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.”