Archive for January, 2016

RICHARD’S “CANADA AM” REVIEWS FOR JANUARY 22 WITH BEVERLY THOMSON.

Screen Shot 2016-01-22 at 12.45.06 PMRichard’s “Canada AM” reviews for the frat boy humour of “Dirty Grandpa,” the galactic party crashers of “The 5th Wave,” and the martial turmoil of “45 Years.”

Watch the whole thing HERE!

Metro: Introducing Chloë Grace Moretz: not your typical teen star

Screen Shot 2016-01-20 at 10.17.13 AMBy Richard Crouse – Metro In Focus

Eighteen-year-old Chloë Grace Moretz played a young vampire in Let Me In, a would-be superhero in Kick Ass and cinema’s most famous telekinetic, Carrie. It’s a diverse group of roles, but Moretz says she can draw a straight line from character to character.

“They’re linear,” she says, “in the sense that they’re all strong characters. A lot of them are like me, the basis of them. They all have a big mountain in front of them but they are going to climb it and fight as hard as they can.”

This weekend she stars in The 5th Wave, a world-under-attack sci-fi flick based on Rick Yancey’s young adult novel of the same name. Moretz plays Cassie and her “big mountain” is an alien invasion that devastates the planet, separating her from her younger brother. Can she find her sibling before the deadly 5th wave hits?

You’ll have to buy a ticket to find out. The only thing I can tell you for sure is that it is another spunky performance from the actress.

Over the course of a short but eventful career spirited characters have become her stock in trade. She has made a habit of playing people with rich lives swirling around them. For instance, she’s a sparkplug teenage prostitute in The Equalizer, a confused best friend to Keira Knightley in Laggies and a movie star with a scandalous life in Clouds of Sils Maria.

Here are her top three career defining roles:

Spunky: In If I Stay Moretz plays Mia, a gifted teenage cellist from a family of musicians. When a catastrophic accident throws her into a coma she has an out-of-body experience. The rest of the story is told from the perspective of her memories before the accident and in the present, as she observes, ghostlike, the aftermath of the car crash.

Here she delivers what may be her best performance yet. As Mia she is a talented teen just discovering a life beyond the cello that has been her constant companion since she was young. It’s a simple and uncluttered performance with a lot going on behind the eyes.

Spunkier: In the 2013 remake of Carrie she put her own spin on Stephen King’s most famous character, originally played by Sissy Spacek in 1976. Where Spacek was a true outsider, an abused, naïve girl, Moretz plays her with a bit more pluck. Both are Ugly Ducklings transformed into swans and then monsters, unwitting and undeserving victims of horrible abuse, but Moretz gives Carrie more backbone than her predecessor.

Spunkiest: Undoubtedly her signature spunky performance came in 2010’s Kick-Ass. If Quentin Tarantino made a kid’s coming-of-age movie it might look something like Kick-Ass. It has most of his trademarks — clever dialogue, good soundtrack and some high octane violence — but there’s a twist. The bloodiest, most cutthroat purveyor of ultra violence in the film is an 11-year-old girl.

The action scenes are plentiful and frenetic and once you get past the question, “Why would Chloë Moretz’s parents allow her to do this?” they’re really fun. It’s a little unsettling to see a young girl wielding a switchblade, gunning down dozens of bad guys and going hand-to-hand with a full grown man, but not since Natalie Portman in Léon has the screen seen such a sweet-faced assassin.

DIRTY GRANDPA: 1 STAR. “it’s time for a career intervention.”

Screen Shot 2016-01-20 at 10.18.11 AMI figure the new Robert De Niro comedy is called, simply and inelegantly, “Dirty Grandpa” because “Filthy-Foul-Mouthed-Misogynist-Sex-Crazed-Pervert-Filthy-Rotten-Old-Coot-Grandpa” was too ungainly for the marquee.

De Niro plays Dick Kelly, a recently widowed seventy-two year old. His grandson Jason (Zac Efron) is a twenty-something who gave up his dreams of being a photographer to study law and join his father (Dermot Mulroney) firm. Jason has his life figured out—he’s about to marry the beautiful but controlling Meredith (Julianne Hough)—but is tragically unhip. According to grandpa he is like “Mitt Romney in Terminator.”

The grieving grandfather asks Jason to drive him to his summer home in Florida. “Your grandmother and I were there this time every year,” he explains. “It’s what she would have wanted.” Instead of a melancholy pilgrimage the trip takes a sideways turn when Dick goes on the prowl for a woman. He gets the chance to hook up when Jason bumps into Shadia (Zoey Deutch), an old schoolmate of his, and her friends, including the oversexed Lenore (Aubrey Plaza).

“The greatest gift a grandson can give to his grandfather,” says Dick, “is a hot college girl who wants to have unprotected sex,” so they take a detour and follow the crowd to Daytona Beach. There they meet a male drug dealer named Pamela (Jason Mantzoukas) who introduces Jason to crack cocaine, get thrown in jail, compete in a bodybuilding contest and much more.

Of course Dick’s unorthodox behaviour is ripe with life lessons… you just have to endure 60 minutes of pedophilia, masturbation and rape gags before those lessons become apparent.

“Dirty Grandpa” is credited to one writer but feels like it was penned by a group of drunken frat boys on the beer and bourbon binge. What, I guess, is supposed to be a funny look at aging and making the most of the time we all have, is reduced to a spectacle of a once revered thespian calling his lawyer grandson “Alan Douceowitz.” If this were a drinking game where you took a shot every time De Niro says “vagina” (and all of that word’s derivations) or any number of other words I can’t print here you’d have alcohol poisoning half an hour in. It mistakes politically incorrect “did he really just say that” jokes for actual humour.

Then there is the presence of the great man himself. I can forgive Zac Efron’s participation in “Dirty Grandpa,” he’s young and the idea of starring with De Niro (who he imitated rather perfectly in “Neighbors”) must have been irresistible but what is the star of “Taxi Driver” doing here? At one point Jason yells, “What the ‘bleep’ is wrong with you?” at him repeatedly. It’s a legit question. Perhaps it’s time for a career intervention. For the good of all of cinema let’s get David O. Russell to talk to De Niro before he accepts “Dirty Grandpa Pt. 2.”

“Dirty Grandpa” is the kind of film that, one day, De Niro’s great-grandchildren will watch and wonder what all the fuss about him was.

THE 5th WAVE: 2 STARS. “a teenage hodge podge of ideas and genres.”

Screen Shot 2016-01-20 at 10.16.17 AMOn screen eighteen-year-old Chloë Grace Moretz has moved things with her mind, played a hundred-year-old vampire trapped in the body of a twelve-year-old and as a teenage assassin used words so naughty they’d make a sailor blush. She’s done it all—even guided loved ones from beyond the grave—but her new movie sees her in her most precarious situation yet.

“The 5th Wave” is a world-under-attack sci fi flick based on Rick Yancey’s young adult novel of the same name. Moretz plays Cassie, a teenaged survivor of four waves of an alien invasion—or “galactic party crashers” as she calls them—that have devastated earth. “When you’re in high school everything feels like the end of the world,” she says. “Curfews, exams. Turns out what we thought was the end of the world wasn’t.”

The actual end of the world comes when “the others” invade looking for a new planet to call their own. Their first wave knocked out all of earth’s electricity, the second brought floods and quakes, the third wiped out hundreds of thousands of people with bird flu while the fourth saw the aliens get off their ship.

When Cassie becomes separated from her five-year-old brother Sam (Zackary Arthur) she reluctantly teams with Evan (Alex Roe), a hunky he-man cut from leftover Hemsworth cloth, to rescue her sib from a training camp run by the military. Wily but wary of everyone, Cassie must rely on Evan to help find her sibling before the deadly 5th and final wave hits.

Being that “The 5th Wave” is packed with millennial stars and is rather po-faced about itself I guess it can be categorized as a young adult drama but I’m shying away from adding any other descriptive labels to it. It’s not exactly a science fiction story even though it contains aliens—although we never get much of a look at them—and it can’t rightly be called a romance even though there are moony-eyed stares and a brief make-out scene. It certainly isn’t an action film even though we witness some of the world’s landmarks get destroyed and Moretz runs and carries a gun at the same time. Also, don’t look to “The 5th Wave” for pulse racing fight scenes as much of the carnage is off screen, perhaps to protect a teen-friendly rating.

It is a hodge podge of ideas and genres.

It starts off strong with a dark vision of what the end of the world might look like then changes into a portrait of a teenage melodrama with dystopian overtones. The blossoming romance offers up some unintentionally funny scenes, although I wouldn’t call this a comedy either.

Moretz has a way with action roles—think Hit Girl in “Kick-Ass”—so her return to a more physical role is welcome, but as a young adult vehicle it will leave you hungry for another episode of “The Hunger Games.”

45 YEARS: 4 STARS. “an actor’s movie with Rampling & Courtenay front and center.”

Screen Shot 2016-01-20 at 10.15.13 AMCan you ever really know a person?

That is the question rattling around Kate Mercer’s (Charlotte Rampling) head as her forty-fifth wedding anniversary to Geoff (Tom Courtenay) looms on the horizon.

In retirement the couple have a comfortable life. He putters and reads, she makes arrangements for their anniversary bash. Their quiet, cozy life is disturbed when a letter arrives for Geoff with disturbing news; the body of Katya, his first love, has been discovered in the Swiss Alps, frozen and preserved, after falling to her death nearly five decades before. In the days leading up to the celebration of their relationship Kate begins to understand the depth of Geoff’s feelings for his long-ago love, leading to distrust and a re-examination of her “happy” marriage.”

Director Andrew Haigh knows this is an actor’s movie and puts Rampling and Courtenay front and center, showcasing them with unfussy and simple presentation. There is no soundtrack to set the scene or flashy editing to entertain your eye, just powerfully subtle performances. Rampling never overstates her devastation. Instead, she allows her nuanced facial expressions to speak volumes, filling in the unspoken parts of the story with tiny but effective looks and actions. It is the kind of introspective work that the big screen was invented to display.

“45 Years” is a master class in acting. It’s a mature story brought to life by two remarkable actors who aren’t afraid to trust the story’s emotional core and take the time to allow it to burrow deep into the viewer’s intellect and more importantly, heart.