alumni?
In Focus by Richard Crouse
METRO CANADA
June 11, 2010          

Producers of this weekend’s 1980s reboot, The Karate Kid with Jaden Smith, must be hoping for a little of the Ralph Macchio “wax on” magic to rub off on their film. The original movie, a 1984 crowd pleaser that made Macchio an underdog icon, grossed $90.8 million and spawned three sequels, all of which made money until the last one, sans Macchio, made only a tenth of the first.

The original series made Macchio and Pat Morita superstars but what happened to them and their Karate Kid alumni once the final tournament was over?

Macchio’s years as a box office draw extended past Karate Kid III, but just barely. After parts in Crossroads and My Cousin Vinny, he couldn’t make the transition into adult roles. Luckily, he avoided the post-fame pitfalls of other ’80s kid actors like the Coreys, but despite steady gigs in low budget film and episodic television he hasn’t been able to shake the spectre of his most famous character.

“‘Wax on, wax off,’” he says. “Every week someone yells out the phrase as if they’d just come up with the idea, thinking, 'Whoa, isn’t that genius? Hey Ralph, wax on, wax off!'”

Macchio’s replacement in the franchise fared slightly better — like two Oscars better. In an attempt to inject some new blood into the series — “Who says the good guy has to be a guy?” read the advertising tagline — the 20-year-old Hilary Swank beat out hundreds of other girls to don Macchio’s gi in The Next Karate Kid. It was a flop critically —“The franchise is still kicking, but not very high,” wrote Variety — and commercially but only slowed her career momentum momentarily. By 1996 she was working regularly and by 1999 it was Oscar time.

The only actor to appear in all four of the original movies was Pat Morita, who became the first American-born Asian actor nominated for an Oscar for his performance as sensei Miyagi in the first film.

It’s impossible to imagine the films without him but he nearly didn’t get the part. Producer Jerry Weintraub initially rejected Morita, claiming he was too well known as Arnold on Happy Days.

Determined to win the role, Morita grew a beard, mimicked his uncle’s Japanese accent and screen tested.

“When Jerry saw it, he said, 'That’s what I want — a goddamn actor,’ not realizing it was Pat,” said the late actor’s wife Evelyn.

There goes first choice
In Focus by Richard Crouse
FOR METRO CANADA
June 18, 2010  
     
The first glimpse of Josh Brolin as scarred comic book bounty hunter Jonah Hex reveals it is a role he was born to play. His natural bad boy swagger shines through the character’s heavy make up but Brolin wasn’t the first choice to play the character, or even the second. As is so often the case in Hollywood many other actors were first considered for the part.

California surf boy Matthew McConaughey was approached, as was indie film darling Emile Hirsch.

Thomas Jane even went as far as submitting photos in full Jonah Hex drag, scars and all.   

In the end, Brolin brought that extra something special that made the role his, and joined a long list of actors who weren’t the first choice to headline big movies.

Many actors have played James Bond but a recent JamesBondwiki.com poll anoints Sean Connery as the two-to-one people’s favourite.

Guess what? He wasn’t the first choice.

Author Ian Fleming partially modelled the Bond character on Cary Grant, so the suave actor was top-of-the-list when the first Bond film, Dr. No, was cast. Grant, however, sent his regrets, saying he was too old to play the spy.

When Connery was cast, the writer was less than pleased.

“He’s not exactly what I had in mind,” said Fleming, who felt Connery was too “unrefined” for the role. He later changed his mind and Connery went on to play Bond in six movies.

Connery was the first choice to play Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings series but said no.

“I didn’t understand the script when they sent it to me,” he said. “Bobbits? Hobbits?”

New Line apparently wanted him so badly they offered him a huge chunk of the of worldwide box office receipts. That “no” cost him almost $400 million.

Many other movies have “settled” for second choices. Pretty Woman director Garry Marshall courted Molly Ringwald and Daryl Hannah, who said no because she felt it denigrated women, before casting Julia Roberts.

Can you imagine The Matrix without Keanu Reeves? Apparently the Wachowski Brothers could as they offered the role of Neo to Will Smith first. Smith declined, opting to make the box office disaster Wild Wild West instead, but says he has no regrets.

“I would have absolutely messed up The Matrix. At that point I wasn't smart enough as an actor to let the movie be — whereas Keanu was.”

Silver screen couples on the run
In Focus by Richard Crouse
FOR METRO CANADA
June 25, 2010

The road trip is part of the American psyche dating back to the young men (and women) who took Horace Greeley’s famous advice—“Go west young man!”—to heart and left the east for the frontier. Hollywood saw the allure early on, recognizing that road movies offer opportunities to inject exciting secondary characters and interesting scenery into stories each time the leads stop in a new town. Add to that the sexy appeal of two people running for their lives and you have a new genre—the fugitive couple movie.

Whether it is the doomed Henry Fonda and Sylvia Sydney on the lam in 1937s You Only Live Once or Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz’s worldwide trek in this weekend’s Knight and Day, the idea of runaways on the open road has been irresistible to filmmakers.

On early fugitive road movie is Persons in Hiding, a nasty 1939 film based on J. Edgar Hoover's best-selling book of the same name. J. Carrol Naish stars as a small-time hood on the run with Dorothy Bronson (Patricia Morison). Together they rob banks and even kidnap a hapless stranger all to appease Ms. Bronson appetite for champagne and furs. Of course, this being based on Hoover’s book, the pair isn’t mythologized à la Bonnie and Clyde. No, the heroes here are the FBI who use their “infallible” methods to bring the couple to justice.

Better known is The Getaway, Sam Peckinpah's violent love letter to criminal behavior. Based on a 1959 pulp novel by Jim Thompson, it stars Steve McQueen as a cocky safecracker who hits the road with Ali MacGraw following a botched holdup. Panned on its original release—Roger Ebert called it “a big, glossy, impersonal mechanical toy”—it was a box office success, partly because of the ruckus the tabloids made when MacGraw left her husband, producer Robert Evans, for McQueen during production.

More recently crime and scandal were at the heart of Natural Born Killers, a satire of media sensationalism and America's love affair with violence. Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis play married murderers—“the best thing to happen to mass murder since Manson”—on a cross country killing spree. Named the 8th most controversial movie of all time by Entertainment Weekly it earned mixed reviews—Movieline called it “mindless” while Peter Travers named it “one of my all time favorite movies.”—and may be the wildest fugitive couple movie ever made.

Cartoons come alive for Hollywood
In Focus by Richard Crouse
METRO CANADA
July 02, 2010          

Like Scooby Doo and Inspector Gadget before it, this weekend’s The Last Airbender first saw the light of day as an animated television show. Director M. Night Shyamalan first came across Avatar: The Last Airbender, when his daughter said she wanted to be one of the characters, Katara, for Halloween.

After that, watching the show became “a family event in my house,” says the director. “When I saw the cartoon, I thought it was so well thought out in term of mythology. It had Buddhism, martial arts and CGI (and it was) character-based. I knew it would make a great feature film … I knew we could do something that wasn’t going to be just a great treat for the eyes, but also for the mind and the soul.”

Shyamalan is shooting high, hoping to turn The Last Airbender (they had to drop the Avatar part of the TV show’s title) into a trilogy. “I have always wanted to develop a long mythology-based franchise like The Lord of the Rings,” he says.

One television-cartoon-to-big-screen adaptation that lasted more than one installment was The Flintstones. The animated modern stone-age family (with friends Barney and Betty Rubble) ruled Saturday morning television for six years, before making the leap to the big screen in 1966 in The Man Called Flintstone, a musical James Bond parody.

After that, the show came back to TV in various incarnations — one even featuring the Marvel Comics superhero The Thing — but a return to the big screen took almost 30 years. In The Flintstones, the 1994 live action version, John Goodman Yabba-Dabba-Dooed his way through the film as Fred. Unable to leave well enough alone a prequel, The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas, followed in 2000. Soon though, Fred and Wilma will be back where they belong, in an animated film, set to be released in 2011.

Accents to Doomsday Devices: The supervillain checklist
In Focus by Richard Crouse
METRO CANADA
July 09, 2010         

Sometimes they are diabolical. Occasionally dastardly. They are, of course, supervillains, the evil geniuses who give Superman, Batman and other caped crusaders a reason to get up in the morning.

Supervillains like Professor Moriarty and Dr. Fu Manchu, with their craving for world domination and habit of calling everyone around them “Fools!,” have been scaring moviegoers for decades, but the Professor and the Doctor are rather conventional compared to the Lightning from the 1938 film, The Fighting Devil Dogs.

Lightning was the first crime mastermind to wear a wild costume — a black shiny helmet and robe that later inspired Darth Vader’s outfit — and he set the tone for hundreds of cinematic supervillians.

In this weekend’s Despicable Me, a new supervillain, Gru (Steve Carell), rethinks his plan to steal the moon after becoming a dad. It’s a comedic take on the standard baddie, but nonetheless Gru has most of the accoutrements of his evil trade.

Here’s a checklist:

Accent
Having a sinister accent is par for the supervillain course. Gru’s sounds like a cross between Ricardo Montalban and Bela Lugosi, but he is just the latest in a long line of baddies with a brogue. Who could forget Batman & Robin’s icy Mr. Freeze? Played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, the frosty bad guy intoned, “The Ice Man cometh!” in a menacing accent that sounded a lot like, well, Schwarzenegger.

Doomsday Devices
What’s an evil overlord without a diabolical device of destruction? Gru has an arsenal of shrink and freeze rays, but those pale by comparison to Doctor Otto Octavius (Alfred Molina) and his Spider-Man 2 explosive superweapon or the Green Goblin’s Pumpkin Bombs — Jack-o’-lanterns that can melt through a three-inch-thick sheet of steel.

Catchphrase
All good supervillains have a motto. Gru could learn a thing or two from the Clown Prince of Crime, the Joker (Jack Nicolson) who cackled, “Have you ever danced with the devil in the pale moonlight?” to his victims before offing them. It’s catchy, but not as memorable as Mr. J’s other well known quote, “This town needs an enema.” Even better is Terence Stamp's haughty command “Kneel before Zod!” from Superman II.

A.K.A.
Finally, Gru fits the baddie bill but does fall down in one aspect of supervillainy, however; no evil nickname. Perhaps he could take his lead from the Joker a.k.a. “the Harlequin of Hate” and go by the Fiend of Fatherhood.

Merlin the Magician, this is your life
In Focus by Richard Crouse
METRO CANADA
July 16, 2010
         
We can all conjure up an image of what Merlin the Magician looks like. He appears in dozens of movies, everything from the Disney cartoon Sword and the Sorcerer to Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

While we may not be able to nail the specifics -- eye colour or height -- the basics are easy -- kindly old man with a long white beard, pointy hat, flowing robe. That’s the likeness of the magician that has graced movies for decades — including this weekend’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, starring Nicolas Cage as a magician and Jay Baruchel as his nerdy protege — but over the years there have been a number of interpretations of the character. Here’s a look back:

Knightriders
George A. Romero brought the Arthurian legend forward to present day, and, of course, along with that comes a modern take on Merlin. Played by Brother Blue, an Ivy League-trained actor and pastor, in his only onscreen credit, the wizard is a harmonica-playing hippie with butterflies painted on his face and forehead who spouts Woodstock-inspired dialogue like, “Magic got to do with the soul, man. Only the soul’s got destiny. It got wings. It can fly. That’s magic. The body’s just got a few minutes down here in the dirt with the rest of us.” Far out, man.

Son of Dracula
A rock ‘n’ roll Merlin! A blend of horror, comedy, and music, Son of Dracula stars Ringo Starr as the wizard in a story that could only have emerged from the drug addled 1970s. The story scarcely makes sense, but it is fun to see Ringo and co-star Harry Nilsson (along with cameos by 70s rock legends John Bonham and Keith Moon). Luckily the movie does have a great gothic soundtrack (featuring Ringo, Peter Frampton and George Harrison) making it one of the rare movies which is actually more fun to listen to than to watch.

Cabinet of Curiosities, Miscellaneous
In The Spaceman and King Arthur (also known as Unidentified Flying Oddball), a loose adaptation of adaptation of Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Merlin is presented against type as an evil character intent on dethroning Arthur. Also out of character is Merlin’s Shop of Mystical Wonders, a horror film about a grandfather spinning tales for his grandson about Merlin’s modern-day store. The wizard sells magical spells and curiosities meant to help people but usually turn out to have the opposite effect. In this movie “abracadabra” usually means “abracadaver.”

The silver screen's sinister sisters
In Focus by Richard Crouse
METRO CANADA
July 23, 2010

The old song lyric “Two different faces, but in tight places, we think and we act as one” pretty much sums up the bond often shared by sisters. No matter how close the connection—or how many sterling silver “sisters are a forever friend” catch bangle message bracelets are exchanged—there is bound to be some tension between sibs from time to time. Even the tagline for this weekend’s kid comedy Ramona and Beezus—“A little sister goes a long way”—suggests some good natured conflict between the girls. Here’s a look at other kinds of cinematic sibling rivalry.

Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?: If sisters are blossoms in the garden of life as one poet said, then Jane Hudson must be a poison ivy plant. Played to great creepy effect by Bette Davis—wearing an inch of thick pasty make-up—Jane was ranked #44 on the AFI’s 50 Best Villains list. As she descends into madness she keeps her sister Blanche (Joan Crawford) captive and even tries to make her eat her pet parakeet for lunch. The movie is great campy fun—one critic at the time wrote, “it sometimes looks like a poisonous senior citizen show with over-the-top spoiled ham”—but the behind-the-scenes stories are almost as psychotic as anything on screen. The aging divas couldn’t stand one another and fought constantly. Davis “accidentally” kicked Crawford in the head, requiring stitches and Crawford weighted down her clothes for the scene where Jane has to drag Blanche causing Davis to suffer a muscular backache. In 1991 the movie was remade with real life sisters Vanessa and Lynn Redgrave in the lead roles.

Sisters: Where would sister movies be without “the evil twin”? Sisters, Brian De Palma’s ode to deviant sororal behavior may well be the Citizen Kane of the genre. On one hand we have Danielle (Margot Kidder), a French/Canadian model and one half of a set of Siamese twins. Then there’s the murderously mad Dominique (also Kidder), who fools her prey into thinking she is the demure Danielle before… well, going murderously mad on them. Unlike Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, the low budget Sisters failed to garner any Academy Award nominations, but it did earn Kidder one of the most florid lines of film criticism ever. “Margot Kidder has a demon-slut's curly lips,” wrote The New Yorker, “and knows how to turn on the sexiness with a witch's precision.”

Droll film duos have unique chemistry
In Focus by Richard Crouse
METRO CANADA
July 30, 2010           

When people talk about chemistry in movies most often they refer to the sexual sparks that fly — or not — between the leading man and woman, but it’s just as important between actors who aren’t necessarily going to fall into bed clinched in a mad embrace.

That connection — as elusive and indefinable as it may be — is just as important to comic actors as jokes or pratfalls. Laurel and Hardy had it. So did Abbot and Costello. And so do Steve Carell and Paul Rudd, who team up for a third time in this weekend’s Dinner for Schmucks. Here are some other droll duos:

Matthau and Lemmon
Jack Lemmon called Walter Matthau the “best actor I’ve ever worked with.” Playing off the differences in their personalities and appearances they made nine films together, some classic — The Odd Couple — some not — Grumpier Old Men — but whatever the movie, they had an ease about them that couldn’t be faked.

Stiller and Wilson
In the early aughts it seemed like you couldn’t have one without the other. Described as “the yin and yang of Hollywood A-listers” Ben Stiller — dark and edgy — and Owen Wilson — laconic and expressive — made four films together in four years — Meet the Parents, Zoolander, Starsky & Hutch and the Royal Tenenbaums — and say that even if the film work dried up they would still find a way to work together.

Pryor and Wilder
Roger Ebert said Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder “make a good team, Wilder with what he calls his ‘low-key high energy,’ Pryor with his apparent ability to con anybody out of anything.” The pair was magic on screen but apparently didn’t always see eye to eye off screen.

Good, bad and ugly of dance
In Focus by Richard Crouse
FOR METRO CANADA
Published: August 06, 2010

There was a time when people would consistently pay money to see actors Feather Step and Dos-y-dos on screen.

For most of the twentieth century dance movies were a Hollywood staple, making stars out of hoofers Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and seeing half the Best Picture Oscars from the years 1958 to 1968 going to movies with smooth dance moves.

Some dance movies from the classic age are memorable — Singin’ in the Rain has a rare 100 per cent positive rating on RottenTomatoes. Others not so much. Remember Yolanda and the Thief? Me neither. But generally audiences were enthralled by Astaire’s graceful moves or Kelly’s athletic style. Producers of this weekend’s Step Up 3D are hoping for a throw back to those heady days and that audiences will be lured to the theatre by their film’s mix of dance and eye popping 3-D.

Dance on film died out during the late 1960s as movies with social messages and hard hitting dramas took centre stage but one actor single handedly brought back hip swiveling to the big screen. John Tavolta’s performances in Saturday Night Fever and Grease opened the flood gates for dozens of high stepping films in the 1970s. Here’s a list of the good, the bad and the ugly of ’70s and ’80s dance.

The Good
Loosely based on the life of screenwriter Dean Pitchford, Footloose is the story of a spunky Chicago teen (Kevin Bacon) who moves to a small town where dancing and rock music have been outlawed. John Travolta, Tom Cruise and Rob Lowe were all offered the lead role, but Bacon sizzles as Ren McCormack, the rebellious boy who teaches the town to kick up their heels to the tune of Let’s Hear it For the Boy. (Honourable Mention: Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure. Not a dance movie but Pee-wee’s (Paul Ruebens) Peewee Dance to the song Tequila is a classic.)

The Bad
Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo isn’t remembered as a great movie (it isn’t) or for Ice-T’s performance, no, it is best remembered as the facetious name given to any unnecessary sequel. For example, Tron 2: Electric Boogaloo or perhaps Titanic 2: Electric Boogaloo.    

The Ugly
Newsweek called 1980’s spirited but ridiculous attempt to cash in on the disco craze Can’t Stop the Music, “the first all-singing, all-dancing horror film; the Dawn of the Dead of the disco era.”

You should call Toronto the Big Smokescreen
In Focus by Richard Crouse
FOR METRO CANADA
Published: August 13, 2010

The new film Scott Pilgrim vs. The World begins with a title card that reads “Not so long ago in the mysterious land of Toronto, Canada.” It establishes that the movie is set in Toronto, but not the Toronto we usually see in films. That Toronto often subs for New York or Chicago.

The Toronto of Scott Pilgrim comes complete with Casa Loma, Lee’s Palace and other T-Dot landmarks. It’s probably the most expensive movie to feature Toronto as itself, but it’s not the only one. Here’s a look back at Toronto on-screen:

Lawyerin’ and doctorin’ jobs!
For many people, the first on-screen glimpse of Toronto onscreen came from the backseat of a 1960 Chevrolet Impala. Goin’ Down the Road, the story of Pete (Doug McGrath) and his pal Joey (Paul Bradley), two Maritimers who set out in a Chevy to find a better life in Toronto, (SCTV joked they were looking for “lawyerin’ and doctorin’ jobs”) is a city time capsule circa 1970.

Look for great shots of Yonge Street attractions including the classic Sam the Record Man spinning double disc neon sign. The signs are gone now, making their last appearance in the 2008 film The Incredible Hulk.

Long live the new flesh!
Although David Cronenberg has made more than a dozen films in T.O. and says, “I love shooting in Toronto,” film critic Geoff Pevere says, “Toronto had never seemed weirder,” than in the director’s epic Videodrome.

The story of a sleazy UHF television station programmer who becomes spellbound by the hallucinatory power of porn movies, is set in Toronto and not only used many of the city’s locations, but its unique references as well. Civic TV allegedly refers to CityTV, which, in its early days used to air soft-core pornography late at night.  

Yonge and Dundas and Beyond
For a look at the down-and-dirty Yonge Street Strip, once the body rub capital of Canada, check out Ron Mann’s 1974 Super-8 documentary The Strip. On the other end of the scale is Atom Egoyan’s Chloe, the story of a Toronto escort and the woman who hires her to test her husband’s fidelity. Toronto has never looked lovelier than this.

“At the level of metaphor, it’s interesting because Toronto is a prostitute. As a city, very often it pretends to be New York or Chicago or San Francisco,” Egoyan said. “So it’s interesting, since this is a film about that.”

Nightmare nannies best avoided
In Focus by Richard Crouse
METRO CANADA

The most famous movie nanny is, naturally, Mary Poppins. Julie Andrews brought the “practically perfect in every way” caregiver to vivid life in the 1964 movie, indelibly imprinting on minds young and old the image of the gracious English nanny with special powers.

Good old Mary with her magic satchel and odd ability to say the word “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” backwards and forwards, is a pop culture icon, parodied on everything from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Saturday Night Live. She’s even inspired other movies, like this weekend’s Nanny McPhee Returns. McPhee (Emma Thompson) fits the enchanted babysitter mould, using her miraculous powers to teach pigs to do synchronized swimming and impose her will on her young charges. She means well even if her teeth are a bit scary and her methods unorthodox unlike some of the nightmare nannies listed below.  

Crazysitters
Redubbed “Fetal Attraction” by one writer, the best known crazysitter movie is The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, a lurid story about a beautiful nanny with bad intentions. After that film, Rebecca De Mornay became the poster girl for nutty nannies everywhere, but she is just one of many who have played crazy caregivers. In Addams Family Values, nanny Joan Cusack is more interested in Uncle Fester’s money than the welfare of the kids and I think the name of the Beverly D'Angelo movie Crazysitter speaks for itself.

“I am here to protect thee”
Like Mary Poppins and Nanny McPhee, who both mysteriously appeared when their families needed them most, The Omen’s Mrs. Blaylock turned up at Damien Thorn’s house just in time to replace the former nanny who met an untimely demise at the end of a rope. Like her colleagues, this mother’s little helper had the child’s best interest in mind. Unlike Poppins and McPhee, she was a disciple of the Devil sworn to protect Damien until he can take over the world.

Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Nannies
Heading the list of musclehead nannies is wrestler Hulk Hogan who donned a pink tutu to play the lead in Mr. Nanny, a 1993 comedy co-starring Sherman Hemsley and former New York Dolls singer David Johansen. A close second is Vin Diesel, the big bad bald guy best known as car thief Dominic in the Fast and Furious movies. In The Pacifier, he’s an ex-Navy Seal on his toughest mission yet—looking after a gaggle of five kids.

Matt Dillon deserves better
 In Focus by Richard Crouse
METRO CANADA
Published: August 27, 2010

He is an Oscar nominee, a multiple Independent Spirit Award winner and the star of more than 40 movies.

He can leapfrog comfortably from comedy to drama -- in this weekend’s Takers he plays a cop hot on the trail of some bank robbers, next he’ll be seen yukking it up in Rio Sex Comedy. He can do it all, and on top of that he has at least one IMDB message board titled “Hottest Man Alive.”

So why is Matt Dillon the forgotten movie star?

With credits like his he should be on the A-list, hobnobbing with the Toms — Hanks and Cruise — and Will Smith, and yet his brother Kevin, who plays a wannabe celebrity on Entourage, probably has a higher Q score. Here’s a look back at why Matt Dillon should be on Hollywood’s hot list.

Troubled Youth
Dillon first got noticed playing troubled teens in Over the Edge, My Bodyguard, Little Darlings and Liar’s Moon, but it was the screen adaptations of three S.E. Hinton novels that made him a star. Tex, The Outsiders (where he shared the screen with Cruise, Rob Lowe and Patrick Swayze) and Rumble Fish made him a teen idol, but also earned him some serious fans as well. Roger Ebert wrote that Dillon has “the kind of clarity, the uncluttered relationship with the camera that you see in only a handful of actors.”

He’s Really Blossomed
He was typecast as a brooding teen early on but breakout roles in several comedies proved he could more than just a gloomy Gus. In There’s Something About Mary, he used one of the most all time politically incorrect (but hilarious) pick-up lines to woo Cameron Diaz. Even better is Randy, his character in One Night at McCool’s. When nice guy Randy’s one-night stand lets it slip that her boyfriend is a killer who might come after them, he doesn’t run but in a beautiful bit of understatement says, “It’s just the sex and the violence all in one night is a little much.”

Wild Things
On the dramatic side he is an Oscar nominee for his work as the racist cop in Crash, an award winner for his realistic portrayal of a drug addict in Drugstore Cowboy and he steamed up the screen as the high school counsellor in the campy Wild Things.

The guy can do it. Why isn’t he a bigger star?

Assassins come in all shapes and sizes
In Focus by Richard Crouse
FOR METRO CANADA
September 03, 2010

 There are many types of movies about people who deal in death to make a living. There’s the cold blooded killer story, the revenge drama and even comedic takes on killing for fun and profit. Assassins can be men, women, children and even robots.

In this week’s The American George Clooney plays another kind of murder engineer, the troubled, introspective assassin. There are as many kinds of cinematic killers as there are kinds of weapons for them to use.

Here’s a look back at the philosophies of some of the screen’s most memorable death merchants.

Charles Bronson, as the skilled slayer in The Mechanic (soon to be remade with Jason Statham and Ben Foster), teaches his young protégé, played by Jan-Michael Vincent, some basic hitman lessons. “Murder is only killing without a license,” he says, adding that when you shoot someone do it right. “You always have to be dead sure. Dead sure or dead.”

That’s key killer advice, but slow down, there is a progression to becoming a hitman. In The Professional Leon (Jean Reno) details the system. “The rifle is the first weapon you learn how to use,” he says, “because it lets you keep your distance from the client. The closer you get to being a pro, the closer you can get to the client. The knife, for example, is the last thing you learn.”

Along the way movie assassins also learn that relationships are verboten. Remember what happened to Mr. and Mrs. Smith (Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie)? “Your aim’s as bad as your cooking sweetheart,” taunts John to Jane, “and that’s saying something!”

Day of the Jackal’s would-be Charles de Gaulle assassin (Edward Fox) adds, “In this work you simply can’t afford to be emotional,” although sometimes feelings inevitably get in the way. Just ask Prizzi’s Honor’s Charley Partanna (Jack Nicholson) who memorably said, “Do I ice her? Do I marry her?”

Once they’ve learned the ropes, one question remains: Why do movie assassins kill?

Max Von Sydow plays one of the great movie killers in Three Days of the Condor, Sydney Lumet’s classic story of conspiracies and murder. His reasoning for doing what he does is chillingly simple. “The fact is, what I do is not a bad occupation,” he says. “Someone is always willing to pay.” The Matador’s Julian Noble (Pierce Brosnan) agrees, “My business is my pleasure,” he said.

TIFF’s best success stories
In Focus by Richard Crouse
FOR METRO CANADA
Published: September 17, 2010

During the Toronto International Film Festival you’ll see stars sipping lattes at the Starbucks in Yorkville and dolled-up on the red carpet at Roy Thompson Hall, but my favourite way to see them is up on the big screen. Celebrity gazing is a pleasant enough festival diversion, but the star attraction is the films.

Over the last 35 years the festival has run over 10,000 movies through their projectors. Obviously not all have gone on to win awards and break office records, but the festival has a surprisingly good track record at picking and showcasing hits. Chariots of Fire, The Big Chill and The Princess Bride all took home the fest’s People’s Choice Award and recent Oscar winners from TIFF include four award winner No Country for Old Men and Capote, which earned a Best Actor Oscar for its star Phillip Seymour Hoffman.

This year as the Oscar buzz is already building for TIFF treats Black Swan (director Darren Aronofsky’s follow-up to The Wrestler), Paul Giamatti’s performance in Barney’s Version and the Bruce Springsteen documentary The Promise: The Making of Darkness on the Edge of Town, I thought I’d look back at movies that used Toronto as a springboard for later success.

SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE

Although not technically a TIFF premiere — it was first shown at the Telluride Film Festival — director Danny Boyle credits the Toronto festival audience’s reaction to the film with saving it from a terrible fate — going direct to DVD.

RAY

Before Ray premiered at the 2004 TIFF Jamie Foxx was best known as a comedian whose credits included dressing in drag as the ugliest woman in the world, Wanda Wayne, on In Living Color who occasionally dabbled in serious films like Oliver Stone’s Any Given Sunday. After TIFF he was a serious actor, on the path to winning a Best Actor Academy Award.

ROGER & ME

At the start of the festival 21 years ago Michael Moore was an unknown documentary filmmaker hawking a self-financed film about the economic impact GM CEO Roger Smith's decision to close down several auto plants in Flint, Mich. By the festival’s end Moore was a media celebrity with a People’s Choice Award and a film that would go on to win ten other major awards — although no Oscar. Moore would have to wait until Bowling for Columbine — which also played at TIFF — won the 2003 statue for Best Documentary.

Some of TIFF's biggest off-screen highlights
In Focus by Richard Crouse
METRO CANADA
Published: September 20, 2010

Throw together 258 feature films, hundreds of famous folks and a celebrity pet lounge and you have the good, the cool and the silly from this year’s Toronto International Film Festival.

The ten-day event is a memory now—it ended last night with some free screenings at the festival’s new home, The TIFF Bell Lightbox, for some very tired festival veterans—but in addition to great movies like 127 Hours, The King’s Speech, Good Neighbours and Biutiful, among others, here are some random festival tidbits that set tongues wagging.     

Best Movie Quote
“There’s more incest in this town than in an Atom Egoyan movie.”
Daydream Nation

Most Fun Celebrity Sightings
The town was busy with celebs — everyone from legends like Robert Redford to newbies like Carey Mulligan — but the coolest celeb sightings had to be Yeardley Smith (the voice of Lisa Simpson) at the Swarovski Party, Bruce Springsteen walking down College Street and Small Town Murder Songs star Jill Hennessy busking with her sister Jacqueline on King Street.

Best Acceptance Speech
“This is a huge honour,” said The High Cost of Living director Deborah Chow, winner of the $15,000 SKYY Vodka Award For Best Canadian First Feature Film. “I need to thank SKYY Vodka, not just for this award but for saving me from having to work at Starbucks next weekend.”

Most Surprising Dinner Order
Slender star Milla Jovovich enjoyed the Truffle Lobster Pasta at the SoHo Metropolitan Hotel so much she ate it every day she was in Toronto.

Best Alleged Bad Behaviour
A very famous movie producer was purportedly seen pushing a baby carriage out of the way while running to catch an elevator at the Four Seasons.

Most Dangerous Screening
Danny Boyle’s 127 Hours, the true story of climber Aron Ralston who cut off his own right arm after getting pinned by a boulder. The amputation sequence is so intense several members of the audience required medical attention. Runner-up: The Whistleblower, which caused at least one fainting spell.

Best Excuse for Cancelling an Interview
John Carpenter, director of the chiller The Ward, who blew off TIFF and dozens of confirmed interviews because he was called to jury duty in Los Angeles.

The best things overheard at TIFF
RICHARD CROUSE
METRO CANADA
Published: September 20, 2010

Buried director Rodrigo Cortés on his admiration for Ryan Reynolds
“I hope that all Canadians are not like Ryan Reynolds because that embarrasses the world. People like him should be forbidden.”

Woody Allen on aging
“I’ll be 75 in another couple of months and I do see myself as becoming waning and decrepit.”

Jacob Tierney on working with a cat in Good Neighbours:
“He starred in 300. That’s the cat from 300. Do you know how many times the trainer told me that? I was like, ‘Awesome. Shall I talk to his agent?’”

Paul Giamatti on the famous “merlot” line in Sideways:
“The funniest thing about that line is the only reason it is merlot is that we tried all these different wines and that was the only one that was funny… was the word merlot. For some reason that sounded funnier than chardonnay.”

Josh Brolin on Diane Lane:
“If you look at my wife’s boobs you’ll see that she doesn’t need a boob job.”

Some movie sequels are years in the making
In Focus by Richard Crouse
METRO WORLD NEWS
Published: September 23, 2010

Twenty three years have passed since the original film won an Academy Award for lead actor Michael Douglas and a Razzie for supporting actress Daryl Hannah which means that many current second year university students weren’t even born when Gordon Gekko made the words “Greed is good” famous.

Twenty-three years is a stretch but it is more common than you think for years, and sometimes even decades to pass between source and sequel.

Return to Oz, based on the second and third Oz books and made forty-six years after the classic MGM film, picks up the story six months after Dorothy returned to Kansas. The film held a Guinness Book of World Records notation as the sequel with the longest gap from its original until it was bumped off by Fantasia/2000, which came a whooping fifty-nine years after Fantasia.

Not record breaking, but still substantial are The Color of Money, which trailed The Hustler by twenty-five years and An American Werewolf in Paris which bounded into theatres sixteen years after An American Werewolf in London.

Sci fi fans also had to wait sixteen years for the follow up to 2001 A Space Odyssey. 2010: The Year We Make Contact featured a whole new cast (save for Douglas Rain who reprised his role as the voice of HAL 9000) but original director Stanley Kubrick was given a cameo of sorts. He can be seen as the Soviet premier on the cover of Time magazine.

Speaking of directors, it’s unusual for the original director to come back and direct a sequel a decade later, but Troy Duffy, stuck to his guns (literally) and ten years after The Boondock Saints came The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day. “To me, the successful sequels in the past have given you everything you’ve loved from the first film, plus a brand-new storyline that you could never have predicted,” said Duffy.

Oliver Stone, who had never made a sequel to any of his films before remounting Wall Street, seems to have followed Duffy’s advice filling his new film with touchstones from the original, but let’s hope he’s joking when he says, “I should go back and do 'Son of Scarface' or something!”

Let Me In gets American Stamp
In Focus by Richard Crouse
METRO CANADA
Published: September 30, 2010

This weekend the story of a 12-year-old vampire who helps her young neighbour deal with bullies at school hits theatres.

Sound familiar?

It should, the movie is an American remake of a Swedish art house hit from less than twelve months ago. Let Me In, the English language remounting of Låt den rätte komma in, joins a long list of movies to paste an American stamp on its cinematic passport.

 Let Me In is earning good reviews for its respectful treatment of the source material but that is not always the case. Critic Tom O’Neil warned, “Chances are, with the remake, Hollywood is just serving up re-fried beans that aren’t very tasty.”

 Re-hashes like Weekend at Bernie’s, which was loosely based on the Indian cult classic Jane Bhi Do Yaaron and the Thai film Bangkok Dangerous, which won the 2000 Toronto International Film Festival international critics’ Award only to be retooled as a big budget, small-brained Nic Cage movie, have left a bad taste in viewer’s mouths but not all remakes are unpalatable.

The Departed, the Irish Mafia movie that gave Martin Scorsese his long deserved Best Director Oscar, was based on the Hong Kong film Infernal Affairs.

Critics loved Scorsese’s film, giving it a 93 per cent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, although Infernal Affairs star Andy Lau grumbled, “The Departed was too long,” and Andrew Lau, the original’s co-director said, “of course I think the version I made is better but the Hollywood version is pretty good too.”

Also pretty good is Insomnia, Christopher Nolan’s 2002 remake of a 1997 Norwegian film of the same name. Directed by Erik Skjoldbjærg, the original’s story of a disgraced Swedish detective, played by Stellan Skarsgård, who struggles to solve a brutal murder case in northern Norway is a gritty psychological drama which writer Peter Cowie said “represents European cinema at its most challenging.”

The U.S. remake, starring Al Pacino, Robin Williams and Hilary Swank is a much different film. Roger Ebert said, “unlike most remakes, the Nolan Insomnia is not a pale retread, but a re-examination of the material, like a new production of a good play.”

These U.S. remakes have always been with us, and regardless of how Let Me In fares at the box office, are unlikely to stop. For better or for worse plans are already underway for an English remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo starring Daniel Craig.

Hollywood goes off to the races with horse movies
RICHARD CROUSE
METRO CANADA
Published: October 08, 2010

What do Elizabeth Taylor and Diane Lane have in common? Besides earning the title World’s Most Desirable Woman (Lane, officially, in 2004, and Taylor, pretty much all the way through the ’60s and ’70s), they’ve both shared the screen with a 1,600-pound leading man.

No, it wasn’t Marlon Brando, it was a horse, of course. Both have starred in movies featuring four-legged cast mates — Taylor most famously in National Velvet, Lane in this weekend’s Secretariat, the story of racing’s most famous thoroughbred.

Secretariat may be the most storied real-life horse to be portrayed in the movies, but he’s not the only one. Remember Phar Lap? The biopic of his life and career — he was the most famous Australian animal athlete of all time, so well known that his heart, preserved at the National Museum of Australia, is their most requested exhibit — was not a hit in North America despite a 100 per cent Rotten Tomatoes rating, but was popular in Australia and New Zealand where the horse is a national treasure.

Faring better at the box office was the inspirational equine movie Seabiscuit, a Depression-era story about a charger that won races and lifted spirits. Dubbed "Three Men and a Horse" by one writer, the story of a jockey (Tobey Maguire), a businessman (Jeff Bridges) and a wise old cowboy (Chris Cooper) connected with audiences and sold a hefty 5.5 million copies on DVD.

Memorable quote? “The horse is too small, the jockey too big, the trainer too old, and I’m too dumb to know the difference.”

More fleet of foot than the racehorse sports movies is the Disney comedy The Horse in the Gray Flannel Suit. Based on the novel The Year of the Horse by Eric Hatch, it mixes Mad Men-style advertising executives, a cute kid and a horse named after a stomach pill with stars Kurt Russell, Dean Jones and Dick Van Dyke Show regular, Morey Amsterdam.

Coming around the homestretch are two horse movies starring Hollywood stud Robert Redford. In The Electric Horseman, he’s a washed-up rodeo star “just walkin’” around to save funeral expenses.” He’s a bit on the decrepit side, but Redford did all of his own riding stunts in the film. Redford is back in the saddle in The Horse Whisperer, playing a horse trainer with a special touch. Memorable quote? “Truth is, I help horses with people problems.”

Edward Norton’s impressive criminal resumé
In Focus by Richard Crouse
FOR METRO CANADA
Published: October 14, 2010

 Edward Norton has made a career of playing jailbirds on screen. His edgy intensity lights up movies like this weekend’s Stone, despite one writer calling him “the passport definition of no distinguishing marks.”

The Yale graduate’s slight, gawky frame is not exactly what you have in mind when you think criminal and yet his portrayals of people on life’s fringe’s have earned him Oscar nominations and come to define his career.

In his first big screen part Norton played the dual role of altar boy Aaron and his alter ego, the psychotic Roy in the film Primal Fear. Accused of murder, he is zealously defended by a defense attorney (Richard Gere) who is drawn to the sweet Southern boy until he realizes that Aaron is totally insane. A complete unknown when he auditioned for the role, he tricked the film’s director into thinking he shared an eastern Kentucky background with Aaron by speaking with a twang —which he picked by watching Coal Miner’s Daughter.

“The most I had to offer was anonymity,” he later said. “The potency of the revelation about who my character really was in that film was in part reliant on the fact that people had absolutely no prior knowledge of me.”

Next time behind bars he pulled a De Niro, and in American History X physically transformed to play the role of a white supremacist sent away for murder. In jail he learns the error of his ways and works to help his brother from going down the same, wrong-headed path.

“I knew this guy was going to have to be really physically fearsome,” he says, “and that’s not something anyone would peg me for. [He’s] defined by rage and this body he’s created is the physical manifestation of that.”

In this weekend’s Stone he stars as an arsonist who will do anything, including using his wife as bait, to earn parole. Despite having played convicts in the past, Norton was keen to bring an extra layer of realism to this role so he met with actual prisoners to learn how they spoke.

“Their language is fantastic. At one point, one of these guys was telling me about a fight and how he had to just let it happen and not fight. (He said,) ‘When you’re short time, you have to be a vegetarian.’ I said, ‘What?’ He said, ‘Vegetarian, you can’t have beef with nobody.’”

Tripping the afterlife fantastic
In Focus by Richard Crouse
FOR METRO CANADA
Published: October 22, 2010

Clint Eastwood’s latest film, Hereafter, concerns itself with what happens once you have, as John Cleese might say, “shuffled off this mortal coil.”

In the film, a woman has a near death experience, beginning her walk into a bright light surrounded by misty figures making a similar journey into that great goodnight. That’s just the most recent cinematic vision of what happens after death, but there are many more, some played for laughs, sometimes for drama and now and then for comfort.

In Deconstructing Harry, Woody Allen goes for the joke, taking the viewer on an elevator ride through hell’s nine floors, each reserved for a different kind of sinner. Best line? “Floor 7: the media. Sorry, that floor is all filled up.”

Tim Burton also had some fun with the afterlife in Beetlejuice. Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis get tips on how to haunt their old house in a book titled Handbook for the Recently Deceased. Best line? “We're not completely helpless, Barbara,” says Adam (Baldwin). “I've been reading that book and there's a word for people in our situation: ghosts.”

Taking the hereafter a bit more seriously is The Rapture, which sees Mimi Rogers almost reunited with her dearly departed daughter. This version of Heaven is much starker than the usual sweetness and light paradise seen on film; there’s no Pearly Gates or fluffy clouds with angels snacking on Philadelphia Cream Cheese. For that version check out the opening minutes of the classic Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Carousel. The story of a dead carnival worker who asks for permission to be sent back to earth for one day to make amends for mistakes he made in life starts with a glittering vision of heaven, complete with sparkling stars. Best heavenly quote? “Here there is no time; this is the beginning and the end.”

What Dreams May Come, the 1998 film about a man who leaves heaven to search hell for his wife paints heaven as a place that, as Roger Ebert noted, seems “cheerfully assembled from the storage rooms of images we keep in our minds: Renaissance art, the pre-Raphaelites, greeting cards, angel kitsch.” The heaven in this film is a wonderful place “big enough for everyone to have their own private universe.”

On the flipside is the movie’s vision of hell as a surreal, dark place. Best quote: “Hell is for those who don't know they're dead.”

'People like to be scared when they feel safe'
In Focus by Richard Crouse
FOR METRO CANADA
Published: October 29, 2010

A Saturday matinee screening of last year’s Paranormal Activity was the first and only time I have ever heard anyone actually scream in a theatre. I don’t mean a quiet whimper followed by an embarrassed laugh or a frightened little squeal. No, I mean a full-on, open throated howl of terror.

The release of Paranormal’s prequel last weekend got me thinking about other big screen scream worthy scenes. So just in time for Halloween are some leave-the-lights-on movie moments.

If Alfred Hitchcock had any doubts about the effectiveness of the shower sequence in Psycho they must have been put to bed when he received an angry letter from the father whose daughter stopped bathing after seeing the bathtub murder scene in Les Diaboliques and then, more distressingly, refused to shower after seeing Psycho. Hitch’s response to the concerned dad? “Send her to the dry cleaners.”

The shower scene was terrifying but at least it was allowed to stay in the movie. In 1931, Frankenstein star Boris Karloff demanded the scene in the movie where the monster plays with a little girl, throwing flowers in a pond be cut from the picture. It’s a cute scene until the beast runs out of flowers and tosses the little girl into the water, leaving her to drown. Karloff, and audiences, objected to the violence against the youngster and the scene was shortened, then removed altogether and remained unseen until a special videotape release 48 years later.

More recently, The Exorcist (now beautifully restored on Blu Ray) so traumatized audiences with shots of the possessed Regan MacNeil's 360-degree head spinning that in the U.K. the St. John's Ambulance Brigade were on-call at screenings to tend to fainters. Star Linda Blair says she wasn’t traumatized by the film, but admits there has been one long lasting side effect. “You wouldn't believe how often people ask me to make my head spin around,” she says.

Blair may have been unfazed while shooting her gruesome scenes, but not all actors emerge unscathed. Elisha Cuthbert was so grossed out while shooting the notorious blender scene in the down-and-dirty flick Captivity she says she felt “physically ill twice” and had to have a bucket nearby.

Scary scenes one and all, but recounting them begs the question, why are we drawn to them?

The quick answer comes from Alfred Hitchcock who said, “People like to be scared when they feel safe.”

Real-life survival stories on the silver screen
In Focus by Richard Crouse
FOR METRO CANADA
Published: November 05, 2010

Wikipedia defines survival as “the struggle to remain alive and living.” Next to that definition should be a picture of Aron Ralston, the poster boy for survival at any cost.

His name may not ring a bell, but his remarkable story will make you wonder how far you would go to stay alive. You see, Ralston is the American mountain climber who was trapped by a boulder for five days in May 2003 and was only able to free himself by amputating his own arm.

His story is told in unflinching detail in 127 Hours, starring James Franco. The film is so intense some audience members have suffered panic attacks and lightheadedness.

The same can’t be said of Alive, the 1993 film about a Uruguayan rugby team stranded in the Andes, who, once their rations of wine and chocolate ran out, were forced to eat their deceased teammates to stay alive.

Based on real events, the facts of the story are gut-wrenching, but as New Yorker critic Anthony Lane pointed out “most people know the story already; everyone began to titter with anticipation whenever one of the characters said he felt hungry.”

The ghoulish humour some audiences found in the film’s story of survival was echoed in Lane’s review when he wrote that the film, “solemnly wring(s) a message of togetherness from the horror. Come closer to your friends than ever before, the movie says: have them for lunch.”

Less known than Alive’s cannibalistic rugby players but just as compelling is Touching the Void, another true-life endurance drama.

The movie’s lesson?

Never go mountain climbing.

Roger Ebert called the story of Joe Simpson’s slow, painful climb from the bottom of a crevice to rescue “the most harrowing movie about mountain climbing I have seen, or can imagine.” 

Most of these movies have happy (or at least happy-ish) endings, but not all stories of survival end in triumph.

The anti-survival movie genre is alive and well, even if the characters usually aren’t by the end of these films.   

Into the Wild, the Oscar-nominated story of an idealistic dreamer not up to the challenges of living on his own in the wilderness of Alaska, and Open Water, the tale of a pair of swimmers who become shark bait, don‘t have the inspirational uplift of some of the other movies I’ve mentioned, but can be essays in courage (or stupidity, depending on your viewpoint). 

Drama of live TV a perfect fit for the big screen
In Focus by Richard Crouse
FOR METRO CANADA
Published: November 12, 2010

There are no second chances or do-overs in live television. Just ask the cast of the Armchair Theatre play Underground who had to continue performing even though the star of the show, Gareth Jones, died during the live broadcast. The show, as they say, must go on whether your star drops dead, you have a wardrobe malfunction, or, as we see in this weekend’s Morning Glory, your co-hosts can’t stand one another. 

The unpredictability of live television is exciting, so it’s not surprising that movies about TV have been around almost since the boob tube’s beginnings.

Just nine years after regular commercial network television programming began in the U.S. A Face in the Crowd, Andy Griffith’s 1957 film debut, showed the dangers of live television. The future Andy of Mayberry played Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes, a charismatic television star whose career falls apart when an open microphone picks up a rant about his viewers—he calls them “idiots, morons, and guinea pigs”—during a live show. 

That rant ruined Lonesome’s career but in Network the immediacy of a live tirade was used to much different effect. Peter Finch plays longtime news anchor Howard Beale who reignites his career with a series of angry diatribes and the catchphrase, “I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!” The motto struck a chord with people and has since been referenced by everyone from Bill O’Reilly in his book Who's Looking Out for You? to Samuel L. Jackson, who, in the television movie Un-broke encourages people to yell, “I'm broke as Hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore!”

A very different slogan, inspired by the amiable goodbye Edward R. Murrow used to sign-off his broadcasts, served as the title of Good Night and Good and Good Luck. The story of Murrow’s battles against McCarthyism showed the power of early television, allowing Murrow to expose Communist hunter Joe McCarthy for what he was—a fear monger—live on air. “We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason,” he said.

Perhaps the best movie about live television is My Favorite Year, a fictionalized account of Errol Flynn’s appearance on the variety program Your Show of Shows. It’s a frenzied and very funny account that breathes new life into the saying “the show must go on.” Best line? “I'm not an actor, I'm a movie star!”

Hogwarts is the greatest prep school of them all
In Focus by Richard Crouse
FOR METRO CANADA
Published: November 19, 2010

Hogwarts, a school of magic founded more than a thousand years ago by a quartet of the greatest witches and wizards of their age, will once again be front and centre when Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 opens on Friday. It’s the screen’s most famous private school, but it isn’t the only cinematic bastion of readin', writin' and 'rithmetic.

The granddaddy of the modern prep school movie is 1972’s A Separate Peace, a dull film, based on a not-so-dull book by John Knowles, starring Parker Stevenson which was later remade as a better than average grade made-for-TV movie. Without the original film’s portrayal of Devon Academy, we might not have had Dead Poet’s Society (set at “the best prep school in America”) or any other classroom drama that teaches life lessons alongside the three R’s.

For instance the all-star students—Brendan Fraser, Ben Affleck, Matt Damon and Chris O'Donnell—in School Ties learn a lesson not on the curriculum—the power of prejudice. Fraser plays David Greene, a Jewish student at a WASPy prep school in the 1950's who becomes the victim of vicious anti-Semitism. Most noteworthy because of its soon to be famous cast—this came out five years before Good Will Hunting made Affleck and Damon superstars and a year before Chris O’Donnell was nominated for a Golden Globe for his other prep school drama, Scent of a Woman—the movie’s message of tolerance resonates when set against today’s recent news stories about school bullying.  

But don’t think all private school movies are about “carpe diem” and uplifting messages. Cruel Intentions sees a group of good-looking learners engage in a dangerous game of seduction and betrayal, and the only lesson Chris O'Donnell learns in Scent of a Woman—whose all male boarding school scenes were actually shot at one of the America’s oldest all-female boarding schools—is how to avoid being crushed by the weight of Al Pacino’s overacting.

Most vapid, however, is Private School, starring Phoebe Cates and Matthew Modine as star-crossed students from the Cherryvale Academy for Women and the Freemount Academy for Men. Completely devoid of merit, it most famously features gratuitous topless horseback riding and a female shower scene; behaviour Albus Dumbledore would certainly frown on. Critics too frowned upon the movie. One writer said “hardcore porn has a better reputation” than this teen sex comedy.

Hollywood plots get hooked on drugs
In Focus by Richard Crouse
FOR METRO CANADA
Published: November 26, 2010
    
We’ve all heard those disclaimers at the end of pharmaceutical commercials.

“May be-harmful-to-humans-if-swallowed-the-most-common-side-effects-are-temporary-eyelid-droop-nausea-decreased-sweating-avoid-contact-with-skin.”

Usually they sound like one long breathless sentence that seems scarier than the disease the drugs are meant to prevent.

A new film, Love and Other Drugs, starring Jake Gylennhaal and Anne Hathaway as a pharmaceutical salesman and the girl he loves respectively, however, forgoes the disclaimer. In fact, in what almost seems like a 90-minute ad for Viagra, it appears that the drug’s—Vitamin V, Jake calls it—only side effect is that it works too well.   

It is the rare movie that uses a real brand name drug as a plot device. Even though the odd movie like Prozac Nation dares to name names, often filmmakers use fictitious drugs to advance their stories (and avoid lawsuits from notoriously litigious Big Pharma), but even in fantasy, side effects abound.

Brain Candy, the 1996 Kids in the Hall comedy, created a cure for depression called GLeeMONEX that “makes you feel like it’s 72°F in your head all the time.” Unfortunately the pill’s patients also turn into comatose zombies.  

David Cronenberg devised Ephemerol, a tranquilizer used as a morning sickness remedy for his film Scanners. Side effects?  Telekinetic and telepathic abilities. Later, in Naked Lunch, Cronenberg featured the more recreational drug Bug Powder, a yellow dust formally used by exterminators, informally by people looking to find a “literary high.”  

In Repo! The Genetic Opera, Paris Hilton’s character Amber Sweet was addicted to a powerful blue, glowing opiate extracted from dead bodies called Zydrate. I’ll do wild things to “your soul for one more hit of that glow,” she sings. An alternative cinematic painkiller is Novril, the pills that kept James Caan sedated in Misery.

Filmmakers don’t just fictionalize pharmaceuticals, however. Plenty of recreational drugs get the Hollywood treatment. Remember Space Coke from Cheech and Chong's Next Movie? One snort was enough to send both Cheech and Chong literally into outer space.

A Clockwork Orange was chock-a-block with fake drugs; everything from Drencrom to the synthetic mescaline Synthemesc to Vellocet, which produced ultra-violent tendencies and sudden outbursts of Singing in the Rain.

Perhaps the strangest recreational drug from the movies is Alien Nation’s Jabroka. Aliens find it highly addictive and grow to monstrous proportions when they take it, but to humans it tastes like dish soap and has no effect.

Hollywood goes dancing with the stars
In Focus by Richard Crouse
METRO CANADA
Published: December 03, 2010

Ballet is inherently dramatic, so it is no wonder the movies have frequently looked to pointed shoes and bun heads for inspiration. The first ballet moves captured on film were likely in the turn-of-the-last-century animated films of Alexander Shiryaev, whose crude but beautiful films used drawings and puppets as an early form of dance notation.

Since then, the movies have been dancing with the stars. Everyone from legendary performers like Mikhail Baryshnikov to gifted amateurs like Natalie Portman, who plays a beautiful but troubled ballerina in this weekend’s dark drama Black Swan, have done a cinematic grand jeté or two.   

The most classic ballet movie has to be The Red Shoes, the 1948 classic which interweaves on and off stage action to tell the story of a ballerina pulled between two men—a composer who loves her and an impresario who wants to make her a star. The British Film Institute labeled it one of “the best British films ever” and the movie inspired Kate Bush's song and album of the same name.

The Red Shoes was nominated for four Oscars and took home a pair, which is two more than our next ballet film, even though it was nominated for eleven. The Turning Point (which ties The Color Purple for most nominations with no wins) starred Shirley MacLaine and Anne Bancroft as lifelong rivals; one who left the ballet to become a wife and mother, the other who stayed and became a star. Audrey Hepburn, Doris Day and Grace Kelly were all offered the lead roles, but turned them down. After seeing the movie, Hepburn regretted her decision. “That was the one film,” she said, “that got away from me.”

There are dozens of Hollywood ballet movies. It’s almost tutu much (you had to know that pun was coming); White Nights, Center Stage (with Avatar’s Zoe Saldana), Billy Elliot, The Company (made with the cooperation of the Joffrey Ballet) and even the South Korean horror film, Wishing Stairs, feature stories about fictional ballet dancers, but there are many interesting ballet documentaries as well.

The history of the Ballet Russe of Monte Carlo is touchingly and lovingly told in Ballets Russes, an intimate documentary focused on the founders of modern ballet and also fascinating is La Danse - Le ballet de l'Opéra de Paris, director Frederick Wiseman’s fly-on-the-wall look at the production of seven ballets by the Paris Opera Ballet.

Kids' action-adventure flicks ruled the 80s
In Focus by Richard Crouse
METRO CANADA
Published: December 10, 2010

Once upon a time, Disney had a corner on the kids' action-adventure market. Sunday at six was reserved for Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color and for a couple of hours once a week movies like Race from Witch Mountain, Kidnapped and Treasure Island mixed plucky kids, mild action, exotic locations and lots of adventure.

The genre hasn’t gone away -- new movies like this weekend’s The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader still give kids a thrill ride -- but I get a nostalgic kick out of older, simpler action-adventure flicks.  

Though it wasn’t a Disney film, The Goonies breathes the same air as Walt’s kids' classics. The adventure begins when a group of kids calling themselves The Goonies find “One-Eyed” Willy’s treasure map. Sprinkle in some crazy inventions, a baddie played by Throw Mama from the Train star Anne Ramsey, a title track by Cyndi Lauper and Spielberg-esque storytelling, and you have one of the best loved kids' romps from the 1980s.

Speaking of Spielberg, without his ET, we wouldn’t have had Flight of the Navigator. After ET’s successful mix of kids and aliens, a whole slew of movies tried to cash in on that formula. The story of a 12-year-old boy who disappears, only to return eight years later without having aged a day at all, Intelligence -- a glib navigational computer -- and a cameo by Sarah Jessica Parker as a NASA orderly with punk rock pink hair.

SJP’s pink hair stood out like a sore thumb in that movie, but two early ’80s kids' fantasy-adventure films feature wild creatures and magical lands.

In The NeverEnding Story, a young hero must save his country, Fantasia, from something worse than an evil king. He must stop a creeping wave of nothingness. It may be the most existential kids' movie ever, but woven into the fabric of the story are cool characters like the Rockbiter and Gmork the evil wolf.

Perhaps the best, although most underrated kids' fantasy film, is 1982’s The Dark Crystal. Directed by Muppet master Jim Henson, the film sees a Gelfling setting off to find the missing piece of a magical crystal, in order to restore to his world. A minor hit when it was released, this masterful kid’s movie is finally getting a much deserved sequel, The Power of the Dark Crystal, scheduled for release in 2011.

Hollywood gets in the ring with real life pugilists
In Focus by Richard Crouse
METRO CANADA
Published: December 17, 2010

When English boxer Bruno Frank said “Boxing is just show business with blood,” he was on to something. Ever since 1937’s Kid Galahad entertained depression era audiences, there has been a steady flow of films set inside the square circle. For generations, audiences have flocked to the intersection of showbiz and blood — the movie theatre — to see films like Gentleman Jim, Million Dollar Baby and, of course, Rocky.

This weekend, Mark Wahlberg adds to that list when he stars as pugilist Micky Ward in The Fighter, joining a long line of actors who have strapped on gloves to play real life boxers.

In Resurrecting the Champ, a sportswriter thinks a homeless man (Samuel L. Jackson) might actually be a down-on-his-luck boxing legend. Loosely based on the story of Bob Satterfield, a fighter ranked in Ring magazine’s list of 100 greatest punchers of all time, it takes some liberties with the real story but makes up for inaccuracies with a great performance from Jackson.

Another flawed boxing movie saved by its performances is The Great White Hope, based on Jack Johnson, a boxer nicknamed the “Galveston Giant.” For some reason the names were changed for the movie, but the story of Johnson’s struggle with racism is brought to vivid life in a towering performance by James Earl Jones, who originated the part on Broadway. A 2005 documentary Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson revisited the story, correcting many of the mistakes of the original film.

Somebody Up There Likes Me stars Paul Newman (replacing James Dean who died before filming) as world middleweight champion Rocky Graziano. The fighter is portrayed as a tough kid from New York’s “Lower East Side, where both sides of the tracks were wrong” whose violent and callous ways are changed by the love of a good woman.

As mushy as the love story is — it inspired Sylvester Stallone when he was writing the Adrian storyline in Rocky — the fight scenes are brutally authentic.

Probably the greatest boxing bio is Raging Bull, the story of Jake “Come on, hit me. Harder. Harder” LaMotta, which earned Robert De Niro a Best Actor Oscar. But Cinderella Man, the inspiring true story of James J. Braddock and Gentleman Jim (which sees Errol Flynn playing Jim Corbett, the first heavyweight champion of the world under the new Marquis of Queensberry) is also worth a look.

Christmas movies for people who don't like Christmas movies
In Focus by Richard Crouse
METRO CANADA
Published: December 24, 2010

These days, malls are festooned in Christmas decorations by October and Starbucks has their Yuletide mugs out before the leaves have even turned. Last year, a new version of A Christmas Carol opened in early November and on TV, A Christmas Story played for 24 solid hours on Dec. 25. It’s easy to get Christmased-out long before the big day rolls around. There’s too much tinsel, too many in-your-face Santas, but for movie fans it is possible to get a taste of the holidays without having to watch James Stewart contemplate suicide.

Here’s some Christmas movies for people who don’t like Christmas movies.

Creepy Christmas

There are dozens of Christmas horror films with names like Silent Night, Deadly Night, but they are still too Christmassy for this list. I’m thinking more along the lines of American Psycho—who can forget Wall Street serial killer Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale) wearing reindeer antlers?—or the Christmas Eve viral outbreak that ravages the planet in I Am Legend.

Noël Noir

Lots of action / crime movies use Christmas as a setting, so much so that Die Hard and its sequel, both set on Christmas Eve, are regularly played as part of TV Christmas marathons. Others you may have forgotten are Lethal Weapon—Jingle Bell Rock plays during the opening credits—Goodfellas—The Ronettes sing Frosty the Snowman during a Christmas party, and later Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) gives his wife a wad of bills as a Christmas present—and L.A. Confidential, which opens on “Bloody” Christmas, 1951 when dozens of policemen beat seven incarcerated Latino men.

You Sleigh Me—Kringle’s Comedy

Looking for holiday laughs? According to Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, in Heaven it is Christmas every day, complete with dancers dressed as sexy Santas. In Trading Places we first see Dan Ackroyd, drunk, dressed as Santa on a bus, eating crusted food stuck in his beard. Even more alarming is Ferdinand the duck’s exclamation that “Christmas is carnage” in the movie Babe.   

Mistletoe Melodrama

Let’s face it, Christmas brings up a whole gamut of emotions, not just love and goodwill, and that’s precisely why Yuletide scenes are so effective in dramas. Far From Heaven, the Todd Haynes film about family secrets uses a drunken Christmas party to unveil some hard truths and, of course, without the Christmas scene in Citizen Kane there’d be no Rosebud mystery.  

Non-Chritsmassy Christmas Movie Quotes:

From Life of Brian
“We are three wise men.”
"Well, what are you doing creeping around a cow shed at two o'clock in the morning? That doesn't sound very wise to me."

From American Psycho's Patrick Bateman
“Hey Hamilton, have a holly jolly Christmas. Is Allen still handling the Fisher account?”

From Babe’s Ferdinand the duck
“Christmas is carnage!”

From L.A. Confidential’s Sid Hudgens (Danny Devito)
“It's Christmas Eve in the City of Angels and while decent citizens sleep the sleep of the righteous, hopheads prowl for marijuana, not knowing that a man is coming to stop them! Celebrity crimestopper Jack Vincennes, scourge of grasshoppers and dopefiends everywhere!”

From Driving Miss Daisy’s Daisy Werthan (Jessica Tandy)
“If I had a nose like Florene's, I wouldn't go around wishing anybody a Merry Christmas!”

Curl up with a good film for New Year's
In Focus by Richard Crouse
METRO CANADA
Published: December 31, 2010

Dec. 31 is one of the busiest nights of the year in bars and restaurants, which is precisely why I like to stay home. I don’t enjoy the crowds or the inevitable awkward midnight kissing that goes along with New Year’s Eve. But just because I don’t like to whoop it up in public doesn’t mean I don’t celebrate. I prefer to staycation, curling up with the P.M.C. (the Preferred Movie Companion), a bottle of something sparkly and a New Year’s Eve-themed movie.

For a romantic end-of-the-year mood I usually reach for The Apartment and watch Shirley MacLaine and Jack Lemmon fall in love at their office New Year’s Eve party. Or I watch Deborah Kerr and Cary Grant sneak a kiss on Dec. 31, then make a deal to meet six months later on top of the Empire State Building in the soapy An Affair to Remember. But maybe the best mushy NYE scene comes from When Harry Met Sally. On New Year’s Eve (when else?) Harry says to Sally (who else would he say this to?), “I came here tonight because when you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.”

For Harry, New Year’s Eve was the beginning of the rest of his life but for the ill fated passengers on The Poseidon it was just the opposite. We’ve all had disastrous end of the year parties but none match one of my other favorites, The Poseidon Adventure. Right in the middle of their on-board New Year’s party, a wild wave knocks the ship for a loop, sending 10 passengers on a watery New Year’s trek to safety.

There are dozens of movies filed under “Auld Lang Syne” in my collection, like 200 Cigarettes—set during New Year's Eve, 1981—and Sleepless in Seattle where Tom Hanks has an imaginary conversation with his late wife. '”Here's to us,” he says, while we wipe a tear or two.

There’s others like Sunset Blvd. and Bridget Jones's Diary, but perhaps the greatest New Year’s Eve scene happens in The Godfather, Part 2. At a New Year's Eve party in Havana, at the stroke of midnight, Michael Corleone grabs his brother Fredo, gives him a kiss, and says, “I know it was you Fredo. You broke my heart.” Terrified, Fredo disappears, which gives new meaning to “may old acquaintance be forgot…”

Fearless Nicolas Cage's most manic roles
In Focus by Richard Crouse
METRO CANADA
Published: January 05, 2011

A cleverly edited YouTube video featuring a montage of Nicolas Cage “losing it” in the movies has racked up 1,677,816 views, which is probably more people than saw his recent trilogy of Razzie-worthy work, The Wicker Man, Bangkok Dangerous and Knowing.

The vid is an eyeopening look at Cage’s trademarked brand of extreme acting -- a method of over emoting perfected in the 66 movies he’s made since his debut (under his real name, Nicolas Coppola) in 1982’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Citing The Incredible Hulk star Bill Bixby as a major acting influence, he has always been, for better and for worse, one of our most completely fearless (and cuckoo bananas) actors.

This weekend’s Season of the Witch promises an extra helping of full throttle Cage and will likely do some bang-up box office, but the actor who is best known for hits like Adaptation, National Treasure and Leaving Las Vegas, has made many other, lesser known movies that are also worth a look.  

One writer called Cage’s work in Vampire’s Kiss “a grand stab at all-out, no-holds-barred comic acting or one of the worst dramatic performances in a film this year” and 21 years after those words were written it’s still hard to judge. The story of a man who may—or may not—be turning into a vampire is best remembered as the movie in which Cage ate a live cockroach, but also features one of his most unhinged performances.

A few years later, somewhere between Honeymoon in Vegas and Guarding Tess, came Red Rock West, a genre busting movie—Ebert said it “exists sneakily between a western and a thriller, between a film noir and a black comedy”—that unfairly barely made it to theatres. Cage hands in some of his best work as a broke but honest drfiter, but only took the role after Kris Kristofferson turned it down.

Existing at the intersection of Vampire’s Kiss and Red Rock West is Wild at Heart, a film that perfectly showcases Cage’s manic energy. As Sailor, a lover boy on the run from hit men hired by his girlfriend’s mother—he’s a one of a kind—an Elvis wannabe with a snakeskin jacket and an attitude. It’s a bravura performance that, like the jacket which he says, “represents a symbol of my individuality,” is a symbol of his artistic individuality. 

Country Strong does for country what Showgirls did for lap dances 
RICHARD CROUSE AND MARK BRESLIN
METRO CANADA
Published: January 07, 2011  

Richard Crouse and Mark Breslin debate the merits of Country Strong.

SYNOPSIS: In “Country Strong” Gwyneth Paltrow plays Kelly Canter, a troubled country music superstar whose husband (Tim McGraw) pulls her out of rehab to plot her comeback tour. While getting clean she befriends orderly Beau (“Tron: Legacy’s” Garrett Hedlund) who also, conveniently, happens to be a musician. Beau ends up sharing the tour’s opening slot with beauty-queen-turned-singer Chiles Stanton (“Gossip Girl’s” Leighton Meester), and all four end up sharing more than just music and road stories.

Richard Crouse: The first line of Country Strong’s catchiest song, Give Into Me, is “I’m gonna wear you down,” and sure enough the movie did wear me down in the last 30 minutes. For the first hour or so I thought the film had as much authentic country spirit as a Muzak version of a Hank Williams song, but it finally won me over.  

Mark Breslin: Really? It never won me over, it just got worse as it ambled from cliché to cliché. Did we really need a remake of Crazy Heart? Although I must admit that Gwyneth looks better in a short skirt than Jeff Bridges ever could.

RC: I admit the script is thick enough with clichés to choke Roy Rogers’ horse and it has the blandest direction this side of Hee Haw, but I was won over by Garrett Hedlund. He walks away with the movie, stealing it outright from Gwyneth Paltrow, who can’t be down home no matter how hard she tries.

MB: You’re right about Hedlund. And I actually didn’t mind Tim McGraw. But it’s Gwyneth’s movie to win or lose, and she’s horribly miscast. Why not Faith Hill? Or get a Judd—any Judd. By the way, what kind of rehab facility lets you wear a half million dollars of bling as you kick alcohol?

RC: That necklace bugged me too! I get not taking off the giant wedding ring, but no matter what she was doing — throwing up in a garbage can, staggering around backstage — I was distracted by the glitter around her neck. She has a couple of moments though — a nice scene with a Make-A-Wish child and a drunken backseat conversation with Chiles — but the character is so thinly written there’s very little for her or the audience to hang onto.

MB: Sorry, but I found that the scene with “Leukemia Kid” was the most exploitative part of the movie. I did like her advice scene with her young rival, which played out quite realistically for me. But the script was so full of inadvertent howlers that the flick will do for country music what Showgirls did for lap dancing.

RC: It is manipulative, too long and while I liked it more than you, I thought that despite its downbeat subject matter — the flipside of fame, alcoholism and jilted love — it  wasn’t quite authentically hurtin’ enough to qualify as real country.

Infidelity can be treacherous ground for Hollywood
In Focus by Richard Crouse
METRO CANADA
Published: January 12, 2011

Sometimes it seems like Hollywood is obsessed with infidelity, both on screen and off.

Celebrity cheating scandals—Jesse and the porn star, Tiger and, well, everyone—covered the front pages recently, and Zsa Zsa Gabor once famously said, ‘How many husbands have I had? You mean apart from my own?”

Even supposedly happily-ever-after-Tinseltown-couples preemptively guard against unfaithfulness by signing “cheat-proof” prenups. Catherine Zeta-Jones has a legal infidelity clause with Michael Douglas and it’s rumoured that Denise Richards and Charlie Sheen signed one worth more than $4 million.

In this weekend’s The Dilemma -- a funny take on infidelity -- Vince Vaughn discovers his best friend’s wife is having an affair. There have been adultery comedies before but usually on screen in American films there is a price to be paid for matrimonial betrayal. Ever since the first cheating Hollywood movie, 1915’s Infidelity, movies like The End of the Affair, Body Heat and Derailed have shown the consequences of bed hopping, but one movie stands head and shoulder above the rest as a cautionary tale.

Fatal Attraction begins with Michael Douglas, a married man, who has a fling with Glenn “I'm not gonna be ignored!” Close. When he tries to break off their affair, she becomes a lesson in why not to cheat on your wife.  

The film was a sensation in 1987 and its most famous clip, the rabbit boiling on the stove, even inspired a phrase in the Urban Dictionary. According to the website, cook your rabbit “refers to the moment when someone goes over the edge in their obsession with another person.”  

Fatal Attraction was a box office bonanza, inspiring a number of imitators including The Crush, Single White Female and a spoof called Fatal Instinct.  

More poignant is Same Time Next Year, the story of a 26-year affair. Alan Alda and Ellen Burstyn star as an extramarital couple who rendezvous once a year from youth to old age. Based on a stage play by Canadian Bernard Slade, it’s a nice mix of humour -- when asked how many kids he has Alda lies, saying two rather than three. “I thought it would make me seem less married,” he says -- and emotion.

Perhaps the strangest infidelity movie on our list is Come With Me My Love, a supernatural tale about a man who kills his cheating wife, then commits suicide, only to come back as a ghost 50 years later to haunt his old apartment.

Rogen's Hornet is Paris Hilton with chest hair
Reel Guys by Richard Crouse and Mark Breslin
METRO CANADA
Published: January 14, 2011 

SYNOPSIS: An all-star cast, including Rogen, Oscar winner Christoph Waltz, Cameron Diaz and Taiwanese superstar Jay Chou, headline the updated adventures of the Green Hornet. In this version Britt Reid (Rogen), heir to his late father's publishing company, enlists martial arts wiz Kato (Jay Chou) to form a masked crime fighting duo. Together they hatch an unusual strategy to help Britt get over his serious daddy issues and take on the leader of the city's underworld, Russian criminal Benjamin Chudnofsky (Waltz).

Richard Crouse: Superhero movies don’t generally get January releases. Typically they’re summer fare, warm weather entertainment catering to teens looking for something cool to pass the school break. But The Green Hornet isn’t a typical superhero movie. Directed by art house favourite Michel Gondry and starring comedian Seth Rogen, it adds something new to the masked crime fighter genre: whimsy.

Mark Breslin: When I heard Seth Rogan was cast as a superhero, I thought it had to be one of the signs of the apocalypse. But now I see why. The character isn’t a superhero at all — he’s a rich doofus who’s playing at being a superhero. The real superhero in the movie is Kato, his sidekick. And I thought the mixture of humour and action worked pretty well.

RC: I agree. As a sidekick, Kato Chou is a cool character with great moves and some of the movie’s best lines. Rogen, however, will divide people. I think his fans will like his slacker Paris-Hilton-with-chest-hair interpretation of Britt Reid, but Green Hornet purists will find his take sacrilegious. Maybe they should stay home and rent The Dark Knight. Again.

MB: The superhero genre has been moving in this direction for a while. Iron Man was a guy with money and a suit. The Green Lantern, out later this year, is about a man and his magic ring. These are not “supermen.” Meanwhile, I thought Christoper Waltz made a good villain, Cameron Diaz could have been played by any model, and the 3-D was unnecessary. The car, however, deserves an Oscar.

RC: I think we’re on the same page with this one. I thought Cameron Diaz was the one nod to the typical masked crime fighter movie. She’s fine in Gwyneth Paltrow’s Iron Man role but is given little to do and the car would make Knight Rider’s Kit green with envy. But the 3-D? I have to ask, What 3-D? The only thing the lame 3-D adds to this movie is a few bucks to the ticket price.

MB: But I did like how Gondry couldn’t help himself and had to add a psychedelic montage sequence toward the end of the movie. I was, however, disappointed by Green Hornet’s lair.

RC: I liked Gondry’s flourishes. I think the great thing about the movie is how it pays tribute to the original while bringing the story and the characters into Rogen and Gondry’s strange universe.

Casual sex’s silver screen return
In Focus by Richard Crouse
METRO CANADA
Published: January 18, 2011

Casual sex seems to be making a comeback at the movies.

Recently Love and Other Drugs showcased the informal liaisons of Anne Hathaway and Jake Gyllenhaal. “We decided it was going to be two characters that both really couldn't be intimate,” says Jake, “and so we both went to sex as a way of avoiding things."

This week in No Strings Attached Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher become the latest Hollywood a-listers to try and keep their relationship strictly physical in this Ivan Reitman comedy.

Other films to ask “What’s love got to do with it?” include 9 Songs, the erotic Michael Winterbottom movie about Matt, an English scientist, and Lisa, an American on vacation in London. They meet, jump into the sack and go to Primal Scream and Franz Ferdinand concerts and soon learn, as Roger Ebert noted in his review, “sex is easy but love is hard.”

Another movie couple learned that lesson, with much happier results in Knocked Up, the 2007 comedy about a one night stand, an unplanned pregnancy and enforced maturity. The Guardian called it “a new genre of romantic comedy in which an unappealing hero gets together with a gorgeous, successful woman.” Star Katherine Heigl had a different take, suggesting the film “paints the women as shrews, as humorless and uptight, and it paints the men as lovable, goofy, fun-loving guys.” In response the film’s director Judd Apatow said “I'm just shocked she [Heigl] used the word shrew. I mean, what is this, the sixteen-hundreds?”

The reviews for Casual Sex?, a 1988 comedy starring Lea Thompson and Victoria Jackson as two women who look for love at an upscale spa—“It was the early eighties,” says Thompson’s character, “and sex was still a good way to meet new people.”—sum up the way many people feel about the sex without commitment. The movie,” wrote Hal Hinson in the Washington Post, “is exactly like the real thing—kinda empty, kinda unfulfilling, and you feel just awful afterward.”

On the other hand James Bond, possibly the screen’s biggest proponent of casual sex, never seemed to have a problem with a quick fling. Not willing to limit himself to earth-bound trysts in Moonraker he even has a rendezvous on a spaceship careening back through earth’s atmosphere. “My God, what is Bond doing?!” asks his boss Sir Frederick Gray. “I think he’s attempting re-entry sir,” replies Q.

Love kills laughs
Reel Guys by Richard Crouse and Mark Breslin
Richard Crouse and Mark Breslin debate the merits of No Strings Attached  Supporting cast much more interesting than two leads in this rom-com  
METRO CANADA
Published: January 21, 2011

Plot synopsis: No Strings Attached is the new R-rated dating comedy from director Ivan “Ghost Busters” Reitman. Ashton Kutcher and Natalie Portman play 20-something Los Angelenos who define their relationship as “friends with benefits” until they realize they’re falling in love

Ratings:
Richard’s: 88
Mark’s: 88 1/2

Richard Crouse: I don’t know about you Mark, but I don’t think Natalie Portman has to worry about No Strings Attached “Norbiting” her chance of an Oscar nomination. It has charm here and there, but is so bland I don’t even think Academy Award voters will even remember she was in the movie by Monday when their ballots are due. Thoughts?

Mark Breslin: I think the movie proves she has a gift for light comedy – very, very, very light comedy. I agree the movie is bland, but the good news is that its weightlessness is an antidote to the legion of overstated rom-coms. For the first half of the picture, I found myself applauding its gentle, loping rhythms. Then I fought to stay awake.

RC: I hear you. The sex-is-easy, love-is-hard premise works well enough when she and Kutcher are arranging trysts by text and keeping it informal but when the l-word — that’s love — rears its head the movie becomes predictable and dull. Perhaps it’s because the leads aren’t nearly as interesting as the supporting cast.

MB: Yes, yes! Great supporting cast! Kevin Kline, Lake Bell, Olivia Thirlby and many more inject the movie with the verve it needs. But now for the big question, Richard — Ashton Kutcher. Well?

RC: He looks good in a suit and can deliver a line but I really thought his role could have been played by any number of actors — Paul Rudd and Josh Duhamel maybe — and it wouldn’t have made any difference to the finished product. Back to the supporting cast though. You’re in the comedy biz. Can’t you get Lake Bell a better gig than this. She’s fantastic.

MB: Let me call the folks over at Little Mosque and see what they can do … As for Kutcher, I prefer him in sleazy cynical roles. There’s nothing more boring than a reformed cad. How much do we blame director Ivan Reitman for all of this? Should he start taking lessons from his son?

RC: Not yet. He is, after all, the guy who directed Ghost Busters, so as far as I’m concerned he’s alright by me. I’m willing to write No Strings Attached off as a noble but so-so attempt at a modern rom-com. My fingers are still crossed for Ghostbusters 3.  

Back to the cop-on-a-mission well
In Focus by Richard Crouse
METRO CANADA
Published: January 26, 2011

Everyone loves new and original characters in movies. One of the great pleasures of last year was watching Natalie Portman transform a stock ballerina character into something we’ve never seen before. Beautiful.

But where would the movies be without straight-ahead stock characters like the arrogant pilot or the rebellious teen? This week, The Factory, starring John Cusack, revisits one of the most frequently exploited big screen stereotypes, the obsessed cop.

The cop-on-a-mission character is nothing new. Film Noir is jam packed with police with something prove. Check out The Big Combo, a little-seen but worthwhile movie from 1955, which sees Cornel Wilde as a cop so fanatical about arresting a crime boss he funds the investigation out of his own pocket. Good gritty stuff.

More recently, Matt Dillon was the best thing in Takers as a detective who relentlessly tracked an elite band of bank robbers. He’s played cops before—a racist one in Crash for instance—and been in trouble with real policemen—he was busted doing almost twice the speed limit in 2008—but this is the first time he’s played one straight out of Central Casting.

Russell Crowe, however, has taken on the stock character more than once. Most famously he played Richie Roberts based on the real life detective who doggedly tracked one of the biggest heroin kingpins of the 1970s, Frank Lucas, played by Denzel Washington. In a strange twist to the story, the real Richie Roberts later became a lawyer and served as Frank Lucas's defense attorney and, to add an even more bizarre twist, became godfather to Lucas's son.

In Tenderness, Russell plays Lt. Cristofuoro a Buffalo detective who takes a “special interest”—read: “becomes obsessed”—with Eric Komenko, a teen who murdered his parents. Cristofuoro was the cop who originally arrested Eric and is convinced he’ll kill again. Crowe was originally meant to be a supporting player but was convinced to sign on when his part was expanded and he was given the voice-over narration.  

Perhaps the greatest obsessed cop in the movies is Gene Hackman as 'Popeye' Doyle in The French Connection. Not only does this movie have one of the all time great chase scenes, but Hackman, who won a Best Actor Oscar for the part, has great hardboiled lines like, “What is this, a [blankety-blank] hospital here?” when he confiscating drugs from a guy in a bar.

'A well directed, well acted piece of hooey'  
Reel Guys by Richard Crouse and Mark Breslin
METRO CANADA
Published: January 28, 2011

SYNOPSIS: Based on the book The Making of a Modern Exorcist, The Rite once again sees Anthony Hopkins in “personification of evil” mode, but just for a few minutes. Otherwise he’s Father Lucas, a veteran priest and expert in exorcism, who leads his student, Michael Kovak (Colin O’Donoghue), a new priest with a crisis-of-faith, into a wild satanic showdown.

Richard Crouse: Mark, if there was an after-school special about exorcism, The Rite would be it. It's earnest, has a message and there’s even a teenage pregnancy angle. I just wish it was scarier. It’s freaky but could really use a few more pea soup and head spinning scenes.

Mark Breslin: A few months ago, Hollywood gave us a movie called The Last Exorcism. Aww, come on, they promised! Really, Richard—I found The Rite to be a well directed, well acted piece of hooey. If you're a non-beleiver, there is nothing in this movie to scare you. You know what's scary? The Company Men—people losing their jobs for no good reason. To me, that's the horror film of the year.

RC: Even if you are a believer there’s not much there to scare you. Exorcism movies like this need lots of pea soup and head spinning. Instead we a get a demon mule with red eyes. Seriously? It’s freaky but not scary. Luckily, Anthony Hopkins brings some, ahem, spirit to the proceedings. But is he too much? What did you think?

MB: Hopkins can never do wrong in my book. He is wonderfully entertaining, especially in the second half of the picture when he goes off the deep end. He's one of the two things I liked about the movie, the other being the actual exorcism scenes, which had a genuine intensity to them. And were there any other actors in the film that even registered for you?

RC: In a word, no. I found most of the other actors rather bland. Even Rutger “Hobo with a Shotgun” Hauer, who can usually be counted on to add a dash or two of crazy is unusually subdued and Ciarán Hinds, usually a majestic figure on film, fades into the background. There’s no question, it’s Hopkins' movie, but I sometimes felt he was acting in a different movie than everyone else.   

MB: And the movie, though not poorly made, seemed beneath Hopkins' usual high standards. In fact, even by the generally low bar that's set for exorcism movies, I thought The Rite was just... Rong.

RC: Yeah, I have very little sympathy for this devil as well. I tried to imagine the movie without Hopkins—for better and for worse—and when I did there wasn’t anything left. He really exercises his exorcisms here and that’s the only real reason to see the movie. 

'No one's ever been down here before'
In Focus by Richard Crouse
METRO CANADA
Published: February 02, 2011

In the new 3-D film Sanctum, a group of cave divers get their spelunk on in the least accessible cave system on Earth. Down deep they encounter problems and end up in a fight for their lives.
If that synopsis sounds familiar, it should. Most cave movies—and yes, that is a bona fide genre—have very similar plots.

Here’s the typical rundown: A group of people jump into a giant hole and then really bad things happen. Usually at least one of the characters says, “It’s so deep... you can’t even see the bottom” just before they disappear forever.

Why do we keep coming back for more—and why do people like Sanctum producer James Cameron keep making these movies? I think it’s because they’re about the most basic primal feelings of all— claustrophobia, fear of the dark and the unknown. What could be scarier than a giant hole with who-knows-what living in it?

The most frightening giant cave movie has to be The Descent, a 2005 scary spelunker that features the second most used line in cave diving flicks: “No one's ever been down here before.” The film focuses on six women trapped in an Appalachian Mountains cave system. That’s scary. Even scarier are the pasty humanoid creatures that start hunting them. Horror website Bloody Disgusting ranked it as one of the top horror films of the decade and Roger Ebert gave it four out of four stars.

A sequel, imaginatively titled The Descent: Part 2, came four years later. Although it was advertised as being “deeper and darker” than the original, it isn’t nearly as bloodcurdling.

2005 was a big year for creepy cave movies. The Cave, starring Piper Perabo and Cole Hauser as cavers who are stalked by bloodthirsty creatures, may have a plot about original as the movie’s name, but it does offer some genuinely terrifying moments.  

If the subterranean creepy crawlers of The Cave (or others like What Waits Below or WithIn) aren’t for you, then perhaps the 3-D thrills of Cave of Forgotten Dreams will appeal. In this breathtaking documentary, director Werner Herzog explores the Chauvet caves of Southern France, literally a 33,000-year-old art gallery containing 400 Palaeolithic cave paintings. The legendarily loopy German filmmaker studies the drawings, made to replicate the movement of animals, and asks, “Is it a kind of proto-cinema?” It’s a wild, gripping look at life beneath the surface.

Sanctum is one very, very bad film
Reel Guys by Richard Crouse and Mark Breslin
METRO CANADA
Published: February 04, 2011

SYNOPSIS: In this James Cameron-produced 3D underground extravaganza, a group of underwater cave divers explore a cave system in Papua New Guinea. The dangerous mission becomes even more life threatening when a sudden storm floods the system. The only way out is a dangerous route downward toward the ocean. The question is: How many will survive?  

Richard’s Rating: 0 stars
Mark’s Rating: 1 star

RC: Mark, the early part of the year is supposed to be the worst movie-going season, but so far it hasn’t been so bad. But Sanctum is my first seatbelt movie of the year - a film so awful I thought I might need a seatbelt to keep me in my chair for the whole thing.

MB: Oh, yeah? I'm a claustrophobe AND have a fear of water. Plus, I'm allergic to bad writing. So I squirmed through this as well. But let me say something good about the movie: the 3D not only was technically superb, it enhanced the plot, what little there was. You must admit it put you in the middle of the adventure.

RC: If you’re allergic to bad writing then stay away. The dialogue is so wooden I swear I saw woodpeckers circling the theatre. I’ll admit the 3D was OK, and some of the pictures were beautiful, but I couldn’t help but think it wasn’t enough to keep me interested. Don’t you think, with some editing, it could have made a better National Geographic cave documentary than an adventure movie?

MB: Definitely. And one of the "characters" even references National Geographic. But then we wouldn't be treated to the stellar "acting" of the no-name cast. Richard, do you mean you weren't moved to tears by the way the son learns to love his irascible but courageous dad?  Why I haven't seen that in a movie in... weeks.

RC: The father and son dynamic doesn’t ring true, but then again, very little in this movie does. Scenes that should be tension filled are just tedious and how is it that someone, who we’re told has “broken every bone in their body,” is able to tightly grab the first character that walks by? Am I being too picky?

MB: No, but the scene does illustrate the limitations of a safety helmet. The scene that offended me was the climactic one between father and son, because it had already been done with other characters earlier on. What could have been moving -- even shocking -- was banal. I should have stayed home and watched The Hole again.

RC: My advice is to stay home and watch anything else. Watch paint dry... the acting is better. And a further word of advice: Don’t be fooled by James Cameron’s name in the credits. Sanctum is no Avatar.   

Who knew garden gnomes were so popular?
In Focus by Richard Crouse
METRO CANADA
Published: February 09, 2011

People have a love for garden gnomes that is gnot gnormal. The colourful terra cotta lawn decorations pop up in everything from Travelocity commercials to R.L. Stine’s Revenge of the Lawn Gnomes to Coronation Street to the Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets videogame and, of course, in tacky garden displays. Since ceramic gnomes were first manufactured in rural Germany by Phillip Griebel in 1847, these strange little creatures have carved out a pointy-hatted niche in popular culture.

This weekend, they take over movie theatres playing the leads in a reimagining of Shakespeare’s most romantic play. In Gnomeo & Juliet, two star crossed gnomes, voiced by James McAvoy and Emily Blunt, must overcome prejudice for their love to bloom.

This is probably the most gnometastic movie to ever hit theatres, but it isn’t the only one. Gnomes have had supporting roles on screen for years.

The most famous movie gnome is the hapless travelling gnome from Amélie. In the film, Audrey Tautou tricks her father into following his dream of touring the world by stealing his garden gnome and having a flight attendant friend send pictures of it posing with landmarks from all over the world.

The worldwide popularity of the film kicked off a resurgence of gnome love, and in 2002 International Gnome Day was instituted and is now celebrated on June 21 in a dozen countries. The travelling gnome also became a popular motif and was featured in the Matthew Good Band video for Anti-Pop, the videogames Half-Life 2: Episode Two and The Sims 3, and on the soap opera Neighbours.   

The garden decorations of Gomeo & Juliet aren’t the first animated big screen gnomes. In Wallace & Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit, Wallace the inventor installs gnomes in all the gardens in his town to guard against pests. Each garden gnome is equipped with a swivelling head and fire engine red eyes that light up when it senses rabbits or other garden invaders.   

Gnomes are used to tragicomic effect in The Full Monty when Gerald (Tom Wilkinson) is distracted by some gnarly dancing gnomes during an all important job interview.  

Also amusing are the airborne gnomes of Teenage Space Vampires, but the little creatures take a sinister turn in Slumming, a nasty horror film that is definitely not Better Gnomes and Gardens approved.

Think you'll hate the Bieber flick? Never Say Never
Reel Guys by Richard Crouse and Mark Breslin
METRO CANADA
Published: February 04, 2011

SYNOPSIS: Justin Bieber: Never Say Never is a 3D story of a pop prodigy who mastered a drum kit before he was ten years old and sold out Madison Square Garden when he was barely old enough to drive. Using a mix of archival and concert footage it follows Bieber from his humble beginnings in Stratford, Ontario to superstardom. 

Richard’s Rating: 3 stars
Mark’s Rating: 2 1/2 star

RC: Mark, generally these kind of music biographies are simply made up of backstage footage and embarrassing childhood photos wedged in between the tunes and this movie is kind of like that as well, but what really sold me on the film was the picture it painted of Bieber before he got famous.  

MB: I don't think either of us is the target demographic for the movie. I've had very little exposure to the Bieber phenomenon, so the movie was fresh to my eyes. Yes, I liked the footage of Bieber before he was famous, especially the bit of him playing competent drums on a chair at a very early age.

RC: To say we’re not the target market is an understatement like saying that Justin Bieber has a few female fans but there’s no denying that the kid has talent. The music in the concert sequences sounds like white noise to my ears, but it the early footage of him playing and singing on the streets of Stratford and drumming with a local band is pretty impressive. I thought the movie presented him as being less pre-packaged than other teen stars. What did you think?   

MB: Well, that's what they'd like us to think. There are a lot of references to how Bieber achieved his success without the Disney or Nickelodeon machines, and that's true. He is the product of some grass roots push, and I found the footage of that very interesting.  But when his manager—who is more likable than most—calls him the "underdog" I call that spin. Or even more proof that the internet has created a new business model. And what did you think of the 3D?  

RC: The “underdog” reference was the most glaringly disingenuous thing in the movie. Anyone selling out Madison Square Garden in under half-an-hour is not an underdog—anything but. If anything, he is as you say, a new kind of business model—fame by youtube. How 21st century. Makes the American Idol format seem weathered and tired. As for the 3D, it works in the concert sequences, less so in the documentary sequences but the little girls will love how Bieber seems to jump off the screen.

MB: Jump off the screen indeed! Scary—I really didn't need the moppet in my lap!

LSD Inferno? It's all in a name for Euro thrillers
In Focus by Richard Crouse
METRO CANADA
Published: February 16, 2011

A couple of years ago, Liam Neeson reintroduced North American audiences to the joys of the Euro-trashy-thriller. In Taken he played a retired undercover agent who rips Paris apart searching for his kidnapped daughter. “I’ll tear down the Eiffel Tower if I have to,” he said.

The French tourist attraction was left standing, but he laid waste to the rest of the city in the movie’s wild action scenes.

Neeson is back this weekend in Unknown, another Euro-thriller that sees him cut a swath through Berlin while trying to get to the bottom of a deadly mystery involving identity theft, shadowy assassins and, of course, European carnage.   

Euro-thrillers are characterized not just by their exotic locations, beautiful stars and international intrigue but by an attitude. They are about glamour, style and over-the-top stories.

A catchy title is also important. The 1967 Euro-heist flick 28 Minutes for 3 Million Dollars wasn’t much of a movie, but the name was a grabber. Ditto Agent for H.AR.M., an outlandish Eurospy movie with a bad guy who bears an uncanny resemblance to Pee Wee Herman. More fun is an Italian sci-fi comedy caper called Kiss the Girls and Make them Die starring Mike Connors (later famous as detective Mannix on TV) in a James Bond rip-off that’s almost as good as the real thing.

Then, what’s a great Euro movie without a cool score? Movies like 1967’s spy parody Kiss Kiss... Bang Bang featured a playful, loungetastic Bruno Nicolai score that sets the scene perfectly, and Ann Margaret’s songs in Appointment in Beirut can only be described as kitschy-cool.

The next ingredient is a wild premise. It doesn’t get much stranger than Bandaged, a German film about a deranged man who transplants the face of his late wife on his deformed daughter. Or how about LSD Inferno? In it the bad guy—an inventively named Mister X—wants to dose everyone in the world with acid.  

After that, all that’s needed is a great villain—like Adolfo Celi and his criminal organisation T.H.A.N.A.T.O.S. in OK Connery—and some gadgets—like Mission Bloody Mary’s rooms that double as microwave ovens. Then top with hot leads like Matchless’s Patrick O'Neal, who plays a secret agent who can turn invisible or Daniela Bianchi, the former Miss Rome who va-va-voomed her way through 15 films, including From Russia with Love, and you get a unique and fun night at the movies.

No 'disarming' James Frano jokes, please
Reel Guys by Richard Crouse and Mark Breslin
METRO CANADA
Published: February 18, 2011

Richard Crouse: Mark, I have to say I don't really care who hosts the Oscars. For me the show is about the movies, not the hosts. But I think the choice of Anne Hathaway and James Franco is kind of intriguing, especially since he's said publicly, “If it’s the worst Oscar show ever, who cares?” With that attitude he may bring some much needed danger to the proceedings.  

Mark Breslin: Sorry, Richard, I cannot agree! The Oscar hosts are incredibly important to the show. How else are we going to get through the awards for Best Documentary Short, Best Sound Editing, and the Jean Hirshholt Humanitarian Award without a little comedy, a little song, and a little dance? Which make Franco and Hathaway interesting choices because they don't do any of these. Then again, anything has to be better than last year's wheezy Steve Martin/Alec Baldwin duo. The big question is, will Franco and Hathaway open with a Black Swan parody in matching tutus?

RC: I can’t say if they’ll start things off with matching tutus, but I think it is a safe bet that leading up to the category Franco is nominated in this year, Best Actor for 127 Hours, there will be jokes about how “disarmingly” handsome he is, or how he “single-handedly” made the movie a success. Wait for those groaners. What everybody wants is for Billy Crystal to come back and host. He’s funny, he’s likeable, he’s a movie star—well, he used to be, anyway—and he keeps the pace of the show chugging along at a nice clip. Hathaway and Franco are both capable performers, but will they be able to keep things moving along?  

MB: Yes, Billy Crystal could have been made Oscar Host For Life. But I guess he doesn't mean much overseas, except for select neighborhoods in Tel Aviv. But here's a question: In the Dead Meal Tickets section, which deceased actor will get the greatest applause? Dennis Hopper or Tony Curtis?

RC: The tributes section is always a favourite of mine, but it does often feel as though someone is standing off stage with an Applause-O-Meter judging who gets the biggest reaction. This year? Who knows, maybe Hopper and Curtis will cancel one another out and leave a little love for departed Canadian Corey Haim. Even in death it seems the Oscars are still a giant popularity contest.

Plenty of traffic between hell and Earth
In Focus by Richard Crouse
METRO CANADA
Published: February 23, 2011

Type in "visitor from hell" on Google and you get about 12,900,000 results in 0.17 seconds. There are ghost stories, a site for a traditional Irish band called Visitor from Hell and stories about unpleasant house guests. But I was more interested in actual visitors from hell. Celluloid demons, tortured souls and devilish characters that somehow manage to slink back from the depths of movie hell to visit us here on Earth.  

Nicolas Cage, who emerged from hell in 2004's Ghost Rider, comes back from the depths for the second time this weekend in a movie called Drive Angry, playing a dearly departed father back on this mortal coil to avenge the death of his daughter. According to that movie, hellions rarely escape and return to Earth, but a quick look at other hellhound films reveals a different truth.

Lots of actors have played Earthbound versions of Satan. In The Private Lives of Adam and Eve, Mickey Rooney played Old Scratch as a piano-playing jokester in red long johns and a straw hat with horns. Tim Curry played the Devil on TV in an episode of Dinosaurs called "Life in the Faust Lane," and years before he became an Academy Award-winning composer, Danny Elfman did a strange Cab Calloway impression of Satan in the very odd film Forbidden Zone

But the most diabolically playful Devil to hit the big screen has to be Jack Nicholson as Daryl Van Horne in The Witches of Eastwick. As a mysterious character who grants wishes to three excitement-hungry widows, Nicholson made the wicked character unforgettable, but he wasn’t the first choice for the role. Bill Murray was.

Probably the most famous representation of hell on Earth came in the form of one of the devil’s underlings, Pazuzu, who inhabited the body of poor little Regan (Linda Blair) in The Exorcist. The images of Blair spitting pea soup and doing a 360 head spin have become the film standard for possession.    

Not all of hell’s citizens are out to do us harm, however. Director Guillermo Del Toro turned his favourite comic book into two fiendishly fun action movies—Hellboy and Hellboy 2: The Golden Army—starring Ron Perlman as the World's Greatest Paranormal Investigator, a red skinned demon named Hellboy who helps mankind by bumping back against the things that go bump in the night.

Drive Angry is trash, and we loved every second
Reel Guys by Richard Crouse and Mark Breslin
METRO CANADA
Published: February 25, 2011            

Another month, another Nicolas Cage movie. The Reel Guys turn their eyes toward Drive Angry.

Richard Crouse: Mark, Drive Angry has all the qualities of a great drive-in movie. There’s muscle cars, gratuitous language and nudity, a vengeful Southern cult leader and the single wildest gunfight/sex scene ever committed to celluloid. Roger Corman would have been proud. Were you? Did you like it?  

Mark Breslin: Richard, this movie was complete and utter trash and I loved every minute of it. Usually I cringe at any supernatural subplots, but with William Fichtner as the underworld's "accountant," how could they go wrong? Did you love him as much as I did?

RC: Oh yes. Fichtner is wicked — see what I did there? — and I loved the way he and Cage use this deadpan delivery to say the craziest dialogue of any movie so far this year. Cage hasn’t had a line as great as “I never disrobe before a gunfight” since David Lynch was writing his lines.   

MB: The dialogue was funny although the serious scenes with David Morse stopped the movie cold. But I thought Amber Heard brought a lot to a role that could have been a throwaway.

RC: The whole thing could have been a throwaway, but it isn’t. Instead it’s a throwback to the kind of movies that played at the bottom of the bill at the drive-in. It’s so over-the-top, so in-your-face it seems like a recent graduate from the Russ Meyer School of Fine Arts, class of 2011. Even the 3-D is extreme. This isn’t Avatar with its elegant stereoscopic effects. Here, as body parts and bullets were flying off the screen I couldn’t help but think that the 3-D was as extreme as the movie. What did you think of the 3-D?

MB: I felt I had to scape those body parts off my sweater when the movie finished. Verrrrry realistic! And Cage was his wonderful squirrelly self again, redeeming his somnambulistic role in Season of the Witch. His performance here is in his pedal-to-the-metal, no-holds barred Bad Lieutenant/Vampire's Kiss tradition — the Nic Cage I love.

RC: Absolutely. He’s a helluva lotta fun here. This is the Cage that I wish we saw more of — the wild-man-actor who seemingly has no boundaries. He’s still not 100 per cent back in my good books — the memory of Season of the Witch is too fresh to be forgotten—but a few more like this and a few less like Bangkok Dangerous and he may yet earn his way back to my A-list.

Phillip K. Dick feeds Hollywood's sci-fi machine
In Focus by Richard Crouse
METRO CANADA
Published: March 02, 2011 

For someone who once famously said, “You would have to kill me and prop me up in the seat of my car with a smile painted on my face to get me to go near Hollywood,” writer Phillip K. Dick certainly has a good Tinsel Town track record. Films based on his novels and short stories have made more than $1 billion, a figure that is bound to increase with the release of this weekend’s The Adjustment Bureau.

Based on Dick’s short story Adjustment Team, the film stars John Slattery as a mysterious Adjustment Bureau agent who must keep star-crossed lovers Matt Damon and Emily Blunt apart. It follows along with at least one tradition typical of Dick’s Hollywood adaptations—a title change.

Blade Runner was based on the 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the short story We Can Remember It for You Wholesale became Total Recall and Next, the Nicolas Cage movie, was loosely based on the short story The Golden Man.

“Phil often commented that he couldn't write good titles,” said Dick's ex-wife, Tessa. “If he could, he would have been an advertising writer instead of a novelist.”    

Blade Runner is arguably Dick’s most famous film, but an early draft of the script so displeased Dick he went on the offensive, deriding it as “Phillip Marlowe meets The Stepford Wives.”

Later, however, when shown 20 minutes of special effects shots, the author came on board, saying the footage of Los Angeles in 2019 looked “exactly as how I'd imagined it.” Ironically, director Ridley Scott later let it slip that he had never even read Dick’s book.

Total Recall also had a similar rocky development from page to stage. Early on, David Cronenberg was attached to write and direct but walked from the project when producers told him they wanted to change the story into something akin to “Raiders of the Lost Ark Go to Mars.” Eventually it was made as an incredibly violent Arnold Schwarzenegger film Roger Ebert called “one of the most complex and visually interesting science fiction movies in a long time.”

Despite the fact that Dick died in 1982 of a heart attack, interest in his work remains unabated. Disney is planning an animated adaptation of King of the Elves and Ridley Scott is reported to be producing a mini-series based on The Man in the High Castle for the BBC.

Star power makes The Adjustment Bureau a winner
Reel Guys by Richard Crouse and Mark Breslin
METRO CANADA
Published: March 04, 2011

SYNOPSIS: Matt Damon and Emily Blunt play star-crossed lovers who fell in love at first sight, but somehow, for years, are kept apart. When they have a second chance meeting he becomes determined not to let her go but the mysterious men from the Adjustment Bureau are just as determined to keep them apart.  

Ratings
Richard: ***1/2
Mark: ****

Richard Crouse: Mark, I really liked this movie even though I can’t really tell you what it is. It’s sci-fi, but it’s also an effective romance. It’s also an action movie that is quite funny. It’s all that and more, which makes it kind of hard to pigeonhole. Do you think that vagueness will hurt it at the box office?

Mark Breslin: I liked the movie too, although I suppose it was all part of the plan. I imagine the hope would be that all those genres will each bring in its own audience, which is possible. I think if you liked The Truman Show or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, or even The Box, this movie may be for you, although its far less menacing than those films. What might hurt it at the box office is its intelligence.

RC: As far as box office goes, I think the thing this movie really has going for it is the chemistry between Matt Damon and Emily Blunt. Sparks fly between them, especially in their scene on the New York City bus. It’s sexy, flirty and lots of fun. They are completely believable as a couple and as an audience member I was pulling for them.

MB: Yes, and I’m glad they let Emily Blunt keep her British accent — a sign of a superior movie. But I really think it’s an idea movie as much as a romance. It’s a preposterous premise, but everything proceeds logically once you accept it. But my complaint is that the details are so arbitrary: the doors, the hats, the rain; oh, and why are there no women in The Adjustment Bureau? Is the Chairman … a sexist????

RC: We never really meet the Chairman … perhaps he is a she. Who knows? Like all great science fiction The Adjustment Bureau isn’t as much about the ideas — do we have free will or just the illusion of free will? — as much as it is about the characters. Without strong leads this might have been a mishmash of arbitrary, unbelievable details, but with Blunt and Damon at the center of it all, it gels.

MB: And good secondary characters, too. John Slattery is note-perfect, and the arrival of Terrence Stamp halfway through has to mean things are going to get rougher. But did Damon’s campaign manager have to look so much like Eliot Spitzer? I found that unnerving.

Is there life on Mars?
In Focus by Richard Crouse
METRO CANADA
Published: March 09, 2011

Superstar astronomer Carl Sagan once said, “Mars has become a kind of mythic arena onto which we have projected our Earthly hopes and fears.”

For more than a hundred years, the idea that life could exist on the fourth planet from the Sun has been a sci-fi staple. In 1898 H. G. Wells wrote the most influential Martian invasion novel of all, The War of the Worlds, later adapted by Orson Welles into the most famous radio show ever. In a less serious vein, Marvin the Martian, a cartoon character voiced by Mel Blanc, gave us the catchphrase, “This makes me very angry. Very angry, indeed.” Years after Marvin’s 1948 debut he made another appearance as the mascot on the Spirit rover sent to Mars.

This weekend, Martians invade movie theaters in Mars Needs Moms, the story of little green marauders who kidnap human moms, joining a long list of Mars movies.

The 40-foot tall Martian in The Angry Red Planet, a low budget 1959 flick, was actually a 15-inch tall puppet made from elements of a rat, bat, spider, and crab. The campy creature was later featured on the cover of the Misfits’ album, Walk Among Us.

A few years later, Robinson Crusoe on Mars used Death Valley as a substitute for the barren terrain of Mars and was so low budget it recycled props from other movies. The aliens are seen dressed in the spacesuits from Destination Moon and Martian spacecraft were borrowed from The War of the Worlds.

The year 2000 was a big one for Martian movies. Red Planet, starring Val Kilmer, Carrie-Ann Moss, and Benjamin Bratt as astronauts sent to Mars when Earth’s efforts to colonize the planet are disrupted, features cinema’s first computer voice to be completely computer generated.

Also released that year was Mission to Mars, the Brian De Palma film about the first manned mission to Mars. The movie flopped domestically—it only has a 25 per cent Rotten Tomatoes rating—but was chosen as one of the top pictures of 2000 by Les Cahiers du cinema.

Not all Mars movies are actually set on Mars, however. Despite its title, Abbott and Costello Go to Mars, the comedy duo never actually makes it to the red planet. First their rocket lands in New Orleans, then Venus, where the Venusian women are all played by Miss Universe contestants.

Mars Needs Moms is a pleasant surprise
Reel Guys by Richard Crouse and Mark Breslin
METRO CANADA
Published: March 11, 2011

SYNOPSIS: The Earthbound portion of the story is set in Anywhere, USA. Little Milo (Seth Green) doesn’t like taking out the garbage. When his mom gives him a firm, but effective talking to, she unwittingly becomes a Martian overlord’s first choice as the model mom for the nanny bots that raise that planet’s young’uns. When she is abducted Milo hitches a ride, determined to rescue his mom from the alien invaders.

Ratings
Richard: ***
Mark: **1/2

Richard Crouse: Mark, I think WALL-E is the pinnacle of science fiction for kids, but after seeing Mars Needs Moms ... I still feel that way. It’s not really sci-fi anyway, it’s more action-adventure in zero gravity, and a pretty good one, but despite some good animation it didn’t feel memorable to me. What did you think?

Mark Breslin: Well, Richard, I dreaded seeing it. To fully appreciate this picture, you have to be an eight-year-old boy, and my inner child ran away from home a long time ago. But I was pleasantly surprised — and a bit angry. The poster and title indicate that that the movie is a comedy for little kids. But it’s not. Parents of very young children should be aware that it is an action-adventure, as you say, with themes about kidnapping and abandonment, and some scary chase scenes.

RC: I, too, dreaded having to sit through this, a feeling that didn’t go away until the story really kicked in around the half-hour mark. The Earthbound portion of the movie bored me silly but once the movie hits Mars it perks up. The female Martians look like E.T.’s younger sisters and the animation is terrific. I think it will appeal to eight- or nine-year-olds, but as you say, anyone younger than that might find it a bit intense.

MB: I got into it as well. But I must say the animation unnerved me. It’s getting to the point where the human characters looked creepily all too real, especially in longshot. On the other hand, it’s nice to see John Candy working again. Richard?

RC:  I can only half agree with you on the animation. I thought the backgrounds on Mars were spectacular, kind of 2001 by way of Triumph of the Will and Brazil, but, for me, the character animation fluctuated. Milo’s mom had a not quite human feel about her, but Milo and his friend Gribble look amazing. And you’re right about John Candy, I couldn’t help but think that Dan Fogler’s Gribble is the part Candy would have played if this film was made in 1990.

MB: Animated movies often entertain children and their parents in different ways and on different levels, but in this movie the pop culture references of the Pixar films or of Shrek are nonexistent. But I must admit I did laugh when Gribble’s mechanical dog threw up nuts and bolts.

Hollywood aliens probe for your funny bone
In Focus by Richard Crouse
METRO CANADA
Published: March 18, 2011

Usually, on-screen E.T.s are presented as either nurturing, evolved beings from another planet, sent here to help mankind, or vicious world domination types, intent on colonizing or destroying Earth. But movies often encounter a third kind of movie alien, the goofy intergalactic visitor.

In this weekend’s Paul, nerd superstars Simon Pegg and Nick Frost play Brit sci-fi geeks on a pilgrimage to some of America’s UFO hot spots. Along the way they help Paul (voice of Seth Rogen), an irreverent alien with a taste for silly gags and Bob Dylan jokes, get back to his home planet. Think of it as E.T. for frat boys and you get the idea.

In the world the movie creates, the idea of a wisecracking alien makes perfect sense, but adding an E.T. doesn’t always fit so well. Take Meatballs Part 2, for instance. The addition of Meathead, a grey, rubber-skinned alien sent to Camp Sasquash to earn an Earth merit badge, hardly improves on the original Bill Murray classic.

The fun -loving aliens of Earth Girls Are Easy are put to better use. The movie’s plot is best summed up by manicurist Valerie (Geena Davis) as she enlists her friend Candy (Julie Brown) to give the aliens a makeover: “A UFO landed in my pool and they captured me but we made friends and I fed them Pop-Tarts and… we've got to cut their hair.”

Once shaved, the former red, blue and yellow-furred wookies look a lot like Jeff Goldblum, Jim Carrey and Damon Wayans and are ready to hit the L.A. clubs in search for love. They may be aliens, Candy says, “but they can still be dates!”

In Phil the Alien, Rob Stefaniuk plays a stranded space-shape-shifter who hides in plain sight on Earth as the singer of a Christian rock band. Best line? “I'm staying with a beaver,” says Phil, “down by the brook.”

One of the most memorable movie aliens is Mathesar, the haute-contre voiced Thermian leader played by Enrico Colantoni in Galaxy Quest. Learning everything he knows about Earth from television transmissions, he turns to the cast of a cancelled sci fi show to help save his planet.

Favourite scene? When one of the actors, Gwen DeMarco (Sigourney Weaver), explains that TV shows are not “historical documents” she says, “Surely, you don't think Gilligan's Island is a…”

“Those poor people,” Mathesar interrupts, moaning in despair.

Cooper proves his leading man chops
Reel Guys by Richard Crouse and Mark Breslin
METRO CANADA
Published: March 18, 2011

SYNOPSIS: Bradley Cooper plays a slacker writer with a crappy apartment, an ex-wife and soon-to-be ex-girlfriend. His life changes when he begins taking a drug that allows him to access the other 80%. Suddenly he can learn languages in hours and can retrieve everything he has ever read, seen or thought about. His intellectual ability is, as the title says, limitless. Also limitless are the people who will do almost anything to lay their hands on the drug.

Richard: ***1/2
Mark: ****

RC: Mark, I enjoyed the heck out of Limitless despite the fact I’m not exactly sure what message the movie is trying to send. Its first act would make Timothy Leary proud—drugs open up the mind, man—then becomes a Nancy Reagan “Just Say No” drama before winding down to an ambiguous ending. I wasn’t expecting Requiem for a Dream, but I would have liked a clearer point of view. You?

MB: Actually, I appreciated its ambiguous point of view especially since the middle section was a bit preachy. I think the movie was illustrating that whoever goes up must come down—usually with a crashing headache. And that we're all addicted to something. I felt the Bradley Cooper character was as addicted to his success and material comforts as to the drug itself.

RC: Certainly he becomes a kind of yuppified Keith Richards, a chemically enhanced knowledge junkie with a taste for the good life, which I thought that was an interesting take for a drug movie. I’m not sure I could have accepted Cooper in a grittier role. I thought he carried the movie—he’s a good leading man, can do comedy and has the chops to do drama.   

MB: I agree, Richard. He's in almost every scene of the movie, and it stands or falls on his abilities. Though I have to give some kudos to the director, Neil Burger, who fills the first half of the movie with appropriate psychedelia. Watching the movie, I sometimes felt like I had taken that drug, or maybe there was just something off in the hot golden topping.

RC: I liked much of the look of the movie, the drug haze scenes are effective and the 18-hour blackout sequence is a kind of a tour de force, complete with Bruce Lee flashbacks, but I thought the attempts to illustrate his newfound intelligence a bit gimmicky. Letters falling from the ceiling while he is furiously writing. Really?  

MB: And I've seen that somewhere before, I just can't remember where. Maybe if I were on the drug, I would. Also, in the Sixties there was a movie called Charly about a slow-witted man who becomes a genius after an operation. But it was the Sixties so he doesn't try to corner the stock market. And if I see one more Russian villain, I'm going to organize a lobby on their behalf. No matter. I really liked this one.

Breathing new life into 'women in prison'
In Focus by Richard Crouse
METRO CANADA
Published: March 23, 2011

Recently a poll found that more than one in five British cinema-goers preferred comedy to any other film style. Action/adventure films placed second, with romantic comedies rounding out the top three. That trio of genres eats up most of the space at the movie theatres, but there are hundreds of other kinds of films.

This weekend, Sucker Punch opens in theatres, a women-in-prison film directed by 300 helmer Zach Snyder, reviving a genre thought to have gone the way of nunsploitation and Pauly Shore movies.

Of all the sub-sub genres, the women-in-prison movie has to be one of the least appreciated... at least in recent years. There was a time when these stories of women in lock up, at the mercy of cruel prison guards, proudly took up screens in drive-ins and second-run houses. With names like Caged Heat and Barbed Wire Dolls, these movies, along with kung fu and blaxploitation flicks, kept many a grindhouse in business.

WIP films have been around since the 1930s, but didn’t become popular until the 1950s when cautionary tales like Agnes Moorehead’s Caged and Ida Lupino’s Women's Prison mixed and matched hardened criminals with sadistic guards.

It wasn’t until Spanish exploitation filmmaker Jess Franco hit upon the misogynistic recipe of mixing babes, bars and bondage, however, that the subgenre was officially born.

His first WIP movie, 99 Women (featuring the voice of the demon child in The Exorcist, Mercedes McCambridge), sparked a revolution in sexploitation films.

One of the early stars to emerge from the WIP heyday was Pam Grier. Starring in The Big Bird Cage and The Big Doll House—“Their bodies were caged, but not their desires. They would do anything for a man. Or to him.”— Grier became, as Quentin Tarantino called her, “the first female action star.”

No WIP exploitation film ever won an Academy Award, but at least one of their filmmakers did. Today, Oscar -winner Jonathan Demme is known as the man behind Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia, but buried deep down on his resume is his big screen debut, Caged Heat. In addition to the obligatory violence and nudity, Demme added a storyline about prisoner abuse through medical experiments.

“Jonathan took that assignment,” remembers producer Roger Corman, “and said: ‘This is gonna be the best one ever made.’ Jonathan took the genre, worked with it, and made something exceptionally good.”

Sucker Punch could learn something from Tarantino
Reel Guys by Richard Crouse and Mark Breslin
METRO CANADA
Published: March 25, 2011 2:00 p.m.

Emily Browning plays Baby Doll, wrongfully imprisoned in a mental institution where a sadistic orderly, Blue Jones (Oscar Isaac), has her scheduled for a lobotomy. As it turns out, this medical facility is also facilitating more than just its patients, so Baby Doll hatches an escape plan involving a mix of fantasy and reality. Aided by four other inmates she has just one week to get away before her scheduled operation.

Ratings:
Richard: *** for visuals, * for everything else = **
Mark: *

Richard Crouse: Mark, the first thing that came to mind after watching Sucker Punch was, “What the heck was that?” The visual sensualist in me loved the look of it, but the rest of me wanted other things. Like a story. Or characters. It made my eyeballs dance, but left the rest of me bored. You?

Mark Breslin: Bored would be an improvement on how I felt. I HATED this thing. It was structured and shot like a video game. Angry Birds has more character development. And the acting? The lead, Emily Browning, had one expression throughout, a doleful countenance that made me think she had a gastrointestinal problem. Can you find anything good to say about this flick, Richard? Besides the “look”?

RC: It’s hard to find much to say about this other than commenting on the look. The soundtrack is interesting and Synder has a way with a camera, just not so much with the story. I also expected more from the action sequences. Unlike Kill Bill, another grrrl power movie with samurai swords, the action scenes here are all basically the same. Tarantino understood the value of the violence and changed it up. Synder doesn’t. 

MB: Snyder is to Tarantino as Salieri is to Mozart ... I will give Jena Malone credit for making me feel something and it was nice seeing Scott Glenn, even though he’s looking more like a carving board every day. But the cruelty of the movie wore me down, and the idea of a mental institution used as a front for a brothel was too ridiculous even as a fantasy within a fantasy. And what’s with Jon Hamm’s cameo at the end? Huh? 

RC: I cannot imagine why Jon Hamm would take this role. It’s one of those parts that the characters talk about a great deal but when they finally show up on screen they only have three or four lines. He could have shot this on his lunch break from Mad Men. I don’t get it. I do get Abbie Cornish however. For one thing she looks like a young Nicole Kidman, and for another she, for me, was the best part of the movie.

MB: The best part of the movie for me was when it ended. By the way, one of the production credits reads “A Cruel and Unusual Production.” ‘Nuff said.

RC: Agreed. High ain’t-it-cool factor, but no heart.

Easter paints the silver screen
In Focus by Richard Crouse
METRO CANADA
Published: March 30, 2011

There are as many different kinds of Easter movies as there are colours on the most psychedelic Ukrainian Easter egg. From kid-friendly romps like Hop, this weekend’s comedy about an errant Easter Bunny, to the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar to all-singing-all-dancing spectaculars like Easter Parade to sword-and-sandal epics like Ben Hur and solemn retellings of the biblical Easter story like The Greatest Story Ever Told.

Then there are horror films like Easter Bunny, Kill Kill and the terrifying Easter Bunny from Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey… so many diverse takes on Easter, but since there’s no way to watch all these movies on Easter weekend, let’s hippity-hop through a list of the bunny’s greatest hits.

Controversial in its time—fundamentalist Bob Jones III denounced it as “blasphemy” without actually watching the film—Jesus of Nazareth, director Franco Zeffirelli’s epic 1977 mini-series, is now considered a classic. Clocking in at a whopping 382 minutes, it’s a reverent look at Jesus’s life from his birth to resurrection starring heavyweights like Laurence Olivier, Anthony Quinn, Anne Bancroft and Christopher Plummer.

From the sacred to the sublime, It's the Easter Beagle, Charlie Brown continues Charles Schultz’s tradition of providing a story for every holiday, both secular and spiritual. The twelfth Peanuts cartoon special sees Linus try to hype up the arrival of the Easter Beagle but only Sally believes him. The rest of the gang is still unsure in light of Linus’s Great Pumpkin Halloween fiasco. This special, now available on DVD, features one of the only times Snoopy ever spoke on screen. He shouts “Hey!” before dancing with bunnies in a fantasy sequence.  

Fred Astaire, the legendary song-and-dance-man was no stranger to holiday entertainment. His Christmas special, Santa Claus Is Comin' to Town, is a Yuletide favorite but he also appeared in no less than three Easter-themed movies and TV shows. Astaire’s movie, Holiday Inn, the 1942 story of a singer who turns his farm house into a dinner theatre on the holidays, is best known for introducing Bing Crosby’s White Christmas, but also produced the tune Easter Parade, which, six years later turned up in the hoofer’s film of the same name.  

Finally, years later he played the narrator in the Rankin/Bass stop-motion animated The Easter Bunny's Coming to Town. Set in Kidville, the most child-friendly place on earth, it is the story of how the Easter Bunny came to be.   

Hop is completely hopeless
Reel Guys by Richard Crouse and Mark Breslin
METRO CANADA
Published: April 01, 2011

Synopsis: Hop begins on Easter Island, home base of the Easter Bunny (voiced by Hugh Laurie) and his son, EB (Russell Brand). On the other side of the planet, Fred O’Hare (James Marsden) is an unemployed SoCal slacker housesitting for his sister’s wealthy boss. Both EB and Fred have one thing in common—daddy issues. When EB and Fred hook up in Hollywood the pair discovers they might be able to help one another out and save Easter in the process.

Ratings:
Richard: *
Mark: *1/2

Richard Crouse: Mark, to me Hop feels more like an hour-and-a-half advertisement for plush stuffed bunnies than it does a movie. EB and his bunny and Easter chick friends are cute, but clearly more time was spent on the marketing angle than the story. What did you think?

Mark Breslin: Richard, let’s face it; we’ve lost the battle when it comes to marketing of characters in kids’ movies. I now just assume that the movie is just a promo for the spending to come. A five-year-old will be transfixed by the eye candy onscreen. The question is whether there’s anything for their parents to enjoy. In movies like Toy Story or Shrek, there’s plenty. But in this one, Richard? What do you think?

RC: The humour and broad acting style is directed at little kids, yet the movie is rated PG, which means that parents can’t just send their kids solo. Grown-ups might get a chuckle out of EB’s jellybean gag — he poops jellybeans and says at one point, “I just jellybeaned all over your dreams” —but the odd cameo from David Hasselhoff — he’s going for the William Shatner self-aware shtick — is as funny as you’d imagine a cameo from The Hoff to be. There’s not much here for anyone over four years old. Harvey this ain’t.

MB: No, but I did enjoy the look of the movie, all primary colours and a few visual gags that popped up just often enough to keep me from losing my mind. The oddest part of the movie was the casting, and not just Hasselhoff. I thought Russell Brand, the comedian du jour, had been so neutered he was wasted in the part (and I don’t mean wasted in the usual Russell Brand way). Couldn’t the part have been done by any Brit?

RC: If this had even a little bit of edge I could see why they chose him, but it seems like he’s only there because Ricky Gervais and Eddie Izzard were too busy or too clever to take the role. I actually had some hope for Hop when I heard Brand was involved because I thought he might bring something interesting to it. Instead it is just average, which is a shame given how kid’s flicks have made strides in recent years away from treating kids like they’re stupid.

MB:­ Of course, to the four-year-old sitting next to me, it was Citizen Kane.

Re-branding Hollywood classics
In Focus by Richard Crouse
METRO CANADA
Published: April 06, 2011 2

It’s a dangerous business trying to recapture movie magic, but Hollywood execs keep trying.

Thirty years ago, Dudley Moore introduced us to Arthur, a lovable but drunken millionaire playboy about to married to a wealthy heiress he did not love. “I race cars, play tennis, and fondle women,” he said, “but I have weekends off, and I am my own boss.”

The movie, Arthur, was a giant hit, coming in fourth in the year’s box office, earning four Oscar nods, winning two and spawning the number one hit Arthur’s Theme (Best That You Can Do). It’s available on DVD and holds up very well, which is why it is a bit baffling that a remake of the same name is hitting theatres this weekend starring Russell Brand.

Remakes, of course, are nothing new. Hollywood has been recycling ideas since the beginning. For example, Cecil B. DeMille remade his own 1915 film The Golden Chance as Forbidden Fruit just six years later. The difference is that back then there was no portable archive of movies available on Blu-ray or streaming video. Take a good story, repackage it and hopefully do well at the box office. Later, in the pre-home video years, remakes were a way to breathe some life into older movies.

But times have changed. Now, via Netflix, On-Demand and Blu-ray, it’s easier and cheaper than ever to seek out and see movies like the original Arthur. So what’s the point of the remake? Well, for one thing, it’s a perfect role for the impish Russell Brand and, for another, it’s always great to see his co-star, Helen Mirren, on screen. And who knows? Maybe it’s better than the original. It wouldn’t be the first time.

With so many remakes — past, present and future — perhaps philosopher Raoul Vaneigem was right when he said, “Our task is not to rediscover nature but to remake it.”

Liking 'Arthur' depends on liking Russell Brand
Reel Guys by Richard Crouse and Mark Breslin
METRO CANADA
Published: April 08, 2011

SYNOPSIS: Russell Brand is Arthur Bach, the ne’re-do-well heir to an enormous fortune. He’s a womanizing playboy, a drunk man-child whose nanny (Helen Mirren) describes as “merely shaped like an adult.” When he embarrasses his mother, she brings down the hammer. Either he straightens up and marries the beautiful but all-business Susan or be disinherited. Trouble is, he’s in love with Naomi (Greta Gerwig) a charismatic Grand Central Station tour guide.

Ratings:
Richard: ***
Mark: **1/2

Richard Crouse: Mark, “Arthur Redux” isn’t an improvement on the original, but it isn’t a complete waste of time, either. I really think your enjoyment of Arthur, the remake of the 30-year-old Dudley Moore comedy, is in direct ratio to your enjoyment of Russell Brand. His brand of Brit-speak verbal diarrhea works in small doses, the trick here is to see whether audiences will sit through two hours of wordplay rivalled only by Charlie Sheen on a crack-fuelled Internet rant.

Mark Breslin: I liked the movie. In fact, I really liked it when I saw it in 1980. It is in no way superior to the original, but Russell Brand does pull it off, although with far less subtlety than Dudley Moore. The lines are good if not great, but I thought everybody else in the film paled in comparison. Even the great Helen Mirren was no John Gielgud, and Greta Gerwig still seems like she’s the best thing in a student film.

RC: Mirren may not equal Gielgud here, but it’s almost worth the price of admission to see her wear a Darth Vader mask. As for Gerwig, I honestly think she’s the best thing in the movie. She’s naturally charismatic and as un-Hollywood an actor as we have in Hollywood films right now. She’s quirky, cool and without her, the movie wouldn’t be nearly as effective. The second half, when it takes a turn for the touching, is better than the “funny” first half and she’s responsible for that.

MB: Interesting. It’s the second, “serious” half of the movie that didn’t work for me. Brand lacks the tragic element that Moore brought, probably because at five-foot-two, Dudley looks vulnerable (and infantile) from the start. And not to attack Ms. Gerwig, but I didn’t get why Arthur would choose her as a romantic interest above all others. She wasn’t all that wild or even all that Bohemian. I thought Luis Guzman was a far better match, although that would have been a very different movie. Nice to see Nick Nolte, although his extended cameo does not qualify as a comeback vehicle.

RC: Funny how we’ve spent very little time discussing the star of the movie. Brand can deliver a joke, unfortunately in the first half of the movie he delivers every line like they are all punch lines. Like the character he’s playing, he’s not as charming as he thinks he is, but he can raise a smile here and there.

Her name is Rio and she dances on the screen
In Focus by Richard Crouse
METRO CANADA
Published: April 14, 2011

Tourists flock to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil’s second largest city, to see the giant statue of Christ the Redeemer, dance the samba and cheer their favorite team at Maracanã Stadium, one of the world's largest football arenas.

The city has also provided the backdrop for many movies, including this weekend’s animated feature Rio, the story of a domesticated macaw (voiced by The Social Network’s Jesse Eisenberg) from small-town Minnesota who follows the bird of his dreams to the carnival city.

Rio has been a go-to location for filmmakers for years. To paraphrase 70s soft rockers Pablo Cruise, “Whoa oh ohh... When my baby’s budget permits, We go to Rio. De Janeiro.” In The Producers, the crooked wannabe embezzlers plan to fly to Rio once they have bilked Broadway out of a million bucks. The city served as the background to Mickey Rourke’s erotic adventures in Wild Orchid and James Bond was famously attacked by the metal-mandibled Jaws on a cable car at the top of Sugarloaf Mountain in Moonraker.

Although shot completely on location at Paramount Studios on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles, Road to Rio, the fifth of the Bob Hope - Bing Crosby “road” pictures, makes good use of stock footage and set decoration to create a suitably exotic setting.

This time out, the guys are vaudevillian stowaways on a Brazilian-bound ocean liner who rescue heiress Dorothy Lamour from an unwanted arranged marriage.

The movie is notable for the music (it contains the last on-screen singing performance by The Andrews Sisters) and Der Bingle’s English lessons to the Portuguese street performers. To help them pass as American he teaches them the hipster phrase, “You're in the groove, Jackson.”

A grittier look at the Brazillian city is offered in City of God (original title: Cidade de Deus), named after one of the city’s most dangerous neighborhoods. Following the stories of two boys—one who becomes a photographer, another who adopts a life of crime—it was shot on location in the violent favela. Director Fernando Meirelles later said if he knew the dangers of filming in the Rio favela in advance he wouldn't have made the film.

Finally, a sunnier look at Rio life comes in Blame it on Rio, a 1984 Michael Caine film Roger Ebert described as having “the mind of a 1940s bongo comedy and the heart of a porno film.”

Rio is good, but it's no Pixar
Reel Guys by Richard Crouse and Mark Breslin
METRO CANADA
Published: April 15, 2011

In Rio, nerd actor du jour Jesse Eisenberg plays, what else, a nerdy birdie—a domesticated macaw—from small-town Minnesota named Blu. He’s never learned to fly, but enjoys a happy and healthy life with his owner and BFF Linda (Leslie Mann). When they discover the last remaining female blue macaw (voice of Anne Hathaway) in the world lives in Rio de Janeiro, they make the journey to find her, but their trip doesn’t go as planned.

Ratings:
Richard: ***
Mark: ***

Richard: Mark, I have to get the 800-pound elephant—or in this case, the big blue bird—out of the way right away. Let me say that Rio has an OK story and fine animation but it really lacks the depth of a Pixar film. Maybe I’m spoiled, but when I watch animated movies, whether they are Dreamworks, or, like this one, from Fox, I can’t help but think, "What would the wizards at Pixar have done with this story?"  

MB: Richard, I agree. Pixar is the gold standard of animated films, but sometimes, you just have to go for the bronze. Or as Stephen Stills once sang, "If you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with." I found there were a lot of things to enjoy about the movie, even if it wasn't Pixar perfect. Let's start with the look and setting: ravishing colour palette and exotic location.

RC: Don`t get me wrong, Rio is perfectly serviceable. It`s colourful and filled with nice little touches like a little bird who warms himself against a traffic light, flitting back-and-forth between the red and green lights,  in snowy Minnesota, but even with all the good stuff it isn`t particularly memorable. It`ll keep the little ones occupied in the theatre—although very little kids may find some of the action a bit too intense—and has some good messages, but there`s no real sticky content here.

MB: Yes, the story is weak, and 15 minutes too long.  But I found the movie came alive during the three musical numbers, and if there only had been more, a full-blown musical, the movie might have been a near classic. But there were nice moments of visual wit, and I appreciated Jesse Eisenberg's attempts at Woody Allen line readings. Nigel, the avian villain, is good, as is Tracy Morgan's drooly bulldog. Could have used more of him.

RC: I agree. The movie is just off by 20 per cent. I wasn’t much taken with the voice work from the leads but will.i.am, Jamie Foxx, Morgan and particularly Jemaine Clement are great. When their characters are on screen the movie comes alive, when they’re not, it doesn’t really take flight.

MB: And although it is a sanitized version of Rio de Janeiro presented in the film, I was pleased to see some references to street urchins, favelas, pickpockets and bad Brazilian steakhouses as part of the movie.

When the movies play the ringmaster
In Focus by Richard Crouse
METRO CANADA
Published: April 20, 2011

The circus is a magical blend of drama, comedy, music and wonderful things you can’t see at home, unless, of course, you live next door to Bozo the Clown.

And that’s why filmmakers look to the Big Top for inspiration. It’s a naturally cinematic place with themes as flexible as sideshow contortionists who can touch their toes with the top of their heads. For instance, Charlie Chaplin mixed comedy and romance in his classic film The Circus, while Trapeze with Burt Lancaster is a three-ring tragedy and Ten Weeks with a Circus is strictly for kids.

This weekend, Water for Elephants, an historical drama starring Robert Pattinson and Reese Witherspoon, takes us backstage at the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth.

The most famous circus movie is probably The Greatest Show on Earth, Cecil B. DeMille’s story of love, crime and clowns under the big top. Today the film—which was named one of the 100 Most Amusingly Bad Movies Ever Made by the Golden Raspberry folks—is most notable for making Charlton Heston a star and as the first movie Steven Spielberg ever saw.

If DeMille’s movie is the most famous circus movie, then Freaks is certainly the most notorious. Set in the world of a funfair sideshow, it features a cast primarily made up of actual carnival performers—like Elizabeth Green the Stork Woman and Prince Randian a.k.a. the Human Torso—to tell the story of a beautiful trapeze artist who agrees to marry a deformed sideshow performer for his money. As a young man, director Tod Browning (who also helmed Dracula) had been a member of a travelling circus and that experience brought such a horrifying realism to the story that one woman threatened to sue MGM, claiming the film had caused her to suffer a miscarriage.

And speaking of sideshow attractions, these days Benicio Del Toro is known as a serious actor, an Academy Award winner who is sometimes jokingly been referred to as the “Spanish Brad Pitt.” That’s a long way from his first role, human oddity Duke the Dog-Faced Boy in Big Top Pee-wee. Despite earning reviews like, “If there's a lower form of comedy than circus humor I've yet to encounter it,” star Paul Reubens once said that “Big Top Pee-wee is "at least as good as Police Academy.”

Water for Elephants feels old fashioned, but works
Reel Guys by Richard Crouse and Mark Breslin
METRO CANADA
Published: April 21, 2011

SYNOPSIS: Set during the Great Depression, the story begins with veterinary student Jacob Jankowski (Twilight’s Robert Pattinson) finding a job as caretaker to the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth menagerie. On the job he meets Marlena, (Reese Witherspoon) a beautiful equestrian star married to August (Inglourious Basterds’ Christoph Waltz), an abusive animal trainer. He falls in love with her while tending to Rosie, the faltering circus’ 10,000 pound star attraction.

RC: Mark, Water for Elephants is told from the point of view of an older man. He's looking back at the most important years of his life, but at first I wondered why they bothered with this device. Other than giving us a chance to see Hal Holbrook, which is always welcome, it didn't seem to ad much to the story. Then I realized that the story has a warm fuzzy kind of glow that is the result of being told from the point of view of memory and not reality. Does that make sense to you?

MB:Well, it worked for The Notebook, so why not? And it allows the film to sneak in a happy ending, although if even Robert Pattinson  winds up looking like Hal Holbrook it's a reminder that time is indeed cruel. But I enjoyed the movie very much. You, Richard?

RC: I did. It feels a bit old fashioned, which I guess, fits the period of the film. I liked the nostalgic glow. I also liked the performances. Reese Witherspoon looks like she was born to sit atop an elephant, R. Patz gets more action here than in all the Twilight movies combined and Christoph Waltz once again shows he was a way with cruel and unusual characters.

MB: I especially liked the first third of the movie with its exploration of the circus hierarchy and its magical evocation of time and place. But I still think Robert Pattinson feels like a manufactured star even though he acquits himself well in the film. Reese really can top a pachyderm, and if Waltz plays one more villain I'm going to cast him in a Jennifer Aniston rom-com at gunpoint.

RC: The only thing missing from Waltz’s bad guy performance here is his SS uniform from Inglourious Basterds. He really is becoming Hollywood’s guy we love to hate, and he’s good at being bad, but I’d like to see if he can do other things as well. I wouldn’t wish an Aniston rom-com on anyone, but his typecasting is getting old. Pattinson on the other hand proved to me that he can play something other than a lovesick vampire, which, the success of Twilight aside, is kind of limiting career wise.

MB: Only one quibble: early in the picture, we're told to expect "the worst disaster in circus history." I expected something of Biblical proportion, but Cecil B. DeMille clearly did not direct this one.

STAR RATINGS:
Richard: 3 ½ stars
Mark: 4 stars

Royal weddings on the silver screen
In Focus by Richard Crouse
METRO CANADA
Published: April 27, 2011

Perhaps you’ve heard there’s a wedding on Friday. But no, your invitation isn’t lost in the mail or caught in a spam folder, you’re just not on the list. When Prince William and Kate Middleton walk down Westminster Abbey’s storied aisle (where William’s uncle Prince Andrew married Sarah Ferguson in 1986) to exchange “I do’s” you’ll be at home in your pyjamas watching it on TV with a cup of tea in your hand and a crumpet at your side. The upside? You don’t have to get them a wedding gift.       

To prep for the pomp and circumstance I’ve selected a number of royal wedding movies to get you primed for the big day.

The name Marie Antoinette is synonymous with surplus and when little Ms. “Let Them Eat Cake” wed the Dauphin of France no expense was spared. Married by proxy a month before, she arrived at the site of the ceremonial wedding—at the Palace of Versailles no less—in a procession that included 48 carriages. See a recreation of the exercise in excess in Marie Antoinette, Sophia Coppola’s 2006 film. It may not get the details 100 per cent right, but if you want accuracy, watch the History Channel.

Also torn from the history books is The Duchess, the story of the 17-year-old Georgiana Cavendish (Keira Knightley), great-great-great-great-grandaunt of Diana, Princess of Wales, who weds the much older Duke of Devonshire (Ralph Fiennes).

Speaking of relatives, the life, love and marriage of Queen Victoria, (Prince William is her fourth great-grandson), are detailed in The Young Victoria starring Emily Blunt. Despite being shot by soft candlelight for a glowing historical feel, The Young Victoria isn’t Masterpiece Theatre. Accents and petticoats aside, this is a modern movie, with a modern sensibility, that mixes history, politics, romance, castle etiquette and backroom dealing into one frilly, appealing package.

In the realm of the unreal are two final reel royal weddings. Before Anne Hathaway started taking her clothes off in every movie, she was the wholesome star of The Princess Diaries. In PD2: Royal Engagement, her character, Princess Mia, must get married in order to become queen.

The most recent royal wedding to hit screens happens in Your Highness, the medieval stoner comedy starring Natalie Portman and James Franco. Prince Fabious Franco walks Belladonna (Zooey Deschanel) down the aisle but the wedding is interrupted by an evil sorcerer.

Let’s hope William and Kate have better luck.

Here's another word for 'Prom': Ugh
Reel Guys by Richard Crouse and Mark Breslin
METRO CANADA
Published: April 29, 2011

Nova Prescott (Aimee Teegarden) is an overachieving senior and head of the prom committee. After spending weeks working on decorations for the big night a mysterious fire reduces her hard work to ash. Will the prom go on? Will school rebel Jesse Richter (Johnny Depp look-a-like Thomas McDonell) actually turn out to be a good guy? Will anyone care by the time the credits roll? Over the course of the extra long running time, hearts are broken and mended, tears are spilled, rugs are cut and the true meaning of prom is revealed.

Star Ratings:
Richard: Zero stars
Mark: *

Richard Crouse: Mark, first of thanks for the corsage. It was perfect for the Prom screening, and how did you know aqua carnations are my favorite? As for the movie itself, I know it is meant for teens and we're somewhat older than the target audience, but really, I think there is a case to be made to bring the filmmakers up on charges of elder abuse for making us sit through this tedious exercise in youth entertainment. What did you think?

Mark Breslin: Richard, I would have hated this movie even when I was a teen. My objection is not that it was for teenagers, but that it was made for stupid and uncritical teenagers. There have been lots of smart, sly high school movies: Heathers, Mean Girls, Jawbreaker, Easy A. This is not one of them. Except for the incredible plot twist revealed halfway through the picture, there would be no reason to see it.

RC: Incredible plot twist? I just saw it and have no idea what you mean. This is as by the book as it gets. Anyone who doesn't know how this is going to end by the time the opening credits have played has never seen a movie before. Predictable in the extreme, even the stuff this kind of movie usually gets right, like the comic relief, doesn't bring any relief.

MB: The plot twist is this: One of the girls gets accepted to Parsons School of Design for the following semester, but the letter is clearly dated 2015. That means the entire movie is taking place four years into the future, during which time a group of orthodontists from outer space colonize a high school and replace the students with insipid, dweeby versions of themselves, giving them all perfect teeth in the process. Diabolical! Then they turn the males into Eighties teen star clones of Ralph Macchio, Keanu Reeves, John Cusack, etc. Diabolical, I say!

RC: Ha! the only truly diabolical thing about this movie is the script, which makes the old Afternoon Specials seem like Chekov. The characters all seem borrowed from The Breakfast Club, only without the special touch that John Hughes brought to his movies. The Johnny Depp lookalike almost brings the bad boys thing to life, but the rest of them are straight outta central casting.

MB: And I've never seen a bad boy roll over so fast. I don't think a principal can order a student to do extracurricular work. That bad boy shoulda called the ACLU!

Definitely famous and almost award-worthy
In Focus by Richard Crouse
METRO CANADA
Published: May 04, 2011

On a recent episode of 30 Rock, Tracy Jordan (Tracy Morgan) joked that he made a North Korean propaganda film directed by Kim Jong-Il rather than appear in a Kate Hudson film. It was a funny joke on a show known for its irreverent take on celebrities, but like all good jokes there’s a hint of truth to it.

Of course Hudson is still a popular actress; capable of headlining any Hollywood rom-com, but this is more a question of what might have been.

How did an Oscar nominated actress who once said, “I’m not a big fan of romantic comedies,” end up with a CV littered with toxic titles like Fool’s Gold, My Best Friend’s Girl and Bride Wars?

Sure, she has a sunny smile and girl-next-door appeal, but anyone who saw her sweet and wonderful turn as Penny Lane in Almost Famous rues the day she decided to aim for the MTV Best Kiss Awards rather than Academy Awards. Surely she can do more than stand on a beach while a shirtless Matthew McConaughey runs into her open arms.

It’s not all bad news in Kate’s career, however. This weekend she is firmly rooted in rom-com land with Something Borrowed, the kind of fluffy confection she specializes in, but lately there have been signs that she’s making some effort to stretch her comfort zone.

Cinema Italiano, her exuberantly fluffy all-singing-all-dancing tribute to 1960’s pop music and style, was one of the best things about Nine, the musical version of Federico Fellini’s classic 8 ½, and The Killer Inside Me, a violent, hardboiled crime story are both steps in the right direction, but they’re baby steps.  

I want to be a Kate Hudson fan. I really do. But I need convincing that she wants me to be a fan and taking the easy route isn’t going to do that. Even her old co-star Matthew McConaughey has smartened up and realized that rom-coms are a faulty foundation to build a career on. His last film, the drama The Lincoln Lawyer, earned him the best reviews and most notice of his recent career.

I’d like to see Kate stretch in that way. Watch Almost Famous again and see the heartbreaking pathos she brings to every frame of that movie.

That’s the stuff careers and legends are built on and she has the talent and the know-how to give us more of that.

Thor is the god of fun at the movies this weekend
Reel Guys by Richard Crouse and Mark Breslin
METRO CANADA
Published: May 06, 2011

SYNOPSIS: Based on the Marvel comic book, the action in “Thor” really begins with our hero about to be named king by his father (Anthony Hopkins, classing up the joint). Seconds before daddy says the words, “You are king,” Frost Giants from an enemy realm interrupt the ceremony. Furious that his big day has been marred Thor (Chris Hemsworth) disobeys his father and skips realms to confront the invaders. His punishment for his reckless, arrogant behaviour is banishment to Earth and the arms of meteorologist Jane Foster (Natalie Portman).  

Star Ratings
Richard: ***
Mark: ***

Richard: Mark, its hammer time! Thor, the ball peen superhero is big, loud cheesy fun. It feels a bit like an amuse bouche to the all-superhero-all-the-time Avengers movie coming next year, but as an origin movie it gets the job done. Unlike its star, the incredibly buff Chris Hemsworth, the movie is a bit soft in the middle. It starts off well, slows to a crawl midway, but as soon as Thor Gets His Groove back... er... Gets His Hammer Back the movie gets back on track. What did you think?

Mark: Well, it did feel long to me. In fact, my ath ith thtill a bit thor. But I liked the way it moved back and forth between the worlds of Earth and Thor's home planet. It almost felt like two different movies were going on, but just almost. At first I couldn't believe that Kenneth Branagh would direct a comic book movie, but the film does have a Shakespearean feel at times. What say you, Richard?

RC: It’s a greatest hits of Willy's themes—love, deception, death and daddy issues and Anthony Hopkins classes up the joint a little bit, although the way he chews the scenery it's like he hasn't eaten in a month, but I wish it didn't sag in the middle. The Natalie Portman love story is the weakest thing about the movie.

MB: And Portman is the weakest link in the film, period. But what about the lead, Chris Hemsworth? I thought he was very good in a ludicrous role, and the twinkle in his eye and swagger in his step really made the part bearable, as did his spectacular pecs.

RC: Couldn't agree more about Portman. She's miscast. Kat Dennings, in a throwaway role that she turns into a charismatic supporting part, would have been a better and more interesting lead. As for Hemsworth, initially I didn't know if he was going to cut it with his oh-so-serious line delivery, but later, his realization that as “the Mighty Thor" has lost some of his powers is fun. The movie is actually a lot funnier than I thought it would be.

MB: Intentionally funny, I might add, which is unusual for this kind of movie. I liked the visuals on Planet Whatever, they were rich and deep, which is more than I can say for the now-mandatory 3D, which I found tepid. But not the noise level! Talk about Hammer time! I'm just getting my hearing back now.

Priests dominate big screen
In Focus by Richard Crouse
METRO CANADA
Published: May 11, 2011

What role do Paul Bettany, Robert de Niro, Rowan Atkinson and Max von Sydow share? Mr. Jennifer Connelly, the Oscar winner, Mr. Bean and the legendary Swedish superstar all have one kind of part in common. They have all played priests on the big screen.

In this weekend’s post-apocalyptic action horror film Priest Bettany plays the title character, a warrior pastor hunting the vampires who kidnapped his niece. Based on Min-Woo Hyung's graphic novels the movie also features Christopher Plummer as the Monsignor, described by the legendary Canadian actor as “a horrible priest gone wrong—a lovely, stylish villain.”

In the Barry Levinson film Sleepers De Niro was Father Bobby, a Hell’s Kitchen priest who lies in court to prevent four of his parishioners from going to jail for killing a sadistic prison guard. “Most priests like to preach from the pulpit,” says one character. “Father Bobby liked to talk during the bump and shove of a pick-up game.”

Atkinson played Father Gerald, a new vicar performing his first marriage ceremony in Four Weddings and a Funeral. The tongue-tied priest has some of the film’s funniest lines, including, “In the name of the father, the son and the holy goat. Er... ghost.” 

Probably the most famous movie celebrant is Father Lankester Merrin, as portrayed by Max von Sydow in The Exorcist. Von Sydow is one of the few actors to have played both God (in The Greatest Story Ever Told) and the Devil (in Needful Things) but it is as Merrin that he is best remembered (unless you are a Great White North hoser who worships his role as Brewmeister Smith in Bob and Doug MacKenzie’s Strange Brew). The statuesque Swedish actor played Merrin twice—he’s seen in flashbacks in Exorcist II: The Heretic—and Stellan Skarsgård played him in two prequels but it is the first movie and the iconic line “The Power of Christ compels you!” that is most memorable.

Many other actors have played clerics. Carl Maldan was Father Barry in the Best Picture winner On the Waterfront, George Carlin was Cardinal Ignatius Glick, the mastermind of Dogma’s ‘Catholicism Wow!’ campaign but the actor most associated with playing priests is Pat O’Brien. He became an actor only after deciding against entering seminary and his devotion to playing priestly characters was so well known it even inspired the name of band, the blues-rockers Pat O'Brien and the Priests of Love.

Bridesmaids take the cake
Reel Guys by Richard Crouse and Mark Breslin
Published: May 13, 2011

SYNOPSIS: Annie’s (Kristen Wiig) life is in tatters. Her business is a victim of a downturned economy and her boyfriend (Jon Hamm) calls her his “number three.” When BFF Lillian (Maya Rudolph) asks Annie to be her maid of honour she should be thrilled but is overwhelmed by the job and her pushy fellow bridesmaids (Rose Byrne, Melissa McCarthy, Wendi McLendon-Covey and Ellie Kemper) or as Lillian calls them, the “stone cold pack of weirdoes.”

Star rating

Richard: ****
Mark: ****

Richard Crouse: Mark, the big mistake people will make about Bridesmaids is thinking that it is a chick flick or a female version of The Hangover. In fact, I think it takes the best elements of those two and cleverly mixes them into one very funny but still very heartfelt movie that should have been called Bridesmaid on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. Do you agree with me that this is the funniest female comedy that Tina Fey didn’t write?

Mark Breslin: I’ve been raving for years that Kristin Wiig is the Carol Burnett of our times: the greatest female sketch comic working today. Now, with this movie, she surpasses even that. I was worried that the movie would just substitute girl gross-outs for boy gross-outs, but there’s a depth here that the trailer doesn’t hint at. The humour is based on some pretty dark topics: fear of failure, loneliness, body image issues, so bravo to Wiig and her cast for going there. But most importantly, Wiig has wrested the wedding comedy from the hands of Kate Hudson.

RC: Hallelujah! Wiig is the best thing to happen to SNL in years but her big screen output has been somewhat underwhelming. Her movies like MacGruber always felt to me like she was acting in a long form sketch. She’s always funny, but I never felt like there was a real depth of character there until now. Her work as the neurotic but mostly well meaning Annie is a breakthrough, proving that being funny and having feelings are not mutually exclusive.

MB: Well put, Richard. But before we turn off any potential moviegoer thinking they’re about to watch a Sundance comedy, let’s remember that there are two hysterical, verrrrry broad set pieces in the middle of the movie that will satisfy anyone – male or female  looking for belly laughs. The only thing in the movie that didn’t work for me were the British roommates, which felt forced, unlike her romance with the patrolman, which felt real and blithe. He’s a standout in a large cast. Anybody in it catch your eye?

RC: Absolutely. Chris O’Dowd as the lovelorn cop brings a huge amount of charm to the movie and Rose Byrne, who I’m used to seeing in dramas, is very funny.

MB: Let’s not forget Melissa McCarthy who gets huge laughs, even if some of them are on the cheap side. And Jill Clayburgh in her last role. R.I.P.

Depp follows a long line of Buccaneers
In Focus by Richard Crouse
METRO CANADA
Published: May 17, 2011

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides co-star Ian McShane suggests that Johnny Depp is “paid more than the national debt of most countries” to play the tipsy freebooter Captain Jack Sparrow. Depp may be the highest paid movie pirate to ever sail the seven seas, but he’s not the only celluloid sea dog.

Movie pirates were popular on the silent screen —they swashbuckled as early as 1908’s Treasure Island — but it wasn’t until Errol Flynn played the title role in 1935’s Captain Blood that pirates became screen staples.

“No one can beat Erroll Flynn,” says Under The Black Flag: The Romance & Reality Of Life Among The Pirates author David Cordingley. “He has the edge over all the other movie pirates.” Coming close is Robert Newton as Long John Silver in Treasure Island.
One of the best live action Disney films of the 1950s, it is the movie that originated the Cornish accent that has become the accepted pirate speak in dozens of movies to follow. For a sample check out the voice of The Simpsons’ Captain McAllister. It’s based on Newton’s pirate portrayal.

Less conventional is Walter Matthau’s take on Captain Thomas Bartholomew Red in Roman Polanski’s Pirates. The planned followup to the director’s massive hit Chinatown (it actually took 12 years to make it to the screen) was to have starred Jack Nicholson but, like the buccaneer he might have portrayed in the movie, the star was money hungry. According to the director, when he asked Nicholson exactly how much he wanted, the actor simply said, “I want more.” His replacement, Matthau, redefines grizzly in his depiction of Captain Red, but the film didn’t meet with good reviews.

“There hasn’t been a pirate movie in a long time,” wrote Roger Ebert, “and after Roman Polanski’s Pirates, there may not be another one for a very long time.”
What look at movie pirates would be complete without a mention of singing and dancing sea dogs? There are lots of pirate musicals but one of the best, and most overlooked, is The Pirate starring Judy Garland and Gene Kelly.

With direction by Vincente Minnelli (father of Liza) and songs by Cole Porter, the story of a young girl in love with a man pretending to be a pirate earned an Oscar nomination for Original Music Score, but lost out to another Judy Garland musical, Easter Parade.

It’s time to jump the pirate ship
Richard Crouse and Mark Breslin debate Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides Mermaids are great, but not much else to write home about
Reel Guys by Richard Crouse and Mark Breslin
METRO CANADA
Published: May 20, 2011

SYNOPSIS: At the behest of King George, Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush), a one-time pirate now turned privateer, is searching for the fabled Fountain of Youth. His job is to claim it for England before the Spanish armada gets there. Meanwhile, Captain Jack Sparrow (Depp) is shanghaied to work on board a ship run by the evil Blackbeard (Ian McShane) and Jack’s old flame Angelica (Penelope Cruz). They’re after the fountain too, but first must fight off manhungry mermaids.

Ratings:
Richard: * 1/2
Mark: **
Richard Crouse: Mark, my main question after watching the new Pirates movie is, If this was the first one of the series would we have had a two, three and four? I don’t think so. It’s a big splashy epic, but lacks the fun and Johnny’s joie de vivre of the original. What say you, matey?

Mark Breslin: Richard, I wasn’t even a fan of the original. And no franchise should exceed a trilogy unless the words “godfather” or “cheerleaders” are in the title. An appreciation of this movie is contingent upon how you feel about Johnny Depp and how much swordplay you can handle. I adore Depp’s brilliant characterization in the series, but really, the tricks are starting to show their age. And I didn’t like swashbuckling even when Douglas Fairbanks did it in 1932. Still, I thought this edition of Pirates was the best since the original, whatever that means.

RC: I don’t think this one has the spark of the others. It’s not as funny, Depp seems like he’s gone back to the Captain Jack treasure chest one too many times and the action scenes, despite the 3-D, don’t fly off the screen the way they have in the past. I liked the mermaids and think their attack sequence is the most exciting thing in the movie, but I may be wrong simply because the movie is so dark I may have missed something.

MB: Oh, those mermaids! Who knew they spoke in a Scandinavian accent? Yes, they are the most exciting thing in the movie, although I did enjoy Ian MacShane’s villainy. But despite the fountain of youth plot device, these Pirates are getting old. And you’re right about how dark the film is: I was straining to make out which pirate was which. Quick clue: Depp is the Pirate Who’s Had A Bit Of Work Done.

RC: Ha! Perhaps playing the same character four times in eight years is too much for Depp, or perhaps the limitations of Captain Jack are becoming apparent but he’s not as entertaining as before. Not that director Rob Marshall helps him. The action sequences are as well choreographed as you might expect from the man who made Chicago and Nine, but they are also as exciting as you would expect from a man who specializes in making musicals.

MB: I see what you’re getting at. For the next instalment, make it a musical complete with a chorus line of mermaids!

Drunks flourish on the silver screen
METRO CANADA
In Focus by Richard Crouse
Published: May 25, 2011

Hollywood loves a drunk. Not the self destructive drink-themselves-to-death kind, although Nicholas Cage won an Oscar for playing one of those in Leaving Las Vegas, but the playfully befuddled drinker whose behavior provides the set up for some intoxicating comedy. W.C. Fields, who once said, “I drink therefore I am,” made a career of playing silly souses and this weekend Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms and Zach Galifianakis are under the influence again in The Hangover Part II.  

From John Belushi as Animal House’s boozy beast Blutarsky, who downs an entire bottle of Jack Daniels in one megagulp to Karen Allen, who drinks her way out of a sticky situation in Raiders of the Lost Ark, the movie’s best boozers have been a varied group.

There’s the happy drunk, a smashed stereotype best personified by Dudley Moore in Arthur. Rarely sober, the character stumbles through life with the aid of his loyal butler and bottles of champagne. When his fiancée Susan (Jill Eikenberry) tells him that “a real woman could stop you from drinking,” he replies, “It'd have to be a real BIG woman.”

If Moore was most loveable, then Billy Bob Thornton’s Bad Santa con man in is the least likeable. As a mall Santa who only takes the job to rob the place on Christmas Eve, he drinks, destroys a holiday display and scars an entire crowd of children. Drunk movie moments abound although the sight of a wobbly Santa Claus in a back alley swigging from a flask is the most indelible. Billy Bob Thornton says he was genuinely loaded during the filming.

Jeff Bridges has played a variety of drunks in his day, most recently in True Grit and Crazy Hearty, but his best known drinker is Jeffrey “The Dude” Lebowski who singlehandedly re-popularized the White Russian. As laid-back party monster he drinks nine White Russians during the course of the movie.

Of course Hollywood occasionally uncorks a serious look at drinkers. Ray Milland showed the destructive side of boozing in The Lost Weekend, ditto Barfly’s Mickey Rourke but few have brought as much boozy beauty to a role than Elizabeth Taylor as the cantankerous Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.

And finally, not all drunks are as dysfunctional as Martha. In Tombstone Val Kilmer’s Doc Holliday could still shoot even though he was seeing double. His technique? Use two guns, “one for each of you.”

Highlights of the summer movie season
Reel Guys by Richard Crouse and Mark Breslin
METRO CANADA
Published: May 20, 2011

THIS WEEK: The biggest film of last summer was Toy Story 3. What will hit the top of the charts this year? The Reel Guys have a look into their cinematic crystal ball and pick some favourites.
 
Richard Crouse: Mark, it’s the season of crash, boom, bang. Movies with the number two, three and four in their titles, and superheroes look likely to rule the summer, and as much as I enjoy a good popcorn movie, the prospect of being bludgeoned by Michael Bay for the next few months isn’t the most appealing thought I’ve had today. 
  
Mark Breslin: Only our editor could force me to see a Michael Bay movie. I am looking forward to the next X-Men installment. It’s a franchise that keeps getting better, and this prequel, which takes place in the ’60s, seems to fuse real events (the Cuban Missile Crisis) with the sci-fi. Could be a potent combo. Richard, what are you looking forward to?
 
RC: The best summer movie trailer I’ve seen so far is for Cowboys and Aliens. I know it will be a loud ‘n’ proud summer flick, but I haven’t ever seen a sci-fi western since Westworld, and anything Daniel Craig does these days is worth laying eyes on. If director Jon Favreau makes this half as much fun as he did the first Iron Man movie, it’ll be a treat. Also, I love the name. So B-movie drive-in. 
 
MB: Yes, the trailer looks like a lot of fun. Of course I’m a sucker for good sci- fi. Which brings me to my anticipation for Super 8, J.J. Abrams’ take on early Spielberg flicks like ET and Close Encounters; and what will surely be the best movie of the summer, Rise of the Planet of the Apes.
 
RC: Super 8 looks good to me as well. It looks like Stand By Me with aliens, but since J.J. Abrams keeps his plots under wraps I don’t know for sure. Love that. I’m also looking forward to the ape movie. I grew up on the originals, and even had the Aurora model kits when I was a kid. But on a more serious note, I really want to see the documentary Project Nim, a kind of real life Planet of the Apes about a chimpanzee raised by a New York City family in the 1970s. Anything other than the blockbusters that you’re looking forward to?
 
MB: Larry Crowne, the Tom Hanks/Julia Roberts vehicle about romance in the downward socially mobile set, looks intriguing, and Bad Teacher, the deliciously amoral Cameron Diaz comedy, appeals to me, but only if she’s really, really bad.

The precociousness of prequels
METRO CANADA
In Focus by Richard Crouse
Published: June 1, 2011

The official definition of prequel is: a work that supplements a previously completed one, and has an earlier time setting. The unofficial meaning reads like this: prequels, a way to prolong a failing movie franchise's life.

On McSweenys.net recently Sarah Garb suggested titles for some lesser known Hollywood prequels. My favorites? Four Bachelorette Parties and a Friend in the Hospital, Borderline-Inappropriate Dancing and There Are Plenty of Mohicans. Of course those movies don’t exist but you get the idea.

OK, I’m being cynical. Not all prequels are money grabs. The Godfather 2 is one of the greatest movies, prequel, sequel or otherwise, ever made and my fingers are crossed for this weekend’s X-Men: First Class, set in 1963 when Charles Xavier starts up a school for humans with superhuman abilities.

Hopefully the new cast, featuring white hot Oscar nominee Jennifer Lawrence and Brit favorite James McAvoy will mutate the movie into something a little more interesting than the dull-as-its-star’s-retracting-bone-claws-after-a-manicure X-Men: Origins: Wolverine.

Of course prequels are nothing new. The 1949 drama Another Part of the Forest supplied the backstory to the 1939 hit The Little Foxes and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly was a prequel to A Fistful of Dollars.

More recently George Lucas chose to make Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom a prequel to Raiders of the Lost Ark—Raiders is set in South America, 1936, while Temple takes place in Shanghai, 1935—as he did not want to use Nazis as villains once again.

The Silence of the Lambs, the story of creepy cannibal Hannibal Lecter, inspired not one, but two prequels and a sequel. Prequel-wise it had its ups-and-downs.

First the good. Red Dragon featured an all star cast, including Edward Norton, Ralph Fiennes, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Harvey Keitel and, of course, Anthony Hopkins who helps law enforcement track down a mysterious serial killer called The Tooth Fairy.

Five years later they took one more kick at the cannibal can with Hannibal, Lecter’s origin story. Hopkins was lucky enough not to be included. Rhys Ifans and Gong Li weren’t.

Finally, there’s The Hobbit, a two-part film adaptation of J. R. R. Tolkien’s 1937 novel and prequel to The Lord of the Rings trilogy, which has internet fanboys all abuzz. One thing is certain, with Peter Jackson at the helm it has to be better than Dumb and Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd. Right?

X-Men is first class entertainment
Reel Guys by Richard Crouse and Mark Breslin
METRO CANADA
Published: June 03, 2011

SYNOPSIS: From concentration camps in Poland to a mansion in Westchester, N.Y., X-Men: First Class details the evolution of the mutant band of X-Men (and Women). We learn how the two most powerful mutants, Eric Lehnsherr/Magneto (Michael Fassbender) and Professor Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) get along long enough to put together a team of mutants, but soon find themselves on opposite sides in a game of free-to-be-you-and-me.

Ratings
Richard: ****
Mark: ****

Richard Crouse: Mark, X-Men: The Younguns has its share of things that go boom but it doesn’t follow the summer blockbuster format. There aren’t action sequences every 10 minutes, the characters actually talk to one another and there’s even subtitles! What a relief. After the heavy metal bombast of Thor and the like, X-Men is more like a Radiohead disc — brainy but still fun. What’s your take?

Mark Breslin: I’ve always thought the X-Men franchise was the brainiest of the comic book movies. But this one exceeds all expectations. Setting it in 1962 and weaving real-world events — like the Cuban Missile Crisis — into the plot was a stroke of brilliance. Although … the setting may be ’62 but the hemlines are definitely ’67!
 
RC: The setting may be ’62 and the hemlines ’67, but the themes are definitely 2011. One quote in particular, “Security is more important than liberty,” sounds scarily up-to-date. Add to that some groovy space age design, and Kevin Bacon as the best bad guy of the summer so far, and you have a great example of how big blockbuster entertainment can entertain the eye (thank you January Jones and Jennifer Lawrence) and the mind.

MB: January Jones looks great in Barbarella drag, but I still maintain she can’t act. But the rest of the cast sure can. James McAvoy brings great humanity — and a great collection of tweed jackets — to his role as a young Professor X. Michael Fassbender seethes as the Holocaust-haunted Magneto. But a clever cameo by a major star beats them all with one succinct and unprintable line. The rest of the film is talky, but it’s mostly good dialogue, except for the constant reminders that “We’re all outsiders, blah-blah-blah.”
 
RC: It is a bit talkier than you might expect from a big budget comic book movie, but at least they’re saying something. It isn’t just chatter. I think the reason this movie works so well is that it has the best of both worlds: good blow-’em-up, great villains, cool characters and a script that respects all of the above. If they wanted to make it less chatty, I suppose they could cut some of January Jones’s lines. One thing is for sure, acting is not her superpower.
 
MB: I also liked some of the director’s ’60s touches, like the split screen effects that I haven’t seen since The Thomas Crowne Affair — the first one.

Books for little readers become big screen fodder
In Focus by Richard Crouse
METRO CANADA
Published: June 08, 2011

According to Wikipedia, books written specifically for children have existed since the 17th century.

Some of those books and stories have endured -- Charles Perrault’s Little Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella. Some have not -- remember the 1658 book, Orbis Pictus in Bohemia? However, stories for kids remain among the top sellers at bookstores and on line.    

Hollywood has been paying attention. As far back as 1910, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz graced the silent screen and this summer, 101 years later, the parade of movies adapted from children’s books shows no sign of slowing.

Next week Jim Carrey brings the Richard and Florence Atwater book Mr. Popper’s Penguins to life, and this weekend Heather Graham stars in an adaptation of Megan McDonald’s Judy Moody and the Not Bummer Summer.

In the world of kid lit, the name Dr. Seuss looms larger than most. His books are classics. Unfortunately, the movies made from his work tend not to be.

Although Theodor Geisel (the good doctor’s real name) had great success on the small screen with animated specials like How the Grinch Stole Christmas, he was reluctant to allow his creations to be turned into films.

Two uneven adaptations -- Ron Howard’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas and Mike Myers as The Cat in the Hat -- so annoyed the writer’s widow, Audrey, that she vowed to never again allow live-action versions of her husband's books.

Apparently animation adaptations are OK, and in 2008, Horton Hears a Who!, a big CGI film featuring the voices of Jim Carrey, Steve Carell and Carol Burnett earned good reviews and broke the Dr. Seuss silver screen curse.

One writer whose work seemed made to entertain kids at movie theatres was Roald Dahl. From Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (later remade by Tim Burton as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) to James and the Giant Peach and Fantastic Mr. Fox to The BFG (Big Friendly Giant), his stories have easily adapted to live-action, stop-motion or traditional animation treatments.

Of course, not all movies that sound like adaptations of children’s books are the real deal. Think twice before you rent The Woodsman.

The title may sound reminiscent of Little Red Rising Hood, but it’s a dark drama about decidedly non-kid-friendly events and although Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? is based on Hansel and Gretel, be careful. It’s the stuff of nightmares for little ones.

A spoiler-free take on Super 8
Reel Guys by Richard Crouse and Mark Breslin
METRO CANADA
Published: June 10, 2011

SYNOPSIS: Welcome to the no spoiler zone! Here’s what we can tell you about Super 8: The action in this movie begins with six Lillian, Ohio kids shooting an amateur zombie movie. As their super 8 film rolls they witness a terrifying real-life train derailment. Soon strange things start happening in town as the army tries their best to contain the situation.
 
Ratings
Richard: ****
Mark: ***1/2

Richard Crouse: Mark, J.J. Abrams directs Super 8 the way he produced the TV show, Lost. He draws out the suspense, doling out just enough detail, shocks and surprises to keep the story interesting and moving forward. He knows that the strength of the movie isn’t the special effects or the whatever-it-is that is causing all the trouble, but the relationship between the kids. Call it Stand By Me with a giant bug... or a monster... or something. I’m not saying what!

Mark Breslin: All true, but you can feel Steven Spielberg’s hand guiding the movie all the way along. The suburban flyover state setting, the gentle outsider child protagonists, the deceased parent, the bicycles, the alien who just wants to go home, all Spielberg motifs. And setting it in the early ’80s, when Spielberg had his big sci-fi hits, surely was no coincidence.
 
RC: Perhaps so, but despite the Spielbergian flourishes, this still very much feels like an Abrams creation to me. His fingerprints are all over the action sequences — particularly the out-of-control train wreck scene — and even the sweetness we’ve come to associate with Spielberg has been dialed back. It’s still there — very much so in the film’s last 10 minutes — but Abrams manages to set the tone as though he is paying homage to the saccharine tendencies of his mentor than actually aping him.

MB: That train wreck scene had me on the edge of my seat! But the rest of the picture did not exactly exude menace. It’s more of a character piece about the young teens, and I thought the kids were great, certainly more interesting than the adults (which may be one of the points of the movie). I liked the picture, and my only real quibble was that the kids’ filmmaking, which played such an important part in the beginning of the movie, is dropped midway through the flick. The scenes of those kids making movies were dripping with charm.
 
RC: I thought so, too. Those scenes had a sense of fun to them and established the personalities of all the main kid characters. I think I liked this one more than you. I thought Super 8 was super great.
 
MB: Well, the middle was a bit soft and I’m always skeptical about courageous 14-year-olds. Still, there’s a lot to like in this one.

Ryan Reynolds earned his A-list status
In Focus by Richard Crouse
METRO CANADA
Published: June 15, 2011

This weekend, Ryan Reynolds becomes a superhero, donning the super-tight tights of The Green Lantern, protecting and hopefully entertaining the universe.

He’s played superhero types before — starring as Captain Excellent in Paper Man, and as the darkly heroic Hannibal King in Blade: Trinity — but this is his first attempt at playing an unqualified good vs. evil guy.

Despite lots of TV work (including a few seasons on the sitcom Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place) the first time most people got a good look at the Vancouver -born Reynolds was as the wisecracking Van Wilder in the movie of the same name.

The success of that movie threatened to typecast the actor as an arrogant, man-child character, always ready with a funny putdown, and while he has followed that course to a certain extent, Reynolds has also been more adventurous in his choices of roles than people give him credit for.

Peppered throughout his major Hollywood successes like The Proposal (co-starring with Sandra Bullock) have been roles like The Amityville Horror’s psychologically unstable father and the crackhead Gary in the thriller The Nines.  

Successful or not, those movies showed a performer looking to stretch his acting muscles (and not just display his prodigious ab muscles).

Here are some other of his movies you might’ve missed the first time around:

Adventureland: Set in a rundown amusement park during the Reagan years, in Adventureland Reynolds plays a part-time musician, womanizer and maintenance man who claims to have jammed with Lou Reed, even though he refers to one of Reed’s best known songs as Shed A Little Love instead of Satellite of Love.

Buried: Buried begins with a Blair Witch close-up—all eyes and nose—of Reynolds. He’s a civilian truck driver in Iraq, taken hostage, buried underground, who will be left to die unless a ransom is paid. Unable to rely on his usual comic timing and bulging muscles, Reynolds hits a career high, keeping us intrigued for most of the 90-minute running time.

Definitely, Maybe: Playing a divorcee telling his daughter the story of how he met her mother, Reynolds’s sense of timing is bang on, and his way with physical humour works here — a subtle sight gag that sees him, with his big hands, drinking from a tiny juice box draws laughs — and since he is in every scene, it’s ultimately his charisma that carries the movie.

Lots to like in Penguins
Reel Guys by Richard Crouse and Mark Breslin
FOR METRO
Published: June 17, 2011 12:00 a.m.
Last modified: June 16, 2011

SYNOPSIS: Loosely based on the classic 1938 children’s book, the movie sees Jim Carrey playing the title character, a ruthless NYC real estate agent who becomes closer to his estranged family when he inherits a penguin from his late father. Through a series of misunderstandings one penguin becomes six. As the penguins take over his life, Popper’s formerly flightless personal life starts to soar.     

Ratings
Richard: ***
Mark: ***1/2

Richard Crouse: Mark, Jim Carrey is back acting opposite wildlife, but unlike the Ace Ventura movies, this time he’s not talking out of his bum, or doing anything that parents may take issue with. Mr. Popper’s Penguins is total family entertainment, paced for young ones but with enough story to keep older kids and parents interested. I dreaded this one but actually ended up enjoying it.

Mark Breslin: Me too, Richard. I’m not a big fan of Jim Carrey movies, but this time the comedian keeps his cartoony instincts in check and brings an easy naturalness to the role. The penguins make great foils for Carrey as they are the comedians of the animal world. With their tuxedo pelts, paunches and big noses they look like standup comics from the ’50s.
 
RC: Ha! They do provide most of the laughs in the film, but I’m not sure I would classify this as a comedy. Carrey has a few funny moments, the penguins — who could be more rightly called Mr. Popper’s Pooping Penguins — engage in some animal antics, and Popper’s “p” popping personal assistant takes alliteration to new heights, but the movie is more about heart than humour.

MB: Maybe that’s why I liked it so much: Carrey wasn’t working so hard to be “on” all the time. I also appreciated the New York setting, though I found it bizarre that Popper was trying to raze, then save Tavern On The Green when it was just closed and slated for demolition last year. I guess the penguins aren’t the only fantasy elements in the film!
 
RC: It is a fantasy film with a nice even tone for families, but I’m curious what sort of movie it might have been if the original director Noah Baumbach had been behind the camera. He’s best known for making edgy family dramas like Squid and the Whale. Mr. Popper’s Penguins might have been more interesting to mom and dad if he had directed, but as it is it will appeal to kids, particularly if they’ve read the book. 
 
MB: I love Baumbach, but I can only imagine his direction would have led to The Squid, the Whale and the Penguins, about a dysfunctional family with lots of flipper wringing. No, the movie ain’t broke, so let’s not fix it. You’re right, it’s a great family picture, but also — dare I say this — a good date movie. I may not know much about life, Richard, but I do know this: chicks dig penguins!

Bad teacher nothing new
In Focus by Richard Crouse
METRO
Published: June 22, 2011

Detroit columnist Bob Talbert once wrote, “Good teachers are costly, but bad teachers cost more.”

Of course he wasn’t talking about actual dollars, but the emotional cost of a sketchy education. He could also have been talking about the new Cameron Diaz movie, Bad Teacher, in which she plays – you guessed it – a bad teacher! More concerned with hooking up with a wealthy co-worker (played by her real life ex Justin Timberlake) than with her students, she doesn’t make much of an effort to actually educate until she learns there’s a cash bonus for the teacher with the highest classroom grade average. 

Bad teachers are nothing new on the big screen.

In Animal House, Donald Sutherland played stoned-out college professor Dave Jennings. Sutherland said he has regrets about the film.

Not that he had to parade around dressed only in a shirt and effectively moon the audience, no, he bemoans that he didn’t accept a percentage of the box office as payment. “(Director John) Landis phones up and says, ‘I'm going do this movie called Animal House, and they want to give you two-and-a-half per cent of the profits.’

“And I said, ‘No way! I've got to have my daily salary everyday.’ So I got paid for one day's work and threw way $2 million!”

Probably the worst teacher ever appears in Class of 1984, a trashy school drama starring Roddy MacDowell as Terry Corrigan, a fed up teacher who threatens his unruly class with a loaded gun.

Director Mark L. Lester claims the scene was based on a real event, although a follow-up sequence showing an unbalanced Corrigan attempting to run down his students was pure fiction.

Due to excessive violence the movie was banned in several countries but is of interest to Canadian audiences for a performance by Hamilton, Ont. punk band Teenage Head.

One bad movie teacher actually redeems himself. When we first meet Fast Times at Ridgemont High’s Mr. Hand (Ray Walston) he’s prone to saying things like, “What is this fascination with truancy?” to his students, but near the end of the movie he softens and even pulls out all the stops to help his worst student, Spicoli (Sean Penn), graduate.

Ray Walston, so memorable as the uptight Mr. Hand, almost didn’t get the part, however. It was originally offered to Munster’s star Fred Gwynne who declined over objections to the film’s sexual content.

Hot for 'Bad Teacher'
Reel Guys by Richard Crouse and Tony Krolo
METRO CANADA
Published: June 24, 2011

SYNOPSIS: In the new Cameron Diaz movie, Bad Teacher, she plays – you guessed it – a bad teacher! More concerned with hooking up with a wealthy co-worker (played by her real life ex, Justin Timberlake) than with her students, she doesn’t make much of an effort to actually educate until she learns there’s a cash bonus for the teacher with the highest classroom grade average.

Star Ratings:
Richard: ***
Tony: ***1/2

Richard: Tony, having seen the red band trailer for Bad Teacher, I went in expecting a vulgar, funny swear fest along the same lines as The Hangover. Instead I got a funny, only somewhat vulgar movie that I think could have benefitted from a bit more raunch. Don't get me wrong, I liked it, but my expectations were higher... or, I guess, lower. What did you think? (Remember you have big shoes to fill here!)

Tony: Well, first let me thank you for the opportunity to temporarily replace the vacationing Mark Breslin. I wanted to like this movie... so i did. From the opening song Teacher, Teacher by Rockpile, something I still have on original vinyl, to the great casting in even the smallest of roles to the sweet moments followed immediately by gross sight gags to the nicely paced direction by Jake Kasdan, Bad Teacher had a little bit of everything. But it could have had a lot more raunch, you're right.

Richard: Yeah, it seems a bit afraid to go all the way. Diaz's character, desperate, pretty on the outside but ugly underneath, is an odd character to hang a comedy on, but she pulls it off. She'll never be the funny, fresh face she was in There's Something About Mary and The Mask, and for this movie that's a good thing. The very slight patina of age and experience in her manner adds some extra desperation to Elizabeth. Having said that, I don't think this movie would work nearly as well without the supporting cast. You?

Tony: The cast was incredible. Justin Timberlake really shines here. Jason Segel, John Michael Higgins, Phyllis Smith from The Office, they do their usual, great characters, but Eric Stonestreet from Modern Family played opposite to what you would expect, to really funny results. The only sad thing was the grossly underused Molly Shannon. It’s sad. If she was 15 years younger, she’d have been perfect to play Lucy Punch’s Amy Squirrel character, who I felt was doing a great Molly Shannon.

Richard: The supporting cast don't exactly rescue this movie--it doesn't need rescuing--but without them, Bad Teacher wouldn't be nearly as much fun.

Tony: It is very funny if you can allow your suspension of disbelief to ignore the premise that Cameron Diaz's character actually worked at the school for a full year and gets hired back to have the shenanigans in this movie.

How about watching Canada play itself onscreen?
In Focus by Richard Crouse
METRO CANADA
Published: June 29, 2011

This Canada Day, it’s possible to sight-see without leaving the comfort of your home.

Many American films use Canada as a substitute for international locations — look for Casa Loma in the X-Men films, or Simon Fraser University in The Day the Earth Stood Still, for example —but our homegrown cinema highlights our landmarks as our own.

So why not reheat some tourtière (with a side of poutine, of course!), or crack open a bag of ketchup chips, then wash it down with a glass of Niagara Peninsula ice wine and see the country through the eyes of our filmmakers. 

Goin’ Down the Road (1970)

The story of Pete (Doug McGrath) and his pal Joey (Paul Bradley), two Maritimers who set out in a Chevy to find a better life in Toronto, (SCTV joked they were looking for “lawyerin’ and doctorin’ jobs”) is a Canadian time capsule circa 1970.

One Week (2008)

The story of a dying man on a road trip is a love letter to Canada, showcasing landmarks — like the world’s biggest hockey stick — but its heartfelt story should appeal to everyone, whether they have the Queen on their money or someone else’s mug.

Jesus of Montreal (1989)

Not only does Saint Joseph’s Oratory represent Montreal in Monopoly: Here and New - The World Edition, it also provides a beautiful backdrop for this classic Canadian film from acclaimed director, Denys Arcand.

waydowntown (2000)

This satire of office life and urban living showcases Calgary’s web of connecting tunnels. You don’t see much of the outdoor life, but it gives you a glimpse of a little-seen aspect of Albertan big city life.

The Snow Walker (2003)

Shot partially in Rankin Inlet, Nunavut, the story of a bush pilot and a sick Inuit woman who must survive after a plane crash features a breathtaking look at Canada’s North, including some beautiful time lapse photography of that natural wonder known as the Northern Lights. 

Larry Crowne and the cinematic empty calories
Reel Guys by Richard Crouse and Mark Breslin
METRO CANADA
Published: June 30, 2011

This week Phil Brown sits in for Mark Breslin.

Star Ratings:
Richard: ***1/2 stars
Phil: *1/2 stars
 
Richard: Phil, Larry Crowne has an old fashioned feel to it, like a Nineties sitcom updated with references from the 2000s. There’s something reassuring about seeing old pros Hanks and Roberts effortlessly glide through this like hot knives through butter, but occasionally the material feels a bit out of date.

Phil: The movie seemed too old fashioned to me and just felt bland. Star power has appeal, but I just can’t buy two of the most recognizable movie stars as down-on-their-luck nobodies. Tom Hanks may have an everyman quality, but he looks as out of place working in a department store as Larry the Cable Guy at Harvard.

RC: Maybe so, but Hanks has been playing the Da Vinci Code’s oh-so-serious iconology professor Robert Langdon for so long now it’s easy to forget that he was once known as an accomplished comedic actor. Here he turns the dial back to movies like Joe Versus the Volcano, playing a likeable character you want to root for. I enjoyed that, I just found the obvious boomer baiting a bit obvious.

PB: Yeah, it was nice to see him try to be funny again and hopefully it's not the last time. Few do gentle character comedy better. The boomer baiting was frustrating, as was the attempt to make overcoming economic crisis seem so easy. If only I'd known before now that the answer to any financial problems I have could be solved by taking a community college level intro to economics course with George Takei. It seems so obvious in hindsight.

RC: I actually really liked the movie’s offbeat casting. Sure, Hanks and Roberts are the above-the-title stars, but they’ll only appeal to people who remember when gas only cost 54 cents a litre. The rest of the cast is bizarre. Pam Grier? Awesome. Wilmer Valderrama? Well, maybe not awesome, but at least left of centre enough to be fun. For all the familiar names in the cast it was an unfamiliar one that grabbed my attention: Gugu Mbatha-Raw. I think a new star might have been born there.

PB: She has a star quality and I did enjoy seeing Tekei, even if his subplot was ridiculous. This is a comfort food movie. For the price of admission you get pretty actors, a comfy moral, and a happy ending. There’s nothing wrong with cinematic empty calories, I just could have used some realism, edge, and creativity. 

There's nothing new about a horrible boss
In Focus by Richard Crouse
METRO CANADA
Published: July 06, 2011

Nobody likes the boss.

Bob Dylan sang "I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more." But Johnny Paycheck said it best for all people with evil employers when he snarled, “Take this job and shove it.”

This weekend, a new movie takes hatred for bad bosses to a new level. The guys in Horrible Bosses, a new comedy starring Jason Bateman, Charlie Day and Jason Sudeikis, hate their supervisors, and try to solve their employment problems…permanently.

Not all movie bosses are in such danger. Often movie characters find more creative ways to get even with their bosses.

Remember Office Space’s Peter Gibbons (Ron Livingston)? He hated his nitpicking boss, Bill Lumbergh (Gary Cole), so much he created a computer virus to steal money from the company. Too bad he got the decimal point wrong.

Gibbons didn’t go to prison for his revenge scheme but another agitated employee did. In Wall Street, Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen) allows his boss, Mr. Gordon “Greed is Good” Gekko, to lead him down a moral and professional rabbit hole.

His revenge was simple: He recorded Gekko’s admission of guilt. Trouble was, to do so he had to implicate himself.

Going to jail was too good for Guy’s (Frank Whaley) boss in Swimming with Sharks. The up and coming writer thought he had it made when he got a job as the assistant to hot shot producer Buddy Ackerman (Kevin Spacey) but soon found out that being low on the food chain in Hollywood means putting up with a constant stream of abuse and humiliation.

Instead of quitting he does what any slightly psychotic Tinsel Town wannabe would do: he breaks into Buddy’s house, kidnaps him and tortures him. In a twist, the extreme behaviour earns Buddy’s respect and Guy gets a promotion.

Usually in the movies, it’s men who are the bad bosses but there are two glaring examples of distaff evil employers. In The Devil Wears Prada, Meryl Streep was Miranda, a boss who redefines the word demanding.

She’s bad, but the worst female boss ever is Working Girl’s Katharine Parker (Sigourney Weaver). Miranda was belittling and arrogant, but at least she was upfront about it. Parker, on the other hand, is two faced, passing off her trusted secretary Tess McGill’s (Melanie Griffith) ideas as her own. In the end, Tess teaches her a lesson about honesty…and gets her fired. 

Bosses delivers the goods
Reel Guys by Richard Crouse and Mark Breslin
METRO CANADA
Published: July 08, 2011

The bosses in this movie make Genghis Khan look like an equal opportunity employer. Jason Bateman works for corporate shark Kevin Spacey. Jason Sudeikis has coke-head Colin Farrell and his comb-over. Charlie Day works for Jennifer Aniston, a dentist who uses laughing gas as a sex toy. All are stuck in their jobs and fed up with the daily humiliation offered in their workplaces and decide to terminate their bosses — literally.

Star Ratings:
Richard: ***
Phil: ***
 
Movie writer Phil Brown is sitting in for Mark Breslin this week.

Richard Crouse: Phil, of course no reasonable person would break into their bosses home looking for ways to kill them, but this is a comedy so we’ll accept that. Or will we? I thought the movie started off strong, funny and well paced, but its central premise — let’s kill our bosses! — seems forced and it sucks some of the funny from the middle part of the movie. What did you think?

Phil Brown: Richard, I’ve got to go the other way. The premise of having a terrible boss that makes your life hell is sadly all too relatable for many, but the opening bad boss gags felt tired even with the R-rated facelift. It didn’t click for me until the murder element turned the movie into a live action cartoon with a sick sense of humour.
 
RC: Interesting, I felt as though I was watching a funny enough movie marred by a silly premise. It’s one thing to have some drinks and joke about killing your boss, it’s quite another to act on it. I don’t want to beleaguer this point, but the crucial set-up scene to me felt forced, like a weak lead in to a funny punch line. Having said that, Charlie Day made me laugh. A lot.

PB: The whole premise is old and they even name-dropped two movies that did it better (Strangers On A Train and Throw Mamma From The Train). I think we can both agree that things really got rolling in the second half when it deviated from that form. Charlie Day definitely induces pants-wetting laughter consistently and I think the cast made this movie work through an improvisation festival. The only problem is that comedy style kills narrative momentum and there was no real tension in the thriller aspect of the story. Though I suppose the laughs are more important.

RC: And there are plenty of laughs. I don’t want to be Debbie Downer here. The movie is funny. It was cool to see Kevin Spacey revive his character Buddy from Swimming with Sharks, and if this doesn’t wipe away any traces of Rachel left over from Jennifer Aniston’s TV work I don’t know what will. Now, I guess, she’s America’s Foul Mouthed Over Sexed Sweetheart.

PB: In my mind, she always will be. Despite the inconsistencies, Horrible Bosses delivers the goods and will always be the only movie featuring Colin Farrell doing a coked-up Michael Keaton impression with a comb-over.

Film franchises and their phenomenon
In Focus by Richard Crouse
METRO CANADA
Published: July 12, 2011

In 2005 when the fourth installment of the Harry Potter films hit screens, I wrote, ‘The Harry Potter phenomenon is so powerful that you could have called this Harry Potter Drinks a Goblet of Water and presented an Andy Warhol-style film of young Harry chugging a glass of H2O for two hours and Potterheads would still wear their wizard hats and line up to see it.’

Astonishingly, six years later, the same holds true for the final installment of the series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2.

It’s not uncommon for movie franchises to span years and hang on to loyal fans. But to have the seven films in the series so far gross an average $909,906,449 each is astounding.

That kind of number speaks as much to the ferocity of the Potterheads as it does to the quality of the movies. The next highest grossing movie series is the James Bond franchise, which originated in 1962.

The super spy has shot and seduced his way through 22 official 007 releases for a worldwide box office total of $5,029,014,110.

Interestingly Harry Potter-player Daniel Radcliffe expressed interest in taking on the role of the teenaged James Bond in a planned film based on the Young Bond series of books.

Perhaps he can bring some of his magic to the part and create another successful franchise.

The Potter films are unique in the sense that the cast has stayed unchanged. Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint were all magically transformed into multi-millionaires playing Harry, Hermione and Ron.

Their presence in the films has provided a sense of continuity from one film to the next, but it’s not always necessary for actors to be yoked to characters in multiple sequels and spin-offs. There have been six James Bonds and Batman –  the highest grossing superhero series – and they’ve seen everyone from Michael Keaton to Christian Bale wear the crusader’s cape.

Even though George Clooney’s installment, Batman and Robin, was a critical and financial disaster — Clooney himself called the film “a waste of money” and volunteered to personally refund money to audience members — it didn’t stop the franchise. Eight years later Batman was reinvented by Christopher Nolan as The Dark Knight, which grossed $1,001,842,429 at the box office.

Not sure if recasting and reimaging Harry Potter would work, but, who knows? Maybe 10 years from now Hollywood will have a Potter new cast and new stories for a new generation. 

Harry Potter franchise goes out with style
Reel Guys by Richard Crouse and Mark Breslin
METRO CANADA
Published: July 15, 2011

Star Ratings:
Richard: 4 ½ Stars
Mark: 4 Stars

SYNOPSIS: This is the one muggles far and wide have been waiting for, the final face-off between boy wizard Harry Potter and his nemesis Lord Voldemort. Elder Wand in hand the merciless leader of the Death Eaters attacks the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, bringing about a fiery showdown between Harry, Hermione and Ron and the dark forces who put both the Wizarding and Muggle worlds at risk.
 
Richard Crouse: Mark, the decision to break the final Potter book into two movies was criticized as a money grab, just a cheap way to get a few extra dollars out of Potterheads before the franchise ends. But I have to tell you I think they made the right move. The movie is completely satisfying, with a well told story and great action scenes. What did you think?  
 
Mark Breslin: Yes, Richard, you're right. The movie is completely satisfying. But I think it's at the expense of the movie that preceded it, which I found inert and talky; the worst of the franchise. But this one felt like a thrilling send-off to characters we've grown to love, with some great action set pieces thrown in for good measure.
 
RC: This is as close to an all out action movie as there is in the Potter series. Harry's Horcrux hunt (say that fast three times!) takes up much of the movie leading up to some major revelations, an existential train station scene and a heartwarming conclusion , but along the way it’s an exciting ride. A small quibble though. What did you think of the 3D. It didn’t add much to the experience for me.
 
MB: The best thing I can say about the 3D is that it was unobtrusive, letting us pay attention to the complex plotting. But I think the movie, unlike most in the series, doesn't work as a stand alone film. It would make little sense if you haven't seen the last few installments. And fans of Ralph Fiennes' Voldemort won't be disappointed: he's as creepy a villain as you can imagine, with lots of screen time. By the way, I did try saying "Harry's Horcrux Hunt" and was kicked out of the restaurant I was in.
 
RC: I thought Alan Rickman stole the show. He has the creepiest vocal tics since Boris Karloff and really brought something to a character that could have been one note. And you’re right, it isn’t a stand alone, but it doesn’t have to be. Harry Potter has stood at the center of popular culture for the last decade, the franchise is the thing, not just the one picture.
 
MB: In which case, I ask you, Richard, which were your favorites? Mine were the first three, when the world of Hogwarts was at its most innocent, and this one, with its brisk pace and brutal efficiency.

RC: I have to tell you, I think the new one is the best of the bunch! 

JT is ‘serious’ about this acting thing
RICHARD CROUSE
FOR METRO
Published: July 19, 2011

Justin Timberlake is many things: music superstar, a booze baron (he owns a brand of tequila called 901), and all round mogul with a clothing line, restaurants and a record label. All that at just thirty years of age, but like so many singing stars before him, it seems what he really wants to do is act.

In fact he once said he believes it was always in the cards for him to be an actor.

"I got a phone call when I was 14 saying that there's a record company that's going to sign me. But two weeks before that, the plan was to drive to Los Angeles for TV pilot season. So I guess everything works out the way it's supposed to."

Fate aside, is his desire to act justified?

From his film debut in the 2000 Disney Channel movie Model Behavior to this weekend’s Friends with Benefits there have been the highest of highs and the lowest of lows.

He’s earned praise from his co-stars. "I only had a couple of scenes with him but he did a really great job,” said his Alpha Dog co-star Bruce Willis. But critics and bloggers haven’t always been so kind. “Dear Justin Timberlake,” read a 2010 blog headline, “STOP ACTING!”  

Forgettable supporting roles in flops like Edison, Black Snake Moan and Southland Tales did little to enhance his reputation, but didn’t hurt it much either. Casting director Billy Hopkins said, “The way he's handling his career is smart. If a movie fails, it's not just his failure.”

Everything changed when he was cast in The Social Network. His take on the fast talking Sean Parker, inventor of Napster and an early supporter of facebook, was his breakthrough and won praise from critics. 

That inspired performance, coupled with hilarious guest shots on Saturday Night Live (“Put any grown man in a leotard and that's already funny,” he says.) have earned him the respect of the industry and fans, but he still doesn’t have his pick of roles.

Even though he didn’t get the lead in The Green Lantern, a part that went to Ryan Reynolds, (“I don’t think I’m the superhero type,” he joked.) he wants everyone to know he’s willing to put himself out there.

“I make no bones about the fact that I have always wanted to work in the forum of film.” he says. “I take this seriously.”

Captain America works as a throwback action flick
Reel Guys by Richard Crouse and Mark Breslin
METRO CANADA
Published: July 22, 2011

SYNOPSIS: After being rejected by the U.S. Army, Steve Rogers (Chris Evans), determined to join his friends and country in the fight against Hitler, volunteers for Project: Rebirth, a secret military operation, where he is physically transformed into a muscle-bound super-soldier nicknamed Captain America. Dedicated to defending America's ideals, he and sidekick Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), take on the Red Skull (Hugo Weaving), Hitler's head of advanced weaponry.

Star Ratings:
Richard: ***
Mark: **

Richard: Mark, I went into this with low expectations. I'm kind of superheroed out these days, but I was pleasantly surprised. It’s a bit long, but it doesn't feel like the other hero movies we've seen recently. The hipness of Iron Man is absent, the jokey feel of Thor is gone, instead this is an old fashioned action adventure movie with a person with extraordinary powers is at the heart of it. What did you think?

MB: I'm superheroed out as well but this guy's no superhero: he's an enhanced mesomorph with a magic Frisbee! The movie works as an action flick, but it's missing the irony of the source material. Is America so desperate to believe in its military that it has to go back to "the last good war" to feel good about itself? And I have other complaints too, like the sloppy CGI.In the beginning, Chris Evans as a 99-pound weakling looked like a bad Photoshopped pic from 2003.

RC: I liked its lack of irony. Perhaps part of the appeal is that in the complicated times we live in it's refreshing to see a movie that harkens back to a simpler time when the enemy was easily identifiable and a strong guy with a colourful shield and plenty of heart could be a hero. The pre-mesomorph Evans may have been a bit sloppy CGI-wise, but you have to admit, Red Skull's lack of identifiable facial features was a nice villainous touch.

MB: It may say too much about me that I always enjoy the villain rather than the hero. And Hugo Weaving was very good indeed, especially with his red skull. And Tommy Lee Jones always brings his game to a movie, even if the role was rote. Same with Stanley Tucci and Toby Young. The satiric USO tour sequence was fun. And I liked the way the movie ended. See, Richard? I can find the good in anything, even jingoistic propaganda!

RC: I know its jingoistic propaganda, but it's 1940s jingoistic propaganda! I liked the way the movie paid tribute to the rah rah movies of WWII and B movies of the period. The bad guys are REALLY bad, but never fear! The good guys are better. Where else are you going to see giant bombs, each labelled for extra evil effect with the name of the city they are meant to destroy?

MB: The labelling of the bombs was exactly what I wanted more of! I would forgive this movie its flaws if its strengths were greater. But it's mostly derivative storytelling, choppy editing and unmemorable dialogue. Good action, though.

Taking the western to outer space
In Focus by Richard Crouse
METRO CANADA
Published: July 27, 2011

When we think of westerns, images of cowboy hats, stagecoaches and John Wayne usually come to mind. I say usually because while those may be the most common icons associated with the genre they’re not the only ones.

This weekend, Cowboys & Aliens adds spaceships, extraterrestrials and laser guns to the existing formula. To research the movie’s western half, director Jon Favreau watched classic movies like Stagecoach and Destry Rides Again. Then he spent time with Alien, Predator, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind to find the sci-fi feel he was after.

“If you do it right,” he said of the film, “it honours both, and it becomes interesting and clever and a reinvention of two things that people understand.”

So call it a spacetern or neo-western if you like, but it isn’t the first movie to mix and match sci-fi with horse opera.

Michael Crichton wrote and directed Westworld after a trip to Disneyland. The Pirates of the Caribbean ride inspired him to imagine an amusement park where vacationers pay $1,000 a day to interact with robots programmed to replicate life in different periods of history. When a computer malfunction sends Yul Brynner’s black-hatted cyborg gunslinger (the actor wears the same costume he wore in The Magnificent Seven) on an animatronic rampage through the western theme park the old west becomes a place of high tech terror.

Sci-fi westerns aren’t always set on Earth, however. 

The animated feature Bravestarr: The Legend sets the action on the planet of New Texas, located 1,956 light-years from Earth. Bashing together the best bits of Star Wars and traditional oater plots, the movie features cool western space toys like rocket scooters with fairings shaped like horses' heads and a villain named Tex Hex. When Hex invades New Texas the town must get a new lawman. Enter Galactic Marshall Bravestarr. “We needed a hundred lawmen to tame New Texas,” reads the film’s tagline. “We got one. You know something? He was enough.”

Outland, the 1981 Sean Connery space thriller isn’t exactly a sci-fi western, but it is based on one of the most famous cowboy movies of all time, High Noon. A critic for the Boston Globe wrote, “Outland marks the return of the classic western hero in a space helmet,” and noted that its themes of loyalty and betrayal echoed High Noon.

Carell and Gosling make Crazy, Stupid, Love sheer joy
Reel Guys by Richard Crouse and Mark Breslin
METRO CANADA
Published: July 29, 2011

SYNOPSIS: When nearly divorced Cal Weaver (Steve Carell) begins hanging around a trendy LA bar he meets Jacob (Ryan Gostling), a handsome slick talker who offers to tutor him in the art of being single. What starts out as a lounge lizard Pygmalion actually blossoms into a deeper friendship as Cal begins to see the world through different eyes and Jacob meets the girl of his dreams. Interwoven are two other love stories—the trials of Cal’s son (Jonah Bobo) who thinks his babysitter (Analeigh Tipton) is his soul mate and Hannah’s (Emma Stone) search for the right guy.

Richard: ****
Mark: ****
             
Richard: As good as Steve Carell is here I have a feeling the person everyone will be talking about on the way out of the theatre is Ryan Gostling. He reveals a gift for comedy, a magnificent abdominal area and the ability to take a stereotype and turn it into a living, breathing character. Agree or no?
 
Mark: Yes, this is a great leap forward for an actor who has played a variety of depressives, mumblers, and addicts. He looks great in a sharp cut jacket and crackles with charisma. Of course, he's got the fun role, but still, he adds something extra to the stock character of the lothario with a wounded heart. And by the way the female members of the audience swooned when he took off his shirt, Gosling has matured into one fine Canada Goose.
 
RC: It's true. Young Hercules seems like a long time ago now. If Gosling can erase his slightly embarrassing TV past away, then I think this is the movie that will go a long way to erase the image of Steve Carell as that guy from The Office. He was masterful on that show and has been good in other movies—particularly as the depressed Uncle Frank in Little Miss Sunshine – but here he absolutely nails the mix of comedy and pathos needed to make Crazy, Stupid, Love so memorable.
 
MB: Right, but I couldn't help notice your lack of praise for his recent film work, which I find tepid and dweeby. Here Carell can get his chops into a script that goes beyond his usual hangdog schlemiels and grow a pair. And it's a joy to watch. But Richard, let's not leave out the perfectly cast supporting roles. I loved both the babysitter and Carell's 13-year-old son. Any other standouts for you? Or can we give the directing team their kudos? I've rarely seen better direction in a rom/com.
 
RC: I agree all round. It's a cut above the usual rom com, reminding more of the Neil Simon relationship movies of the Seventies that were family dramas disguised as sex comedies. As for the supporting cast, I have to say I called it for Emma Stone when I first saw her in Superbad and predicted she will be a superstar any second now.
 
MB: By the way, I wasn't sure about the movie at first. The plot seemed to be too close to something Dane Cook might have done in his brief heyday, but then it ripened into a full-fledged, perfect farce with all the plot strands coming together perfectly. The ending's a bit sentimental, and I've always hated when characters express their feelings in a Big Speech, but these are tiny quibbles.

The monkey business behind 'Planet Of The Apes'
In Focus by Richard Crouse
METRO CANADA
Published: August 03, 2011

There have been plenty of real flesh and fur movie monkeys.

Peggy the Chimp starred alongside future president Ronald Reagan in Bedtime for Bonzo and of course, the Tarzan movies made a superstar out of Cheeta the Chimp. But for me the best moving picture primates were actors dressed up in monkey masks.

Long before computer generated special effects made digital apes like the ones featured in this weekend’s The Rise of the Planet of the Apes possible, a makeup artist named John Chambers pioneered primate makeup. His work on the original Planet of the Apes was based on a technique he developed during World War II to give disfigured veterans a natural look.

Later, his makeup work earned him a special Academy Award (his statue was presented by a tuxedo-clad chimpanzee) but before the movie rolled he had to persuade the studio his techniques would look convincing. To do so he shot a test scene with actor Edward G Robinson, who found the makeup sessions too gruelling and left the movie as a result. Won over, the studio approved the makeup budget — an astronomical, for the time, $1 million -- almost one sixth of the entire budget.

Chambers put together a team of more than 80 people, delaying several other movies by causing a shortage of makeup artists in Hollywood.

On location in the Arizona desert, the lead actors spent three to four hours in the makeup chair every day. Because the applications took so long to apply the actors couldn’t take them off until the very end of the day. Since they were encased in makeup 12 to 18 hours at a stretch they had to “eat” liquefied meals through straws, and, as star Roddy McDowell found out, they couldn’t sneeze. He achoo-ed one day and blew half his chimp face off.  

The makeup process was so intense that Kim Hunter, who played chimpanzee psychologist and veterinarian Zira, had to be prescribed valium to keep her calm during the sessions. She spent so much time made up that when her co-star Charlton Heston saw her sans make-up for the first time he didn’t recognize her.

Some of the actors had fun with the makeup, however. McDowell liked driving home still made up just to see the surprised faces of the drivers on the freeway.

The following four Apes sequels featured actors in makeup, but for me, the original contains the best monkey business. 

Get your hands off my franchise
Reel Guys by Richard Crouse and Mark Breslin
METRO CANADA
Published: August 05, 2011

SYNOPSIS: In modern day San Francisco, a geneticist played by James Franco develops a cure for Alzheimer's which when tested on chimps gives them extraordinary intelligence. When he rescues a baby chimp from his lab after an experiment gone wrong, the ape, named Caesar, uses his newfound smarts to begin a revolution. This ape is mad as hell and he’s not going to take it anymore.

Richard: Mark, I love Planet of the Apes. I’ve seen the original and the sequels countless times but I don’t think Rise will find its way to my Blu-ray shelf. I liked the action and some of the monkey business was very cool, but honestly, I wish they would have kept their stinking hands off my beloved damn dirty apes.

Mark: Yes, Richard, one tinkers with a masterpiece at one's own peril. And I can't help but miss the elements that made the original franchise so great, mostly the heavy-handed irony, satiric wit, and that the apes talked. These apes are just too real, grunting away like a bunch of...apes. Although, even the CGI isn't perfect. In some shots, Caesar, the lead ape, looks like an overgrown Beanie Baby.

RC: I thought Andy Serkis's performance-capture work as alpha ape Ceasar was both one of the movie’s strengths and weaknesses. No doubt his facial expressions, particularly the use of his eyes, add much to the character but the computer generated imagery used to bring Caesar to life, while often impressive, lacks an organic feel. The Roddy McDowell era apes were obviously fake—sometimes painfully so—but somehow they had more soul.

MB: I don't know about you, but I found the story- Science Experiment Gone Awry!- cheesy and derivative, but I did enjoy Caesar's antics in James Franco's house, which were pure kinetic poetry. But I suspect the entire movie exists for the last 20 minutes when the apes run amok in San Francisco. Genuinely thrilling, for me. Did you think of Franco as really the reason to see the movie?

RC: No, I don't think Franco or Frida Pinto are reason enough to see the movie. It's all about the monkey business.  When the revolution begins the movie kicks into gear and becomes the movie the trailers promised. Some of the action is a bit too showy—since when can apes do martial arts?—but the scene of Caesar on horseback leading the charge against the heavily fortified cops is a real crowd pleaser, but for my money it took WAY too long to get to the good stuff.

MB: There's also a lot of hack work in the minor roles: John Lithgow's saintly Alzheimer's patient, the angry next door neighbour, and worst of all, Franco's boss at the research facility- a cardboard villain out of a much cruddier film. The apes had more depth, although perhaps that's the point of the movie.

Hollywood's many bad feelings
In Focus by Richard Crouse
METRO
Published: August 10, 2011

When the first Final Destination movie was released in 2000, no one could have predicted the success of the horror franchise. No one that is, except for maybe Devon Sawa, the Canadian-born actor who played Alex Browning, the film’s character gifted with second sight.

At the bloody heart of each of these gory horror movies is a character with premonitions of the future. Usually he or she has forewarning that all his/her good-looking friends will die in the most terrible way imaginable. When the vision comes true—usually preceded by the tell tale line, “Something’s wrong!”—whoever survives ends up dying anyway, in increasingly complicated ways. With Final Destination 5 opening this weekend it seemed like an appropriate time to look back at other movie characters that have had creepy visions.
 
In The Gift, the movie Sam Raimi directed just before spinning the web for his Spider-Man trilogy, Cate Blanchett plays a psychic who helps the police locate a missing girl.

Billy Bob Thornton, Blanchett’s co-star and the movie’s screenwriter, based the character on his mother, Virginia Thornton Faulkner. Like the character in the movie, the psychic Mrs. Faulkner was a widow who raised three boys and used her extra sensory ability to make extra money.

In the hauntingly surreal Don’t Look Now, John Baxter (Donald Sutherland in a curly wig) has a premonition that something awful is about to happen to his daughter. Sure enough, seconds later she falls in a pond and drowns. Later in Venice, John and his wife (Julie Christie) meet an elderly psychic who claims to see apparitions of the dead daughter which triggers John’s own otherworldly visions.  

Adapted from a short story by Daphne Du Maurier, the psychic thriller has become a cult classic since its release in 1973, inspiring filmmakers like Danny Boyle, who cites it as one of his favorite movies and E=MC2 a Top Twenty hit by Big Audio Dynamite.

Finally, some call these premonitions ESP, others, like author Stephen King, call them The Shining. In King’s novel, Stanley Kubrick’s film and the television movie of the same name, both Danny Torrance, the telepathic son of the winter caretakers of the remote Overlook Hotel and chef Dick Hallorann (Scatman Crothers) have visions and premonitions. King says the title was inspired by the Plastic Ono Band's song, Instant Karma which features the chorus, "We all shine on." 

30 Minutes or Less aims low and exceeds expectations
Reel Guys by Richard Crouse and Mark Breslin
METRO CANADA
Published: August 05, 2011

SYNOPSIS: Very loosely based on a strange Erie, Pennsylvania bank robbery, the story involves a slacker pizza delivery boy (Jesse Eisenberg) who is kidnapped by two moronic criminals (Danny McBride and Nick Swardson). They strap a bomb to his chest and order him to rob a bank or, in ten hours, everything will go boom. Incidental to the main story are a best friend (Aziz Ansari), his sister (Dilshad Vadsaria) and a psycho killer (Michael Peña).

Star Ratings:
Richard: ***1/2
Mark: ***
 
Richard: There’s nothing genteel about 30 Minutes or Less. The presence of Danny McBride assures that. If you don’t find his brand of foulmouthed, anything-goes humor, then you’ll find very little to like here. But, if McBride turns your crank, you’ll find much to like here.

Mark: I am no fan of Danny McBride. He's always playing the same loutish character in every movie. But he worked for me here, probably because the tight script gave him so little wriggle room. On the other hand, I am a fan of Aziz Ansari, and for me he's the standout character in the film, with great and subtle line readings. Jesse Eisenberg? Let's just say he probably won't be nominated for an Oscar for this one.

RC: He may not get nominated for this one, but he does get a good Facebook jab in there. Good to see he can have a sense of humor about The Social Network, his biggest success so far. I have to agree with you about Ansari. He's a manic ball of energy here, and while I thought he might be too much for in the beginning, by the end I was glad he was there. The other thing this movie has going for it is the pace. It moves like a rocket. The ninety minutes really does feel like 30 minutes, or less.

MB: I know. I ordered a pizza when the movie started, but it was over before it even arrived. I applaud the producers for knowing that the film is flimsy and ensuring that it doesn't overstay its welcome. We've seen this plot done as a thriller, as a comedy it's not going to be as gripping. But I thought its low-rent setting and general shabbiness fit with the rest of the movie. No one will be talking about the cinematography or costume design, will they?

RC: No they won't, but they will be talking about what a raunchy good time they had at the movies, and I think that is the goal of this kind of movie. It's like the spiritual cousin to Eisenberg's Zombieland, an unexpectedly fun mix of action and humour.

MB: So it's a movie that aims low, and exceeds expectations!

The career-killing potential of sword and sorcery flicks
In Focus by Richard Crouse
METRO
Published: August 17, 2011

Sword and sorcery movies are easy to spot. Look for a bare-chested hero, damsels in distress, big swords and at least one character described as “a mysterious warrior of dark magic.” You’ll also see an epic story, a hint of romance, some fantasy and, of course swashbuckling battle scenes.

On film, the genre had its heyday with two 1980s cheese fondues starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Brigitte Nielsen (as the She-Devil with a Sword) respectively— Conan the Barbarian and Red Sonja.

This weekend, Hollywood hopes to breathe new life into the genre with a reimagining of the Schwarzenegger saga. Stepping in for Arnold, Jason "Game of Thrones" Momoa will battle monsters, evil henchmen and a powerful witch, played by Rose McGowan in Conan the Barbarian.     

Critics have always had an ambivalent relationship with sword and sorcery. The 1982 Conan the Barbarian was described as “both exciting AND unintentionally amusing,” while Red Sonja was dismissed as “pure silliness, but not silly enough to qualify as amusing.”

The Beastmaster, a 1982 film starring the Canadian-born Marc Singer as Dar, a warrior with a mystical control over all animals, only has a 50 per cent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, but has become a cult classic over the years due to near constant exposure on television. TBS played the movie so often it earned the nickname The Beastmaster Station. Ditto HBO, which one writer joked stood for “Hey, Beastmaster is On.”

Also dismissed by critics but worth a look is Atlas In the Land of the Cyclops, a 1961 film starring muscleman Gordon Mitchell, whose first showbiz gig was as a strongman in Mae West's beefcake revue, and sex symbol Chelo Alonso as the prerequisite beautiful but evil queen. Strangely, no character named Atlas actually appears in this Italian import—Mitchell plays Maciste, a hero made famous in silent Italian cinema, but unknown to American audiences—and Cyclops is only onscreen for about two minutes. Still, it’s good Saturday matinee fun.

No mention of sword and sorcery films could be complete without Hercules. There are dozens of films starring the Greek demigod but Hercules Against the Moon Men must be the silliest. This grade-Z flick is so bad, its director, Giacomo Gentilomo, who also made Slave Girls of Sheba and Goliath and the Island of Vampires, quit the film business shortly after the movie was completed.

One Day that's full of gimmicks
Reel Guys by Richard Crouse and Mark Breslin
METRO CANADA
Published: August 19, 2011

SYNOPSIS: Jim Sturgess and Anne Hathaway play friends who meet on July 15, 1988 and play romantic cat and mouse for almost the next 20 years. They spend most of their lives trying not to fall in love until one day, July 15th, no less, they take the leap.

Ratings:
Richard: ***
Mark: *1/2

Richard: Mark, One Day is many things. It’s a style parade of hair and clothes from the past two decades and it’s an interesting take on how to tell a story, but it’s also a little disconnected. I think the year-by-year format—we drop in on Jim and Anne every July 15 for 20 years—is the culprit. It begins to feel gimmicky by the early Nineties and by the millennium almost feels as though it is playing out in real time.

MB: Finally, a movie that asks the question: What happens when an insufferable prig meets an egomaniacal twit? The answer is: very little, at least until 15 years has passed. In the Seventies, there was a film and play called Same Time Next Year which used a similar gimmick. In that film, a couple meet every year at the same time for a sexy romp, and slowly fall in love. In this movie, the couple start off with a romantic friendship, and then consummate the relationship after many years. And there, Richard, is the indisputable evidence of why the Seventies was a much better time than the present day.

RC: Ha! I'll give you that this might have been a very different story had it been set in 1974, but I thought the decades-long dance they do as they pretend not to be in love showed the chemistry between the two. The film has some serious structural flaws but the spark between the two of them forgives many of the film’s sins.

MB: Spark? What spark? I could barely see what they saw in each other. He's a jerk, at least until half the movie's over, and she's a puritan with bad taste in eyewear. And her accent is as fake as the rest of this sentimental travelogue through time. The movie did make London look very appealing, though, so I kept wishing that a neutron bomb would go off, wiping the cast from the screen and leaving all the gorgeous architecture intact.

RC: I clearly liked this more than you. I thought Sturgess brought an easy charm to the character, and his transformation from happy-go-lucky student to lounge lizard TV presenter is effective. Hathaway’s appeal lies in the intelligence she brings to her characters. Here she plays a smarty-pants young woman set adrift in life, someone who is slowly finding the self confidence to be who she really wants to be. In Hathaway’s hands you never doubt that she’ll get there.

MB: Usually, I'd love to be in Anne Hathaway's hands. But not this time. And she wore the same T-shirt in bed in 1988 as she did in 1992. Did she ever wash that thing? Ewwww!

Don't fear the femme fatale
In Focus by Richard Crouse
METRO CANADA
Published: August 24, 2011

Chances are the first movie assassin names that pop into your head are The Jackal, Martin Q. Blank or El Mariachi. What do they have in common, other than flashy names and a predilection for gunning down their on-screen enemies? They’re all men.

What about the ladies? Beatrix Kiddo, Charlie Baltimore or Jane Smith?

Jean Luc Goddard said, “All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun,” and often these days filmmakers are placing that gun in the hands of female film assassins. Nikita is back on the tube and earlier this year Saoirse Ronan played a deadly 16-year-old in Hanna. This weekend, Avatar's Zoe Saldana is back as a stone-cold killer in Colombiana.

As Charlie Baltimore, Geena Davis created one of the screen’s most loved female assassins in The Long Kiss Goodnight. Suffering from amnesia, when her past catches up with her she flip flops from suburban mom to killer. Best Line? “They're gonna blow my head off, you know. This is the last time I'll ever be pretty.”

Angelina Jolie's deadly demeanour has pumped up several action movies. Lara Croft was a gun-slinging super-heroine, but she's also played assassins in two movies.

In Mr. and Mrs. Smith she's a hitlady assigned to kill her own on-screen (and future real life) partner, Brad Pitt. “Still alive, baby?” she purrs after trying to shoot him through a wall.

Also, as Fox in Wanted she was a member of the Fraternity, a deadly group of killers with the useful ability to shoot around corners. Best line? “We kill one, and maybe save a thousand. That's the code of the Fraternity.”

The highest body count must go to Beatrix Kiddo, played by Uma Thurman in Kill Bill. As a bride done wrong by her former Deadly Viper Assassination Squad colleagues, (including Vivica A. Fox who plays Vernita Green and Lucy Liu as O-Ren Ishii), Kiddo slices and dices her way through more than 100 opponents.

But the two most unlikely female assassins on film were found in Leon: The Professional and Kick-Ass. In the former, Natalie Portman was a 12-year-old who learns how to kill from her teacher, Léon (Jean Reno), a skillful but sensitive hitman.

In Kick-Ass, a 2010 action-comedy starring Nicolas Cage and Chloë Moretz, Hit Girl (Moretz) asks her father (and assassin mentor) for a Benchmade model 42 butterfly knife for her eleventh birthday.

Idiot Bro a smarty-pants
Reel Guys by Richard Crouse and Mark Breslin
METRO CANADA
Published: August 19, 2011

SYNOPSIS: Paul Rudd plays Ned, a Mr. Nice Guy unsuited for life outside of his organic farm. When he innocently sells marijuana to a uniformed policeman he is thrown in jail. Unfortunately in his absence his hippie girlfriend found a new boyfriend. His three sisters (Elizabeth Banks, Zooey Dechanel and Emily Mortimer) take turns housing him, but in each case his willingness to believe the best in people causes chaos.
 
Ratings
Richard: *** 1/2
Mark: *** 1/2

Richard: Mark, Our Idiot Brother is a low key indie comedy with a much different feel from the movies that made Rudd famous. His Apatow years have been spent doing broad comedy in movies like The 40 Year Old Virgin, but this is more character based — and less funny. There are laughs here, but instead of going for the jokes Rudd is concentrating on playing the character and allowing the humour to flow naturally from him and the situations. Did that work for you?

Mark: Most definitely! I was worried — based on the title, the poster, the trailer, and the Apatow DNA — that this would be nothing but silly slapstick. But it turned out to be a nicely tuned comedy of manners about the clash between bourgeois and counterculture values. The irony of the title is that the Rudd character is anything but an idiot. Like the ’80s movie Down and Out in Beverly Hills, the hippie outsider upsets the domesticity of those around him, but somehow improves everyone's lives in the process. Rudd is great, and so is the rest of the cast, don't you think?

RC: I thought so too. Banks, Dechanel and Mortimer each bring a different flavour to their roles as the sisters. Banks is a driven writer with sketchy ethics, Dechanel a free-ish spirit with commitment issues while Mortimer plays a mousy mom. They all stand in stark contrast to the innocence of their brother but their presence buoys, and gives heart to, the film’s family first message.

MB: One thing I really liked about the film is that it completely nailed the Hudson Valley neo-hippie movement in all its charm and hypocrisy. It’s a subculture ripe for satirizing, but it hasn’t been done much until now, so it felt fresh. Deschanel’s weird bohemian lifestyle also felt original and contributed to the indie feel of the film. But I have to admit, as much as I enjoyed watching it, it’s a flimsy movie and it didn’t stay with me.

RC: I sort of agree. I think it’s a likeable comedy elevated by a strong cast who bring empathy to characters who, in less experienced hands, might not have had any.

MB: Only the last 10 minutes felt rushed, with characters changing their motivation for no discernible reason at all. It felt like some scenes had been edited out. But overall, it was a good way to spend 90 minutes in the dark.

The found footage of missing protagonists
In Focus by Richard Crouse
METRO CANADA
Published: August 31, 2011

The most famous "found footage" film begins with the words, "In October of 1994, three student filmmakers disappeared into the woods of Burketville, Maryland while shooting a documentary. A year later their footage was found."

Thus began the Blair Witch Project, a movie Roger Ebert called an "extraordinarily effective horror film." He also called it a "celebration of rock bottom production values" for its rough hewn camera style and effective no-budget scares.

Those are trademarks of found footage-style movies. The premise is almost always the same: someone has recovered film left behind by, as Wikipedia says, “missing or dead protagonists,” and pieced it together to tell a (usually) horrifying story. This weekend, Apollo 18 uses (fictional) found footage from NASA's abandoned Apollo 18 mission to reveal the reason the U.S. has never returned to the moon.

In the wake of Blair Witch, theatres were overflowing with found footage movies, partially because they’re cheap to make, and partially because audiences raised on reality television seemed to respond to them. Movies like The St. Francisville Experiment, The Last Horror Movie, September Tapes and The Curse tried, most unsuccessfully, to cash in on the box office bonanza of Blair Witch, but [Rec], a Spanish horror film about a haunted building was the most successful, artistically and financially. If you missed the Spanish version you can always check out the shot-for-shot remake, Quarantine, starring Dexter’s Jennifer Carpenter.  

Less successful but interesting is Redacted, a Brian De Palma war film shot through the lens of one of his characters. De Palma came up with the idea when he was asked by HDNet Films to make a movie for $5 million on HD. In creating the story of U.S. soldiers on a revenge rampage after one of their friends is killed by an IED, he earned the ire of many conservative groups who called for boycotts of the film and producer, Dallas Maverick's owner Mark Cuban.  

If the Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity are the commercially successful of the genre and Redacted the most contentious, the most controversial must be Cannibal Holocaust. The 1980 fake cannibal found footage doc that was so convincing the director was arrested and charged with murder. Police believed several actors had been killed on screen but charges were dropped when the actors showed up at the trial, safe and sound.

A cinematic preview for fall
Reel Guys by Richard Crouse and Mark Breslin
METRO CANADA
Published: September 02, 2011

For the Reel Guys, the beginning of September means not only the changing of the leaves, but the switch from popcorn season to Oscar time. This week, Richard and Mark discuss which films might get Academy attention and which one definitely won’t!

Richard Crouse: Mark, the silly season is pretty much over. That should mean an end to superhero stories, remakes, reboots and reimaginings and a beginning to Oscar season, right? It seems like the studios want to remind us of the balmy days of summer because it appears to me there is still lots of silly stuff on the way. When I see movies like Paranormal Activity 3 and Johnny English Reborn on the schedule it feels like summer in October.

Mark Breslin: Richard, come on, the theatre owners need to pay their rent. And that means popcorn sales. Which means sequels, remakes, and all the rest. But have no fear! Leonardo DiCaprio will be donning the fat suit to play J Edgar Hoover. What could be more original -- and weird -- than that, unless it was Bob Dylan starring in a Ben Johnson biopic. Surely there's some stuff coming up that has piqued your interest...

RC: Absolutely. Wedged in between remakes like The Thing are some Oscar contenders like Moneyball, Ides of March, and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, but I think the movie I'm most excited to see is My Week with Marilyn. It's the story of Marilyn Monroe and Laurence Olivier and their tumultuous relationship as they made The Prince and the Showgirl. It's the kind of turning the camera on itself that Hollywood does really well, and I hear Michelle Williams absolutely nails the performance as Marilyn Monroe. What are you excited to see?

MB: That does sound good! I'm most excited about The Descendents, which pairs George Clooney and Alexander Payne, who directed Sideways, in a Hawaii location. I'm also jazzed about David Cronenberg's new movie, A Dangerous Method, which imagines a love triangle among Freud, Jung, and a hot female patient. Freud and Jung rarely are seen in the same movie, but Cronenberg's got a lot of clout these days. And let's not forget Puss In Boots. Puss has always been my favorite character in the Shrek franchise. Interestingly, these are all autumn releases. The Christmas slate looks kind of tepid to me. What do you think?

RC: Tepid! Not with A Very Harold & Kumar Christmas topping my Christmas list. Looks hilarious. On the other end of the scale is The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. If anyone can improve on the originals, it’s David Fincher.

MB: Yes, well, been there, done that. In Swedish, no less. At least there's no installment of the Focker franchise, and that may be the best Christmas present of all.

Reel Guys TUFF it out
Richard Crouse and Mark Breslin get a sneak peek at 10 short films playing on TTC screens

The Toronto Urban Film Festival begins Friday.

Reel Guys by Richard Crouse and Mark Breslin
METRO TORONTO
Published: September 05, 2011
 
The Reel Guys take the TTC — usually on the way to a movie — and find that the worst part of the trip is that you can’t watch movies while you wait for the train ... until now. Starting on Friday, the Toronto Urban Film Festival will play dozens of movies on the ONESTOP TTC subway platform screens for an estimated audience of 1.3 million daily commuters. The Reel Guys got a sneak peek at 10 of the one minute short films.

Richard: Mark, I liked quite a few of these. A minute from director James Newman is a snapshot of city life from curb level — 60 seconds in the life of the city’s footwear. Is this a fashion parade or a comment on the make-up of the city? You decide.

Mark: In Hang Tough, James Schreyer shoots the current Queen Street scene, including panhandlers and anarcho-hippies, on an old B&W camera, making it feel like lost footage from a far gone era, and linking the scene with Yorkville of the ’60s.

RC: Based on family photographs, Courtship, a watercolour animation by Winnipeg’s Alison Davis, is a poignant look at the beginning and end of a relationship.
 
MB: Laura Zaylea’s Her House is a deliberately degraded sepia-toned film exploration of a cat, a chair, ancient wallpaper, and some stairs. It could have used a storyline, no matter how slight.

RC: Dystopia, a surreal animated film from Venezuelan director Igor Bastidas, owes a debt to Salvador Dali and Mad Magazine.

MB: In Haircut, by Terry O’Neill and Tara Cooper, a guy gets a haircut in an old fashioned barber shop. Not too interesting, but the camera work and eye popping colour show the filmmakers have talent.

RC: My favourite will probably Rob Ford’s least fave. FLIP HOP by Che Kothari with Elicser & Skamn is an ode to the art of graffiti.  This inventively shot and edited short will make your eyeballs dance.

MB: Shoeshop by Mai Phuong Pham takes place in Hanoi. A shopkeeper plays with his rooster in a shop with shoes piled high to the ceiling. Is the rooster a clever pun? Or dinner, perhaps? A thriller, sort of.

RC: In Fresh Start from Richard B. Pierre a series of optical illusions reignites a heartbroken man’s romantic life. Whimsical and sweet, it tells a complete story in 60 seconds with no sound. Nice.

MB: Woodland by Claire Bennett is a B&W animated tale straight out of the Brothers Grimm. Beautiful to look at — a frightening kid’s tale for all ages.  This one is a complete winner, and I would watch it again and again.

Warning: Virus films are contagious
In Focus by Richard Crouse
METRO CANADA
Published: September 06, 2011

If Jaws kept people out of the water, Contagion, this weekend’s all-star Towering Inferno of germ movies, will keep them from touching their faces.

The average person touches their face upwards of 3,000 times a day, and in the world of Contagion everything that comes in contact with your skin — an elevator button, a glass at an airport, a handrail on a ferry — could be fatal.

In this world of big diseases with little names like SARS and H1N1, germs are the new Frankensteins.

The movies have used microscopic germs and viruses as bogeymen for years.

In Warning Signs an experimental virus turns people (including Law and Order’s Sam Waterston) into rage filled maniacs, a plot echoed in Resident Evil when a virus gets loose in a secret facility. “The T-virus is protean,” says the Red Queen, “changing from liquid to airborne to blood transmission, depending on its environment. It is almost impossible to kill.”

The Thaw sees Val Kilmer unleash a prehistoric plague when he discovers a diseased Woolly Mammoth carcass. Eli Roth gave new meaning to the term cabin fever in his virus movie of the same name and the movie Doomsday sees most of Scotland devastated by a deadly germ.

Michael Crichton dreamt up the idea for The Andromeda Strain when he was still a medical student. The story of a deadly alien virus was inspired by a conversation with one of his teachers about the concept of crystal-based life-forms. His novel was a bestseller and the author — who would later go on to write the sci-fi classics Westworld and Jurassic Park — actually makes a cameo appearance in the hit 1971 film of the same name. He can be seen in the scene where the star of the movie, Dr. Hall (James Olson), is told to report to the government’s secret underground research facility.

Outbreak features germs of a more earthbound kind. Dustin Hoffman, Rene Russo, Morgan Freeman and Kevin Spacey star in this 1995 film about an outbreak of a fictional Ebola virus called Motaba spread in the States by a white-headed capuchin monkey. If the contagious simian looks familiar, no wonder. It’s Betsy who also appeared as Ross’s pet Marcel on Friends.

The sitcom spoofed Betsy’s work in the disaster film by showing the monkey on a poster for a fictional film called Outbreak 2: The Virus Takes Manhattan.

The cold and clinical
Reel Guys by Richard Crouse and Mark Breslin
METRO CANADA
Published: September 08, 2011

SYNOPSIS: The story begins with patient zero, Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow), an executive who carries a disease from Hong Kong to Minneapolis. Twenty-four hours later she is dead and a modern day plague has begun. Add in a meddlesome blogger (Jude Law), medical emergency personnel (Marion Cotillard, Laurence Fishburne and Kate Winslet) and widespread panic and you have SARS, Soderbergh style.

Ratings:
Richard: ** 1⁄2
Mark: *** 1⁄2

Richard: Mark, Contagion is The Towering Inferno with germs, an all-star disaster movie in the mode of Irwin Allen’s 1970s spectacles. It’s a generally more serious affair than the Allen cheesefest but they both beat with the same pulpy heart. Each movie takes itself a bit too seriously — although the scene that gives new meaning to the phrase, “picking Gwyneth Paltrow’s brain,” seems geared for gruesome laughs — and has too many characters and tries, with varying levels of success, to pluck at your heartstrings.

MB: Well, Paltrow has always had a cerebral approach to acting, and this movie proves it. And the “cerebral” approach extends to the rest of the movie. Unlike you, Richard, I found it a bit aloof and clinical, which fit the topic. After all the science fiction movies about bad viruses, this one is closer to actual science. And the movie arrives just in time for flu season. I had to suppress a cough at the theatre, lest I get roughed up.

RC: I get what you mean by the aloof and clinical remark to a point. The Lawrence Fishburne story is an effective medical procedural. It’s a bit clinical at times, like an episode of CSI set entirely inside the lab, but large parts of the story seemed unnecessary. A plot line featuring Marion Cotillard in China, for instance, could easily have been removed with no noticeable (except for the absence of the lovely Ms. Cotillard) effect and the blogger story feels forced.

MB: Usually movies of this type focus on one family and we see the crisis (zombies, war, Contagion) through their eyes. Soderbergh is working differently here, as if conducting a survey of how this pandemic might affect different types of people in various social groups. Only the Matt Damon thread seemed to have any real emotion; but even his story is underplayed. As far as the Jude Law blogger, I wouldn’t want to have missed his homemade Hazmat suit, which made him look like the cyborg he played in A.I. But it was fun to watch so many major actors in the small roles, especially Elliott Gould; and Demitri Martin, who barely had one line!

RC: I did enjoy the movie; I just thought it was a bit sloppy for a Soderbergh film. Having said that, however, it should do for touching your face what Jaws did for ocean side vacations.

MB: Ha! And not many people will crave Chinese food after the film. But I liked the movie, too, even if it sometimes felt like a grad thesis in epidemiology.

SJP’s flip flopping movie career
In Focus by Richard Crouse
METRO CANADA
Published: September 14, 2011

Sarah Jessica Parker is best known as Carrie Bradshaw, the sharp-tongued figurehead of Sex and the City, the long-running ode to post feminism and stylish clothes. But before Mr. Big and the Louboutins she was a movie star with some classics-- like Footloose--and some stinkers--like Dudley Do-Right --to her credit.

This weekend she's back on the big screen for the first time in a non-Sex and the City movie since the 2009 flop Did You Hear about the Morgans? In I Don't Know How She Does It she plays a version of Carrie all grown up with kids and a job in the financial sector. It's a far cry from her first big movie, Footloose.

She played Rusty, a role Parker called the "best friend of the pretty girl." The movie and its fancy footwork earned her a Best Young Supporting Actress in a Motion Picture Musical, Comedy, Adventure or Drama nomination at the Sixth Annual Youth in Film Awards.

A few forgettable films followed like Firstborn—described as a “heavy-handed suburban sitcom”—Girls Just Want to Have Fun—called “a total wannabe in the realm of 80s teen flicks”—and Flight of the Navigator, which features the voice of Pee Wee Herman as a robot.     

It wasn’t until she teamed with Steve Martin in L.A. Story that things started looking up. In this surreal look at life and love in Los Angeles Parker plays SanDeE*, a ditzy blonde who aspires to be a spokesmodel. “Um, it's just a model who speaks,” she explains. “You know, and she points at things like merchandise, you know, like a car or washer and dryer. Sometimes it's something really small, you know, like, like a book or fine art print.”

The movie broke her out of the teen movie mode and displayed her deft comic timing which was put to great use in Honeymoon in Vegas opposite Nic Cage. A few flops later she appeared in the critically acclaimed Ed Wood with Johnny Depp. Playing the much put-upon girlfriend of the world’s worst director, she calls the actors and crew of his film Bride of the Monster “the usual cast of misfits and dope addicts.”

Her most spectacular pre-Sex and the City role, however, is in Mars Attacks. In it she plays a flighty talk show host, who literally becomes a talking head when she is beheaded by aliens.

A strong, silent type
Reel Guys by Richard Crouse and Ned Ehrbar
METRO CANADA
Published: September 16, 2011

STAR RATINGS:

Richard: 4 ½ STARS
Ned: 5 STARS

SYNOPSIS: Ryan Gostling is Driver, a movie stunt driver/grease monkey by day and get-a-way wheelman by night. Befriending his neighbors Irene (Carey Mulligan) and young son Benicio (Kaden Leos) he makes a deal to drive get-a-way for some criminals to square a debt Irene’s husband ran up and safeguard the mother and child. When the deal goes bad he unwittingly becomes involved in a treacherous situation involving Irene’s recently paroled husband, one million dollars in cash and some angry mobsters.

Metro World News Hollywood Correspondent Ned Ehrbar sits in for Mark Breslin this week.

Richard: Ned, Gostling isn’t the easy charmer of Crazy, Stupid, Love, he plays Driver like a coiled spring. There hasn’t been a leading man this close-mouthed since Rudolph Valentino was the king of the silent screen. He’s a man of very few words, but his silence hints at an active inner life and his actions certainly speak to having a past. It’s a brave and strange performance, either emotionally shut down, or simply cool-as-a-cucumber, take your pick.

Ned: Definitely the strong silent type. But I guess if your best friend is a scheming, motor-mouthed deadbeat like Shannon (Bryan Cranston), you learn to keep your mouth shut. The expression Gosling has on his face most of the time seems just as likely to turn in to a smirk or have him burst into tears, making him fascinatingly impossible to read.
But he certainly knows when to put his foot down. So to speak. As electrifying has Gosling's toothpick-chewing Driver is, the performance that impressed me the most was Albert Brooks as former movie producer and current mob boss Bernie Rose. I never thought I'd the sight of the star of "Lost in America" would fill me with dread, but there you go.

RC: Albert Brooks walks away with the movie in his blood stained hands.  Gosling, Mulligan and Bryan Cranston are all great, but the character you remember is the ex-movie producer-turned-gangster Rose. He delivers what may be the best bad guy line of the year. When Gosling's character refuses to shake his hand because his hands are dirty from working Rose says, "So are mine." Great stuff.

NE: The only real criticism I'd make of Brooks is his performance makes Ron Perlman's character, Rose's less well-spoken partner Nino, stand out for being so conventional. But that's really about the only complaint I can put against the film. Every shot is artfully composed, and the tension-filled sequences of Gosling waiting for his getaway driving gigs to begin will make you reconsider how long you can hold your breath. And the music — I've been listening to the soundtrack every day since it was released last week.

RC: It’s funny that a movie that values silence so much—there are l-o-n-g pauses in the dialogue—has such a great soundtrack, but there you go, just another surprising thing about an unconventional but intriguing movie.

METRO MATH MOVIES
In Focus by Richard Crouse
METRO CANADA
Published: September 21, 2011

Two plus two equals four isn’t really a compelling idea for the plot of a movie, but filmmakers have often turned to mathematics as the basis for a story.

The Coen Brothers focused an entire film around the Uncertainty Principle in Quantum Mechanics. In A Serious Man Prof. Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) teaches his classes the principle, but desperately wants to believe, despite the equation, that life makes sense. It’s not a movie about wave-particle duality and the DeBroglie hypothesis—it’s a very human story about a man searching for answers—but the math is crucial to the story.
 
The same holds true for Moneyball, the new Brad Pitt movie opening this weekend. The story of a baseball team’s general manager who uses algorithms and computer-generated analysis called sabermetrics to draft his players isn’t strictly about the math, but the story wouldn’t be the same without it.  

A Beautiful Mind shows how mathematician John Nash, played by Russell Crowe in the role that won him an Oscar, would visualize math problems in order to identify patterns and solve equations.

The Hangover uses a similar trick. At a Las Vegas casino Alan (Zach Galifianakis) counts cards at a blackjack table as mathematical equations appear on the screen. In reality none of the equations—like the Fourier theory of additive synthesis—have anything to do with cheating at cards, but it’s a funny scene that inspired the facebook page “Alan from The Hangover makes math seem AWESOME.”

A love poem called The Square Root of Three appears in the raunchy comedy Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay. “I fear that I will always be a lonely number, like root three,” writes the lovelorn Kumar (Kal Penn), “A three is all that's good and right. Why must my three keep out of sight?”

The Da Vinci Code famously uses the Fibonacci sequence—1 - 1 - 2 - 3 - 5 - 8 - 13 – 21— as a key to unlock the movie’s mystery and Cube sees people trapped in a giant cube with mathematic problems as clues to their salvation.   

The John Astin comedy Evil Roy Slade features some frontier math. Schoolteacher Betsy asks Roy, “If you had six apples and your neighbor took three of them what would you have?”

"A dead neighbor and all six apples," he replies.

A different ball game
Reel Guys by Richard Crouse and Mark Breslin
METRO CANADA
Published: September 22, 2011

Synopsis:
Pitt plays Billy Beane, the real-life General Manager of the Oakland A’s. Faced with piecing together a pro team with a budget a fourth as large as the New York Yankees he breaks with tradition — using scouts, instinct and guts — to find a scientific method to build a team on the cheap. With a Yale trained economist (Jonah Hill) he creates sabermetrics, a combination of facts, figures and computer algorithms to recruit his team.

Ratings:
Richard: ****
Mark: ****

Richard: Mark, I liked this movie. The synopsis sounds very dry, but so did The Social Network before you actually sat down and watched it. I thought Moneyball took what could be the dry subject of baseball stats and spiced it up with complex, interesting characters, a compelling human story while leaving the usual sport’s movie clichés behind. What did you think?

Mark: I liked it, too. It’s a sports movie for people who don’t care about sports. What really struck me about it was that while most movies have heroes who believe in intuition and passion, the Brad Pitt character sees reason and science as the path to success. It’s kind of a Revenge Of The Nerds story, except that Pitt couldn’t look nerdy if he tried. Your comparison with The Social Network is apt, Richard, but Billy Beane is played as a much nicer person than Mark Zuckerberg.

RC: Maybe so, and better looking too. The movie moves at about half the speed of The Social Network but that’s OK; we’re not dealing with the fast moving world of cyber space here but the more relaxed pace of America’s favourite pastime. It’s a slow build, but the seventh inning stretch is exciting.

MB: Yes, two excellent set pieces towards the end of the movie: the rapid set of phone calls as players are swapped and dropped, and the montage of record breaking wins that come one after the other. But there’s an elegiac tone of melancholy that permeates the picture. For a couple of outsiders who turn out to be right, Pitt and his crony, played admirably by Jonah Hill, seem to derive little pleasure from their victories. This is not a sports movie in which guys high five each other constantly. They’re all a pretty gloomy bunch.

RC: This isn’t a baseball movie and despite the game footage, it’s not a sports movie either. Pitt and Hill, in a rare serious role, dominate the movie with their behind-the- scenes stories. Like The Social Network, Moneyball places the onus on the characters and not the technology that drives the story. We’ve seen baseball movies before, but we’ve never seen the game from this angle.

MB: And I can’t say enough good things about Pitt’s effortless acting or Jonah Hill’s wonderful supporting work. He no longer needs the Apatow factory to pay his rent!

Casting cancer
In Focus by Richard Crouse
METRO CANADA
Published: September 27, 2011

Cancer is no laughing matter, but a new film starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a young man afflicted with a rare and deadly form of the disease is both heartfelt and humorous.

50/50, based on the real life experiences of screenwriter Will Reiser, was written to show how he and his best friend Seth Rogen (who plays a character loosely based on himself in the film) dealt with the trauma of the diagnosis by trying “to find the humour in the situation [because] we were not good at talking about it at an emotional level.”

The result, which hits screens just in time for Breast Cancer Awareness Month, is touching, poignant and funny.

Here are some other inspirational films about cancer.

The Terry Fox Story, the 1983 HBO biopic of the cancer research activist and his Marathon of Hope, was shown in theatres in Canada and Britain, but was the first television film ever made for a cable network in the United States.

Starring Eric Fryer, an amputee who, like Fox, lost a leg to cancer, the movie details Fox’s goal to raise one dollar from every Canadian and create awareness of cancer issues.   

Also based on real life is The Doctor, a 1991 film starring William Hurt as a physician who becomes more compassionate after he is diagnosed with throat cancer. Based on the book A Taste of My Own Medicine: When the Doctor Becomes the Patient by Dr. Ed Rosenbaum, the movie co-stars Christine Lahti, Mandy Patinkin and Adam Arkin, all of whom also played doctors on Chicago Hope.

Other films show the different ways people react to a cancer diagnosis. In My Life Without Me, Sarah Polley plays a 23-year-old mother of two diagnosed with a terminal endometrial cancer.

Choosing to keep the news to herself, she makes a secret list of all the things she wants to do before she passes. From the sublime —“Tell my daughters I love them several times” — to the ridiculous — “Get false nails. And do something with my hair.” — the items on the list give her life purpose and meaning.

In Life as a House, Kevin Kline is George Monroe, an architect’s model builder with terminal cancer. The diagnosis forces him to look at his life — “Hindsight,” he says, “it’s like foresight without a future”— and rebuild his dilapidated house as well as his tattered relationships.

Anna Faris shines as lead in What’s Your Number?
Reel Guys by Richard Crouse and Mark Breslin
METRO CANADA
Published: September 29, 2011

SYNOPSIS: Anna Faris is Ally, a young Bostonian with a bad relationship track record. Weeks before her sister is to wed she reads an article that suggests the number of sex partners a woman has had will predict her romantic success later in life. More than 20, it says, and you have virtually no hope of settling down. She realizes she’s in the danger zone. To not go over 20 she revisits all her ex-boyfriends in hopes of
finding a husband.

Ratings
Richard: ***
Mark: **1⁄2

Richard: Mark, I’m not going to suggest What’s Your Number? is a great, or even good movie. It has a typical rom-com plot gussied up with some Judd Apatow style barbs and some gratuitous shots of its almost naked star but it also has Anna Faris, and for me that’s enough. She has crack comic timing and an unpredictable way with a line that takes a Kathryn Heigl level script and turns it into something watchable. What did you think?

Mark: Without Anna Faris, this movie would have gone directly to the DVD bin. She’s so good I was able to sit through the movie and actually laugh a few times. But I resent the movie for wanting it both ways: on the surface it seems like a raunch-com but underneath beats the heart of the typical story of a young woman who just wants to get married and settle down. And by the way, since when did bedding 20 guys in your entire life make anyone a slut? Maybe if they were all at once...

RC: Ha! Spoken like someone who has the updated edition of The Joy of Sex handy. It’s a strange movie that uses both the standard old cellphone switcheroo plot device and rape jokes. It doesn’t have the laughs of an Apatow movie or the heart... but once again, I’ll say it, it has Anna Faris.

MB: It also has Chris Evans, in a stock role that only his agent could love. But I did feel there was some genuine chemistry between him and Ms. Faris, especially in the scenes where they get hot ‘n’ sweaty. Romantic comedies like this one usually have a number of well acted, well written secondary characters, but they were completely absent from this picture, unless you count Andy Samberg’s great and ridiculous cameo.

RC: A love scene with a puppet and Andy Samberg is just one of the things — did I mention Anna Faris? — that make this movie almost special. There are just enough funny scenes (and shots of Evans’s abs) to almost make this an in-the-pocket rom com, but then the good stuff is followed by long stretches of by-the-book writing. It’s a shame to see this kind of potential wasted.
 
MB: I also resented the dated sexual politics of the movie. The male lead can sleep with as many partners as he likes and he’s a rake. If a woman like Faris tries the same thing, she’s a slut. This is old-school thinking, and shame on the movie for buying into it, and not challenging it.

Before Twilight, there was the Twilight Zone
In Focus by Richard Crouse
METRO CANADA
Published: October 04, 2011

If the premise of Real Steel sounds familiar, it’s because the last time you saw it was in black and white, coming to you from the Twilight Zone.

“The Twilight Zone episode called Steel with Lee Marvin, written by Richard Matheson, was in the ’60s,” says Real Steel director Shawn Levy.

“It was about a robot boxing promoter, a guy who owns robots and fights them for money. From there we beefed it up.”

In its original run the anthology series mixed and matched science fiction, comedy, supernatural and occult stories usually featuring ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances.

Hosted by Rod Serling, it was must see TV with a catchy theme song, which influenced thousands of writers and directors.

Three series and a movie have officially claimed the Twilight Zone name but dozens of other films have been either directly — or indirectly — inspired by the show.

Submitted for your approval, here is a list of movies that owe a debt to one of the greatest television shows ever:

The 1996 Kyle MacLachlan thriller The Trigger Effect was a reworking of a classic episode called The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street, which shows the effects of a power failure on a neighbourhood. Named the best Twilight Zone episode by Time Magazine, the show is still shown in classrooms to illustrate how lethal a mix intolerance and panic can be. The film pays tribute to its television roots by placing its main characters at the corner of Maple and Willoughby Streets, a reference to another famous episode, A Stop at Willoughby.

The Cameron Diaz movie The Box was a remake of Button, Button, a story from the series’ 1980 reinvention and Child’s Play, the movie which introduced the murderous doll Chucky seems to have looked to a 1963 episode called Living Doll for inspiration.

Two towering artists of modern horror can count the Twilight Zone as seminal to their work:

The show perfected the use of the twist ending, which M. Night Shyamalan would later incorporate into his work. His most famous film, The Sixth Sense has echoes of Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, a 1964 episode about a man who is revealed to be dead.

In Danse Macabre, Stephen King called the show “damn near immortal” and it’s been hinted that his novel Christine (later made into a movie) was inspired by the driverless car episode A Thing about Machines.

Clooney's Ides of March packs a political punch
Reel Guys by Richard Crouse and Mark Breslin
METRO CANADA
Published: October 7, 2011

SYNOPSIS: Ides of March focuses on Stephen Myers (Ryan Gosling), an idealistic campaign manager who will do anything to win, as long as he truly believes in the candidate. He is devoted to Governor Mike Morris (Clooney), a candidate in the Democratic primary. The first hour is spent getting into the campaign, learning the machinations of a big league primary run, the behind the scenes. Clooney sets up the themes of the piece--loyalty, ethics and the hard edge that comes from playing in the bigs--before taking a right turn--story wise, not ideologically--into different territory.

Star Ratings:

Richard: 3 ½ Stars
Mark: 4 Stars

Richard: Mark, I'm not going to give away the twist, but it is really then that the movie picks up steam. The first hour is good stuff, with its great acting from Paul Giamatti and Phillip Seymour Hoffman and a fascinating, if occasionally dry, look at life in the political fast lane. Then comes the blackmail, the meetings in darkened stairwells and double crossing journalists and it becomes something darker and more interesting.

Mark: Richard, the movie had me from the opening scenes. Well-acted, great script; a smart and sophisticated film about power and politics. I knew there had to be a twist, but I liked it even before the twist. Personally, I didn't find it dry at all, but I follow political campaigns the way that most people follow sports. But you're right; once it becomes a cat and mouse game it really gets exciting.

RC: To me it feels like a sexed up All the President’s Men, a movie filled with good looking movie stars that still packs a serious punch. Gosling impresses as he makes his way from idealism to stark realism, and Clooney looks like he was born to sit in an oval office, but it is the supporting cast who really shine. What did you think of Giamatti and Hoffman?

MB: Brilliant, both of them! But don't leave out Marisa Tomei and Evan Rachel Wood in smaller but crucial roles. Another thing about the movie that impressed me was that although the film was based on a play, it didn't feel "stagey" as a lot of these adaptations do. Clooney really opened it up and at no time did I think I was watching what had once been a play. And I'll put you on the spot- how many Oscar nominations do you think the movie will get?

RC: We’re looking at a few nominations overall and maybe a win for either Giamatti or Hoffman. They both reek of the backroom, the kind of guys who invisibly pull the strings. I also thought Clooney did some good work here. If his character leans any further left he'll topple over, but it’s not a love letter to the left. If anything the movie levels the playing field between the Democrats and Republicans, suggesting they’re cut from the same cloth.

MB: The movie raises Clintonian ethics issues- can a politician be deeply flawed in his private life and yet be the most skilled and humane legislator in the field? And then it goes further to suggest that moral corruption is inevitable. How could I not love this flick?

Horror-remake factory is working overtime
In Focus by Richard Crouse
METRO CANADA
Published: October 12, 2011

Hollywood is so into recycling you’d think Al Gore was running a studio and green-lighting movies. This year alone we’ve seen reimaginings, reboots and redos galore, from Straw Dogs and Footloose to Conan the Barbarian and The Mechanic.

It seems Tinseltown never met an idea it couldn’t endlessly recycle.

This is particularly true in the horror genre. In the last 12 months, Colin Farrell clipped on Chris Sarandon’s used fangs in a remake of Fright Night, and this weekend, The Thing is, according to IMDB, “a prequel to a remake of an adaptation of the novella Who Goes There?” Whatever it is, original it’s not.

Not that all original horror films are better than their remakes. David Cronenberg’s dark vision enhanced the story of The Fly, delivering the real scares that the campy 1958 version lacked, and 1978’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers is far creepier than its cinematic predecessor.

The Blob, the tale of what happens when germ warfare goes awry, has been made a couple of times.

The original is an unintentionally funny flick with more giggles than gore, but it inspired a sequel, a remake and, if the rumours are true, a bloody revamp by horror maestro Rob Zombie.

I have a soft spot for the low-budget charm of the 1958 version, although the 1988 reboot has a smarter-than-it-needs-to-be script co-written by Frank Darabont and a cool tagline — “Scream now! while you can still breathe!”

Count Dracula is one of the most portrayed characters on the big screen, having appeared in more horror films than any other famous monster of filmland. Eighty years after he first portrayed the vampire in the 1931 film Dracula, Bela Lugosi is still the most famous blood sucker of them all, although for my money, two British actors — Gary Oldham in Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Christopher Lee in Horror of Dracula — are tip-top Transylvanians.

Unlike his work in Scream, Wes Craven’s early films didn’t have any of the self-depreciating humour to go along with the scares.

His first movies were brutal, bloody and grim, usually all at once. Recent remakes of The Last House on the Left — rated R for “sadistic violence”  — and The Hills Have Eyes — “The lucky ones die first!”— don’t have quite the impact of the Vietnam-era originals but still require a strong stomach.

Footloose: Country-fried fun
Reel Guys by Richard Crouse and Mark Breslin
METRO CANADA
Published: October 13, 2011

SYNOPSIS: Ren (Kenny Wormald) is a big city kid forced by circumstance to move to the small town of Bomont, Ga., where dancing is outlawed. Ren, a former gymnast and dancing fool, challenges the law, butts heads with the local preacher (Dennis Quaid) and falls in love with the minister’s daughter Ariel (Julianne Hough). Will the town lift the ban? Will the love birds ever get to break dance in public?  

Ratings:
Richard: ***
Mark: **

Richard: Mark, Footloose is grittier than you would imagine a movie starring Ryan Seacrest’s girlfriend to be. The slickness normally associated with contemporary teen fare is mostly missing here, replaced with the steamy Southern feel that permeates director Craig Brewer’s other films. You won’t hear a line like, “You’re sexier than socks on a rooster,” in any of the Twilight movies.
 
Mark: Yes, Richard, the best thing about the movie is its authentic country-fried details. It doesn’t condescend to its blue collar characters and that’s to its credit. I thought the original was dated way back in the ’80s. Now, in an Internet world, the town that banned dancing would have been ridiculed all over America and the American Civil Liberties Union would have filed suit immediately. And why did the town ban teen dancing when the real problem was teen drinking?

RC: Because then the movie would have to have been called Intervention, and that’s a whole different story! Rebooting a well-loved classic is a tricky business. There are slight changes, Ren is now from Boston instead of Chicago, the tractor game of chicken from the original is now a bus race and the dancing has been updated but the upbeat rebellious core (and most of the songs) of the ’84 movie is intact.

MB: Speaking of dancing, I wish there had been more of it. The first dance scene in the parking lot had nice energy, Kenny Wormald’s solo when he dances off his anger in the warehouse was riveting, but then it takes a long time to get to the big finale, which I thought was a dud. The movie should have gone craaaaaaazzzzzy at that point, but everyone, including the choreographer, was on their best behaviour. And what did you think of the acting?

RC: I thought Wormald and Hough shone the brightest when they are in motion on the dance floor-— which isn’t often enough — but Miles Teller as Willard (played by Chris Penn in the original), Ren’s dance-challenged best friend steals the show on and off the dance floor.

MB: You could not be more right. Teller has the looks and presence of a young John Cusack. And only Dennis Quaid could take the thankless preacher role and imbue it with a sense of humanity. But in the end, it’s still a cheesy flick, even if this remake takes it from mild to medium cheddar.

Another makeover for the Musketeers  
In Focus by Richard Crouse
METRO CANADA
Published: October 18, 2011

What do beloved hoofer Gene Kelly and post-millennial wild man Charlie Sheen have in common?

The Hollywood stars both were “all for one, one for all” in a Three Musketeers movie.

Kelly was the heroic D’Artagnan in the 1948 version of the Alexandre Dumas story, while Sheen was  — unsurprisingly — the arrogant womanizer Aramis in 1993.  

The swashbuckling exploits of D’Artagnan and his three friends first appeared in print in 1844. Sixty years later a French film detailed their exploits for the first time.

Since then they have swashbuckled though an all-girl version called Barbie and the Three Musketeers, an old west adaptation starring John Wayne and bow wowed in an all canine edition called Dogtanian and the Three Muskethounds.  

This weekend the all-new Three Musketeers brings their swashbuckling style to the big screen for the 30th time in the last century.

The Gene Kelly Three Musketeers is probably the most accurate adaptation from page to stage, but the most entertaining — and star studded — has to be The Three Musketeers: The Queen’s Diamonds.

The 1973-era movie is bawdy, outrageous and action packed, with lavish set design and an even more lavish cast, including Michael York, Oliver Reed, Charlton Heston, Christopher Lee, Raquel Welch and Faye Dunaway.

Highlights include a chess game played with trained dogs and monkeys and some of the best sword fighting this side of an Errol Flynn movie.

The Musketeer (2001)  features plenty of swordplay, but amps up the action with crouching tiger choreography by martial arts master Xin Xin Xiong.

Starring Justin Chambers as D’Artagnan, the story will ruffle the giant feather plumes worn by Dumas purists but as an action movie — Roger Ebert wrote, “Occasionally the action is interrupted by dialogue scenes” — it is the most exciting of the recent Musketeers movies.  

Occasionally the Musketeers have appeared as supporting characters.

In 1998’s The Man in the Iron Mask, the aging D’Artagnan and his posse — played by Gabriel Byrne, Jeremy Irons, John Malkovich and Gérard Depardieu — come out of retirement to rid France of an evil king, Louis XIV and replace him with his twin brother, both played by Leonardo DiCaprio.

Based on Dumas’s novel Count of Bragelonne the story was also the basis for The Fifth Musketeer, a 1979 movie with the unlikely cast of Beau Bridges as Louis XIV and Alan Hale Jr. (best known as The Skipper from Gilligan’s Island) as Musketeer Porthos.

Horror hat trick
Reel Guys by Richard Crouse and Mark Breslin
METRO CANADA
Published: October 20, 2011

SYNOPSIS: The new film is a prequel to the first films and follows the template set by the first two movies. Set in the VHS era of 1988, recurring characters Katie and Kristi Rey are little girls living with their mother (Lauren Bittner) and her boyfriend (Christopher Nicholas Smith), a wedding video editor. When they start hearing strange sounds in their new house, he sets up video cameras to find out what’s keeping them up at night. Is the boyfriend obsessed or is the house possessed?  

Ratings:
Richard: ***1⁄2
Mark: ***

Richard: Mark, I have to say, I’m a bit of a sucker for things that go bump in the night and even though the Paranormal Activity series should be a little long in the tooth by now, it still made me jump. Are you as big a fraidy cat as I am?

Mark: I usually pop a Xanax before I see a horror film so I can better appreciate the movie for its technical merits. But I didn’t for this one. And yes, the movie did frighten me, but only in the last 15 minutes, which were terrific. I found it a bit too long getting going and had a bit too much dark humour to create that air of dread right off the top. The first two installments of the franchise really creeped me out; this one is better made, but didn’t give me the punch until the end.

RC: This one is 99 per cent anticipation, one per cent payoff, but the one per cent is pretty good. I think the low-fi feel of the movies — the picture really does look like home video most of the time — combined with really natural performances from unknown actors make the Paranormal Activity movies feel like real “found footage” movies. Most movies of the genre are a little too slick. These aren’t. There’s no music, no stars and it feels like you’re watching something that could be real ... almost.
   
MB: Yes, and that’s not easy. It takes real filmmaking talent to look this artless. One thing I love about the series, and this movie in particular, is how much of the plot takes place at the edges of the screen. You really have to pay attention to see what’s really happening in the frame. And the static takes almost feel like some European art film, although the technical innovation of the oscillator-cam in this film is inspired. I was also pleased that the movie had a backstory and plot, although, cleverly, you don’t realize it until the movie is done.

RC: This one is a prequel, featuring the recurring characters Katie and Kristi Rey as creepy little kids. Not sure what’s next though ... maybe Paranormal Activity in Outer Space?

MB: Well, before the screening, we were warned that to prevent privacy, the theatre would be continuously scanned using night vision technology.  Paranormal Activity 4, anyone?

Popping Shakespeare’s collar
In Focus by Richard Crouse
METRO
Published: October 25, 2011

A new movie called Anonymous asks a question that has kept academics debating for decades. Was it actually William Shakespeare, of Stratford-upon-Avon, who wrote the plays and poems attributed to him?

The film suggests it was Edward De Vere, Earl of Oxford (Rhys Ifans) who actually put pen to paper.

Then to hide his identity he hired a semi-employed actor named William Shakespeare (Rafe Spall) to act as his literary beard.
 
There is no evidence to support the movie’s theory but at least one detail is consistent with history — the likeness of Shakespeare. Even though no painting of the Bard was done during his lifetime, the 1632 Martin Droeshout portrait showing the writer with, “a huge head, placed against a starched ruff,” has become the accepted version of his appearance in art and on film.

Shakespeare and his ruffed collar has popped up in everything from The Simpsons’s 2007 videogame to the Bugs Bunny cartoon A Witch’s Tangled Hare.

Playing the Bard as a lusty poet in Shakespeare in Love made Joseph Fiennes a star, but he was far from the first actor considered for the role. Daniel Day-Lewis and Kenneth Branagh both turned it down before Ralph Fienne’s little brother snapped it up.

The movie, about how Shakespeare’s love affair with Viola De Lesseps (Gwyneth Paltrow) helped him overcome writer’s block and pen Romeo and Juliet in her honour, earned 13 Oscar nominations and won seven, including Best Picture and Best Actress for Gwyneth.    

One of the stranger depictions of Shakespeare on screen came in Jean-Luc Godard’s King Lear.

Called “Godard’s most insane, headache-inducing and inscrutable movie,” by one critic, it features Peter Sellars (not the Pink Panther actor, but an avant guard theatre director) as William Shakespeare Junior the Fifth.

In the movie’s post Chernobyl world, all of the world’s culture has been lost and it’s up to folks like Shaksper Junior to try recreate it. Searching for inspiration he scribbles familiar phrases in his notebook — “Love’s Labors Lost. As you wish. As you wish. As you wish. As you witch. As you which? As you watch. As you watch…” — as he tries to piece together the works of his long lost relative.

Best remembered as the Woody Allen movie you haven’t seen — the comedian plays Mr. Alien in an uncredited cameo — King Lear is a head scratcher, even for the often unfathomable Godard.

To see, or not to see
Reel Guys by Richard Crouse and Mark Breslin
METRO CANADA
Published: October 27, 201

SYNOPSIS: With a plot that mixes and matches themes from history and Shakespeare’s plays, “Anonymous” uses the backdrop of the struggle for succession between the Tudors and the Cecils as the Essex rebellion moves against Queen Elizabeth I (Vanessa Redgrave) to set the scene for the debut of Shakespeare’s plays. But were they actually written by Shakespeare?  The movie supposes it was Edward De Vere, Earl of Oxford (Rhys Ifans)—the Anonymous of the title—who penned plays attributed to William Shakespeare.

Star ratings:
Richard: 4 Stars
Mark: 3 Stars

Richard: Mark, this is a sprawling story with many twists and turns. The downside is the film's sketchy casting. In flashbacks the queen and Edward appear to be the same age, but later after a major twist, are revealed to be sixteen years apart. This kind of lack of attention to detail makes it difficult to follow the story in the first hour. Soon enough, however, all the players are straightened away and the pleasures of the story take hold.

Mark: Sorry, but is the authorship of Shakespeare's plays a burning issue for anyone? Whenever they try to make Shakespeare "sexy" I want to hurl. And yet, there were a lot of things to like about the movie. Pageantry geeks will swoon for the production design, theatre buffs will groove to the re-creations of the Elizabethan stage, and middle age women will get hot flashes at all the bodice ripping. But why was the story so hard to follow?

RC:  It's hard to follow because it assumes we know the political history and can juggle an abundance of powdered wigs with royal titles, many of whom kind of look alike. Having said that though, I think Ifans is terrific here. A little of him usually goes a long way but he's doing some interesting work here.

MB: Is it racist to say that all British fops in the same facial hair look alike? I hope not... You're right about Ifans- he's the soul of a very messy movie and anchors it with his sad eyes. Lots of good acting, (David Thewlis, Joely Richardson, and Sebastian Armesto as Ben Johnson) and lots of good overacting, too, from the rest of the cast. One of the things that will jolt most viewers is the way Shakespeare himself is portrayed- as a murderous, scheming, illiterate; so antithetical to our reverence for the man that I found it quite unnerving.

RC: I don't think Anonymous has much to do with historical fact--there is no real life evidence that the Earl of Oxford penned the plays--it's just a palette for a twisted tale about how politics and art intersect, and the written word's ability to instigate change.

MB: I know that's what the movie aims for, but it doesn't quite pull it off. There are two stories here: one is a literary biopic, the other a political thriller, and they don't exactly mesh. But I think it's a movie that would become clearer after a second viewing.

Harold and Kumar put the ‘X’ in Xmas
In Focus by Richard Crouse
METRO CANADA
Published: November 01, 2011

The week after Halloween is a strange time to be writing about Christmas movies. Almost like cooking a Thanksgiving dinner in July.

But if department stores can display Lady Gaga masks beside Christmas ornaments and Hollywood can release A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas while we’re still digesting our Halloween haul, I can write about some movies that put the tinsel in Tinsel Town.

Harold and Kumar isn’t your average Christmas movie.

I doubt Jimmy Stewart would have considered burning down the family Christmas tree part of his wonderful Yuletide life, but Harold and Kumar aren’t the first to put the X into Xmas.

Many movies are set at Christmastime — the Brat Packer flick Less Than Zero features an LA Yule, and Die Hard takes place on Christmas Eve — but I’m thinking of movies that use the holidays as a springboard for the action.

The raunchiest Christmas movie has to Bad Santa, starring Billy Bob Thornton as a boozed-up, thieving department store Kris Kringle.

Unsentimental and crude, Bad Santa is bound to make the elves choke on their eggnog.

Dan Aykroyd also played a less than cuddly Santa in Trading Places. Drunk, disorderly and waving a gun around, he even has a fish hidden in his fake beard.

Unwrap Mixed Nuts, the 1994 Nora Ephron black comedy, and you’ll find Christmas tree theft, lunatics and the worst Christmas gift ever: a dead body.

Staying up on Christmas Eve, waiting for Santa to come, will be easy after watching Black Christmas. You’ll be too scared to sleep!

The tinsel terror about a mysterious killer in the attic is considered to be the first modern slasher movie.

Gremlins mixes horror, humour and ho ho ho’s. Set at Christmas, the story of little creatures who turn nasty when wet features a gory story about a missing father, a chimney, an overstuffed Santa suit and the punchline, “And that’s how I found out there was no Santa Claus.”

A very merry Crime Christmas can be had in both The Ref and Reindeer Games.

In The Ref, cat burglar Dennis Leary soon regrets breaking into the home of squabbling couple Kevin Spacey and Judy Davis on Christmas Eve.

Reindeer Games sees Ben Affleck reluctantly rob a casino at Christmas.

The movie is such a lump of coal that one of its stars had this to say about it: “That was a bad, bad, bad movie,” said Charlize Theron.

Stealing laughs in Tower Heist
Reel Guys by Richard Crouse and Mark Breslin
METRO CANADA
Published: November 03, 2011 8

SYNOPSIS: Allan Alda is Arthur Shaw, a Bernie Madoff character whose Ponzi scheme defrauded his clients out of millions of dollars. Among those burned were the employees of his luxury high rise. Having lost his pension plan, the building’s manager Josh Kovacs (Ben Stiller) concocts a plan to break into Shaw’s apartment and steal his $20 million stash. When his posse of employees prove to be less than criminally adept, Kovacs brings in an old friend and ex-con, Slide (Eddie Murphy), to help.  

Ratings:
Richard: **1⁄2
Mark: ***

Richard: Mark, it’s nice to see Eddie Murphy in a movie that allows him to drop his beloved family entertainer guise and bring back some of the bravado that we loved in movies like 48 Hours. It’s just too bad the movie feels like it was made 30 years ago. Despite its Bernie Madoff storyline it feels old-fashioned.

Mark: Of course it feels old-fashioned. It’s an Eddie Murphy movie circa 1990. If not for the hairstyles, you could almost believe it was an unreleased film from that era finally freed from some legal limbo. But you have to admit, it’s great to see Murphy doing the kind of work he should have been doing over the last two decades. So, sure the plot feels hackneyed. But it’s the fine ensemble cast that makes this thing click. My favourite? Matthew Broderick. Yours, Richard?

RC:  For me it was Michael Pena. Great comic timing, perpetual dazed look on his face. He and Murphy were the high points for me. It was interesting, however, to see Ben Stiller as the straight man to Murphy’s wisecracks. Loved hearing Murphyisms like, “I will blow your face clean off your face!”

MB: Well, I haven’t liked Stiller in anything for quite a while, and I appreciated his comic restraint here, penance perhaps for all his shameless mugging in those Night at The Museum movies. I will admit the whole enterprise does have a retro vibe, including Tea Leoni and Alan Alda in key roles, but Gabourey Sidibe freshens up the cast in a comic turn a million light years from what she did in Precious.

RC: She is a pleasant surprise. I just couldn’t shake the feeling that the actual robbery, despite a few twists here and there, was completely unbelievable. I don’t mind suspending part of my disbelief but the sheer lunacy of the crime took me out of the movie.

MB: I went with it because it was fun, if not credible. But I must say I enjoy the irony of any film that critiques the class system in America starring actors each worth half a billion dollars.

Playing multiple roles must be twice the fun
In Focus by Richard Crouse
METRO CANADA
Published: November 08, 2011

Ben Affleck did it. So did Eddie Murphy and Charlie Chaplin. Heck, Alec Guinness did it eight times, including once as a woman.

This weekend in Jack and Jill, Adam Sandler adds his name to the list of actors who have played multiple roles in the same film.

“In Jack and Jill I play me,” says Sandler, “and I play my twin sister. The man version of me is doing OK; he has a family out in L.A. The twin-sister version of me lives out in the Bronx and comes out to L.A. for Thanksgiving and then refuses to leave.”

The idea of playing more than one role in a movie dates back to the Mary Pickford 1918 weepy Stella Maris.

In it she plays the wealthy title character and the uneducated orphan Unity Blake. The studio balked at her insistence on playing both roles, but Pickford insisted.

As Stella she was photographed like a glamorous movie star, but as Unity she wore unflattering makeup and was shot from her right, less photogenic, side. Scenes where the two characters shared the screen were achieved through double exposure.

Since then everyone from Mel Brooks (he was President Skroob and Yogurt in Spaceballs), to David Carradine (remember him in Circle of Iron as The Blind Man, Monkeyman, Death, and Changsha?) to Peter Sellers (who played as Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, President Merkin Muffley, and Dr. Strangelove in Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb) have taken on multi-roles.

Perhaps because of their sketch comedy backgrounds, Eddie Murphy and Mike Myers often take on various roles in their films, but Alec Guinness, the actor best known in North America as Jedi knight Obi-Wan Kenobi, must hold the record for character changes in one feature-length movie. In Kind Hearts and Coronets he plays no less than eight characters. In an acting tour de force he’s easily recognizable in each part, but doesn’t repeat himself from character to character. Instead he carefully constructs each, from the happy-go-lucky young photographer to the window-smashing suffragette Lady Agatha.  

Rivaling Guinness’s achievement is Buster Keaton who played every part — including a stagehand, a dance troupe, a full band and every member in the audience — in the 1921 short film The Play House.
To top it off he also took credit for every crew job including editor, director, writer and cameraman.

‘Tis the season for film
Reel Guys by Richard Crouse and Mark Breslin
METRO CANADA
Published: November 09, 2011

The Christmas movie season promises a little something for everyone. There’s family movies like The Muppets, Oscar bait like My Week with Marilyn, and even a silent movie in wide release! This week the Reel Guys look ahead to their most anticipated movies of November and December.  

Richard: Mark, the film critic in me really wants to see Carnage, the Roman Polanski adaptation of the Braodway hit about two couples who get together to discuss an altercation between their children. I expect the all-star cast’s — Kate Winslet, John C. Reilly, Christoph Waltz and Jody Foster —heavy-duty acting chops may earn an Oscar nod or two and have heard there’s even Oscar buzz for Polanski. What are you most excited about?
   
Mark: Richard, I’d like to agree with you about Carnage, but I saw the play on Broadway and wasn’t impressed. However, I like everything Roman Polanski has ever done — well, ahem, almost everything — and maybe this will be an example of a movie improving on the play. I am looking forward to Young Adult, and here’s why: 1. screenplay by Diablo Cody. 2. directed by Jason Reitman. 3. starring Charlize Theron. 4. lots of bad behaviour. I also look forward to the new installment of Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. Am I a fool?

RC: Not at all! I’m excited to see what Brad Bird, the Pixar wizard behind The Incredibles, can do with live action and a few hundred million dollar budget. I’m also curious to see how the Cold War paranoia of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy plays at Christmas, 2011. I want to know if playing in the Potterverse for the last few years has dulled Gary Oldham’s edge. I’m hoping for some of his old-school Romeo is Bleeding attitude!

MB: I don’t know... those John Le Carre adaptations can be pretty dry. What about My Week With Marilyn? Sounds pretty juicy to me.

RC: It’ll certainly have some juice with Oscar voters I think. The Academy loves biopics and while Michelle Williams might not have been the obvious choice to play Marilyn Monroe, the early word is that she might be in line to win the Oscar that Marilyn always wanted in real life. I think Williams’s biggest competition will be Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher in the Iron Lady.

MB: And the trailer for the Streep film is so good that it makes me want to line up for the movie today! And it would make a perfect double bill with the J. Edgar Hoover biopic at a Tea Party conference.

Much ado about penguins
In Focus by Richard Crouse
METRO CANADA
Published: November 15, 2011

At the start of the animated penguin picture Surf’s Up, Cody Maverick (the voice of Transformer’s star Shia LaBeouf) takes a shot at another cartoon tuxedoed bird movie.

 Asked if he has any other skills besides surfing. Cody sarcastically says, “Like what? Singing and dancing?”

Of course, he’s referring to Happy Feet, the Oscar winning movie about an Emperor Penguin who can’t find his soul mate the usual way — through song — so he uses his other talent — tap dancing.

The musical penguins of Happy Feet shim shammed their way to huge box office in 2006, and will paddle and roll their way back into theatres again this weekend in Happy Feet Two.

For a while, it seemed like you couldn’t swing a herring without hitting a penguin at the movies.

March of the Penguins, a real-life look at the migration march of Emperor penguins to their traditional breeding ground, was a left field hit in 2005. The winner for Best Documentary not only out grossed all the nominees for Best Picture that year — it took in $77 million vs. $75 million for Brokeback Mountain — but also became the second highest grossing theatrical documentary after Fahrenheit 9/11.

It was such a huge hit it inspired an R-rated parody, Farce of the Penguins. Featuring the voices of Samuel L. Jackson, Jason Alexander and Christina Applegate, it’s an R-rated spoof that imagines what sex-starved penguins might talk about on the 70 mile walk to their mating grounds.

“I am tired of the club scene,” says one penguin. “So are the baby seals!” replies another.

More family friendly was Madagascar, the story of four Central Park Zoo animals who get stranded on the island of Madagascar. The movie featured a large menagerie of characters, but the zoo’s penguins, Skipper, Kowalski, Rico and Private, proved to be audience favourites.  They have most of the movie’s best lines — on landing in Africa one of the flightless birds says, “Africa? That ain't gonna fly!” — and were featured in a short film, The Madagascar Penguins in a Christmas Caper, a TV series and video games.       

Probably the most famous penguin character in the movies is Oswald Cobblepot a.k.a. The Penguin, as played by Danny DeVito in Batman Returns.

This super villain is human, but dresses like a penguin, eats raw fish and tries to conquer Gotham with an army of specially trained penguins.

A ‘biting’ battle
Reel Guys by Richard Crouse and Mark Breslin
METRO CANADA
Published: November 17, 2011

Team Werewolf: Need some convincing to get hairy with Richard? Ginger Snaps and Dog Soldiers expand on the werewolf story. The Howling and An American Werewolf in London both contain Reagan-era thrills. And, of course, no lycanthropic list would be complete without The Wolf Man.

Team Vampire: Looking for a good vampire flick to sink your teeth into? Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula has thrills and atmosphere. But a more unusual choice would have to be Shadow of the Vampire, one creepy flick. For over-the-top wild fun, nothing beats Nic Cage as a reluctant vampire in Vampire's Kiss.

Richard: Mark, on the occasion of the release of Breaking Dawn, the next-to-last in the Twilight saga, it’s time we finally debated the burning question on the lips of every Twihard — who would win in a fair fight between a vampire and werewolf? I’m on Team Werewolf for this one. Big fangs coupled with hot-blooded animal instincts trumps the oversized molars of the nocturnal undead any day (or night for that matter).
 
Mark: Fighting each other, Richard, you might have a point. But in a fight against humans, I have to say I’m a vampire man. You can spot a werewolf a mile away, enough time to run for cover. But vampires can be undetectable, until it’s too late. They can seem perfectly normal until they open their mouths, kind of like members of the Tea Party. It really comes down to the relative dangers of brute force versus seduction, doesn’t it?
 
RC: Perhaps so. Bella, the vampire groupie of Twilight, certainly finds the blood-suckers irresistible, but I’d suggest Jack Nicholson, as the hirsute gentleman in Wolf, is much more of a charmer than the vampires of Near Dark. They don’t seduce as much as manipulate, taunt and slaughter their victims in the nastiest of ways.

MB: The vampires in Near Dark should be thrown out of the Vampire Union! But if you’re using Jack Nicholson as an example of the urbane, more mature werewolf, let me submit Frank Langella in Dracula and George Hamilton in Love at First Bite as vampiric counterparts. The sadder but wiser vampire for me! But really, Richard, who would you rather meet in a dark alley? Kate Beckinsale or Benicio Del Toro? Case ... closed ... I think.
 
RC: Hmmm… I’ll take Kate, but remember Underworld? She played a beautiful vampire but who was she in love with? A werewolf. I rest my case. In the battleground of love chalk one up for the werewolves. To answer our original question I checked with the authority — the internet — and found this: “In a fair fight (no weapons) a werewolf will destroy a vampire in a few seconds (unless the vampire is smart and tries to run away).” I rest my case.
 
MB: Ahh, but the vampire is nothing if not smart —way smarter than the werewolf — smart enough not to engage in a fight that he cannot win. But I’ll concede to you on this one. I’ll be in the corner ... sulking ... with Kate Beckinsale to give me solace.

The orphan adoption
In Focus by Richard Crouse
METRO CANADA
Published: November 23, 2011

The new Martin Scorsese film is the director’s first PG rated film in 18 years. Hugo is a handsome 3D kid’s flick featuring adventure, a broken robot, a toy store owner and one of the mainstays of Central Casting—an orphan.

There are all kinds of on-screen orphans, some lovable—The Jungle Book’s Mowgli, Harry Potter—some not-- Hannibal Lecter, Darth Vader—but few have been as memorable as Oliver Twist.

The younster first captured people’s imaginations one-hundred-and-seventy-three years ago as the title character in Charles Dickens’s second book and debuted on film in 1908. Since then there have been at least eleven adaptations of the story of an urchin who famously asked his cruel workhouse foreman for more gruel with the words, “Please sir, I want some more.”

The most famous version of the story has to be Oliver!, a splashy 1968 all-singing-all-dancing edition which film critic Pauline Kael said was one of the few film adaptations of a stage musical superior to the original stage show.

Oliver had it rough. Much rougher than Little Orphan Annie, the perky red-haired waif adopted by the über -wealthy Daddy Warbucks but for the actress who played her in the 1982 movie Annie there were some unpleasant moments.

The curly red wig Aileen Quinn wore was so itchy a specially designed comb had to be created to give her some relief and in order to get Annie’s dog Sandy to realistically kiss her the prop master rubbed Alpo all over her face. Still, Quinn says, “I just remember having the best time.”

Unlike our next orphans Oliver and Annie were decidedly earthbound ragamuffins but the movies have seen lots of alien children abandoned on our planet. In Escape to Witch Mountain Tony and Tia Malone’s psychic abilities made them standouts at the orphanage and the moniker Clark Kent was the name his human adoptive parent’s gave to Kal-El. You know him best as Superman.

Superman wasn’t the only superhero orphan, however. The death of Bruce Wayne’s parents at the hand of the Joker prompted him to become the Caped Crusader. “You made me,” he grumbles to the parent’s killer in Batman.

Finally, Peter Parker’s parents were Richard and Mary, CIA agents killed in the line of duty. Rumor has it they will appear in the 2012 reboot, The Amazing Spider-Man, played by Campbell Scott and Embeth Davidtz.

‘Marilyn’ charms
Reel Guys by Richard Crouse and Mark Breslin
METRO CANADA
Published: November 24, 2011

SYNOPSIS: Based on two books by Colin Clark, The Prince, The Showgirl and Me and My Week with Marilyn, the movie’s main character isn’t Monroe, but Clark (Eddie Redmayne), the third assistant director on The Prince and the Showgirl starring Sir Laurence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh) and Monroe. It was the summer of 1956 and Clark was a 23-year-old who, like the rest of the planet, was smitten with Monroe. The two form a bond, and for a few days it looks like his love for her might actually be reciprocated.

Ratings:
Richard: ***1⁄2
Mark: ***

Richard: Mark, almost 50 years after her death, Marilyn Monroe is still one of the best-known actresses in the world and yet Michelle Williams manages to bring something new to someone we thought we knew so well. Even though I liked this movie and thought that Monroe’s off-screen life, as dramatic as anything she ever did on screen, is tenderly portrayed, the story isn’t as interesting as the performance. What did you think?

Mark: This movie is definitely NOT the Marilyn Monroe biopic. It’s a small, charming film about the havoc the sexiest woman in the world can have on those around her. The movie’s fabulous first half sets up the characters, milieu, and conflicts, but then doesn’t have anywhere to go. So the story is weak, as you say, but its pleasures are in the fine details, including Michelle Williams’ amazing portrayal of Ms. Monroe, and the wonderful sense of time and place on a film set circa 1956. And I’ve never seen Kenneth Branagh better!

RC: Branagh is very good, but when placed against Williams’s Monroe his work seems to lack the soul she brings to every frame of film. He does have many of the film’s best lines, however. His delivery of lines like, “Trying to teach Marilyn to act is like teaching Urdu to a badger,” is letter perfect and adds much to the movie but I think the Oscar nomination here will go to Williams.

MB: The movie belongs to her, no question. But there are so many finely etched smaller parts that flesh out the movie. Judi Dench as the regal Dame Sybil Thorndike and Zoe Wanamaker as prickly acting coach Paula Strasberg are both exceptional. But why was the Arthur Miller part so underwritten? And were you impressed by Eddie Redmayne as the boy who becomes a man?

RC: His story should have been titled The Week I Almost Made It with Marilyn. It might have spiced up his role a bit. He’s good, I think, but when Williams and Branagh are on screen he disappears. He’s a main character but unfortunately for him he’s saddled with a quiet role in a movie filled with bravura performances.

MB: I thought the movie was quite funny in places, by the way; the clash of acting styles between the Brits and the Yanks made for good fun, as did Branagh’s growing exasperation with his star. But the abrupt turnaround at the end of the movie where he gushes over Marilyn’s “natural, intuitive talent” seemed forced and false.

Helen Mirren got it right when she said ‘flesh sells’
In Focus by Richard Crouse
METRO CANADA
Published: November 30, 2011

A website called Mr. Skin notes that Helen Mirren is the only celebrity to appear nude on screen in five different decades.

The Oscar winner became the first British actress to appear in the buff in a mainstream film in 1969, when she was just 24 years old.

On her revealing scene in Age of Consent she said, “Flesh sells. People don’t want to see pictures of churches. They want to see naked bodies.”

Since then Mirren has doffed her clothes several more times, and become one of the most acclaimed actresses of her age.

Appearing nude doesn’t appear to have hurt her career with the public or the Academy, which is probably makes Michael Fassbender, the very naked star of this weekend’s Oscar contender Shame, very happy.

In a performance that bares not only his body but his soul as well, Fassbender might become the most unclothed star to ever be nominated for Best Actor.

 But he wouldn’t be the first star to go naked as a jaybird for their craft and take home Oscar gold.

Kate Winslet says there was so much nudity in The Reader, which earned her an Oscar, because the story required it. But, she added in the same interview, she thinks people might be tired of looking at her body.

The first nude film scenes happened almost 100 years before Fassbender drop trou.

In 1915’s Inspiration an actress named Audrey Munson undressed and for the next 20 years stars regularly exposed their hidden talents.

Then came the Hays Code, which banned nudity from the major studios well into the 1960s.

 One of the first big stars to break the code was Jayne Mansfield, whose topless role in Promises! Promises! landed her on the Top 10 list of Box Office Attractions for 1963.

Since then many A-listers have taken it off for their art.

Recently both Amanda Seyfried and Julianne Moore stripped in Chloe. Anne Hathaway and Michelle Williams wore their birthday suits in Love and Other Drugs and Blue Valentine respectively.

But it’s not just women exposing themselves.

Gerard Butler let it all hang out in Mrs. Brown and Gamer and Daniel Craig is buck naked in Love is the Devil.

Producer Judd Apatow promises more male nudity in his films.

“It really makes me laugh in this day and age that anyone is troubled by seeing any part of the human body.”

Go ask Oscar
Reel Guys by Richard Crouse and Mark Breslin
METRO CANADA
Published: December 2, 2011

So many movies were released last weekend for American Thanksgiving it seems like there weren’t any left for this week. With only limited release new films in theatres the Reel Guys have decided to look at what’s at the multiplex already that could take home Oscar gold.

Richard: Mark, for me right now the frontrunner for Best Actress is Michelle Williams. Her take on Marilyn Monroe in My Week with Marilyn is so eerily accurate it transcends mimicry. She really becomes Marilyn. I say right now, because The Iron Lady hasn’t hit theatres yet. Word is the only way Williams can beat Meryl Streep playing Margaret Thatcher is if Streep decides not to allow herself to be nominated. Are their any surefire bets for you?

MB: Even with Meryl in the race, Williams will win because Hollywood loooooooooves Marilyn Monroe, and Thatcher is an unsympathetic figure to a liberal community. I think George Clooney could be a lock for The Descendants. It's the most nuanced work he's ever done, and I think there's a feeling it's time he got that statue for his cumulative body of work. Who else might challenge him?

RC: I think Clooney deserves an Oscar for just being Clooney. He's our generation's Cary Grant and I loved that he didn't rely on his usual charm and likability in The Descendants, but how cool would it be if Ryan Gosling gave him a run. He had a great year with three high profile interesting roles to choose from. Me, I'd give it to him for his brilliant, menacing work in Drive.

MB: Brilliant, yes. But he won't win. The movie will be too violent for older academy voters. But I sense a strong contender from the same movie for Best Supporting Actor: Albert Brooks. I love when comedians play bad guys and Brooks was the most memorable baddie of the year.

RC: I would love Albert Brooks to win simply to hear his acceptance speech. If it's anything like his twitter feed it would be hilarious. I would also love to see Hugo have a shot at Best Picture. It's perfect for the Academy. It 's a big beautiful movie about the magic of movies. It would be one for the history books; a kid's flick directed by Martin Scorsese as the year’s big winner.

MB: The academy is always biased against kid’s pictures even if it's one as magical as Hugo. Maybe it will be one of those instances where it won't win for Best Picture but Scorsese will take home the Best Direction award. Everyone would have to admit the direction was nothing short of ravishing.

Sitting through a familiar film
In Focus by Richard Crouse
METRO CANADA
Published: December 07, 2011

Wikipedia says “babysitting is commonly performed as an odd job by teenagers for extra money.” While that is undoubtedly the stereotype, the movies have shown us that babysitters come in all shapes and sizes.

This weekend Jonah Hill plays an irresponsible college student who reluctantly looks after his neighbour’s wild kids.  How wild is it? Well, let’s put it this way; I don’t think Nanny McPhee had a “red band” trailer.

If it sounds familiar, it should. Twenty-four years ago babysitter Elisabeth Shue led her young charges through the streets of Chicago in Adventures in Babysitting. At one point they end up on a nightclub stage. The leader of the house band, played by blues legend Albert Collins, says, “Nobody leaves this place without singing the blues.”

After an awkward pause she improvises the Babysitting Blues.

“It’s so hard babysitting these guys,” she sings. “And they should be in bed,” replies the guitar player over a classic blues-rock riff.

It’s a fantasy, but then again, babysitters have often been the subjects of fantasy. Mary Poppins is a mythical character, a “practically perfect in every way” nanny who knows how to do the right thing in every situation. Kind of like a Victoria Age Super Nanny. In The Babysitter, however, Alicia Silverstone was a much different kind of fantasy child-minder.

This 1995 thriller about a babysitter who becomes the object of obsession for not only the young boys she looks after but for their father as well, is more chilling than titillating. The ads hinted at some nudity from star Silverstone, but in reality she refused to do the film unless the nude scenes where removed.

The most lovable movie minder has to be John Candy as Uncle Buck. Even though he pretends to be capable of mutilation with power tools, he’s less violent than Rebecca De Mornay in The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, manlier than Robin Williams in Mrs. Doubtfire and more alive than all the babysitters in Halloween.

In the movie’s most famous scene he answers a barrage of questions from his nephew, played by Macaulay Culkin.

On the day of filming the younger actor couldn’t remember all the questions, so Candy wrote them out and hid them where Culkin could read them.  

Now that’s something a great babysitter would do.

New Year’s Eve devoid of real emotion
Reel Guys by Richard Crouse and Mark Breslin
METRO CANADA
Published: December 09, 2011

SYNOPSIS: It’s Dec. 31 and we follow the stories of Robert De Niro as a terminally ill man; Halle Berry as his kindly nurse. Then there’s odd couple Michelle Pfeiffer and Zac Efron, anxiety-ridden Hillary Swank, ex-lovers Katherine Heigl and Jon Bon Jovi and even Ryan Seacrest pops up playing — who else? — himself. Have we left anyone out? Probably. There are more stars here than in the heavens, but rest assured, by the end of the movie, stories have woven together and no hearts are broken.

Ratings
Richard: 1⁄2
Mark: *

Richard: Mark, this mishmash of easy sentiment, romance, illness, musical numbers and product placement flip-flops from story to story so often, it’s like a five-year-old grabbed the remote and is wildly channel surfing. It’s not so much a movie as it is a cavalcade of familiar names in situations geared to make you understand why everybody hates Dec. 31. Am I being too cynical?

Mark Breslin: Oh, Richard, what’s the matter with you? You mean you don’t like shoddy writing, implausible plot lines, cameos masquerading as script development, and a general tone of emotional manipulation?  The movie screams “BOGUS” from the opening “inspiring” shots of the Statue of Liberty to the hack credit roll outtakes.

You know what’s odd? I kind of liked Valentine’s Day, the earlier, funnier, more touching version of this Garry Marshall shmaltzfest. Here’s a challenge: did you find anything to like?

RC: Well... let me see. I thought Zac Efron was passably charming and a couple of the outtakes at the end are funnier than anything contained in the actual movie. But there are Walmart commercials with more real emotion than director Gary Marshall manages to bring to this manipulative mess.

MB: And I didn’t mind the scenes between Ashton Kutcher and Lea Michele. Trapped in an elevator, at least the movie slows down long enough for a few real moments to break through. And Larry Miller was funny as the tow truck operator.

But back to the travesties: Russell Peters hiding behind an accent he swore he’d never do; Michelle Pfeiffer’s stupid bucket list; Robert DeNiro’s bathetic hospital scenes; but the worst was Hilary Swank’s “love” speech to the assembled Times Square multitude.

I’ve lived in New York, and believe me, the crowd wouldn’t have applauded politely — they would have hurled obscenities at her. Which would have been a much better scene!

RC: It certainly is a New York-centric flick. Even NYC mayor Bloomberg gets into the action.

By the time he kicks off the New Year’s Eve countdown with the words, “Let’s drop the ball,” its already abundantly clear that Garry Marshall already dropped the ball with this movie.

MB: Very funny, Richard!

I think a better version of the movie would have been scenes of Garry Marshall convincing all those Hollywood stars to work for a fraction of their rate card.

The chips are definitely not down
In Focus by Richard Crouse
METRO CANADA
Published: December 14, 2011

The Chipmunks have done for small striped squirrels what Rin Tin Tin did for German Shepherds. That is, it made the squeaky-voiced rodents big screen stars.

Alvin, Simon and Theodore have been well-known since they topped the music charts with the Witch Doctor’s crazy chorus, Oo-ee, oo-ah-ah, ting-tang, walla-walla, bing-bang in 1958 but their new movies, including this weekend’s The Chipmunks: Chip-wrecked, have turned them into the tiniest celebrities of the 20th century.

The three of them, along with furry actors like Despereaux Tilling, Fievel Mousekewitz and the gang from Once Upon a Forest have sold loads of tickets, but none would have made much of an impression if not for the pioneering work of the world’s most famous rodent, Mickey Mouse.

Created in 1928 by Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks, Mickey is one of the most recognizable movie stars in the world, rodent or otherwise. He’s an Oscar winner with 175 movies, shorts and video games on his CV; and was the first cartoon character to have a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Mickey’s fame endures, but why? “We felt that the public, and especially the children, like animals that are cute and little,” said Walt Disney. “When people laugh at Mickey Mouse, it’s because he’s so human.”

Mickey paved the way for generations of rodent actors.

G-Force is a sci-fi-spy film featuring a specially trained squad of guinea pigs who prevent an evil millionaire from taking over the world.    

Who could forget Mr. Gopher, the burrowing terror from Caddyshack? (Did you know the movie’s gopher “voice” is made up of the same dolphin sound effects used on Flipper?)

Or Rizzo the Rat, the streetwise New Jersey puppet from The Muppets Take Manhattan and possibly the only kid’s character named for Enrico (Ratso) Rizzo, a character in the X-rated Midnight Cowboy.

More sinister than Rizzo-despite his X-rated name--is Ben, the story of a boy and his rat. Best known for its Michael Jackson theme song — it’s possibly the only love song to a rat ever released — the movie plays like a Disney movie, if they made a killer rat flick.

In the movie Danny, a bullied boy, befriends Ben, the leader of a swarm of telepathic rats.

When the police use flamethrowers to exterminate the rat pack only Ben survives, saved by his human friend. “I love you Ben,” says Danny. “You’re the only friend I have.”

Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows light on storyline, heavy on action and witty banter
Reel Guys by Richard Crouse and Ned Ehrbar
METRO CANADA
Published: December 16, 2011

SYNOPSIS: The puzzle at the heart of Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows begins with the death of the Crown Prince of Austria. Written off as a suicide, Holmes (Robert Downey Jr) deduces there is more to the story. Enter Watson (Jude Law), who should be on his honeymoon, a beautiful fortune-teller (Noomi Rapace, the original girl with the dragon tattoo), the unspeakably evil Moriarty and more intrigue than you can shake a deerstalker hat at. This week the game’s afoot with Reel Guy Ned Ehrbar!

Star Rating:

Richard: 2 ½ Stars
Ned: 3 Stars

Richard: Ned, there is no question that RDJ and Law bring a certain joie de vivre to the usually staid portrayal of the great detective and his loyal sidekick. They look like they're having a ball. probably more fun than the audience, in fact.  As enjoyable as it is to watch these two riff off one another it soon becomes clear the whole movie is nothing more than a vehicle for their banter.

Ned: The banter is delightful, there's no denying that. But when they're not sniping at each other, you start to notice the plot doesn't really measure up to a detective of Holmes' stature —  or offer any original ideas. Basically, if you don't want the movie spoiled for you, wipe "the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" from your memory, as Moriarty's scheme is exactly the same in both movies. I'm assuming the filmmakers are banking on no one remembering that movie, though — which is a safe bet — but still.

RC: Agreed, if you can figure out the story. Confused and confusing, the plot zips along at such a rapid pace you'll barely know it doesn't make much sense because director Guy Ritchie fills the screen with atmospheric, wildly edited scenes anchored by Downey's flamboyant performance. It looks cool and will make you laugh occasionally, but the quips and extravagantly edited sequences are only fun in the moment. They don't add up to much of a movie.

NE: Some of those cool-looking scenes can grate, as well. A little bit of the Sherlock slow-mo fight analysis goes a long way, but since it got such a good reaction in the first film, Ritchie lays on the bullet time a little thick here. One element that did work for me though was Jared Harris' Moriarty, a dangerously brilliant villain with a plausible cover story as a mild-mannered professor. It's a shame he's not in the movie more, though.

RC: Harris has one seminal psycho moment--is there anything crazier than belting out an aria while torturing your nemesis?—but I didn’t think Noomi Repace, while eye catching as Sim, was given enough to do to be truly memorable.

NE: True, she doesn't get much to do besides react to the dynamic duo's chicanery and drop helpful reminders about the plot. And the less said about RJD on on a pony, the better. Still, audiences could do a lot worse.

A Swedish invasion
In Focus by Richard Crouse
METRO CANADA
Published: December 21, 2011

These days it seems there are almost as many movies set in Sweden as there are Billy bookshelves in college dorms.  The original Girl with the Dragon Tattoo books and movie series kicked off a thirst for all things Scandinavian.

Headhunters, a Norwegian noir, was a big hit recently at the Toronto International Film Festival and Let the Right One In placed vampires against a snowy, stark white Swedish backdrop.

This weekend the Americanized version of Girl With the Dragon Tattoo opens, starring Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara in the roles Swedish superstars Michael Nyqvist and Noomi Repace made famous. Shot in Sweden, the movie promises open landscapes, the crunch of snow underfoot and even the odd fjord.

Suddenly, it seems people are hungry for movies from Sweden, Norway and Denmark, but there has always been a smorgasbord of cinema available from that part of the world.

No discussion of Scandinavian cinema can be complete without mentioning Ingmar Bergman. Woody Allen named him “the greatest film artist since the invention of the motion picture camera,” and Francis Ford Coppola called him “my all-time favourite.”

If you haven’t seen The Seventh Seal or Wild Strawberries, you should; they are both classics. But you have undoubtedly seen movies inspired by or parodying Bergman’s work.

His famous Seventh Seal scene of Death playing chess has been mimicked in everything from Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey to Woody Allen’s play Death Knocks, which features a man playing gin rummy with Death.

More recently a Norwegian mockumenary called Troll Hunter earned praise from critics all over the world. One writer said this Blair-Witch-style story of cave-dwelling trolls and the government-sponsored hunters who track them was “destined to be a classic of its kind.”

Another said, “You’ll want to catch this clever movie before Hollywood ruins everything with a dumb remake.”    

Denmark has a thriving film industry. Since 1956 they’ve entered 40 flicks for Best Foreign Film consideration at the Academy Awards.

At last year’s Oscars Susanne Bier’s drama In a Better World beat Canada’s entry Incendies to take home Best Foreign Film.

The best-known Danish films of recent years have been made by Lars von Trier, the distinctive and controversial director of Breaking the Waves and this year’s   Melancholia. As well known for his depressed behaviour as he is for his films, Von Trier once said, “Basically, I’m afraid of everything in life, except filmmaking.”

Bah, Humbug!
Reel Guys by Richard Crouse and Mark Breslin
METRO CANADA
Published: December 23, 2011

Since first being published in December 1843 Charles Dickens’s story of Ebenezer Scrooge's emotional transformation from hoarder to Ho Ho-er has been presented in many forms.  A Christmas Carol has been adapted into opera, ballet, a Broadway musical and even a mime show starring Marcel Marceau. On film there have been at least 28 versions of the story and dozens more for television. This week the Reel Guys have a look at the best big screen versions of the classic story.

Richard: Mark, there is only one must-see out of all the dozens of film and TV versions of the Charles Dickens classic and that’s the 1951 Alastair Sim version. Nearly perfect in every way, it is a tale of redemption that confirms the fundamental spiritual nature of Christmas itself. In other words, it makes us feel good. Accept no substitutes. If, however, you've already seen it this year or you're allergic to black and white movies, there are alternatives.

MB: Richard, you are so right. The movie HAS to be in black and white to make us feel the spirit of Dickensian deprivation. It's the classic. But growing up in a Jewish household, it didn't have any importance to me as a child. I discovered it much later, and was transfixed by its narrative power and perfectly gloomy mood. May I contrast this with the Jim Carrey version? Now that's a movie with no sense of mystery, and a buffoonish interpretation of the lead character. I feel sorry for children who grow up with this bloated, CGI-laden excuse for a classic. Richard,please don't tell me you like it!

RC: Before I saw the Jim Carrey version of A Christmas Carol I wondered why remake a story that has been done so often and so well in the past. I’ve seen it and I’m still wondering. The weirdly lifeless animation was creepy, akin to a Christmas story performed by zombies.

MB: Let me praise Bill Murray's version "Scrooged". It's far from authentic, light years away from Dickens, but it makes its points in a very modern way. Bill Murray is great in it, and the writing is sharp and satirical. Setting it in the milieu of the television industry obviously changes the mood of the original, but as long as you see the movie as an interesting and successful riff upon the original story, and not as a substitute for it, it's a great movie for the season.

RC: I agree. It's become a must see for me every year. Although i don't have to see The Muppets Christmas Carol every year, it is a treat to see Michael Caine as Scrooge. I also like the musical Scrooge with Albert Finney in the lead.

MB: I've never seen it!  I sure hope they gave Tiny Tim a tap solo.

The end of days in film
Reel Guys by Richard Crouse and Mark Breslin
METRO CANADA
Published: December 26, 2011

Top Three
Richard’s Picks:
1. On the Beach A dystopian drama starring Gregory Peck that set the date for the end of the world just after World War III in 1964.
2. Panic in Year Zero! Begins with one of filmdom’s great understatements. “We've had it, haven't we dad?” as a mushroom cloud rises in the background.  
3. Rock & Rule An animation set on a devastated planet where a rock star tries to rule what’s left of
the world.

Mark’s Picks
1.  Miracle Mile Real-time panic as our hero frantically searches for his girlfriend in L.A. before the
bombs drop.
2. The Day After Made for TV, a hyper-realistic look at Lawrence, Kansas after it’s hit by a nuke.
3.  I Am Legend Will Smith is great in the Charlton Heston role from Omega Man.
 
Hollywood loves a good apocalypse and here are some of its most watchable worst-case scenarios.

Richard: Mark, there are so many end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it movies out there it’s hard to narrow it down, but I’ll start our look at the end with Last Night. It’s a dramedy about how people react in the hours before the destruction of the planet. My favourite part has David Cronenberg, in a rare appearance in front of the camera, as a utility company boss spending his final moments calling all his clients to offer thanks for their business.   

Mark: Oh, Richard, I hated that movie. I found it twee and precious. Maybe I’m just an old-fashioned guy when it comes to the end of the world, but I want to see landmarks crumbling, a body count in the billions, explosions, tidal waves, and most importantly, a dad separated from his estranged wife and child who saves them, and his relationship. So, I liked 2012, even though I suspect the Mayans were numerically challenged. But I think it’s important to differentiate between a natural apocalypse and one caused by alien invasion. Which do you – ahem – prefer?

RC : I’m more of a good old-fashioned apocalypse guy, although I’m also partial to super-plagues as well. At least on film. Omega Man, 28 Days Later and 12 Monkeys all have crazy viruses with the potential to wipe out mankind. One of the best epidemic movies is The Stand. It was made for TV, but doesn’t skimp on the apocalyptica.

MB: Let me reverse my stand on my desire to see big special effects in these films. The Road is one of the scariest, most haunting movies about trying to survive an apocalypse I’ve ever seen. But then again, Independence Day has the White House blowin’ up real good! I think there’s an interesting double bill here, with two widely different takes on the topic.

RC: I have to say that one of the best apocalyptic movies didn’t have anything to do with aliens or killer planets but with a very simple idea — mass infertility. There’s few special effects and the White House is probably still standing at the end. It’s more about great storytelling and a thought provoking idea.

MB: Children of Men? Brilliant. But when I was a little boy I saw On the Beach, set in Australia after a nuclear holocaust. Not one special effect, but I cried myself to sleep for months.

Frosty-day films
Reel Guys by Richard Crouse and Mark Breslin
METRO
Published: December 30, 2011

Richard: Mark, the end of the year always offers up great movies for Christmas consumption. Some of the biggest hits of the year, like The Help and The Smurfs, are coming out, but I’d like to suggest an overlooked movie from earlier this year. The First Grader is the story of Kimani N’gan’ga Maruge, an 84-year-old Kenyan villager and ex Mau Mau freedom fighter, and his fight to earn a fundamental right — to get an education. It’s inspirational and an engrossing study in strength and dignity. What will you rent this week?

Mark: Yes, DVDs are an excellent way to see some of the smaller films that flew under the radar this year, although I can’t completely share your enthusiasm for The First Grader. I found the film kind of reductive, although the stellar performance by the elderly lead was captivating. You cannot keep your eyes off him! Another octogenarian, Christopher Plummer, stars in Beginners, which I want to see again. One of my favourite films of the year, it’s an elliptical romance involving a depressive slacker and his girlfriend, with Plummer as the dad who comes out of the closet at 75. Seen it?

RC: I have! Plummer is fantastic, but I have to say my two favourite performances in that movie belonged to Mélanie Laurent and Cosmo, the Jack Russell terrier. If there was an Academy Award for cute, they’d both win. Another movie that should have gotten more attention is Warrior. Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton play estranged brothers brought together by ultimate fighting. It’s hard going stuff, but in its own way it was a heartfelt, inspirational story. Like Rocky times two.    

MB: Haven't seen it, Richard, so thanks for the tip. The antithesis of Warrior might be Magic Trip, a documentary of found footage from Ken Kesey’s band of Merry Pranksters bus trip across America in 1964. A real time capsule of proto-hippie peace and love, I’m giving it as a gift this season to any of my friends who think they remember the Sixties. And I never saw Apollo 18, which combines mock-footage, paranoia, and sci-fi. I’m hoping to love it!

RC: I missed that one as well. But in keeping with the spacey theme, I can recommend Another Earth, a low-fi sci-fi story about a second earth and the redemption it offers. It’s more about ideas than special effects, but it is worth a gander.

Bringing hellfire back
In Focus by Richard Crouse
METRO CANADA
Published: January 04, 2012

Demonic possession has been terrifying moviegoers for decades.

The Exorcist, the most famous fiendish film, created such a stir with audiences that in 1973 Newsweek ran a cover story entitled The Exorcism Frenzy. Complete with stories of queasy theatre-goers and their Exorcist barf bags, it helped create hysteria and make the movie one of the biggest hits of the year.

The impact The Exorcist had on audiences has yet to be duplicated by any of the dozens of possession movies released in its wake, but this weekend’s The Devil Inside is hoping to bring a little good old-fashioned hellfire back to theatres.

The devil, of course, is the star of any possession movie, even if you don’t actually see him. What’s more petrifying than the idea of Old Scratch taking over your body and making your head spin 360 degrees?

But what about the brave priests who battle Beelzebub? Here’s a few cinematic celebrants who have gone mano-a-mano with Mephistopheles.

Father Lankester Merrin, as portrayed by Max von Sydow in The Exorcist, presided over the most famous Satan skirmish.

The statuesque Swedish actor played Merrin twice — he’s seen in flashbacks in Exorcist II: The Heretic — while Stellan Skarsgård played him in two prequels.

The loopiest of devil hunters must be Father Pierre Barre (Michael Gothard) from the Ken Russell film The Devils. He is a corrupt and despicable holy man who convinces a group of terrified nuns to fake a mass possession with the words, “You will scream! You will blaspheme!” His other questionable methods include “forcible colonic irrigation” with holy water and torture.

Barre isn’t the only real life exorcist to be portrayed on film, however. Both The Rite, starring Anthony Hopkins as a real life exorcist tutor and The Exorcism of Emily Rose with Tom Wilkinson as a priest accused of murder when a young woman died during an exorcism, are based on true stories.

More fanciful is Leslie Nielsen as Father Mayii in Repossessed, an Exorcist parody co-starring Linda Blair, who played the possessee in the original film. When told she “has an ungodly voice and maniacal facial expressions” the skeptical Mayii replies,  “That doesn’t prove a thing! She could be related to Joe Cocker.”

And finally, Beetlejuice has a different kind of exorcist. Michael Keaton plays a supernatural character called in as a “bio-exorcist” to rid a house of its human inhabitants.

Going for the gold
Reel Guys by Richard Crouse and Mark Breslin
METRO CANADA
Published: January 06, 2012

Award season is upon us. Soon Hollywood will hand out more gold than Fort Knox on free doubloon day. This week the Reel Guys have a look at the first major awards, the Golden Globes.

Richard: Mark, I enjoyed bits and pieces of a lot of movies in 2011 so choosing winners in the Golden Globe Best Movie categories is giving me a bit of a headache. In the drama category I’ll have to go with Moneyball as the film that hit it out of the park. As for comedy or musical it’s a toss up between The Artist, which was the best time I had at the movies overall this year, and Bridesmaids, which made me laugh more than any movie this year. You?

Mark: Yes, Richard, Moneyball was a fine film. But I can’t believe it will take away any top prizes because it just lacked any real emotional content — and the ending, while true to life, was a bit of a dud. I think it’s George Clooney’s year, and that The Descendents is the film to beat in the drama category. As for comedy, Bridesmaids is the funniest movie of the year, although The Artist is a more audacious achievement. I notice its director is nominated in that category, and I hope he wins. He made me feel like I was in 1928!

RC: I think you’re right about Clooney. He brings with him the kind of star power the Globes crave for their broadcast. The Artist, not so much. With that in mind it seems likely Meryl Streep will take the Globe for best dramatic actress for The Iron Lady. Her mix of star power and chops almost guarantees a win. As for Comedy or Drama, I’d like to see Kristen Wiig take it for Bridesmaids. Of all the nominees it is the only full-on comedic performance.   

MB: You’re right about La Streep. Frankly, she won it the day the trailer aired. And with Michelle Williams shunted into the comedy category, there’s little competition for her. And although it’s a real stretch to call Williams’ Monroe homage ‘comedy’, her only competition will be Charlize Theron’s dress. Kristin Wiig is a comedic genius — the best thing since Carol Burnett — but I think her bid will be scuttled by the movie’s poop jokes. Unfair, perhaps, but pure comedy scares votes away — it just doesn’t seem like acting.

RC: One movie I think is a lock is the hands-down favourite for Best Foreign Film, A Separation. I’ll be shocked if this doesn’t win.

MB: Haven’t seen it, but the buzz has been deafening. As long as Cars 2 doesn’t win for Best Animated Picture, I'll be a happy man.

Good box office vibes
In Focus by Richard Crouse
METRO CANADA
Published: January 11, 2012

“I’ve always looked at my career as an athlete would look at his,” said Mark Wahlberg, star of this weekend’s thriller Contraband. “I won’t play forever. Some don’t know when to walk away, but the smart ones do.”

Wahlberg has proven himself to be one of the smart ones. In a career that dates back 20 years, he has moved from strength to strength.

His first taste of success came as the titular lead rapper of Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch. Their 1991 hit Good Vibrations was a highpoint, but just two years later, Wahlberg walked away, leaving the Funky Bunch to fend for themselves.

Streamlining the Marky Mark moniker to his birth name, he took on his first role in front of the camera (that is if you don’t count his short lived career as an underwear model for Calvin Klein). Roles in The Basketball Diaries (opposite his future The Departed star Leonardo DiCaprio) and Fear, where he played what one writer called “a teenaged Travis Bickle” got him notice, but it was Boogie Nights that made him a movie star.    

The role of Dirk Diggler, a naïve man with physical charms sucked into the dark underbelly of the 1970s Californian porn industry, showed his range (among other things) but he wasn’t the first choice for the role. DiCaprio was offered the part but turned it down because he was already committed to Titanic. He suggested his Basketball Diaries co-star Wahlberg.

The movie was a hit, but a certain prosthetic got almost as much attention as Wahlberg’s performance. He still has the 13-inch rubber prop, which he keeps in a safe at his mother’s home, otherwise, he says, “mom would… put it on the end of her Dustbuster thinking it came with the vacuum cleaner.”

Since then Three Kings, The Perfect Storm, The Italian Job, Shooter, We Own the Night, Planet of the Apes and Four Brothers have all been box office hits. His work in The Departed brought him the best notices of his career to date plus an Oscar nomination and The Fighter (which he also produced) was an artistic triumph.

Despite all the spot-on choices, like many actors he’s turned down some important roles. Can you imagine him as Linus in Ocean’s 11? Or how about Brokeback Mountain? That part went to Jake Gyllenhaal, who earned an Oscar nod for his work.

Old plot, new twist
Reel Guys by Richard Crouse and Mark Breslin
METRO CANADA
Published: January 13, 2012

SYNOPSIS: In the New Orleans-set crime thriller Contraband Mark Wahlberg plays Chris Farraday, a reformed criminal forced to do the proverbial one last job when his brother-in-law Andy (Caleb Landry Jones) runs afoul of a local gangster (Giovanni Ribisi). To square the deal and pay-off Andy’s debt Chris agrees to go back into his old line of work—smuggling contraband goods. In this case he must illegally transport millions of dollars in counterfeit bills. But can he navigate around the police, ruthless drug lords and double crosses to keep Andy and his family safe?

Star Ratings:
Richard: 3 ½ Stars
Mark: 3 Stars  

Richard: Mark, Maybe January isn’t a dumping ground for awful movies anymore. Used to be that only the dregs came out after Christmas, but Contraband is actually a pretty good thriller. It's not brilliant, but succeeds mainly because Wahlberg can play the family man, as he does in the first part of the movie, and then switch gears to a believable tough guy swagger.

Mark: MB: Well, the plot- One! Last! Heist! is as old as Dick Clark's toupee. But the movie is all in the details- the gritty port milieu, the dirty hold of the cargo boat, the cheap n'sleazy Panamanian dives; this flick is the antidote to Miami Vice-there's zero glamour in this smuggling game. As far as Wahlberg goes, I found him totally believable and it's the best thing he's done in a while. But what's up with Ben Foster? Does he have to be a creep in every movie he's in?

RC: Foster is a fine but typecast actor, really needs to break away from the deadbeat kind of characters he’s been playing lately. More work like his heartrending performance in The Messenger please and less like paint-by-number creepy guys he plays in movies like this and The Mechanic.

MB: And I was all excited to see Kate Beckinsale out of Vampirella drag- and then they gave her nothing to do; the worst wifey part in recent memory. The other supporting roles weren't all that great, either, although Giovanni Ribisi does make a swell bad guy, and I'll always have a soft spot for JK Simmons after his role in Oz. I like seeing him in anything.

RC: The way Ribisi chews the scenery here and his work in The Rum Diary he’s proving himself to be the hungriest actor in Hollywood next to Nic Cage. He was fun, Beckinsale, not so much. Why cast her and then simply make her the damsel in distress? You’d think after kicking werewolf butt in four “Underworld” movies she’d be able to defend herself by now. Unfortunately the supporting characters are less interesting than the movie as a whole.

MB: It's not really an "actor's movie", is it?  But the mechanics of the heist work, as well as the action sequences, and that's why it's worth watching. Oh, and a fabulous art joke which seems out of whack with the rest of the film, but is a hoot nevertheless.

Aviation films still fly
In Focus by Richard Crouse
METRO CANADA
Published: January 18, 2012

The first Best Picture Oscar winner was Wings, a 1927 aviation flick featuring an inane love story but some spectacular aerial footage.

Director William A. Wellman used his experience as a celebrated combat pilot during World War I to create the movie’s realistic and thrilling dogfights, which packed audiences into first-run theatres for 63 weeks straight.

George Lucas, the producer of this weekend’s Red Tails, must be hoping for similar success for his aviation movie. If Red Tails draws crowds, he says, he wants to expand the story of African American World War II pilots the Tuskegee Airmen into a trilogy.

Advance word suggests Red Tails’ air battles are amongst the best ever created on film. Perhaps so, but Lucas has 100 years of elaborate aerial photography to compete with.

The flying sequences in Battle of Britain, the 1969 recreation of the British RAF’s defeat of the Luftwaffe, are regarded as the gold standard of aviation footage. To shoot these spectacular scenes the filmmakers assembled such a large collection of vintage planes that the production briefly became the 35th largest air force in the world.

But not all the planes were authentic. Mock-ups of Spitfires and Hurricanes, powered by lawn mower engines, can be seen taxiing down runways.

Shooting complicated stunt scenes always involves risk, but rarely has a movie been as deadly as Howard Hughes’s aerial epic Hell’s Angels.

The eccentric Hughes shot the movie as a silent film in 1928, and then reshot the entire thing the following year when sound equipment became available. In the process, 70 WWI aces were used, and three were killed. Hughes himself was injured when he crashed after performing a tricky aerial stunt.   

The most famous aerial movie of recent years has to be Top Gun. Inspired by a California magazine story about the U.S. Navy’s Top Gun School, the movie used several real aircraft from F-14 fighter squadron VF-51 Screaming Eagles. The planes cost the production $7,800 per hour for fuel and other operating costs, and one shot cost three times that.

Legend has it that director Tony Scott wanted to film an aircraft landing on an aircraft carrier, backlit by the sun. The captain, however, changed course before Scott got his shot. When the director was informed it would cost $25,000 to turn the ship around Scott pulled out a chequebook, wrote the cheque and got his shot.

Red Tails is too ‘talky’
Reel Guys by Richard Crouse and Mark Breslin
METRO CANADA
Published: January 20, 2012

SYNOPSIS: Based on true events (though highly fictionalized), the movie focuses on four African American pilots from the Second World War — the top guns of the 332nd Fighter Group — the Tuskegee Airmen. In fighting the racial discrimination of the U.S. military, they prove their mettle by taking on dangerous assignments in active combat.

Richard: 2.5 out of 5
Mark: 1.5 out of 5

Richard: Mark, you can’t accuse Red Tails of being subtle. It is unabashedly patriotic, unapologetically melodramatic and an unashamed throwback to the propaganda movies of the 1940s. The mix and match of those elements works for the first hour, but the time one of the pilots whoops, “Let’s give those newspapers something to write about!” the once charming tone of the movie started to wear thin for me. You?

Mark: Charmed? Naw, I was too busy being stupefied at the racial condescension of the movie. The movie has the best of intentions, but its anti-racist message is lost amidst the cardboard characters, leaden dialogue, wooden acting and overemphatic score. The story is so dumbed down it’s a bit of an insult to those Tuskegee airmen it wants to honour.  Neat flight jackets, though.

RC: I didn’t find the script condescending, just ordinary. An extraordinary, and mostly hidden history like the story of the Tuskegee Red Tails deserves something a little more than a by-the-book retelling. I agree with you about the flight jackets; they are sharp, but I also found the in-flight scenes to be exciting. Too much dialogue for my taste,
but the aerial photography was fun.

MB: The aerial photography may be the only reason to watch this picture.  Yet, in many of the long shots, it looked like a video game to me. And was there ever a more nauseating, saccharine romantic subplot as the one in this movie? I was so grateful that most of the dialogue was in Italian! Some of the acting was passable: Terrence Howard had a couple of good speeches, but most of the time he acted with his pipe.

RC: Ha! I think I enjoyed this more than you. But just by a hair. It’s too long, too talky and too corny, but I liked some of the characters and enjoyed watching the flight sequences. I do, however, wish there was less dialogue during the dogfights. I think fighter pilots in attack mode have better things to concentrate on than making wisecracks.

MB: Yes, the confidence of the pilots under fire bordered on the comical. But one thing I found interesting: The racism of the pilots’ fellow white Americans was worse than of the Nazis, who only dismissed them with snotty attitude rather than overtly trying to beat them up and using the dreaded N-word. I don’t know if it was intentional, but the point packed a wallop for me.

What movies teach us about life’s Grey areas
In Focus by Richard Crouse
METRO CANADA
Published: January 25, 2012

This Christmas I got a book titled The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook.

Contained within were tidbits of information on how to survive shark attack, a volcano eruption, even what to do when the pilot passes out leaving you to land the plane.

It’s an interesting read, but I am a visual person and have learned much more about survival from watching movies than from the pages of this book.

From this weekend’s The Grey, a man versus nature tale starring Liam Neeson, I learned that empty airplane booze bottles can be broken, wedged between your fingers and repurposed as Wolverine-style knuckles of death.  

Hopefully I’ll never have to use that trick, but it is just one of many lessons learned at the movies.

Alive, the story of Uruguay’s rugby team whose plane crashed in the middle of the Andes mountains, I learned that cannibalism is a good way to stave off hunger pangs.

A similar lesson was taught in the Robert Redford film Jeremiah Johnson, based on a real-life trapper named John Johnston, nicknamed “Liver Eater Johnston” for his habit for cutting out and eating the livers of men he killed.

From the true-to-life mountain climbing movies 127 Hours and Touching the Void, I learned perseverance.

In the former a man is wedged literally between a rock and a hard place. To get free he cuts off his own arm with a pocketknife. Now that’s stick-to-itive-ness!

The latter sees a man with a severely broken leg crawling his way out of a deep crevice to safety.

From Cast Away, Tom Hanks’s stranded-on-a-desert-isle movie, I learned how to build a raft from a portable toilet, and how, in lieu of friends, a soccer ball with a bloody handprint can be man’s best friend.

Should you find yourself stranded on a snowshoer mountain top think back to the Lance Henriksen movie Survival Quest; not only does it teach viewers to forage for food and raft raging waters, but also how to dig an ice cave to survive the bitter cold.

In case of a zombie attack the classic George A. Romero movies teach us all we need to know. Remember the rhyme: “Shoot the living dead in the head.”

Should you find yourself in mortal combat with a monster, another tip learned from dozens of other horror films suggests that once you’ve slain the creature, don’t double check to make sure its really dead.

Big, bad wolves
Reel Guys by Richard Crouse and Chris Alexander
METRO CANADA
Published: January 27, 2012  

Liam Neeson plays John Ottway, a sharpshooter hired to keep predatory wolves out of an oil station in the remotest part of Alaska. He becomes the leader of a ragtag group of survivors when the plane transporting them to their oil job crashes in the wilderness. Hunted by wolves and exposed to the elements, Ottway’s know-how is the only thing between freezing to death or, worse, becoming the big bad wolf’s dinner.

Richard: ****
Chris: ****

Richard: Chris, the thing that separates The Grey from other man-versus-nature movies is the characters. At first glance they are the usual assortment of rough and ready characters: the edgy chatterbox, the ex con. But soon nuances appear. They shed tears and even recite poetry when not fighting off steely-eyed wolves. Most action movies are only concerned about setting up the action and the payoff. The Grey isn’t. It wants you to get to know the men so when something awful happens to them, you care.
 
Chris: That’s what I found so disarming about the picture, that lyricism. The trailer certainly leads you to believe that it’s all about Neeson suiting up with busted bottle fingertips, growling and boxing toothy timber-wolves. And while we DO get that, its strength is that tapestry of characters and how instead of becoming more savage as their situation becomes more desperate, they become more human. This is as much Hemingway as it is horror show. Speaking of horror ... what did you think about those wolves? Did you buy it?
 
RC: For me the wolves were the least interesting part of the movie. They make for cunning foes, but Neeson’s Wolf Whisperer character defanged some of the horror because he understood and was able to explain their behaviour. A dose of unpredictability might have been scarier for me. Having said that, I still wouldn’t want to meet up with any of the movie’s wolves, no matter how much CGI was involved.
 
CA: Ahhhh...I loved them. Of course, they are not based in reality by any stretch. But that’s OK, neither was Bruce the Shark in Jaws. The wolves are death itself, stalking the men, toying with them, picking them off randomly and without warning in novel and gruesome ways. On that tip, The Grey is kind of the spiritual sister to the Final Destination films. OK, that may be a stretch, but the wolves and their almost supernatural presence really do push the film into an almost surreal area that I liked. And I’d be willing to bet some viewers won’t like them for that very reason...
 
RC: The wolves, I guess, are the film’s hook, but for me it’s all about the characters. Come for the wolves! Stay for the characters!
 
CA: Well, whether it be wolves, sensitive manly men or a glimpse into the snowy hell that we've mercifully been spared this year, The Grey is spectacular entertainment.

What makes a hero super?
In Focus by Richard Crouse
METRO CANADA
Published: February 01, 2012

What does it really take to become a superhero? Wikipedia simply defines a superhero as “a type of stock character, dedicated to protecting the public.”

What? No mention of capes or crazy gadgets? I guess because there are so many types of superheroes, Wiki decided to keep the definition vague.

Take, for instance, the lads in this weekend’s Chronicle. After uncovering a mysterious crater they develop telekinesis, flight and invulnerability all without the aid of butlers named Alfred, secret identities or spandex suits.

They’re just ordinary guys with extraordinary powers. Civilian superheroes, if you will.

But they’re not the first everyday movie characters to make the leap (sometimes over tall buildings) to become superheroes. The flickers are filled with stories of regular folks who become crusaders — some with extraordinary powers, and some without.

In Defendor, Woody Harrelson plays a man whose rich inner life spills out into his real life. By day he is dead-end-job Arthur, but by night he is Defendor, a masked superhero do-gooder. His task? To clean up the streets of Hamilton, Ont.     

Speaking in comic book clichés — “Look out termites,” he says, “it’s squishin’ time!”— and with a duct tape “D” on his chest, Defendor and his homemade arsenal of weapons patrols the streets looking for crime to prevent. He’s a bit delusional, but his heart is in the right place.

“Who writes your dialogue?” asks a bad guy, “Spiderman?”

“No, I do it myself,” he answers innocently, before teaching the guy a lesson he won’t soon forget.

Based on a wild indie comic of the same name by Mark Millar, Kick-Ass tells a couple of intertwining stories. First up is Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson), a fanboy who creates a superhero alter ego called Kick-Ass as a way to boost his self-esteem. In life he says his only superpower is being invisible to girls, but when he dons the suit he becomes… only marginally more super.

His exploits, however, grab the attention of Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage) and Hit Girl (Chloë Moretz), a slightly psychotic father-and-daughter team of masked (and in Hit Girl’s case, wigged) avengers who admire Ass’s style and moxie. Defendor and Kick-Ass don’t have superpowers, but they do have cool costumes and the right attitude. That places them alongside other characters that helped redefine what it takes to be a superhero, the better-known movie heroes Batman and Iron Man.

Radcliffe goes up against supernatural again and does a good job, too
Reel Guys by Richard Crouse and Mark Breslin
METRO CANADA
Published: February 03, 2012

SYNOPSIS: Daniel Radcliffe plays lawyer Arthur Kipps. Leaving his son behind in London, the widower travels to a remote English village to settle the affairs of Alice Drablow. Ms. Drablow may have shuffled off this mortal coil but the locals are convinced she still haunts her old house. Worse, because she still mourns her son Nathaniel, a toddler who drowned on her estate, whenever she is seen, a village child dies.

Richard: ****
Mark: ** 1/2

Richard: Mark, I really like haunted house movies and as haunted houses go, this is a doozy. It’s remote, old and rambling. Doorknobs turn by themselves, faces appear in windows and there are stuffed monkeys and creepy Victorian children’s wind-up toys everywhere. With toys like this to play with it’s a wonder Victorian kids weren’t scared half-out-of-their-minds all the time. Did this movie creep you out?
 
Mark: Creep me out? Definitely. The movie is a masterpiece of atmospheric dread. It’s not so much about what happens onscreen, but what is about to happen onscreen. Let’s face it, there’s something creepy about Victorians to begin with. Did it scare me? No, I just don’t have a fear of the supernatural. And although I loved the look and feel of the film, with its peeling paint and fog that you can sense at the nape of your neck, the creaky plot, reminiscent of those remakes of Japanese ghost films of the mid-90’s, did not excite me. But let’s talk about the 800 lb wizard in the room, Mr Radcliffe. Richard, was this film a good choice for him?
 
RC: Well, once again Radcliffe finds himself butting heads with the supernatural. It’s not exactly Harry Potter Meets the Woman in Black, but it’s almost as entertaining and I think it will act as a smooth transition from child star to adult. He’s giving people what they want, a heroic figure, like Harry, but one with added dimensions —he’s a widower and a troubled soul who finds a new lease on life through adversity. A smallish gothic horror film might not have been the obvious choice for Radcliffe’s coming out party, but it was a good one.
 
MB: I’m glad he chose a film so very British to do; it keeps him true to his roots. But if there’s any doubt we’re dealing with a true star whose talents will last, it’s Radcliffe’s 20 minute dialogue-free set piece in the middle of the movie. He holds our attention with only his physical presence and expressions. Impressive, don’t you think?
 
RC: He really anchors the film. It’s difficult not to see Harry Potter in his face but here he takes a good stride to step away from the typecasting of his most successful role.
 
MB: Loved Radcliffe, loved the meticulous direction; just wished the storyline weren’t so thin and derivative.