Harry Potter grows up
RICHARD CROUSE
METRO CANADA
Published: January 29, 2012

“Normally,” says Daniel Radcliffe, “I hate watching my movies and hate watching myself.”

Why, then, did he sit through his new film, The Woman in Black, during its Canadian premier last week in Toronto?

“The last time I will watch it was last night,” the former Harry Potter told me the next day.

“I’ve picked this apart enough now. I don’t need to watch it any more.

“The line between self-critical and self-hating is blurred.

“Normally when I watch my stuff, I say, ‘I don’t like that but I don’t know what to do about it,’ but last night I was watching and thinking, ‘Oh, this is how that could be improved.’”

Despite being one of the most beloved actors on the planet and the star of some of the highest grossing films of all time, Radcliffe isn’t content to rest on his laurels.

“I know I have a long way to go as an actor,” he says.

“I’m 22 and at the stage when most actors would be coming out of drama school but because I’ve got 10 years of experience on a film set I think people expect me to be more complete, perhaps, than I am.

“I think that there are some things I do really well and some things I see and go, ‘OK, I know how to fix that now.’”

One thing he can’t change is the way his fans respond to him.

“It’s kind of part of my life,” he says of the fandamonium that follows wherever he goes.

“The thing you have to remind yourself is that it is not about me.

“It’s about the fact that I played this character, which became beloved and anyone who took on that character would be getting this reaction.

“The fact that I’m now getting it on my own away from the series is very gratifying, although it is still kind of residual from Potter, unless they are fans of that and of me.

“You just have to laugh at it and have a sense of humour about it.

“As I said to you, when I’m at home, smoking a cigarette and it’s cold and I’m in my Canada Goose jacket eating half a pizza, those are the moments you have to take a picture of yourself and play it to yourself when you are on the red carpet and go, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, you’re not all that, really.’”

Tackling the ‘royal’ W.E.
RICHARD CROUSE
METRO CANADA
Published: January 26, 2012

Actress Andrea Riseborough has no time to be intimidated by co-workers, even when they are world-famous icons.

“Making a movie is no small feat,” she says, “and there is so little time and you can enter into something being paralyzed by fear or you can just experience it.”

She’s referring to being directed by Madonna in W.E., a film that mixes-and-matches a modern day New York tale with the scandalous 1930s love affair between Wallis Simpson and King Edward VIII. “I didn’t know her personally,” she says of the singer-turned-director.

“I went to meet her and was taken aback at her ultimate passion for wanting to tell the story. That was really what ignited me.”

“When she sent me the script I read it and thought it was totally unique in the sense that it existed in the surreal. There are two time frames intertwined with one another and I found that really unique.”

She says as the project started she had only a peripheral idea about Wallis Simpson, the American socialite whose husband, Prince Edward, abdicated his throne to marry her. Wallis was, says the actress, “a still image, unmoving.”

That picture soon started coming to life, but it took some time for both director and actress to flesh a real character out of Wallis’s life. “We were really quite complicit from the outset in terms of who we might discover this woman to be,” Riseborough says.

“Neither of us really knew yet. We knew what we had researched but that really is the suit that you then have to unzip and forget about. (Madonna) talks about trusting the DNA being within you but not being a slave to it.”         

The result sheds some light on why the story of the divorcee and the king still resonates with people almost 80 years after the event.

“It’s interesting for us all to question why we find it such a fascination that the king might give up his throne for someone who’s not terribly beautiful,” she says.

Wayans sheds her smile
RICHARD CROUSE
METRO CANADA
Published: January 11, 2012

The new drama Pariah isn’t exactly a laugh-a-minute. A gritty look at a dysfunctional family and a daughter’s desire to be accepted, it’s a heavy, timely story. But one of its stars wants you to know it’s not without its lighter moments.

And Kim Wayans knows funny. She starred alongside her brothers Keenen, Ivory and Damon on the legendary In Living Color television show and once played a character named Ms. Dontwannabebothered in Dance Flick.

“To me, this movie is really truthful,” she says, “and in life in your darkest hour sometimes something funny happens. Have you ever been to a funeral and something funny happens and you find yourself laughing and grandma’s in the coffin? It’s just life, but to me, that was part of the brilliance of bringing real truth to this story. Yes, there is humour, there’s all kinds of stuff.”

In person, Wayans smiles and punctuates her sentences with a laugh, a far cry from the person she plays in the film.  Her character, Audrey, has rejected her daughter because of her sexuality, is alienated from her husband and has no friends.

“She has everything every parent could dream of right in front of her, and yet…” her voice trails off.

The tough, uncompromising character is a far cry from the woman sitting in front of me today, and I tell her so.  “You have to put Kim on ice someplace,” she says. “The work is to go over the script with a fine-toothed comb and find Audrey. Find how she sees the world. Find out what her value system is. Find out what her family dynamics were in her background, not what Kim’s are. That is the work. Basically you put ‘you’ somewhere else and step into these shoes.”

But can she kick those shoes off at the end of the day and go back to her normal life?  

“I personally can clock out at the end of the day and go back to being Kim,” she says. “When I’m there I’m in it. I’m in the story. I’m in Audrey. But when the day is done I can go home and take off that jacket, put it aside and put it back on the next day. I know a lot of actors can’t do that and they have to say in character but I am thankful that isn’t my story.”

Writer captures Maggie’s mettle
RICHARD CROUSE
METRO CANADA
Published: January 09, 2012

Margaret Thatcher, the longest reigning British Prime Minister of the 20th Century, remains a polarizing figure even though she hasn’t held office since 1990.

She’s a hero to some: Gloucester City Council leader Paul James calls her “the best prime minister there’s been.” But a villain to others: “She made all manner of cuts society is still recovering from,” says Steve Lydon, branch secretary of Stroud Labour Party.

She is now the subject of The Iron Lady — a nickname Thatcher picked up from Soviet newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda — a biography starring Meryl Streep, written by Shame playwright Abi Morgan.

The film has already ruffled the feathers of Thatcher devotees. Tim Bell, a longtime associate of the former PM, called the movie a “non-event” and Tory loyalist Norman Tebbit commented that Thatcher was “never, in my experience, the half-hysterical, over-emotional, over-acting woman portrayed by Meryl Streep.”

“It’s not a documentary, it’s not a social history, it’s a drama,” says Morgan on the controversy.

“I think if you see yourself as an artist, part of being an artist is to comment on your times. I feel it is a comment but it is a creative comment.

“I hope it’s a humane and dignified portrayal. I think anybody can see it’s not an attempt to sabotage.

“I feel it is as much the study of power, the study of loss and the study of the isolation of office and [because] Margaret Thatcher is an icon, a recognizable public figure, she was a way to filter those very powerful themes.”

Morgan says those “themes and the ideas and the human story are bigger than the individual.”

As written, the character of Thatcher is complex. The film first shows her long after her glory days and works backwards through her career highlights.

Meryl Streep plays her in various stages of her career.

“She is absolutely dream casting,” says Morgan.

“There are, obviously, amazing British actors and one would have been lucky to work with any of them, but what was exciting to me about working with Meryl is that she’s a complete shape shifter.

“I think she is an absolutely fascinating actress and I felt incredibly reassured when I learned Meryl was going to play the part because I knew she would imbue that character with such humanity and such complexity.

“She has such integrity, she just elevates the work.”

Keira’s breakthrough
RICHARD CROUSE
METRO
Published: January 09, 2012

Since her 2002 breakout performance in Bend it Like Beckham, Keira Knightley has starred in 18 films, but it was only recently she realized something about her acting process.

“I suffer very badly from stage fright,” she says.

“I didn’t find it out until I had actually been on stage that that’s what the feeling was.

“It’s literally like having a wall in front of you. You know you have the ability to break through but for some reason you can’t on that day.

“It’s very strange that you can work as much as I do and still have a problem with that.”

She has found a way to circumvent her fears, a method that came in handy while making her newest film A Dangerous Method, the story of the fathers of psychoanalysis, Carl Jung (played by Michael Fassbender) and Sigmund Freud (played by Viggo Mortensen), and Sabina Spielrein, the intelligent but troubled patient who causes a falling out between the men.

“I found only in the last few years that research helps,” she says.

“As far as getting over that fear of stage fright I find that preparation is the key.”

To play Spielrein, a woman wracked by tics and repression, Knightley threw herself into the exploration of the character.

“There was nothing that linked me to her,” she says.

“I had no idea about it. So I phoned Christopher Hampton because he did the adaptation of Atonement, which I did a few years ago, and said, ‘I’m going to do this, so help. Just help.’

“I went round to his house and thought he was going to give me a talk for a couple of hours and give me all the answers but he just handed me a pile of books and said, ‘Start reading. It’s all in there.’”

She eased her nerves with the research and further support was supplied during shooting by the film’s director, David Cronenberg.

“Sets… are very difficult creative spaces,” she says, “and trying to get the space so you can use your imagination and get yourself so you are not frightened by however many hundreds of people are on the set is quite a difficult thing.

“What David does is entirely creative. As much as it is technical it is also creative, collaborative and everybody is incredibly respectful of each other.

“He’s a magician. He’s absolutely extraordinary.”

Viggo Mortensen on research

“With David (Cronenberg) I know I’m going to have a good time shooting and the movie is probably going to be really interesting and original. As is the case this time again. A lot of cases with other directors the shoot is maybe fraught with tension and disorder but the research period can always be interesting. I love that.”

Top 10 TIFF films of 2011
RICHARD CROUSE
METRO
Published: December 22, 2011

Now that Santa’s naughty and nice list has been put away for another year, it’s time to have a look at another list, Canada's Top 10, the Toronto International Film Festival's annual tally of the best Canadian features. In alphabetical order, here are the winners as chosen by a panel of industry experts.

Café de flore

The main pleasure in this story about the uncompromising power of true love is watching Vanessa Paradis throw glamour out the window and deliver a gritty, but lovingly rendered performance as a protective mother.

A Dangerous Method

Here two pioneering psychoanalysts, played by Michael Fassbender and Viggo Mortensen, have a falling out over an intelligent, beautiful but troubled patient (Keira Knightley). The movie is an enticing stew of psycho-sexuality and repression that challenges commonly held beliefs about what is normal and what is not.

Edwin Boyd

The story of Canada’s John Dillinger is an entertaining romp through three decades in the life of a notorious homegrown folk hero.

Hobo With a Shotgun

This is like what would have happened if Roger Corman made Death Wish with a fake blood budget the size of a James Cameron movie.

Keyhole

Guy Maddin’s homage to 1930’s gangster melodramas is exactly what we expect from the eccentric director. It’s an expressionistic, beautifully grotesque story that demands multiple viewings.

Marécages

This lush looking story of the hardships of rural life and keeping a family together is slow moving but rewarding.

Monsieur Lazhar

Canada’s official entry to the Oscar race, this schoolroom drama — think To Sir with Love, with a suicide subplot — is one of the best films of the year, Canadian or otherwise.

Starbuck

A charming movie about a man — winningly played by Patrick Huard —who discovers his sperm bank donations unwittingly made him the father of 533 children, 142 of whom have filed a class action lawsuit to learn their biological father’s real identity.

Take This Waltz

This second feature from director Sarah Polley is a bittersweet Canadian kitchen sink drama about being trapped in a marriage with someone who can’t speak his mind.

Le Vendeur

This looks at what happens to life in a small town when the largest employer is about to shut down. It is a Main Street drama seen through the eyes of a kindly car salesman.

Tintin’s character rings true for Bell
RICHARD CROUSE
METRO CANADA
Published: December 15, 2011

Legend has it that when Steven Spielberg offered Jamie Bell the lead role in The Adventures of Tintin, the actor looked the Hollywood legend in the eye and said, “I’ll have to think about it.”

“What is true is that he said, ‘If you were to be Tintin it would be about five years of your life. Are you comfortable with that?’

“To me, as a 16-year-old, five years was a really long time. [He’s 24 now.] So I didn’t want to be the naïve actor and say, ‘OK, I’m fine with that. I wanted to really consider it. I don’t even think I said I’d think about it, I just didn’t give a definitive answer.

“For me it was more important to be sitting down at a table with him.

“Just sharing a Hollywood meeting with him was awesome. To me, as a child, he was otherworldly. He was a Houdini character who made dinosaurs live and boys fly on bicycles.”

Bell, who first won hearts as the lead in coming-of-age-dance movie Billy Elliot, says getting to make the movie with Spielberg has “remarkable synergy” because “Tintin was one of his favourite childhood things.”

Originally, he simply enjoyed the characters, he says, but there was something special that set the stories about the young detective apart from other kid’s comics.

“It was different from all the other cartoons. I felt respected, as a kid, by Tintin. That allowed me to gravitate toward him and go on his adventures.   
“I was a very inquisitive kid,” he says.

“I used to watch a lot of political satire comedy shows.  I’m sure I had no idea what they were talking about, but they were funny to me. Grown-ups making fun of other grown-ups was hilarious.

“So when I read Tintin and he was travelling around the world solving political corruption, I just knew what was going on.”

The film grabs the spirit of the beloved books, bringing some of the intensity — and mild violence — of the original Hergé books to the screen.

“If Tintin wasn’t the beacon of excellence that he is,” says Bell, “if he wasn’t the guy with the correct moral compass, if he wasn’t so innocently earnest all the time, I think that could be an issue.

“But because the character at the front is such a great, natural and instinctual heroic character, I think you kind of get away with it.”

Downey Jr. dusts off his deerstalker
RICHARD CROUSE
METRO CANADA
Published: December 08, 2011

Robert Downey Jr. knows how to work a room. I notice this while at the swank-a-delic Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills for a press conference to celebrate the release of Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows.

It’s a packed panel, including co-stars Noomi Rapace (the original Girl With the Dragon Tattoo) and Jared Harris, mega producer Joel Silver and Downey’s business and life partner Susan. Between them there are untold Oscar nominations and hundreds of millions in box office returns, but that doesn’t mean squat when Downey enters and takes centre stage.   

All eyes — and 90 per cent of the questions — go to him. Midway he feigns embarrassment at the attention and says, “Why doesn’t someone ask Joel Silver a question?”

Why? Because Downey is the most quotable, funny and memorable person in the room, that’s why.

Here’s a sample of what he had to say.

On making sequels:
“There should be a whole online support team for anyone who has ever been involved in making a second part to a first that worked. There is so much to learn. The greatest disguise was us disguising ourselves as consummate by-the-numbers professionals when, in fact, we’re all incredibly eccentric.”

When asked to talk about performing Sherlock Holmes’s drag scenes:
“I guess we’re not talking about this as one of the most important films of the year. I put on some makeup. How are we going to get nominated with these kinds of questions?”

On improving on set:
“I think the goal is to make a well-written scene seem improvised, or to find things in the room you couldn’t have known until you get in the real situation and just try and improve things as you go along.”

On why his co-star was absent:
“Jude (Law) would have been here, by the by, but his son had a soccer game.”

On keeping the set “green”:
“I just remember that every animal that was harmed was promptly taxidermied and sent as a gift to one of the many ecological companies who have these huge concerns that I validate.”   

On working with Jude Law and director Guy Ritchie:
“Jude and I are pretty close, but Guy and I are practically brothers. There have been times I have wanted to lob off his head with a machete.”

On collaborating with his director and fellow actors:
“It was a democracy in the truest and most frustrating and most rewarding sense of the word.”

The cast of New Year’s Eve shares their lacklustre memories of evenings filled with Auld Lang Syne
RICHARD CROUSE
METRO CANADA
Published: December 07, 2011

The cast of the new Garry Marshall film, New Year’s Eve, had a great time making the movie, but haven’t always had the best time on December 31st.

Josh Duhamel says the key to enjoying the night is keeping “expectations low” and leaving by 10:30 p.m.

Hector Elonzo, who has appeared in all 17 of Marshall’s films, agrees.

“Expectations low, definitely,” he says. “I did have one lousy New Years, because I expected something from it.” He tells a story about being a musician “in the days of rocks and caves, before they knew the world was round.”

His jazz quartet scored a show — “New Year’s Eve was the big gig,” he says, “that’s when you made $50!” — to discover the audience didn’t go for their New York brand of cool jazz. “They were like an oil painting looking at us. That was a big let down for us”

“When I stopped wanting my New Year’s Eve to be perfect is when it started working out right,” chimes in Hillary Swank, who plays the producer of the Times Square New Year’s Eve show in the all-star film. “When I was young I was always looking for the best party to ring in the New Year, and I always ended up in a car saying, (sadly) ‘Happy New Year.’”

“I got to kiss the girl I really liked, and then she turned around and kissed seven other people,” says director Garry Marshall. “Not a good night.”

But not all his end of the year experiences have been bad. In the early ’60s he met his wife Barbara at a New Year’s Eve party, and the two are still married. In fact she has a cameo in the movie playing a nurse.

Abigail Breslin may have an Oscar nomination under her belt, but that doesn’t mean she can do whatever she wants on New Years.

“My parents are cool,” says the 15-year-old actress, “they let me do things.” But would they let her behave like her on-screen character and go to the biggest New Year’s party on earth?

“I was saying the other day in an interview, ‘I’m not really sure my mom would let me do New Year’s Eve in Times Square.’

And she was like, ‘You’re right. I wouldn’t.’ So I don’t think that’s going to be happening any time soon.”

No shame in change
RICHARD CROUSE
METRO CANADA
Published: November 30, 2011

“It has just been a very, very intense year,” says screenwriter Abi Morgan. In addition to the release of Shame this week, her name also appears on the scripts for the new Meryl Streep film The Iron Lady and six episodes of the British television series The Hour.

“I just keep my head down and write,” she says. “The hardest thing for a writer is if you don’t have anyone with a deadline waiting for you.  It’s someone saying, ‘Deliver. I’m interested. I want to see what you’ve got.’ I think I’m a natural people pleaser so I like going, ‘Yes, I’m coming.’ It appeals to that part of me.

“I don’t have writer’s block as such. I certainly can write rubbish. I think your b******t barometer has to go up when you write every day because you have to stop and think, ‘Is this working? Is it good?’ You have to stop yourself from using the same rhythm or the same bad stage directions.

“So you know I have to shake up my writing quite a lot.”

Shake up, indeed. The Iron Lady is a portrait of hard line British PM Maggie Thatcher, The Hour a 1950s set newsroom drama, while Shame is a modern day look at sex addiction and the role the Internet plays in comodifying pornography.

“We didn’t set out to write a film about sex addiction,” she says of her collaboration with director Steve McQueen. “Our starting point was how the Internet can draw you in.”

She calls Shame star Michael Fassbender “the most brilliant choice” to play Brandon, a sex dependent New Yorker, because “he’s so fearless.”

The film wasn’t originally written with Fassbender in mind, but after the second draft director McQueen suggested the actor. The two had worked together in the festival hit Hunger, and Morgan says, “Steve and him have such an incredible relationship.”

Now she says “the film was very bespoke for him.

METRO KIEFER SUTHERLAND MELANCHOLIA INTERVIEW
RICHARD CROUSE
METRO CANADA
Published: November, 2011

The apple, as they say, doesn’t fall far from the tree. Not only has Kiefer Sutherland followed the famous footsteps of his parents, Donald Sutherland and Shirley Douglas, into the acting biz but he seems to have also inherited some of the fire of his grandfather.

When I compliment Sutherland on his glasses, a pair of retro-looking heavy frames, his passion flares.

“In the 30’s Roosevelt made a deal between Moscot and the federal government,” he says. “Anybody who needed glasses during the great depression got these glasses for free. They made millions of them. So anyone who says there was never a National Healthcare in the States is a liar.  That was the first national healthcare program where they provided glasses for free for the entire country.”  

Echoes of his grandfather, Tommy Douglas the father of Canadian health care, hang in the air.

He’s equally passionate when he speaks of his admiration for his latest director, Lars Von Trier, the controversial filmmaker behind Melancholia.

“I have a great affection for Lars,” he says. “I’ve done eighty some odd films. I’ve done one hundred and ninety eight episodes of 24, which is the equivalent of another 100 movies and this was the most unique experience I’ve had as an actor.”

Von Trier, the outspoken Danish director broke down the way his actors were used to working, doing away with lengthy rehearsals and traditional blocking.

Sutherland explains how, on his first day of shooting, Von Trier threw him and co-star into a complicated scene.  “He walks Charlotte Gainsbourg and I to a door. He says, ‘OK this is the room. I want you to play this scene on the other side of this door. We’re all set and ready to go, and you just go do it. ‘

When Sutherland objected Von trier told him to, “Stop talking.”    

“We went and did the scene and he deconstructed everything I’ve learned as a technical actor,” he says. “John Hurt has my favorite line in the entire movie. He’s dancing and I’m walking with all the drinks for the table. As I walk by he says, ‘I have no idea what I’m doing!’ We all felt like that. I don’t know what I’m doing either! And that’s exactly how Lars wanted it. That was the spirit of it.

“It’s something that I will carry with me for the rest of my career.”

A ‘krilling’ adventure
RICHARD CROUSE
METRO CANADA
Published: November 14, 2011

“One thing I am drawn to unconsciously is the hero myth,” says director George Miller.

Looking over his resumé it’s easy to see what he means. His creations, like Mad Max, who ruled a dystopian Australian landscape from the driver’s seat of a Ford Falcon XB Coupe and Babe, the king of the barnyard, are agents of change in their own worlds.  

In his new film, Happy Feet Two, the follow up to the Oscar winning dancing penguin musical of 2006, you’ll have to look closely to see his heroes, because they are the smallest creatures in the movie.

They are Bill and Will (Matt Damon and Brad Pitt), two bug-eyed characters who can only be described as existential shrimps. Actually, they’re krill – a minute marine crustacean.

“Happy Feet Two is not a saga,” he says. “It’s not the hero myth, except from the point of Will the Krill. From his point of view the world is epic because they are so tiny. He goes off on a classic hero myth, going out, looking into the unknown, confronting great dangers and bringing a boon back to his world.

“Because the film takes place in a truncated time period it was important to make it epic from some point of view. From the krill’s point of view it’s a very big world — universe — out there. We saw them like space explorers wanting to go out beyond their world.”

The krill may leave their flock — the “krillions” of krill they live with — to go on a journey, but Miller says the point of the story has more to do with family than heroes.    

“They begin by being torn apart in some way,” he says, “and it is only in the coming together that they are able to solve the problem.”

For Miller, Happy Feet Two was a bit of a family affair, but not intentionally. He says he turned to his daughter to write the lyrics of the show-stopping tune Eric’s Opera because he was desperate.

“We had three very well-known writers who have written musicals in Australia to try and write some lyrics and it just wasn’t working,” he says. “It was over elaborate so I called her and said, ‘Can we just sit down together and work through it.’ In two hours she had it, but it was more out of desperation than wanting specifically to work with my daughter.”

Clint makes the day
RICHARD CROUSE
METRO
Published: November 10, 2011

I'm tempted to borrow a phrase from MGM to describe the star-studded reception before the first-look screening of J. Edgar on Monday night in midtown Manhattan.

The studio boasted having "more stars than there are in the heavens," but this wasn't an MGM party, it was a Warner Bros soirée to celebrate their latest Oscar hopeful, a biopic about the controversial and enigmatic J. Edgar Hoover, who spent five decades as director of the FBI.

To my left 60 Minutes reporter Steve Croft worked the room. In another corner Alan Cummings chatted quietly to friends. David Byrne mixed and mingled and Tower Heist co-star Judd Hirsch snacked on sashimi from the sushi bar.

Behind the food stations framed posters of some of the biggest stars from movie history looked down on the party goers.

They are keepsakes from the Warner Bros legacy; a reminder that the company has making movies for almost as long as there have been movies to make.

Then a real life reminder of that legacy walked into the room. Clint Eastwood, J. Edgar's director, quietly slipped into the party. Well, as quietly as one of the most iconic movie faces of all time can slip into a room. With him was Leonardo DiCaprio, Armie Hammer ("Not Arm and Hammer, but Armie Hammer," Eastwood jokes) producer Brian Grazier and Oscar winning screenwriter Dustin Lance Black.

The weight shifts in the room, as though Clint's star power has a gravitational pull all its own. At eighty-one he's more weathered than when he made Dirty Harry a household name, but it is impossible to look a him and not have memories of "Go ahead, make my day..." or the Man with No Name character awakened, and everyone at the party feels it.

Inside the screening room he introduces his J. Edgar actors and creative team. After a long list of names he pauses and says, "that takes my memory as far as it will go." Holding for the laugh, he continues, "I've always been curious about J. Edgar Hoover... and I still am."

That's it. Like his characters he's a man of few words. Or maybe it was the hour. It was only eight o'clock but as someone sitting behind me joked, "He only works from nine to five."

I guess when you're a legend you can set your own hours.

Skarsgård longs for Sweden
RICHARD CROUSE
METRO
Published: November 03, 2011

Alexander Skarsgård is homesick.

The transplanted Scandinavian heartthrob, best known as Eric, True Blood’s sexiest vampire, lives in Los Angeles, but pines for his childhood home.

“I miss my family,” the 6’4 actor says. “They’re all in Stockholm. My parents are divorced but they both live in Stockholm. I have six siblings and they all live in Stockholm. Huge extended family… we’re all very close.  So it is tough being that far away.”

Life in his new home has been an adjustment. “It’s been difficult,” he says. “I’ve been there on and off for seven years now. I like California. I like Californians. The weather is great, however, I do miss the seasons. When you’ve been there for a while you realize they do have seasons in California, but the changes aren’t as dramatic as they are in Scandinavia.

“In Sweden you really feel how it changes, and there’s something about that I love. In a weird way you feel how time is moving forward. Sometimes in California I wake up and I don’t know if it is February or June. In Sweden it is so brutal; nature, how it dies and then the rebirth. That kind of cycle. I do miss it. But the grass is always greener because when I’m in Sweden for a winter and it is five months of darkness I’m like, ‘Oh man! Where’s the sun? I wish I was in California.’ So I’m always complaining I guess.”

Weather aside, he doesn’t have that much to complain about these days. True Blood continues to take a bit out of the ratings and his new film, Lars von Trier’s Melancholia — he plays Kirsten Dunst’s husband in this dark end-of-the-world drama — won an award at Cannes. But more than that, shooting the film reunited him with his much-missed family.

“Lars shoots all his movies in Sweden,” says Skarsgård. That meant he got to see his family —“On weekends I had rental cars and I drove up to Stockholm to see my mom and siblings.”— and work with “one of my best friends”— his father, the celebrated Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgård.

“I’m at an age now where we’re buddies,” says the thirty-five-year-old Skarsgård. “I have a great deal of respect for him as a human being and as an actor so it was just lovely.”

Sheen finds The Way
RICHARD CROUSE
METRO CANADA
Published: October 27, 2011

Tree of Life director Terrence Malick has had an enormous impact on actor Martin Sheen’s life.
“He’s one of the great, great people,” says Sheen, “and one of the most mysterious, wonderful characters.”

Professionally, the director gave Sheen the role that broke him out of the episodic television grind and made him a movie star. As Kit Carruthers in Badlands, Sheen won raves and was set upon a career path that would see him star in Apocalypse Now and win a collection of Golden Globes and Screen Actors Guild awards for playing President Bartlet on The West Wing.

Personally, however, Malick’s influence has been even more profound. A formerly lapsed Catholic, Sheen’s faith was restored after meaningful discussions with Malick  30 years ago.

The pair has stayed in touch despite Malick’s notoriously reclusive lifestyle.

“He is the most shy person I have ever met in my life,” says Sheen.

“He was living in Paris years ago and we got reacquainted in 1981. One day we were walking down the street and somebody recognized me and he kept going. I lost him totally! I said, ‘Hey, how are you guys?’ and boom, he was gone.

“He lives in Texas with his wife, who is the love of his life. They grew up together and went to school together but it took two wives in between to get back to that. I adore him.”

The two old friends still engage in deep conversations, says Sheen, and it’s possible that indirectly their tête-à-têtes helped the actor get into his latest film, The Way.

“We talk about family,” Sheen says.

“We talk about spirituality. We talk about the mystery of life.”

All topics covered in the new film.

Directed by his son Emilio Estevez, it gives Sheen his first chance to carry a film since the days of Apocalypse Now.

Describing the movie as a story about “loss, recovery and healing, with some laughs along the way,” Sheen hands in a touching performance as Tom, a man struggling to deal with the death of his son.
What begins as a physical trek on the El camino de Santiago from France to Spain turns into a spiritual pilgrimage as Tom re-examines and rediscovers his faith.

Sheen is out tub-thumping the film to the press, but there is one person he surely won’t be deliberating it with — his friend Malick.

“We have never discussed films,” he says.

Remaking a teenage classic
RICHARD CROUSE
METRO CANADA
Published: October 06, 2011

The names Ren and Ariel are touchstones for a generation. In the teen classic Footloose, big city boy Ren (Kevin Bacon) romanced Ariel (Lori Singer) and brought the boogie back to the small town of Bomont, Georgia.

Despite bad reviews, the story of teen rebellion and two-stepping struck a chord with audiences who made it one of the biggest hits of 1984.

Director Craig Brewer knew his new big-screen version had to tread carefully, reinventing the characters without losing what made them popular in the first place.

“I think all of my cast members were able to occupy the characters without there being any sort of mimicry or impersonation of the original,”?he says.

The project had been in development for some time, with big names like Zac Efron attached, but Brewer decided to go a different way.

“If you went in a time machine and sat with me in 1984 when I was 13 and went and saw Footloose, right before the screening happened if you would have asked me, ‘What do you think of Kevin Bacon?’ I would have said, ‘Who?’ That movie made that guy. He was already a talented actor, he just needed a movie to break him into the pop scene.

“You want to see someone new come into town, you want to have that same bit of mystery surround them so I resisted having Ren McCormack being played by a ‘movie star’ because then you get all the baggage of their other movies tied into this one,” he says.

Kenny Wormald, a choreographer and dancer, won the role after a recommendation from Justin Timberlake, who spotted his innate talent when Kenny was a backup dancer for the singer.

For Ariel, Brewer cast the more established Julianne Hough, best known as a Dancing with the Stars champion.

After her initial audition Brewer was relieved.

“I knew I had Ariel. I was excited because I had just seen the birth of a new actress who was really good and really brave,” she said.

Hugh not always so steely
RICHARD CROUSE
METRO CANADA
Published: September 29, 2011

Hugh Jackman must be the envy of his drama school’s graduating class. Between the opening of Real Steel this weekend and the end of 2013 he’ll star in six films ranging from The Wolverine’s high octane action and the high notes of Les Misérables to the high comedy of Movie 43.  

It seems apt that he’ll also soon be starring in The Greatest Showman on Earth because he can do it all — in between action movies he can out-sing-and-dance anyone on the circuit — but it wasn’t always that way.

“When I started acting I was the dunce of the class,” he says.

Success in school, he says, came because of his work ethic, a trait he picked up from his father.

“He never took one day off in his life,” he says. “Now, he had five kids he was bringing up on his own. If anyone deserved a day off it was my old man, but he never did. I learned that from him.

“There’s always that feeling of, ‘I have to work harder than everybody else. I’m not born Phillip Seymour Hoffman. I’ve got to just work harder and I’m prepared to do it.”  

Being the youngest of five children also contributed to his outlook. “I always wanted to do stuff and not be left out,” he says, but adds, “I was quite a fearful kid, which I hated.

“I’ve always had a fear of fear. It’s a weird to think back now but drama school, it is a pressure kind of situation. People get kicked out of drama school. You are constantly being judged on how you are doing, are you progressing, are you not.

“Almost everyday you had to get up and do a monologue. Sing a song. Do it in front of everybody.

“I noticed I was always first. I never wanted to sit there waiting.

“I’m not saying that out of courage. It was too uncomfortable to sit, stewing. I don’t think I’ve told anyone else that.”

Later, fear of unemployment pushed him to expand his talents.

“When I came out of drama school I was like, ‘I’m going to do anything I can just to keep working.’ In drama school you do Shakespeare to movement to circus skills to singing all in one morning. I know a lot of people hated it but I reveled in it. I loved it. It’s weird how it evolved.”

Director up in the clouds
RICHARD CROUSE
METRO CANADA
Published: September 26, 2011

Shortly into my conversation with Irish filmmaker Jim Sheridan I begin to understand what his daughter Kristen meant when she said her father “exists up in the clouds. In order to communicate with him, you have to go up into the clouds yourself.”

When I mention the quote to the Dream House director he laughs and tries to explain.

“I think that’s probably true in relation to the way I approach actors and story. I know directors like Tim Burton or David Fincher, they're very structured visually. Then there’s the approach that says, ‘It’s emotional over here.’

But emotions are invisible and it’s hard to catch the invisible. Trying to catch the invisible is very interesting because it’s just something that happens in front of you rather than something that has happened, as Hitchcock said, and then I’m only shooting it.”

A scheduled 10 minute interview stretches into 35 minutes as the three-time Oscar nominee chats amiably about the movies he thinks will eventually become classics — “the poetic ones that don’t make as much sense” — on artistic vision — “it’s a product of interior emotion” — the meaning of the Kubrick film 2001 — “it’s a baptism!” — and, of course, his new movie.

In Dream House real life newlyweds Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz are Will and Libby, a happily married couple who leave New York City for a simpler life in New England. Of course, this is a thriller, so their hopes for a happy life are dashed when they discover their new home was the site of a grisly murder.

“It’s a genre piece,” he says.

“It’s a psychological thriller with horror overtones and detective story overtones, but essentially, deep down it’s a love story. It’s in the vein of A Beautiful Mind and Shutter Island. We’ve made the kind of movie with thriller and horror elements, but women will like it.”

Sheridan may exist in the clouds, but he is realistic about the state of the movie business. The kind of character dramas that made him famous are harder to get made these days.

“One day, I don’t know what day it was, maybe a Thursday, about a year ago, everybody decided you couldn’t make a drama anymore,” he says. “I think there was a surfeit of independent movies when there was a surfeit of money,” he says. “In Ireland we built too many houses, in America we made too many movies.”

Harry Connick Jr.: The dolphin whisperer
RICHARD CROUSE
METRO CANADA
Published: September 21, 2011

Harry Connick Jr. says working with his co-star everyday was “really incredible.” He’s not talking about Morgan Freeman or Ashley Judd, although he enjoyed spending time on set with them. No, he’s referring to Winter, the titular star of his new film Dolphin’s Tale.

Winter is the real-life inspiration of the story of a bottlenose dolphin whose tail was lost in a crab trap. Rescued and rehabilitated by the folks at the Clearwater Marine Aquarium, the giant marine mammal was equipped with a prosthetic tail that allows it to swim normally.

“When you really got to spend time with her you got the sense that she was aware of your feelings more than your presence,” he says.

“There were times when I had to apply the prosthetic to her, when you thought she could wipe me out with her tail if she wanted to but she was very calm. It was strange, like an otherworldly type of communication.

“I’ve been around dolphins before but there is something different about her. I guess it’s because she’s been so ultra socialized, she’s been around so many different people since she was months old that maybe there is a different type of relationship she has with humans. I’m not sure. There is something you can feel. It’s pretty cool.”

“When we got her she was about 60 pounds and about two-and-a-half or three feet long,” says David Yates, CEO and director of the Clearwater Marine Aquarium. “Very, very small. A dolphin that small, with that kind of trauma, is not expected to live at all.”

But Winter defied expectations and is now an inspiration for visitors to the aquarium, and starting this weekend, to movie audiences.  

“I know exactly how the movie is going to impact people because we see it every day around here in real life,” says Yates.

“Winter is a young dolphin who lost her tail and wouldn’t give up, simply wouldn’t quit. People look at her, especially kids and they realize she is different, and what kid doesn’t think they are different?
“But they look at Winter and go, ‘You know, she’s different and she’s OK. I’m different; I’m going to be OK.’ That’s the essence of the movie.”

From the trailer park to Afghanistan
RICHARD CROUSE
METRO CANADA
Published: September 21, 2011

So many movies are being made in Halifax these days the city is informally nicknamed Haliwood.

Hollywood fare like Titanic and Dolores Claiborne have frequently used the city as a backdrop but lately Canadian filmmakers have taken back the streets from their Hollywood counterparts.

Thom Fitzgerald’s new film Cloudburst recently filmed there, Hobo with a Shotgun cast a lurid light on its streets and Charlie Zone is a thriller set against the city’s soft underbelly.

“There’s a lot going on in the city,” says native Nova Scotian Mike Clattenberg.

He should know. As the director of The Trailer Park Boys he made seven seasons of the show and two spinoff movies in “the Fax.”

His new film, Afghan Luke, starring Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines star Nick Stahl, was conceived in Halifax, but set in a place where “everything is true but the facts.”

A gonzo look at one reporter’s efforts to report on the truth of what is happening in Afghanistan, it’s a departure from the work the director is best known for.

“I loved the 10 years we did Trailer Park Boys,” says Clattenberg. “There was insane drunk lunacy; blowing up cars.

“All that stuff was really fun but it was really nice doing something entirely different, 80 per cent drama, 20 per cent insanity, whereas Trailer Park was the other way around,” he says.

While interiors and post production were done in Halifax, Clattenberg had to look further afield for exteriors.

“The first gigantic challenge was to shoot a film that is 90 per cent exteriors, set in Afghanistan, in Canada during the rainy season,” says Clattenberg.

“We eventually found Ashcroft and Cache Creek, British Columbia, about five hours from Vancouver.”

The setting mimicked Afghanistan’s rugged, mountainous terrain so much the film’s technical advisor Wafi Gran gave it the thumbs up.

“He said the next time he pines for Afghanistan he’s just going to go there and hang out.
“He really thought that it looked like his home town,”

In one respect, however, the location was almost too authentic.

“I didn’t expect dust storms, but we had them,” Clattenberg says.

“It really worked for the film, but the most dangerous thing for our gear is sand.

“The guys had to work three and four hours after wrap every night cleaning the equipment because when the sand came up, we were like, ‘Let’s go. We have to shoot!’”

Redefining fatherhood
RICHARD CROUSE
METRO CANADA
Published: September 18, 2011

The new comedy Starbuck has a story line which sounds ripped from the headlines.

Recently the New York Times reported on a sperm donor who has fathered 150 children with more on the way. The Times was slightly behind the times, however, according to director and writer Ken Scott. “We’ve known of these cases and have been telling people and everyone says, ‘Yeah, come on, this is not possible,’” he says.

“It is possible. It is actually happening and not in one case but in several throughout the world. People don’t believe me but they believe the New York Times. As if they have the truth, but not me!”

From the film Bon Cop, Bad Cop, star Patrick Huard plays David, an irresponsible Montrealer whose “donations,” under the pseudonym Starbuck, unwittingly made him the father of 533 children, 142 of whom have filed a class action lawsuit to learn their biological father’s real identity.

Through his “kids” he learns commitment and responsibility.

“It would have been impossible for me to do this part [before I had kids of my own],” Huard says.

“I really think I was preparing for this part for years and that’s why it feels so natural. Probably not even four years ago could I have done this role. I was ready and ripe for that part now. That’s why it is so magical for me.

“When I read the script that’s the feeling I had. I am the age of the character now, and I have that feeling — that I want to commit.

“When I was even 30 I wasn’t committed in every part of my life as I am now. When I read the script, I thought, not only do I want to do this, but I want to do it now.

“I am ready.”  

He was ready to make the film but anxious to try something different. “I changed my natural rhythm,” says Huard. “I wasn’t even moving at the same pace I move in life.”

“The way the film is structured his character is in every scene,” says Scott. “So I needed a well crafted actor, talented, charismatic and funny. Patrick was the right guy.

“I think what’s interesting is that Patrick was a natural choice because he has all these qualities but he is playing a character very different from what he’s done before.

“That was very exciting, that feeling that we are doing something new.”

Albert Brooks Is All A-Twitter
zoomermag.com
PEOPLE
Wednesday, September 14, 2011

By Richard Crouse

Albert Brooks has a new obsession. “I hate to say I put more thought into it than it deserves,” he says.

His new hobby? Twitter, that one-hundred-and-forty-character microblog has captivated the actor since the release of his last book, 2030: The Real Story of What Happens to America, in April of this year.

“I started for real practical reasons,” he says. “Like trying to say, ‘Hey, I’ll be at a bookstore in Manhattan, come and say hello,’ and then I found it was an interesting way to see a headline and have a feeling about it and make a comment on the Republican debate. I used to call my friends and do these lines.”

He muses on his everyday life, with a comic twist. “Great time in Toronto,” he tweeted about his recent trip to the Toronto International Film Festival. “Great people. If you can make it here you can make it….well, in most parts of Canada.” Short and sardonic, the tweets are worth a read, but their short form goes against his usual style.

“As I said in one of my early tweets, ‘Twitter is turning us all into Bob Hope,” because my whole comedy career was as the anti-Hope. I liked to take seven minutes to tell you something and now I’m back to, ‘Liz looked out the door!’ “My shoes are wet!’ The real test of twitter will be to see if I can ever write in long form again. If it’s killed me, it’s been the devil.”

One thing he’ll certainly be tweeting about this weekend is Drive, the new film he co-stars in with Hollywood it-boy Ryan Gosling.

Unlike his best known roles—like Aaron Altman in Broadcast News or Marlin the clownfish in Finding Nemo—he’s not playing it for laughs this time. In this stylish crime drama he is a shady character named Bernie Rose. In an early scene Gosling declines a handshake from Rose. The younger actor stares at the gesture of friendship for a moment before declining to shake. “My hands are a little dirty,” he says. “So are mine,” replies Rose.

It’s a great scene which tells us that nobody in this movie is above boards and it’s something different for the actor.

“The same twelve people play all the roles,” he says. “Even though you may like an actor, there’s no surprise anymore. When Edward G. Robinson came on-screen you knew what he was going to do. So the fact that [director] Nicolas [Winding Refn] thought this was a good idea worked for everybody. I wanted to try something different. It doesn’t let the audience know one hundred percent just because they see me. As a matter of fact, they might even think something different. It’s always a good thing in movies if you can do that and pull it off.”

His performance is getting great buzz—he even manages to upstage Gosling—and says it is a movie that sticks with you. After seeing it for the first time he couldn’t get it out of his head.

“Both my wife and I, like four days later, said, ‘Are you still thinking about this?’ I don’t know why. I’ve been trying to figure it out. I said to Nicolas, ‘I felt like I’ve had a dream. The movie started and ended and where did I go?’ Nicolas consciously talks about movies like that. He says dreams are 94 minutes in length, and has all sorts of theories, but whatever it is, it sticks there.”

Want to know more about the movie? Check out his twitter feed at @AlbertBrooks.

Dog days of summer
RICHARD CROUSE
METRO CANADA
Published: September 13, 2011

1971 was a watershed year for new cinema. Films like A Clockwork Orange, Dirty Harry and Straw Dogs pushed the boundaries of what was acceptable on the silver screen. None are passive films. Each brims with the obsessions of their makers, and for that each was the subject of controversy and censorship.

Eventually they became accepted by the mainstream. A Clockwork Orange has become a cultural touchstone, with everyone from Lady Gaga to David Bowie to Kylie Minogue, who dressed in a black bowler hat and a white jumpsuit on tour in 2002, paying tribute. It was even played at the Cannes Film Festival and released on Blu Ray to mark its fortieth anniversary. Dirty Harry is on constant rotation on television and Rod Lurie’s remake of the Sam Peckinpah film Straw Dogs hits screens this weekend.

The movie stars James Marsden and Kate Bosworth as David and Amy Sumner, a big city couple who move back to her hometown on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Tensions with some of the locals (including True Blood’s Alexander Skarsgård) bubble to the surface and soon boil over into violence.

“If you look at a movie like Straw Dogs, which was heavily influenced by a book called The Territorial Imperative,” says Lurie, “Peckinpah seems to be saying that violence is in the genetics of all men and therefore we must be aware of it so we can control it. It was extremely fascist thinking but that also seems to be the thing with Dirty Harry.

“A Clockwork Orange is a much more clinical look at that but I think artists were trying to provide the answers top what society was asking then. It was a very, very violent era.

“This was an era in which people were searching for answers to the madness that was going on around them,” Lurie continues, “and filmmakers were trying to provide some of the answers. You had everything from the assassinations of Kennedy and King to Vietnam to the Whitman murders to My Lai. I think all of society was trying to understand how human beings could do such things.”

David Cronenberg: Still too dangerous for an Oscar?
Constance Droganes, CTVNews.ca Staff
Date: Thu. Sep. 8 2011

When TIFF 2011 raises its curtain on David Cronenberg's new film, "A Dangerous Method," audiences will ask: Can the controversial director finally win an Oscar?

It he does, it'll be a long time coming.

Cronenberg, 68, first found fame in the 1970s for cult horror movies like "Shivers," "Rabid," and "The Brood." Three decades later, he has transcended a genre seldom favoured by Oscar voters to become a filmmaking auteur equal to art-house favourites like Jean-Luc Godard.

His films increasingly encroach into the mainstream, while retaining Cronenberg's unmistakable penchant for disturbing violence. In 2005, he gripped audiences with one man's secret past in the crime thriller, "A History of Violence." The protagonist was played by one of Hollywood's top heartthrobs, Viggo Mortensen.

He got down and dirty with the Russian mob in 2007's Russian mob drama, "Eastern Promises." That film also starred Viggo Mortensen, who won his first Oscar nomination for Best Actor.

TIFF co-director Cameron Bailey said Cronenberg has never strictly been a horror filmmaker, "even when he was making horror movies."

"With films like ‘Eastern Promises' and ‘A History of Violence' Cronenberg showed that he could work in different genres and still bring really challenging elements to these stories," Bailey told CTVNews.ca. "But these aren't horror movies at all, and even less so at this point in his career."

Now comes "A Dangerous Method," a film about the power of ideas generated by two titans in the field of psychiatry: Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung.

Set in Vienna on the eve of the First World War, "A Dangerous Method" has an impressive cast headlined by Mortensen, Michael Fassbender and Keira Knightley.

The script is based on Christopher Hampton's 2002 play of the same name. It digs into the turbulent relationship between Jung (Fassbender) and his mentor Freud (Mortensen). That relationship implodes after one patient (Knightley) undergoes their treatment and takes these giants to the dark side of genius.

"Oscar voters love films like these," said Canada AM movie critic Richard Crouse.

"It's got great actors, a great story and historical gravitas. It's is also being launched at a major international film festival. You know Oscar voters will give it some consideration," said Crouse.

Even so, Cronenberg's horror roots may still be too dangerous for some Academy members. A shocking 1981 film like "Scanners" -- where a character uses telekinetic powers to make a man's head explode -- is difficult to forget.

"Once you've earned a reputation for making people's heads explode on film, it's hard to get the Academy to think of you as an Oscar contender," said Crouse.

That may explain why Cronenberg was denied a Best Director's nod for "Eastern Promises" in 2008. Whether that matters to Cronenberg is another matter.

"Cronenberg stays true to himself. Telling a great story will always be his real satisfaction," said Crouse.

Shark shoot has bite
RICHARD CROUSE
METRO CANADA
Published: August 25, 2011

Making movies can be glamorous, but there according to the stars of Shark Night 3D, their shoot was anything but.

“I got a little chewed up,” says the Yellowknife-born Dustin Milligan.

“We went blind, literally,” adds co-star Sara Paxton. “It was pretty bad, but my retina has healed.”

The pair are laughingly describing the rope burn and chlorine damage they suffered doing some of the stunts in the film, but that, they say, wasn’t the craziest part of making the shark attack movie in the middle of nowhere.
 
“We were literally in Deliverance town,” says Sara. “We were shooting in a place called Uncertain, Texas, population ten. There were the houses on the bayou on the stilts. It was straight up True Blood.”   

“There were some locals that definitely reminded you of how remote it was,” adds Dustin.

“They were super nice though,” says Sara.

Not as nice were the other indigenous life forms of the area.

“There were twelve foot alligators, there were water moccasins, crazy fish with big teeth and snapping turtles,” Sara says

“It was definitely a scary experience,” Dustin says, “and then the sharks themselves were terrifying but there’s all kinds of stuff in the water. And it was dirty water too.

“Really dirty,” chimes in Sara. “I just didn’t want to get bitten by anything. We had ex Navy Seals as our stunt guys and they would go out on Wave Runners and clear out the area beforehand. They’d swirl the water around and make noise. ‘It’s fine. It’s fine. We checked the water.’ Then Alyssa was in the water and asked, ‘Why did that log blink?’”

Least threatening of all were the mechanical sharks.

“There were a couple of guys with remote controls working them, but they had real shark’s teeth in them,” said Sara.

“One of my favorite things to do,” says Dustin, “was to watch the team with the remote controls. There’s three guys; one person working the tail and the body, one person working the head up and down and one guy working the jaw specifically. And the guy doing the jaw work was always snarling, moving his jaw with it. It’s a testament to the quality of the shark work that went into this. Even behind the scenes these guys were living the life of a shark while they were trying to eat us.”

The irrational love of the world's cuddliest boogeyman
RICHARD CROUSE
METRO CANADA
Published: August 21, 2011

Guillermo del Toro may be the world’s cuddliest boogeyman. When I enter the hotel room to interview the 47-year-old producer of Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, he stands up and hugs me. Not exactly what you anticipate from a master of horror.

But then again, surprises are his stock in trade. From the eerie Pale Man character in Pan’s Labyrinth to the deadly mechanical scarab of Cronos, he has trained viewers to expect the unexpected from his films.

A career spent scaring the pants off people has given the director some insight on why we like to be terrified at the movies.

“We try to look for the extraordinary in our ordinary lives,” he says. “That’s just the normal way we behave as spiritual beings. And horror movies allow us to live extraordinary experiences without having to go through extraordinary risk.

“I have a harder time understanding reality shows than I have a hard time understanding genre films. Because genre films give you something you don’t get in real life. Reality shows give you people you would normally never talk to in real life. Why are you interested in watching them?”

Not that the self described workaholic has much time to watch reality TV. When he’s not executive producing Oscar-nominated movies like Biutiful he’s writing the much anticipated The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, or working on a new novel with his co-writer Chuck Hogan. Add to that the alien attack movie Pacific Rim which he’ll spend the next year filming in Toronto and you have one of the busiest men in the business.

“Hard work is pleasure for me,” he says, adding that luckily, “I have been surrounded by a system of enabling family and I submerge myself in my work.”

A horror fan since childhood, (“I read Salem’s Lot in one sitting,” he says. “Eleven hours from eight a.m. to seven p.m. outside in the pool. I had a second degree burn because of that!”), he has s simple criteria for the projects he accepts.

“You should only get involved in things you love irrationally,” he says. “I turn down very lucrative things. I do constantly and I’ve done it all my career. But I go with the things I believe in and I think, so far, everything you see that I’ve put out feels like part of that universe.”

Del Toro on his movie's monsters:
“The scariest thing about these creatures in the movie is that they are intelligent. They strategize. They literally find ways to get the upper hand against the humans.”

Bryce Dallas Howard Goes Back in Time in ‘The Help’
zoomermag.com
Movies PEOPLE
Tuesday, August 9, 2011

By Richard Crouse

Bryce Dallas Howard broke one of acting’s cardinal rules when she took on the role of Hilly Holbrook, the socialite segregationist in the film adaptation of Kathryn Stockett’s best selling book The Help. It’s always said that an actor cannot judge the character they are playing. Doing so erases any chance of finding the character’s humanity.

“I think they say that for a reason,” she said in a recent interview in Toronto. “I didn’t listen and I did judge her and it was really hard for me to create a real human being for a very long time. It wasn’t until just before shooting that a few things pieced together in my head that made me say, ‘Oh man, this is why she is this way. I can play that. I can play that person.’”

“That person” is the villain of the piece. Set in the weeks and months leading up to the 1963 death of African American civil rights activist Medgar Evers, The Help is the story of a young writer (Emma Stone) who goes against convention—and Hilly, the town’s most outspoken racist—to tell the stories of the settlement’s African-American maids (Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer).

“She’s the character you love to hate [in the book] and I was really excited to play her,” she says. “But then I got to Mississippi for rehearsals and I realized, ‘Oh my gosh, I can’t play a kind of Cruella de Vil version of this woman.’

“This is a character based on not just several women of the time, but the majority of women, and if I didn’t get into her psychology then I was not really portraying the devastating honesty of the people at that time. So I had to get how she ticked.”

Shooting in Greenwood, Mississippi helped her find the character.

“Greenwood, Mississippi happens to be a really well persevered town,” she said. “When you are there the aesthetics of what you are surrounded by is so out of the ordinary because you really feel like you are walking around in the 1960s. The houses look exactly the way they did back then. To the eye it is really beautiful, and I think that was captured in the film, but making this movie and shooting there was eerie because it felt like, while the people were so great and embraced us, aesthetically you felt like you were in a place where nothing had changed.

“Then of course, if you know the history of that era, I mean, Greenwood, Mississippi, in particular, was really the hotbed of the civil rights movement. It’s where the White Citizen’s Council was. Emmett Till was a young boy who was murdered by a group of white men, which was kind of in a way the beginning of the civil rights movement.

“You couldn’t forget that. It made everything extremely real to all of us. If we were shooting in a soundstage in Los Angeles it would have been easier to escape at night or in between takes, whereas shooting there we couldn’t escape what the movie was about.”

Playing the prejudiced Hilly as a combo of “queen bee” and “power hungry woman with a duplicitous nature,” Howard was struck by the immediacy of the film’s story of racism and segregation.

“This was just my parent’s generation,” she says. “That was so recent. On the one hand it is great to see how far we’ve come but we have to remind ourselves that we are very, very close to it and can easily slip back into that mentality.

“I have a four-and-a-half year old son and I’m pregnant now and I think about the things that my children will grow up and say, ‘I can’t believe that was an issue.’ My prayer for myself is that I’m on the right side of history. That I can say, I did something, that I contributed to the evolution of my country.”

The Help's Howard stays on the level
RICHARD CROUSE
METRO CANADA
Published: August 07, 2011

At the beginning of my interview with Bryce Dallas Howard she does something I’ve never experienced before in a celebrity sit-down. Curled up on a coach in Toronto’s Park Hyatt Hote,l the four-and-a-half month pregnant star of The Help does something really un-celebrity-like—she offers to hold the microphone I’m using to record our chat.

It’s a small thing, but it goes a long way to creating a portrait of the down-to-earth Golden Globe nominee, who is best known for roles in blockbusters like Spider-Man 3, The Twilight Saga: Eclipse and Terminator Salvation.

Surrounded by celebrity from birth—her father is TV icon Ron Howard—she has observed stardom up close and has strong opinions about fame—her own and those around her.

“It’s weird that we expect celebrities to behave like they’re so entitled,” she says. “I think it’s because a lot of celebrities do, and that’s just absurd.”

This is coming from someone whose godfather is Henry Winkler, who once had Tom Cruise as a babysitter and first acted at age seven as an extra in one of her dad’s movies.

“I’ve always been kind of fascinated by that subject because while I have closely observed celebrity I have always felt apart from it because I was raised outside of Hollywood,” she says. “I’ve always had an interesting relationship with the idea of what a celebrity is.

“Recently, because of reality television, the notion of celebrity and what people are famous for is changing,” she adds.

I mention stars that parlay sex tapes into a showbiz career and she nods.

“I think unfortunately that is defining our time. I’ve never actually had this thought before, but I think it would be interesting to look back in history and see who the most iconic individuals of that time period were and then look at now, and perhaps be a little bit horrified.”

When I ask if fame is important to her personally she is quick to answer.

“No,” she says emphatically. “Not at all. One of the things I feel most grateful for is that I don’t live the life of a famous person. I could not imagine living a life with paparazzi around me, when you feel like your privacy is being intruded. That would be really terrifying to me.”

Pooh’s chance to shine
RICHARD CROUSE
METRO
Published: July 12, 2011

For most people, Walt Disney is a brand name, or a flickering black-and-white image best remembered for hosting the Disneyland series throughout the 1960s. But for animator Burny Mattinson he was a real living, breathing person.

“I first met him as a traffic boy when I first came to the studio,” said Mattinson, a Disney employee since 1953. “I was in the elevator and he stepped in. I said, ‘Good morning Mr. Disney.’ He looked at me with a cocked eyebrow and said, ‘It’s Walt, son.’ That was my first adventure with him.”

Mattinson had many adventures in the studio, including working on Aladdin, Beauty & the Beast and the original Winnie the Pooh shorts in 1964 and ’74. Those shorts were wildly popular, but were originally planned as a feature film. Mattinson remembers watching the rough cut of the  film with Disney.

“He came out afterwards and said, ‘You know, I think we should cut our losses. I don’t think audiences are going to like this kind of humour. It’s too mild. Let’s put it out as a featurette.’ So we cut it to 20 minutes and lost a lot of footage. We put it out as Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree and it did very well, and Walt said, ‘Well we have the rest of this footage, let’s put it out as A Blustery Day. Which we did and it won an Academy Award the following year.”

Recently Mattinson’s career came full circle when he was approached to help relaunch the Pooh Bear and his friends from the Hundred Acre Woods. The result is Winnie the Pooh, a movie Mattinson says, “is kind of like visiting an old friendly family you’ve grown up with.”

Mattinson has another family connection to the film. The movie’s opening moments are live action, featuring a Winnie the Pooh stuffed doll his wife made in 1964. It was set to be used in the 1964 movie, but when it wasn’t he gave it to his children.

“My kids played with it,” he says, “and their kids played with it. It’s kind of raggedy; it’s gotten a lot of patina of age on it but then when the bosses said they were going to shoot a new live action opening I brought it in and showed it to them and they said, ‘Yes! That’s it.’ It’s finally gotten its chance.”

A Pooh for a new century
RICHARD CROUSE
METRO
Published: July 08, 2011

Winnie the Pooh has Canadian roots. The beloved A.A. Milne creation, a potbellied bear with a taste for “hunny,” was based on a real-life Canadian black bear that lived at the London Zoo.

Brought to the zoo by Lieutenant Harry Colebourn during the First World War, the bear was named Winnie after the soldier’s hometown of Winnipeg.

It’s fitting, then, that the new Disney Winnie the Pooh movie had many Canadians help bring it to the screen.

“It’s like winning the lottery having worked here,” says Alberta native Brian Ferguson of his 21 years working at the House of Mouse.

His first job after joining the company was animating the company’s mascot in Mickey Mouse’s Prince and the Pauper. “It’s such a simple design,” he says, “but if you get a pencil thickness off in the proportions, it looks wrong.” That’s a lesson he took with him when drawing the classic characters in Winnie the Pooh.

“The people who did the first Winnie the Poohs were masters and the stuff they did then, wow,” he says. “Even as an experienced animator I look at it and go, ‘Oh my goodness, I wouldn’t have thought of that.’ It’s subtle little things that make a character be just a little away from normal. It’s the subtle difference between, ‘I would never have done it that way,’ to ‘I would never have thought to do it that way.’”

Nik Ranieri, a Torontonian with 23 years at the studio, adds that while the classic look of Winnie the Pooh has been maintained in the movie, efforts have been made to update the feel of the film.

“When I watch the film there are some things in there I don’t think you’d see in the old ones,” he says. “Look at the character of Rabbit. Some of those poses and expressions are a little more manic, but it doesn’t take away from the charm of the original. It just adds a little bit of contemporary feel to it.”

For Vancouverite Clio Change, Winnie the Pooh marks a landmark — it’s her first Disney film. “I think I was four when I told my dad I wanted to work here,” she says. “He said, ‘OK, you can sell Coke in the parks in a mouse suit.’ Luckily it was animation instead.”

When I ask her if all the Disney Canucks have their own table in the cafeteria she nods and laughs, “We eat maple cookies and drink syrup.”

Kevin Spacey drinks up playing a horrible boss
RICHARD CROUSE
METRO CANADA
Published: July 05, 2011

In the first decade of his career, Kevin Spacey made 20-plus movies and appeared in dozens of TV shows. In the process he took home two Academy Awards — Best Actor for American Beauty, Best Supporting for The Usual Suspects — and became one of the best known actors in Hollywood. But these days he’s not as ubiquitous a presence on screen as he once was, and that’s by design.

“I made a choice that I was going to focus on theatre for 10 years,” he says on the line from his home in London, “because I had focused on film for nearly 12.

“I got to a point where I thought, 'That went better than I could possibly have ever hoped. Now what? Am I going to spend the next 10 years chasing the same dream?' I thought, A: I don’t need to top myself and B: I’d like to take all the incredible personal good fortune and attention that came to me and put it toward something that isn’t about me. That is about putting myself back into something that has always been my first love.”

To that end he took over one of England’s oldest theatres, the Old Vic, as artistic director in 2003, creating a company of actors and educational programs. It’s work that keeps him busy.

“Let me tell you the honest truth. I don’t have time to make movies that often, so I’m not offered that many movies. Sometimes I get the feeling from journalists that they think you sit around and decide which movies you’re going to do. I’ll let Tom Hanks do that one and George Clooney can do that one but I’m going to do this one. That’s not the way it works. There are only two reasons I do movies. One, because they offer it to me and two, am I available to do it. There’s no great design. Trust me, I’m not sitting around with a magic wand picking my parts like I have a deli in front of me of choice. That’s a myth. It’s a nice myth, but it isn’t true.”

He took a break from the stage long enough to play one of the evil employers in Horrible Bosses, a new comedy co-starring Jason Bateman and Jennifer Aniston. 

“I love all these actors,” he says, adding, “It’s great fun to pretend to be a horrible person for a couple of weeks.”

An unflinching view of the real Conan O'Brien
RICHARD CROUSE
METRO CANADA
Published: July 05, 2011
      
Rodman Flender says the hardest part of making Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop, a movie about his chat show host pal, was detaching himself from their friendship.

“All of us experience terrible disappointments in our lives and careers,” he says. “We all get jobs and lose jobs but very few of us do it on the front page of the New York Times. So as his friend I wanted to be there for him. However, as a filmmaker I wanted to detach myself. That was difficult for me.”

The pair began to document the creation of O’Brien’s live touring show, a two-hour, all-singing, all-dancing way for the host to thank the fans who stood by him as he was unceremoniously sacked as Jay Leno’s replacement on The Tonight Show.

“I wanted to capture the process of putting this tour together,” says Flender, “to capture Conan at this moment in time, at such a crossroads in his career. To see how the tour evolved and the nuts and bolts of the tour in a kind of Judy Garland-Mickey Rooney, ‘Hey let’s put on a show’ kind of way.

“I never wanted it to be a promotional piece for Conan. I just wanted to capture, in the true, old-school direct cinema style, whatever happened.”

In that spirit the movie reveals an unvarnished portrait of the star.

“People have asked me, ‘Is this the real Conan O’Brien?’ Yes. But so is the guy you see on TV every night. What you see in the movie is the real Conan O’Brien without a script.

“And like a real person, he has real feelings and he has moods and he is kind and generous and he gets tired and cranky at the end of a long day and that is what I think it is to be a human being. It’s interesting to me that so many people have thought, ‘Oh wow, it’s such a negative portrait of him,’ but he doesn’t do drugs, he doesn’t abuse anybody.”

O’Brien’s down-to-earth side is evident in the off-stage footage, particularly in his interactions with fans.

“He really wants to be kind to everybody and really show his appreciation to his fans and everyone who has done so much and stuck by him,” says Flender. “But there is a toll that takes. He is a human being after all. He’s not a machine.”

Talk about stealing the spotlight
RICHARD CROUSE
FOR METRO DRIVE
Published: June 28, 2011
                 
Tonight, when Transformers: Dark of the Moon opens on screens everywhere, it will be the first in the series without starlet Megan Fox, but what it may lack in sex appeal it makes up for in steel appeal with the introduction of new car characters.

The continuing story of the war between the heroic Autobots and the evil Decepticons — two armies of alien robots who disguise themselves on earth by transforming into vehicles — will be enhanced by Autobot Mirage, a cherry red Ferrari 458 Italia and Brains, a blue Mercedes-Benz W212 Autobot inventor, whose design was modeled on Albert Einstein.

The new characters, along with some returning but souped up cars — Autobot Sideswipe, the Chevrolet Corvette Stingray, is now a convertible, while Autobot leader Optimus Prime is still a Peterbilt 379 truck, but now has a trailer which allows a third mode of transformation — join the long list of movie cars that have stolen the spotlight from their human co-stars.

One of the most well-loved cinematic scene stealers is The Love Bug’s Herbie, a 1963 deluxe ragtop sedan Volkswagen Beetle.

Disney originally looked at Toyotas and Volvos but when casting agents noticed how the crew responded to the Volkswagen, they realized it was the car for the job.

Crew members brusquely kicked the tires and grabbed the steering wheels of the other cars, but when they approached the Beetle, they gently caressed its pearl white paint job.

Back to the Future featured a wide range of cars, like a 1984 Jeep Cherokee Chief but it’s the 1981 DeLorean everyone remembers.

The Robert Zemeckis production scooped up six of the existing 8,543 gull-winged cars, modifying three of them into operational autos for filming, while using the other three for spare parts. 

Chases are an exciting way to showcase cars in movies.

Probably the most famous chase sequence sees Steve McQueen’s 1968 Ford Mustang GT 390 CID Fastback pursuing two hit-men in a 1968 Dodge Charger R/T 440 Magnum through San Francisco in Bullitt.

The 10 minute and 53 second scene took three weeks to shoot and both cars hit speeds of 177 km/h on surface streets. 

A little more exotic, but almost as memorable is The Pink Panther’s 1960 Autobianchi Bianchina Cabriolet, Ferrari 250 GT chase.  The beautiful pink convertible is eye catching enough on its own, but even more so when driven by an actor in a gorilla suit! 

'Horrible Bosses' more proof that three is the new two
RICHARD CROUSE
METRO CANADA
Published: June 30, 2011

Although Jason Sudeikis stars in the new comedy Horrible Bosses, he says in real life he’s never worked for a horrible boss.

A short retail career—“It was not my forte,” he says—saw a manager harp on him about “hanger integrity” which he explains is “the act of making sure all your hangers in a closet or on a clothing rack face the exact same way.” But he doesn’t remember her as horrible. “Passive aggressive, yes, and very detail oriented. But horrible, no.”

His current boss, Saturday Night Live head honcho Lorne Michaels gets more effusive praise. “I picture him laughing a lot,” he says. “I think that is what keeps him so spry.”

In Horrible Bosses, the handsome actor—he’s good-looking enough to have dated January Jones!—plays Kurt, who, along with Jason Bateman and Charlie Day, plot to kill their evil employers. “I just think Jason and Charlie are so great,” he says. “I watched and thought, ‘Golly, they’re so frickin’ funny. I hope people are alright with me.’”

The plot sounds sinister, and Sudeikis admits “you could do a Fox Searchlight movie of this” but his movie isn’t serious in any way. “I don’t know if any of our characters go through an emotional arc,” he laughs. “It never gets too dark. There’s not going to be any copycat situations. It’s not going to start things up around the country, or the world for that matter.” 

It’s a buddy comedy expanded to three, just like another big hit this summer, The Hangover Part 2. “People, if they want to be crappy about it will say, ‘Oh, they want to be The Hangover,’ but it is totally different.”

I mention a tweet someone sent after seeing Horrible Bosses. “Three is the new two,” it read.

“I’ve been working on my own theory that four is the new rule of comedy in this new generation,” he says. “One establishes the premise, two hits it, third is the punch line, then the fourth one is a comment on what the first three were.”

Horrible Bosses is being released amidst the crash, boom, bang of the summer blockbusters. I ask him if he’s concerned about competing with the likes of Transformers.

“Out of the movies that are being released around it, it’s the one I would go see,” he says. “I just happen to be in it, which is nice.”

Media, Darling: Richard Crouse
Richard Crouse is the regular film critic for CTV's Canada AM and its 24-hour news source News Channel. His Bravo show, In Short, runs Wednesday nights at 10 p.m. Crouse was the host of Reel to Real, Canada’s longest running television show about movies, from 1998 to 2008, and he is a frequent guest on many national Canadian radio and television shows.

His syndicated Saturday afternoon radio show, Entertainment Extra, originates on NewsTalk 1010 in Toronto. He is also the author of six books on pop culture history including the best-selling The 100 Best Movies You’ve Never Seen, its sequel The Son of the 100 Best Movies You’ve Never Seen and the upcoming Raising Hell: Ken Russell and the Unmaking of The Devils. Crouse also writes two weekly columns for Metro News and is the pop culture reporter for The Morton Report.

Website:

“Larry The Cable Guy” Attracts A Younger Crowd In “Cars 2"
zoomermag.com
PEOPLE
Monday, June 20, 2011

By Richard Crouse

“Once it’s said and done you’re glad it’s out,” says Dan Whitney, better known to comedy fans as Larry the Cable Guy. “You know, it’s another poster I can hang up in the house. So that’s kind of cool.”

Larry is referring to the poster for Pixar’s Cars 2, which prominently features his character, a tow truck named Mater. The friendly breakdown truck has a major role in the new film, accompanying his best friend, the race car Lightening McQueen, to a World Grand Prix race over seas.

It’s a far cry from his other films—Witless Protection or Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector—which were financially successful but critically lambasted. “I have a joke about this movie,” he says about Cars 2, “It’s the only time you’ll ever see me in a movie with the number two after it.”

This car trip started five years ago when he was offered a small role in the original Cars movie playing a character named Zeb.

“John [Lasseter] tells a great story about how he couldn’t find the right voice,” the 48 year-old comedian says. “They’d been through two or three hundred people and finally he said, ‘Go get that Blue Collar CD. Some of those guys I haven’t heard of before.’ I was the first one up and he dropped everything he was doing in the first thirty seconds and said, ‘That’s my tow truck. Get that guy on the phone.’”

The movie introduced his exaggerated Southern drawl to a whole new audience—kids. His Blue Collar Comedy tours, with fellow “redneck” comics Jeff Foxworthy, Bill Engvall and Ron White, made him a star and one of the highest paid stand-ups in the biz but it wasn’t (and still isn’t) a show for the young ones.

“You have to be over 18 to come to my show,” he says. “I like to not include everybody. Look, if you want to go out with your wife and come see a more adult show with a comedian you like already, then you can come to my show. You can also take the kids to another project that I’ve done. I try to keep a good balance like that.

“I’m all about doing stuff for kids, and I tell everybody this. Eddie Murphy went from doing his stage act, which is 100 times dirtier than mine will ever be, to doing nothing but kid’s stuff. So it can be done. It all started when he had kids. Same with me. Before I had kids I never thought I’d do anything like this.”

He’s continuing to make movies with his children in mind—in January he’ll be starring in The Tooth Fairy 2—but it’s only been recently that his kids—Wyatt and  Reagan, ages 3 and 4—caught on that dad was one of their favorite movie characters.

“When they were really little they couldn’t figure two and two together,” he says. “They had no idea but they had a little talking tow truck. You’d hit it and it would go, ‘Git-R-Done!’ or ‘My name’s Mater!’ that kind of stuff. Then one time I hit the thing and then I said it after the toy and they started crying. I don’t know if that freaked them out or what it did. Now, they walk around saying, ‘Mater’s my daddy,’ which is kind of cool. I told my little girl the other day, ‘You know you’re the only girl who can say that Mater’s their dad.’”

Thinking big paid off for Tyrese
RICHARD CROUSE
METRO CANADA
Published: June 21, 2011

Tyrese Gibson, the handsome singer and actor, thinks big.

Making his new film, Transformers: Dark of the Moon, was intense, he says, because “we were working on something the world is anticipating.” Later he mentions Michelle Obama is a fan of his book How to Get Out of Your Own Way. “I’m going to meet her one day,” he muses, “and she’s going to say, ‘Hey I got your book. Thank you so much.’ She was probably reading my book in her bed and her husband came to bed. ‘What are you reading, baby?’ ‘Oh, Tyrese’s new book.’”

Gibson doesn’t regard these overblown statements as hubris but as simple statements of fact. It’s hard to argue with him. The third Transformers movie is one of the most anticipated of the year and his book is on the New York Times Bestseller list.  

The key to his success is something called “maximizing the stage.”

“It really is about maximizing the stage,” he says. “As these opportunities come up you dream with your eyes open. You want to become or be a part of the things that you see. There is only so much in your life that you can plan out. It’s arrogant to believe that the next second belongs to you. Tomorrow is a promise so now that we’re here it’s about maximizing.”

That kind of motivational motor-mouthing makes up much of his book and his very active twitter account. 1,723,206 people follow his every post, soaking up axioms like, “If it IS to BE it's up to ME.”

“Twitter has definitely revolutionized the entertainer and fan experience,” he says. “I have a certain responsibility to the fans to make them aware of the things that I know and the things I am exposed to and things that motivate me. There are a lot of people out there who are talented, enthusiastic and fired up about life but they have no sense of direction. Through twitter I have been able to put some information out there that people are responding to.” 

Thinking big has paid off for Gibson.

“I shot both Fast Five and Transformers simultaneously over seven months,” he says. “Hanging out with Vin Diesel and Paul Walker from 6 am to 11 am and then getting on a private plane to get to Michael Bay. The same day; two different movie sets. That’s a good life right there baby.”

'I've never courted fame': Mark Strong
by Richard Crouse
METRO CANADA
Published: June 15, 2011

'I've never courted fame': Mark Strong
by Richard Crouse
METRO CANADA
Published: June 15, 2011

When I tell Mark Strong, the handsome English actor with a jaw line perfectly suited to his last name, that he is almost unrecognizable as the alien enforcer Sinestro in the new Green Lantern movie he is chuffed.

“Good,” he says. “I miss the fact that I can’t be somebody that people don’t know. I wish that people would encounter Sinestro and say, ‘Who is that guy?’ Because to blend into the characters dates back to my theatre roots. In drama school I played the 75 year old character of Moses in Sheridan’s The School for Scandal, aged 24. The transformation is the thing I enjoyed most of all.”

But what kind of movie star likes to go unrecognized? Surely not someone who has starred in Guy Ritchie and Ridley Scott movies and acted opposite the likes of Robert Downey Jr. and Leonardo DiCaprio?  

“The truth is I’ve never courted fame,” he says. “I don’t have a PR machine working for me. I don’t go to premiers and openings that I’m not involved in. I don’t do interviews or try and get on the telly just to keep my face around.”

An alum of the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School Strong, he doesn’t buy into the North American idea of stardom. 

“It is a job,” he says. “That’s what we’re trained for. I think the fact that we have hundreds of years of tradition of acting in Britain… it isn’t exotic [to us]. It is a craft. For me film is exotic.”

Although he has high praise for the work ethic of recent co-stars Ryan Reynolds and Taylor Kitsch (from the upcoming sci fi epic John Carter) he’s not sure when some actors became divas.

“When did it become not a job, I wonder? Was it the advent of huge payments to film stars; when being a film star became really sexy and then actors had to somehow justify making that amount of money so they turned it into something mystical?”

Don’t look for Strong to go Hollywood anytime soon and demand a covered walkway between his trailer and the set. With three movies set for release this year and two new movies scheduled to shoot between now and January he’s doing what he likes best—keeping busy. 

“It’s all about the work. I’ve never tried to be a big movie star. What I want to be is a successful actor.”

More from Mark Strong on The Green Lantern:
 
“The thing I responded to initially was the look of Sinestro—that iconic look which I subsequently discovered is based on the look of David Niven—the mustache and the widow’s peak. I thought if we could make that flesh it would be amazing. There are people who love this stuff and not only love it but live and breath it and I felt a great responsibility to deliver what was in the comics.”

Culture Club: Is viral marketing the new normal marketing?
National Post
Ben Kaplan  Jun 9, 2011

Sony went through an interesting few days the other week as their Girl with the Dragon Tattoo trailer leaked, though many thought the studio itself was responsible (they said no, and eventually removed the R-rated trailer from the Web before officially releasing a nudity-free version). Meanwhile, the next Batman movie is already heating up the Internet with its viral campaign, even though the movie won’t be out until an entire year from now. Add to that the clever ad schemes for Super 8 and the new Muppet movie, and there’s an argument to be made that you can no longer market a movie with junkets and trailers … you have to have secrets and mystery. In this week’s Culture Club, the Post’s Ben Kaplan asks whether studios can keep people guessing.

This week’s Culture Clubbers
- Dr. Doris Baltruschat, author of Global Media Ecologies: Networked Production in Film and Television and an instructor in the film department at the University of British Columbia.
- Richard Crouse, film critic and host of In Short on Bravo!
- Barry Avrich, founder of Endeavour Marketing and the director of Unauthorized: The Harvey Weinstein Project.

Doris  Viral marketing for feature films hasn’t “peaked” yet because we’ve only seen cross-media advertising strategies for certain genres such as adventure, sci-fi and action movies. We’ve yet to see a campaign that engages viewers from ages six to 60. This brings up the question of whether viral marketing could be successfully applied to other genres such as family, drama and even art-house films.

Richard  I agree with Doris that viral marketing hasn’t come close to peaking, but I question how effective some viral campaigns have been. Snakes on a Plane and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World are two examples of movies that ate up their fair share of Internet space and yet still under-performed at the box office.

Barry  So far, there doesn’t seem to be a direct correlation between the amount of interest online and the box office.

Doris  It’s likely that viral marketing will become more popular in the future, especially when the gaming aspects of campaigns move beyond the current “solve this mystery” to get access to a movie’s trailer or poster.

Richard  Is it possible that for certain kinds of movies — like sci-fi and horror — viral marketing is simply a tool to alert fanboys (and girls) that there’s a new movie out there to download instead of checking out in the theatre?

Barry  Love it or hate it, there’s no playing with the volume with regards to viral marketing. As both a filmmaker and marketing guy, this is a game of swallowing swords. It’s dangerous, but you can get a ton of attention. Ultimately it’s an awareness tool with the potential of imploding a film as you can’t lower the volume on a dud.

Doris  This brings up the question of costs, as well as skills, for rolling out a marketing campaign. Considering the million-plus budget for the Dark Knight campaign by 42 Entertainment, which involved a team of marketers and lasted for a year, how can independent filmmakers in Canada remain competitive?

Richard  I don’t think it’s realistic to think that Canadian or American or any other independent filmmakers can compete with the bottomless pockets of the studios. It’s more a question of having to figure out a cost-effective way to make yourself heard. It’s impossible to predict what kind of marketing will go viral; despite its digital imprint, success on the Internet is still an organic thing that must happen naturally, so indie filmmakers must rely on their wits rather than their pocketbooks. The trick is being heard above all the cyber noise.

Barry  While I usually agree with my much taller friend Richard, I must beg to differ. You can’t compete or out-spend the majors on a TV or print buy, but if you’re provocative and creative, you can make way more noise than studios who are faced with endless levels of approvals and branding rules.

Richard  I hadn’t figured in the endless layers of approvals, but I’d also add that big corporations are less likely to be as provocative for fear of alienating Gladys in Peterborough or their stockholders. Indie artists have the freedom to push the envelope in a way the majors don’t.

Barry  The lesson here is: don’t blend in and be provocative even if you offend Gladys.

Ben  Is it only with marketing or has the Internet also changed the way we make films?

Richard  I’d say it’s eroded people’s attention spans to the point where movies aimed at young Internet-savvy users are more concerned with pace than story, or character arcs.

Barry  Long before the Web, the VCR and the DVD machine did enough damage by turning movie theatres into giant living rooms where people are free to talk loudly, eat like pigs and bump my seat. I think more people are watching movies as a result of the Web and Netflix.

Richard  Maybe so, but they’re watching them differently. I hate to think that the next generation’s idea of “going to the movies” is ordering from Netflix and eating pizza while the movie unspools on an iPad.

Mr. Tupper's penguin on-set penguin adventure
RICHARD CROUSE
METRO CANADA
Published: June 10, 2011 3:

James Tupper, the Nova Scotia-born star of Mr. Popper’s Penguins, calls his co-stars “ornery.” No, he’s not talking about Jim Carrey or Angela Lansbury. He’s referring to the movie’s aquatic, flightless actors.

“They kind of look like toddlers wearing a tuxedo with their chests sticking out in this really open, sweet way,” he says. “But when you get close to them, they will give you a nip.”

To accommodate the birds, the film’s set was kept at below zero. “You could see your breath all day long,” says Tupper. As for working with them he says, “they’re not great actors,” but performing opposite the Antarctic imports was less strange than acting without them.

Computer generated penguins were used for several scenes, which meant Tupper would have to emote to a mark on the wall.

“There would just be a dot on the wall and they would put the penguin in later. Sometimes the director would be back there saying, ‘Oh! Oh! I’m going to bite you!’ and act stuff out for you to react to but we all got this weird ‘acting to the dot’ effect.”

Tupper, best known for his work on television shows like Men In Trees (where he co-starred with his fiancée Anne Heche) and Grey’s Anatomy, says the penguins weren’t the set’s most intimidating presence. At first, anyway.

“It was a little bit intimidating when I first met him,” he says of Jim Carrey. “He slapped me on the back and was like, ‘Jim or James?’ I said, ‘You know what. I think you’ve probably got Jim covered. I’m going to stick with James.’”

That intimidation soon gave way to a lively collaboration.   

“He’s really fun. It’s a playful set. He improvises a lot and generally has the crew chuckling most of the day.”

James, however, wasn’t the only member of his family impressed with Carrey. His nine-year-old son is also a fan.

“When we read the book Mr. Popper’s Penguins to him in bed he got so excited when he found out Jim Carrey was in it. He said, ‘Can you please get Jim Carrey to sign it?’ So I did. I took it to New York and he signed it and I brought it back and I said, ‘Would you like me to sign it too?’ No! Why! I said, ‘Cut me a break. I’m in the movie.’”

Super 8 secrecy kept star in the dark
RICHARD CROUSE
METRO CANADA
Published: June 03, 2011

Who says kid actors can’t have normal childhoods? During a phone interview with Ryan Lee, the 15-year-old Super 8 star, he briefly interrupts our chat to act like a youngster. “I just saw a stray dog and I’m trying to catch him right now. What was your question again?”

I had just asked the Austin, Texas native about working with director J.J. Abrams, the megamind behind TV and movie hits like Lost and Star Trek.

“He’s just one of those guys who can really make you feel comfortable during a scene,” said Ryan. “He’s really good at what he does. He’s really hands on, down to earth and just an amazing director all round.”

Like all of Abrams’s projects the plot of Super 8 has been kept under wraps. Ryan plays one of six kids who witness a mysterious train wreck. “Then everything starts to go crazy,” he says, picking up the story. “Once we get away things start to go weird in the town, like people going missing, dogs going missing, home appliances going missing. Nothing can really be explained.”

Other than that he’s been sworn to secrecy. “Once I got the call back I had to sign confidentiality papers,” he says. “I had to bring them home to my family and they had to sign them, too. It was really secretive.”

So secretive he didn’t know what he was auditioning for when he first went out for the part.

“My agent sent me on the audition and I had no idea it was for J.J. or for Super 8,” he says. The audition was about a girl and a boy fighting about math homework. It had nothing to do with Super 8. Then at the first audition with him this girl next to me said, ‘J.J.’s waiting.” I said, ‘J.J. who?’ Her mouth dropped. I had no idea he was going to be working on this.”

Working with Abrams he says, was a breeze. “He never yells and with a group of six kids…” Ryan said. “Not yelling? How do you even do that?”

There’s a great buzz around Super 8 right now, even Ryan feels it—“I want to see the movie so bad, just like everybody else,” he says—but right now in the days before the movie opens it’s back to being a kid and catching that dog.

“I’m trying,” he says. “He’s fast.”

Good Neighbours aims to make you uncomfortable
RICHARD CROUSE
METRO
Published: May 31, 2011 5:00 a.m.
Last modified: May 30, 2011

Good Neighbours is the second collaboration between Montrealers Jay Baruchel and director Jacob Tierney, following up last year’s high school comedy The Trotsky. Baruchel says their connection began because “we are both rabid Habs fans and movie nerds” but solidified on set.

“I embarrass him when I say this but he’s probably the best director I have ever worked with,” Baruchel said. “I don’t mean to take anything away from the guys I’ve worked with but I’ve never seen such an uncommon combination of definitive vision, open mindedness and an ability to let others contribute. That’s the key and that’s why we made an awesome movie.”

Set in Montreal’s Notre-Dame-de-Grâce neighbourhood the movie mixes and matches Rear Window, Twin Peaks and, according to Baruchel, “a really uncomfortable sense of humour.”

Don’t expect the sunny Ferris Bueller optimism of The Trotsky. Good Neighbours involves three young Montrealers, the wheelchair bound Spencer (Scott Speedman), cat lover Louise (Emily Hampshire) and Victor, an earnest school teacher played by Baruchel. As their lives become entwined it becomes difficult for them — and the audience — to know who to trust. Good Neighbours also features a murder Baruchel calls “if not the goriest, then the most uncomfortable death scene in any movie this year.”

There’s that word again, uncomfortable.

“It will be polarizing,” says Baruchel, next seen in Goon, a hockey comedy he wrote and stars in, “but I think this movie really gets under your skin.”

It’s also the kind of movie that probably wouldn’t easily find funding in Hollywood.

“The main reason this would never get made stateside is that it leaves too much up to the audience,” says Baruchel. “The studios don’t like that. They like to kind of give you a road map and let you know when you are supposed to be sad or happy and who you are meant to root for. Some people will say that my character is so lovely and sympathetic and others think he’s really creepy. Your life will inform how you see our movie.”

Cattrall eager for fans to see her in latest film
RICHARD CROUSE
Published: May 06, 2011

Kim Cattrall wants you to see her new movie Meet Monica Velour.

She’s been doing a great deal of press, but hasn’t restricted herself to only talking to reporters. Her campaign to find an audience for the film includes talking to everyone who’ll listen.

“I feel like a kid passing out my CVs,” she says, relating a story about a woman who approached her at lunch asking about the name of the movie. Cattrall not only gave her the title, but told her where it was playing and how to get there.

“It’s very blissful for me to tell people about something I think is good and that they might enjoy and possibly need in the sense of it being a reflection of something in their lives.”  

In Meet Monica Velour Cattrall, best known as Sex and the City’s iconic Samantha Jones, plays the title character, a former porn star, now a struggling, single mom. Her life changes when she befriends her biggest fan, an awkward 18-year-old boy who learns to accept her for what she is, not for what she was.

“I really believe this film should be seen,” she says. “I feel like such a big mouth famous, but Michael Stipe is a friend of mine, and he brought a bunch of people to see the film. A couple of them were younger and they said, ‘We’ve never seen a film like that. We really enjoyed it. It unfolded in a different way.’

“I thought, yes, it’s not about slamming you, or 3-Ding you, or out electronitizing you,” she laughs, “or whatever the words are! Welcome to stories that are about people. That are subtle and nuanced and detailed and three dimensional. Life is not always about huge meteorites heading toward your planet, it’s sometimes just about a page turn.”

The film represents a bit of a page turn for Cattrall. The glamorous star left the Louboutins behind and gained 20 pounds to play the down-on-her-luck Velour. It’s a role Cattrall has been yearning for.

“I’ve waited my whole life in some ways as an actress to say, ‘Look at me,’” she says, “not the images you cast upon me, but me. That’s fantasy. This is reality.”  

It’s a reality she desperately wants to share.

“I think it’s an E-ticket because it takes me on a journey. I want to find more movies like this.”

Jodie Foster On Mel Gibson and The Movie That Could
zoomermag.com
Movies PEOPLE
Thursday, May 5, 2011

By Richard Crouse

Stand aside Oprah, Jodie Foster must be the most powerful woman in Hollywood. Possibly in all the world. Not only did she get The Beaver, a difficult script, long thought to be brilliant but unfilmable, to the big screen but then got the movie released in spite of her star, Mel Gibson turning into a public relations nightmare.

Gibson’s recent notoriety threatened to derail the film—three release dates have come and gone—but Foster fostered on, and the movie, about a depressed man who communicates through a beaver puppet hits theatres this weekend.

In a recent sit down in Toronto I asked Foster if Gibson’s baggage would prevent her from working with him again. The two have been friends since meeting on the set of 1994’s Maverick.

“I would work with Mel Gibson every day of my life if I could,” she said without hesitation. “He is the most beloved and easiest guy I have ever worked with. He is the least neurotic actor I’ve ever worked with and incredibly inspiring to work with.”

She goes on to call him “one of our greatest American directors” and says that whenever she sees him she asks, “Don’t you have a part in your Viking movie for a little blonde girl that’s about five foot three?”

Gibson and Foster came to The Beaver after it had languished on the Hollywood Black List, a compendium of great unproduced scripts that has featured titles like Juno and Lars and the Real Girl. The director – actor combo of Steve Carrell and Jay Roach considered making it but passed the script along to Foster instead.

“I can only imagine it would have been a very different film with them,” she says, “maybe a fantastic movie as well. There’s many ways of treating this story. When I read it I was just so moved by the drama of it. I warned everybody up front, ‘I just want you to know, for me, this is a drama. It needs to be moving and we need to work backwards from there.’

“In some ways we had to curtail a lot of the lighter sides and really pull down the comedy.”

She says several scenes were left on the cutting room floor because they were too funny.

“The great professional challenge of this film was trying to figure out the tone. It is a tone that is all over the place. It is light in the beginning and little by little turns darker and you kind of have to embrace that. It’s also a film that is chatty and witty and has a strong intellectual side and yet it is a very raw and primitive film as well.”

The Beaver is a passion project for Foster who says as a director she can’t work on anything she doesn’t feel in her gut.

“Just as you are well cast for certain roles,” she says, “you’re well cast as a director for certain roles. What a director has to do is wake up at three o’clock in the morning and say, ‘I’ve got an idea!’ I don’t know how you do that in a buddy cop movie about Martians. I don’t have any ideas unless I’m inspired. Unless I have an emotional connection to the material I know my limitations. I know that as a director that’s what I bring to the table. I don’t have any interest in doing a big event release CGI movie. The good news is I don’t really have to because I have another identity as an actor.”

“Well,” I say, stating the obvious to the most powerful woman in the room, “you’re Jodie Foster.”

“Whatever that means,” she laughs.

So, what's Justin Bieber really like?
RICHARD CROUSE
METRO CANADA
Published: February 04, 2011

Each time I interview someone really famous the questions start.

How’s Gwyneth’s skin? How tall is Brad Pitt? I’ve even been asked what George Clooney smells like. But ever since I hosted a Toronto press event with Justin Bieber to publicize his new movie Never Say Never on Tuesday, the question everyone has asked, and it has been dozens of people, is much more basic. “What’s he like?” everyone wants to know.

I won’t presume to be able to answer the question after only spending a few minutes backstage and 30 or so minutes on stage with the pop prodigy, but I have a few observations based on our short time together.

Firstly, he’s a high-energy kid. Backstage he was a bundle of energy. When he wasn’t tweeting or sharing funny You Tube videos with his stylist Ryan, he was chatting and joking around. “I hope you’re a good translator,” he joked to me as we walked to the stage, “because I’m going to do the whole interview in Spanish.” Then he burst into song. “Feliz Navidad...”

Onstage, luckily he stopped the Christmas carols but showed another aspect of his personality. Less than two years ago he was playing to 40 fans at a water park in Poughkeepsie, New York. Now he can sell out Madison Square Gardens in 22 minutes and he hasn’t forgotten the people who got him there—his fans.

“Where are my fans at?” he asked. “There’s a lot of fans [outside]. Can we bring those fans in? I love you guys with the cameras and stuff, but what’s the point if my fans aren’t here?”

Also, he’s as humble and normal as a pop superstar can be. When I asked him when he first felt famous he said, “I still don’t really notice it. I’m still just a regular teenage boy, living his dream and having a lot of fun.” Later I asked about household chores. “I do clean my room, especially when I’m home at my grandma’s house.”

Lastly, I learned he’s still a proud Canadian, with a taste for a particular icy cocktail not served in his new hometown of Atlanta, Georgia. “I miss Tim Hortons,” he said. “I miss Timmy’s! I miss my Ice Cap.”  

So what’s my answer to the burning question, “What’s Justin Bieber like?” Well, he’s just like any other high energy, fan-lovin’ Canadian multi-millionaire 16-year-old pop superstar with a taste for chilled coffee. 

Kevin Spacey Plays Lobbyist Jack Abramoff in Casino Jack
zoomermag.com PEOPLE
Thursday, January 27, 2011

By Richard Crouse

For Kevin Spacey the release of Casino Jack must be bittersweet. On one hand it is a return to form for the actor, who has received much praise, and a Golden Globe nomination, for his work playing disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

On the other hand his director, George Hickenlooper, who passed away suddenly last October, isn’t around to bask in the acclaim the film is earning. “That Casino Jack turns out to be his last, the pride I feel in it—in his direction, his ideas and the final results—has soared,” said Spacey in a prepared statement.

In an interview taped a month before the director’s untimely death Spacey discussed playing Abramoff, a one-time Washington high flyer later convicted of mail fraud and conspiracy.

“I chose not to start my research about him until after I met him,” the actor told me. “But then, after we met I began the process of looking at a great deal of the material that had been written prior to, during and after his trial and conviction, and it was like, ‘Wow, they really made him out to be the devil incarnate.’ But then you look at Abramoff and you go, ‘OK, so wait a minute. He wasn’t buying houses. He wasn’t buying helicopters. He wasn’t buying limousines. He wasn’t taking fabulous vacations with his family. What was he doing?’ He was giving money away to people who needed it. He was trying to build a Hebrew school. He wasn’t even paying his own mortgage. So wait a minute, the greediest man in Washington DC wasn’t spending any of the money on himself!

“So how do you play that because it is certainly not black and white? Did he consider himself to be the Orthodox Robin Hood? What is that all about? That’s where you hope an audience can lead themselves to their own conclusions.”

Spacey, as one of the film’s producers—“When you are a producer on a film you actually have a voice that can be listened to,” he says—was in a unique position to help mold not only his performance but also the structure of the film to help people get a fully rounded portrait of Abramoff.

“It was an interesting process of putting the film together because once we shot it and I looked at the first cut of it I remembered thinking, ‘Recount [his award winning 2008 account of the 2000 U.S. presidential election and the subsequent recounts in Florida] began with an event; a voter in a voting booth on Election Day, voting. But there is no event in this film and I remember saying to George, ‘I know this is going to sound crazy to you but I think the event is Jack Abramoff and we have to start with him. And there is a scene that’s playing an hour and forty minutes into the movie that I think we should start the film with.’

“And that is why the film starts the way it does. It gave you him at the moment just before he was about to be indicted. I felt like that has to move up because otherwise it will take us too long to have any grip on him. We had to start the movie with a scene that makes you say, ‘That guy! Wouldn’t mind watching a movie about that guy. He’s out of his mind doing a monologue into a mirror.’”

Spacey got close to the character so I ask if he would consider turning his take on Abramoff into a one man show at the Old Vic theatre in London where he is artistic director and frequently seen onstage.

“No… no… no,” laughs. “Generally, because I tend not to repeat myself and also, I don’t think it would play for our Old Vic audience.”

Peter Weir Takes A Walk Back
Movies PEOPLE
Friday, January 21, 2011
zoomermag.com
By Richard Crouse

The WayBack, a new drama from Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World director Peter Weir, is a sprawling epic with a very personal focus. Set against the backdrop of war, inhumanity and an almost insurmountable challenge, it is about that most personal of things, survival.

Based on a controversial memoir written by Slavomir Rawicz, the film begins with Polish solider Janusz (Jim Sturgess) sent to a hellish Siberian gulag in 1941 on trumped up charges. Sentenced to ten years—a term he knows he won’t survive—he and a group of prisoners, including a grizzled American soldier (Ed Harris) and a violent Russian criminal (Colin Farrell) make a break for it. Their goal? Freedom. The obstacle? A 4000 kilometer walk through the harsh terrain of Mongolia, China and Tibet on the way to India and a new life. Along the way they pick up one more traveler, a young girl (Saoirse Ronan) whose camaraderie helps bond the ragtag band of escapees.

“The book was published in 1956 and called The Long Walk by Sławomir Rawicz,” Peter Weir said on a recent stop in Toronto to promote the movie. “There is no question from documents that later appeared after the fall of the Soviet Empire when KGB documents were briefly available, that yes, Rawicz had been in a gulag. But did he go on the walk or not? Question mark.

“So the first thing I said was, ‘I can’t do a true story called The Long Walk, but I can fictionalize it based on, or inspired by the book and based on true events if I can prove the walk actually happened.’ We got that proof and I felt comfortable going around the Rawicz question and not saying it’s his personal story.”

To add detail to his fictionalized tale Weir says he became deeply immersed in the subject.

“I became somewhat obsessed with it I think, even though I was fictionalizing it,” he says. “[I learned] through deep background reading, through accounts of those who had gone through the situation in one form or another, including Polish prisoners and soldiers who had been caught up, rather like my central character. I then interviewed survivors in Moscow and Siberia and in London and I just crammed as much as I could into the screenplay.”

Weir says that while he strove for absolute authenticity in the film, he had to temper the depiction of life in the gulag for the big screen.

“I did restrain myself from what I was finding in research. Obviously in the worst situations there was a commandant who was a sadist and there were, to a degree, worse situations. So I chose something that I felt was reasonably representative of a number of these hundreds of camps and gulags.”

At the heart of the film is Jim Sturgess as Janusz, the determined and kind-hearted leader of the escapees.

“I’d seen Jim Sturgess for the first time in Across the Universe and thought how well cast he was as a young Beatle as it were,” says Weir. “He has that kind of guilelessness and openness that I needed for my character.

“He’s one to watch. In my film firstly,” he laughs, “and in whatever else is coming up for him.”

Tim Burton Is Director-Turned-Artist for New Exhibit
by Richard Crouse
zoomermag.com
PEOPLE
Thursday, November 25, 2010

By Richard Crouse

Tim Burton’s cell phone ring tone is exactly what you would expect from the man who has directed some of the most atmospheric films of the last two decades. In Toronto this week to promote an exhibition of his art and films at the TIFF Bell Lightbox Burton was mid sentence when his cell phone went off. The eerie wail of a Theremin filled the room.

“Sorry,” he says fumbling to mute the phone. “It scares me every time it rings.”

Turns out the visionary director of Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, Beetle Juice, Batman, Edward Scissorhands and most recently, the billion dollar grossing Alice in Wonderland, values his time away from technology, specifically his phone.

“I always try to at least spend time, as much as I can everyday, staring out into space; staring out a window,” he says. “I find that sometimes you get the most ideas and the most feelings when you’re not involved in things you have to do everyday; especially these days when technology is such that you can be reached any time. I try and avoid that.”

He may call spacing out an “important part of the day” but don’t call him a loner. On set he looks forward to working with others.

“Part of the joy of making a movie is working with collaborators,” he says. “When I first started in animation class you’d draw all the characters, you’d cut it, you’d do everything, which is great because it gives you a great background. But as you go on part of the joy is working with collaborators. People who surprise you. People who you try and tell them what you are doing and they get it and they add something to it, whether it’s actors or designers or whomever. I’ve really gotten to enjoy that process. It keeps things fresh. You get surprised by people and that is part of the joy of making a film.”

Right now Burton is working on full-length 3-D stop motion remake of his own 1984 short film Frankenweenie, a well loved cult classic about a young boy who uses electricity to revive his recently deceased dog.

“I love stop motion,” he says, “so it is kind of fun to keep with that. The tactile nature of it is something I always like to experience.”

Ironically he’s making the film in conjunction with Walt Disney, the same company who fired him in the mid-80s after he made the original short film, claiming it was too scary for young audiences. The House of Mouse and Burton have since kissed and made up—he made Alice in Wonderland for them—and he says now he’s appreciative of the two years of experience Disney gave him as a young man.

“If I had been there at any other time I wouldn’t have gotten the opportunity to do what I did,” he says, “because they were so directionless as a company. They were trying to move into the modern world but they weren’t quite ready for it yet so I got to try things that were off the track. It was a strange time but I’m always grateful for it because if it had been any other two years on one side or another [of the time he was there] I wouldn’t have gotten that opportunity.”

Now, courtesy of the Bell TIFF Lightbox working in conjunction with the MOMA, we’re getting the chance to see some of the early Disney work as well as 700 of the director’s paintings, drawings, maquettes, puppets, videos and storyboards.

“This is a strange thing,” he says. “I never really went to museums. A wax museum maybe, so the idea of [seeing my work] here was an out of body experience. It’s kind of like, ‘Look at my dirty socks hanging on the wall. Look at my underwear.’ But reconnecting with yourself is very interesting because I would never have looked at any of this stuff ever again and so they kind of forced the issue. It’s strange, which is fine. I don’t mind a strange feeling.”

The Burton exhibit runs at the Bell TIFF Lightbox from Nov. 26, 2010 to April 21, 2011.

Paul Haggis is Back with “The Next Three Days”
Movies PEOPLE
zoomermag.com
Thursday, November 18, 2010

By Richard Crouse

When I ask Paul Haggis, the Canadian-born but Los Angeles-based writer-director, if he considers himself Canadian or American or perhaps a cross-section of both—Camerican—he laughs and says, “Snowback is what I’m called down there,” before adding, “I feel like an outsider in both countries which I think is really good for me. I’m a bit of a misanthrope and a loner, even though I’m a social loner. A social hermit. I can work a party like nobody’s business but if you really know me and look in my eyes you’ll see how uncomfortable I am.”

Today then must be a tad uncomfortable for him. In Toronto to promote his latest film, he’ll submit to a dozen or two interviews and later tonight, a Q&A in front of an audience. It’s a long day but par for the course when you are chatting up a big budget thriller starring two Hollywood stars. In the Next Three Days, Russell Crowe plays a man desperate to get his wife (Elizabeth Banks) out of jail for a crime he is convinced she didn’t commit. When he all his legal avenues are exhausted he turns to an illegal one and plans an elaborate jail break.

Based on a French film, it takes the original’s premise and adds star powder and high-action wattage. “ I saw the film Pour Elle,” he says, “It was brought to me by my head of development. She’s Parisian. She’d seen it and I thought it was a lovely story. It’s very slight. It’s only 86 minutes long but it had what I call really good bones. Really lovely structure. I thought there were questions they asked that they didn’t get to explore. The nature of trust and belief and what you would do for the woman you loved. I thought I could expand upon it and make it, perhaps, more exciting and search the characters and the depths a little deeper.”
Comparing The Next Three Days to his best-known film, the Academy Award winning drama brings out a curious response from the director.

“Every project is different. Oddly directed Crash was more of a thrill ride than directing The Next Three Days because I had to shoot it in so few days. Thirty-five days for Crash versus fifty-two days for this. Everything was on a panic on Crash. This we got to think it through and really plan it. It was a lot of fun doing this. There were many more scenes. There are 394 scenes in this movie so you really had to move to accomplish it. This was scene, scene, scene all the way down the page. Ten scenes per page often. There is a lot of cutting back and forth.”

After the fast pace of shooting The Next Three Days I ask if he would consider coming back to Canada to make a movie.

“I’d love to,” he says. “There is a book I really, really loved, I shouldn’t say what it is, but it was set on the east coast. I really wanted to do it. It was a beautiful book but I couldn’t figure out a way to make it into a screenplay. Struggled with that. Love to.”

The Madness Behind “Night of the Living Dead”
Movies REVIEWS
zoomermag.com
Thursday, October 28, 2010

By Richard Crouse

Without Night of the Living Dead movies like 28 Days Later, Shawn of the Dead or even Zombie Strippers wouldn’t exist. In 1968 the story of story of people trapped in a rural Pennsylvania farmhouse trying to survive an attack by reanimated ghouls dragged a bloody new horror genre into the marketplace. For better (see Re-Animator) and for worse (see Zombie Nightmare) the movie Rex Reed called “a classic” has spawned four decades of brain eating and head explosions, but according to the film’s co-author John Russo the origin of the idea was anything but sinister.

“Sometime in the winter of 1966 George Romero and I were having lunch with Richard Ricci,” says Russo, then a co-partner with Romero and Russell Streiner (who has the film’s most famous line, “They’re coming to get you, Barbara!”) in The Latent Image, a commercial television production house. “George and I were complaining about the fickleness of our commercial clients who, when they had not too much money to spend, would come to us for a good, creative job on their spots and sales films, and would promise to come back to us next time, when they would have more money to spend. But when they got more money they’d run away to the supposed glitz and glamour of New York or Hollywood. Richard said, ‘So why don’t you do something about it?’ I thought about it and said, ‘We oughtta be able to make something better than the crap we see on Chiller Theater.’

“George right away got excited, slammed the table with his big hand, sending bottles and glasses flying, and yelled, ‘We’re gonna make a movie!’”

The two batted around several ideas. One, titled Monster Flick, was a horror comedy about teenage aliens, while another focused on flesh eating aliens. “But we quickly discovered that we could not afford all the necessary special effects,” he says, so the writing continued.

“We’d go to work late at night in separate offices, at separate typewriters,” says Russo. “I said right away that our story should start in a cemetery because folks found cemeteries spooky. I was working on a script that started in a cemetery and involved aliens coming to earth in search of human flesh. But George took a break at Christmas time and came back with half of a story that started in a cemetery, and was in essence what became the first half of Night of the Living Dead. There were all the proper twists and turns and a lot of excitement, but George never said who the attackers were or why they were attacking.

“I said, ‘I like this, George, but who are these attackers? You never say.’ And he said he didn’t know. So I said, ‘It seems to me they could be dead people. But why are they attacking? What are they after?’ Again, he said he didn’t know. So I said, ‘Why don’t we use my flesheating idea?’ And he agreed.

“So that’s how the modern flesheating zombies were born!”

The film, titled Night of the Flesheaters, was shot on a shoe string budget—Bosco Chocolate Syrup and pig’s intestines subbed for real blood and guts—in rural Pennsylvania between June and December 1967. Once finished, Russo and Romero had a hard time selling the movie because of its unflinching violence and gory special effects. The pair stuck to their guns, however, denying distributor after distributor who demanded cuts or a happy ending. Finally they found a company who would show the film uncensored but there was still a problem.

“There was already a movie called Flesheaters, and their attorney threatened us, so we had to come up with a different title,” says Russo. “George Romero decided on Night of Anubis, after the Egyptian god of the dead. This was a weak title, and when Continental Pictures got ready to distribute we changed it to Night of the Living Dead.”

The movie premiered on October 1, 1968 earning a rave from Roger Ebert and that other mark of success for a horror film, condemnation from fundamentalist Christian groups.

These days it doesn’t take a lot of braaaaaaaaaaaaaaaains to see the legacy of Night of the Living Dead. The ghoulish story is considered a classic, has spawned comedies like the box office hit Zombieland and serious television shows like The Walking Dead and was even selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Film Registry as a film deemed “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant.”

“We were absolutely dedicated toward making a movie that was true to its premise and the motivations of its characters, from start to finish,” says Russo, adding, “[the movie] struck a primal chord in everybody, perhaps because of the atavistic memory of our species as easy prey for wild beasts, which we were for most of human history. We all carry the deep-seated fear of being devoured.”

Gemma Aterton takes time to pick eclectic roles
RICHARD CROUSE
METRO CANADA
Published: October 22, 2010

Since 1904, London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) has almost single-handedly kept the British actors' union flush with members. John Gielgud, Anthony Hopkins and Kenneth Branagh are just a fraction of the school’s famous alumni. More recently, Gemma Arterton, star of this weekend’s Tamara Drewe, studied there before becoming Britain’s latest “it girl.”

“I left RADA three years ago and never expected I would have a film career,” she says. “I always thought I would do theatre, and then it happened and I said, ‘Yes, yes, yes’ to every job without thinking about it.

“You are grateful that you’re being considered and don’t want to seem rude by turning them down. As a Brit, we tend to think like that.”

Among the roles Arterton said yes to are Quantum of Solace Bond girl Strawberry Fields and leads in green screen blockbusters Prince of Persia and Clash of the Titans. High profile for sure, but not exactly challenging for the recent graduate.

“This year I have been able to think about what I want,” she says. “I’ve always just wanted to act and do things that are interesting and exciting. So now I have learned that the only power I have as an actress is the power of choice.

“I’m taking my time and reading scripts thoroughly. It doesn’t matter if it is big or small, or whether I have a large part or a small part and that is serving me well. And those films that I did like Tamara Drewe and The Disappearance of Alice Creed have actually transformed my career from here on. It’s going to be much more eclectic, intriguing films rather than all out action movies.”

In that vein, she recently played the decidedly non-glamorous lead in Alice Creed and the manipulative Tamara Drewe, a successful columnist who stirs things up in her childhood village in rural Dorset.

“They are not particularly attractive roles, in that Tamara Drewe is kind of a sex symbol but underneath it all she is an ugly character and isn’t necessarily appealing or someone you’d want to be with,” she says. “For me, as an actor, that is exciting because I want to work out why people who aren’t me, do things.

“The same with Alice Creed. She’s full-on, visceral and dirty inside and that, to me, is very attractive when I’m looking for a role.”

Rick Springfield is More Than a One-Hit Wonder
By Richard Crouse
zoomermag.com
PEOPLE
Thursday, October 21, 2010

Rick Springfield is an 80s icon, best known as Noah Drake, the handsome playboy doctor of General Hospital, circa 1981, when the show garnered 12 million viewers a day and the teased hair behind the hit Jessie’s Girl. His clean scrubbed visage decorated the cover of teen magazines and helped sell over 17 million albums. He performed at Live Aid, won a Grammy Award for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance and headlined a Broadway show, but despite all his achievements he will always be best known as the heartthrob who wrote the song Rolling Stone says is globally the No. 1 karaoke pick.

“I’m very, very proud of it,” says the 61 year-old Springfield, “but I have done other things. It’s more than a hit song. Not every writer produces a song that has done what Jessie’s Girl has done. It has taken on a life of its own. It’s nothing I did. It was up to the music gods and the people. I had nothing to do with putting it in Boogie Nights. I had nothing to do with it being in Glee. Nothing to do with it being the center of 13 Going on 30. Nothing to do with it being put in Friends when Friends was the hottest show on TV. For some reason it is one of those 80s iconic songs and I am incredibly grateful for that because every writer wants one. I never go, ‘Oh God can we stop talking about Jesse’s Girl’ but it does overshadow other stuff. I think I have written better songs but that one they’ll probably play at my funeral.”

Probably. But a frank new autobiography, Late, Late at Night (Simon & Shuster), scrapes some of the sheen off his clean cut image to reveal a complex man who has struggled with depression, thoughts of suicide and sex addiction. Far from the run-of-the-mill celebrity memoir—“I had never read one before so I didn’t know what was expected,” he says.—the book is by times funny, by times shocking, by times revealing, often all at the same time.

“I just wrote about my life,” he says simply. “I didn’t see the point in leaving holes in it because everything I’ve done I’ve learned from, I hope.”

The book is brutally frank. He writes about being a 17 year-old musician in 1968 on a USO tour of Vietnam and helping to load mortar shells during an attack. One of those bombs killed a Viet Cong soldier.

“That was difficult to write about,” he says, “because I’m the guy who lifts bees out of the swimming pool if I think they’re drowning. I was caught up in the spirit of war because we were bunking with the G.I.’s. We travelled with the G.I’s. and the only other people we saw were the local hookers and the local kid who sold us dope. We very much lived in their world and adopted their mentality. It was the mentality of war. Even though we weren’t going out everyday to the jungles like them, we were getting shot at and rocketed and mortared. We were in fear for our lives especially because we didn’t have any defensive weapons. I was scared 24/7.”

Other stories involve his lifelong battle with depression, a specter he has personified in the form of The Darkness, a malevolent presence who has plagued him his entire life.

“Mr. D just appeared through the narrative,” he says. “One time I called him My Darkness and I started viewing him as this guy sitting over there and I think it helped the story that he was in the third person. It made it less maudlin, less woe-is-me, less poor me. It was this dick of a guy sitting over there f**king with me all the time and that is what it really feels like.”

Despite the scandalous revelations and the introspective look at depression Late, Late at Night isn’t a gloomy book. Springfield writes with humor and finesse—no ghostwriter required—and may now finally be known for writing something other than the line “Where can I find a woman like that?”

“Once I started to do it I looked forward to writing everyday,” he says. “It was cathartic at times and helped me see a through line into certain parts of my life. Once it was done I was kind of nervous about it coming out but the writing of it was fun.”

Legend Olivia Newton-John returns to musicals after 30 years
RICHARD CROUSE
FOR METRO CANADA
Published: October 14, 2010

Although she sang with John Travolta in Grease, danced with Gene Kelly in Xanadu and recently featured her hit Let’s Get Physical on Glee, Olivia Newton-John hasn’t appeared in a full-on musical on the big screen for 30 years. That will change this weekend when she will be seen playing an overprotective hockey mom in Score: A Hockey Musical.

Director Michael McGowan wanted Newton-John, but didn’t think he’d be able to get the Australian superstar, who now makes her home in Florida, to come north to shoot the film.

“She’s funny and she doesn’t take herself seriously,” he said, “but for her to say, ‘This is the film, a hockey musical shot in Toronto, in February, seemed virtually impossible.”

When asked why chose to do this film, Newton-John laughed and said, “Because it was fun. Marc Jordan (who plays her husband in the film) is my friend and he is married to Amy Sky, one of my best friends who also produces my music, so why not?”

Shooting in Toronto in frigid February temperatures, she says, was “an experience,” but the working with the cast and crew made it worthwhile. “My memory of the movie was having fun,” she adds.

Working with her friend Jordan, who is best known as a solo singer-songwriter (he wrote the hit Rhythm of My Heart for Rod Stewart), caused to her to occasionally get the giggles so badly she could barely contain herself.

“I was really embarrassed in the end because you can break up a couple of times but you have to know when to stop, but Marc was just so hysterical.”

Ditto her director. “He is marvelous,” Newton-John says. “He has such a quirky sense of humour which fits in with mine really well. On the set he was very relaxed; he’s worked with everyone before so it was a real family atmosphere. There was no stress, there was no, ‘Oh he’s yelling at you.’”

She saves her highest praise, however, for her young co-stars, Noah Reid and Allie MacDonald who play her son and his best friend. When asked if she passed along any tips to the neophytes she said, “They are both really gifted. I probably should have asked them for hints rather than the other way around.”

Quotable

“It’s a lot of good fun, but the peace message is good I think. I’m not one for violence and was brought up in the same kind of family as (the character of home-schooled-pacifist-hockey-prodigy-Farley Gordon). Maybe not quite as stringent but my father was a professor and parents were academic and peace was a big thing for my mother. It wasn’t important to win, it was important to play fair, so (Score: A Hockey Musical) kind of rung true for me."
—Olivia Newton-John

Olivia Newton John: Hockey Mom?
Movies PEOPLE
zoomermag.com
Thursday, October 14, 2010

By Richard Crouse

Does a country that already has a Hockey Hall of Fame, a omnipresent coffee chain named after a defenseman and Wayne Gretzky Riesling really need an all dancing, all singing tribute to the sport? Olivia Newton-John apparently thought so when she signed on to star in Score: A Hockey Musical a parody of hockey violence set to a soundtrack that rhymes baloney with Zamboni.

She hadn’t appeared in a full-on musical in thirty years, not since the one-two punch of Grease (which saw the 29 year old play a high school senior and score the biggest box-office hit of 1978) and Xanadu which paired her with Hollywood legend Gene Kelly. Score writer and director Michael McGowan always imagined John in the role of the hockey prodigy’s pacifist mom but didn’t think he’d be able to get the Australian superstar, who now makes her home in Florida, to come north to shoot the film.

“She’s funny and she doesn’t take herself seriously,” he said, “but for her to say, ‘This is the film, a hockey musical shot in Toronto, in February, seemed virtually impossible.”

The key word there is “virtually.” As McGowan soon learned nothing is impossible when the movie co-stars one of your potential leading lady’s best friends.

“Marc Jordan [who plays her husband in the film] is my friend,” said Newton-John, “and he is married to Amy Sky, one of my best friends who also produces my music, so why not?”

She wasn’t quite prepared for shooting in Toronto in frigid February temperatures—that was “an experience,” she says—but the warmth of the Canadian cast and crew took away any edge she may have been feeling. “My memory of the movie was having fun,” she says.

Occasionally she had a bit too much fun with co-star Jordan—a solo singer-songwriter who wrote the hit Rhythm of My Heart for Rod Stewart—who would cause her to get the giggles so badly she could barely contain herself. “I was really embarrassed in the end because you can break up a couple of times but you have to know when to stop, but Marc was just so hysterical.”

She also notes that McGowan “has a quirky sense of humor which fits in with mine really well,” but saves her highest praise for her young co-stars, Noah Reid and Allie MacDonald who play her son and his best friend. When asked if she passed along any tips to the neophytes she said, “They are both really gifted. I probably should have asked them for hints rather than the other way around.”

She describes the final product as “a lot of good fun” but insists there is a message to the film.

“I’m not one for violence and was brought up in the same kind of family as [the character of her home-schooled-pacifist-hockey-prodigy-son Farley Gordon]. Maybe not quite as stringent but my father was a professor and parents were academic and peace was a big thing for my mother. It wasn’t important to win, it was important to play fair, so [Score: A Hockey Musical] kind of rung true for me. I like that message. I thought it was sweet but it also funny and ironic and campy and that is part of what people like about it.”

When it was all said and done did playing a hockey mom and shooting in the home of the Maple Leafs make her a hockey fan? “I guess I’ll have to become one,” she laughs. “My husband loves it and he took me to a game a few years ago in Florida. I couldn’t keep up with the puck though. It was too fast.”

Aaron Johnson Plays Legend John Lennon in BioPic
zoomermag.com Movies PEOPLE
Thursday, October 7, 2010
By Richard Crouse

Aaron Johnson knew when he signed on to play John Lennon in the biopic Nowhere Boy that he would come under scrutiny from not only Lennon fans but from the late musician’s friends.

“I get guys who know the exact type of guitar string, the tie pin he wore and what colour brothel creepers he had,” the young actor says, adding that “all of those things have been positive.” Also positive, although a little more nerve-wracking, were the reactions of Paul McCartney and Yoko Ono.

McCartney, Johnson says, “thought it was great. The only thing he said was that he couldn’t remember John ever punching him in the face. But that is something you would want to forget; your band mate punching you in the face.”

The toughest critic of all, Lennon’s widow Yoko Ono lent a hand to filmmakers early on when she granted the right to use the song Mother over the closing credits. “Yoko has been a huge supporter of this film,” says Johnson. “She says if you want to understand John even more, and see what pain he put away this is the untold story.”

The film, which examines Lennon’s relationship with his estranged mother and his Aunt Mimi, will be released in Canada on October 15, just a few days after what would have been Lennon’s seventieth birthday.

“We did it as accurately as we could,” says Johnson, “but with the characters we didn’t want to make it impersonations. We just wanted to embody the spirit and the soul of these people. We were lucky because this is the only part of his life that wasn’t documented so we had a bit of freedom to make a natural and instinctive film.”

Johnson says he approached the role as a Lennon outsider. Although the Beatles “are kind of embedded in my British history,” he wasn’t a Lennon obsessive when he signed on.

“I’m not from the generation,” says the actor who was 18 when he made the film, “which was kind of a big thing for me, playing Lennon, because I wasn’t a fanatic or anything. I could look outside the box and look in, observe and analyze and not feel so attached. It was a bit easier for me to perform it, I suppose.”

In the beginning he approached the project as simply a coming-of-age story, but came closer to Lennon as the first day of shooting approached.

“I couldn’t play guitar and didn’t know if I could sing or anything,” he says. “I was willing to give it a shot, but the producers were like, ‘No, no we’ll just dub your voice and we’ll cut to someone strumming the guitar.’ I said, ‘We’ve got a couple of months, let me at least try.’ They kind of batted me away and I think that made me more determined to show them that I could do it. I can’t play John Lennon and not be able to play guitar or sing. I had a blast doing it and in the end I got to sing and perform on songs.

“It was a big thing for me to learn more about Lennon as well because his inspirations became my inspirations. Watching Elvis and watching Buddy; looking at how they moved and how they held a guitar and how they sang. That added another whole level of insight for me into the character.”

He now counts himself among Lennon’s fans, singling out In Spite of All the Danger as his favorite Lennon tune. “It’s one of the first ones he ever wrote and recorded and it is the song I perform in the film. It’s quite a personal one to me.”

John Sayles Independent and Proud of it
PEOPLE
Thursday, September 30, 2010
By Richard Crouse

“You can absolutely, for very little money, make a good movie,” says director John Sayles. “You just need a good imagination and some good coconspirators and you can do it.”

John Sayles knows of what he speaks. Parlaying a gig writing exploitation movies like Piranha and Battle Beyond the Stars for low budget king Roger Corman into a career making critically lauded indie films, he has forged a career on the fringes of Hollywood.

“Independent, when we started, which was a long time ago in 1980,” he says, “meant an independent way of thinking about story as well as not getting your money from the usual places.”

His first film, Return of the Secaucus 7, is a case in point. The story of a group of friends who reunite for a New England summer weekend was made for just $60,000, half of which came from the money he saved while working for Corman.

It was low budget but earned a reputation large enough to have possibly inspired The Big Chill—that movie’s director denies the connection—and be chosen for preservation in the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress.

His indie spirit is very much alive in the seventeen films he’s made since then even though the business has changed. He notes that these days his style of filmmaking—“legitimately low budget independent movies” he calls them—are usually “attempts to break into Hollywood.”

He also notes that Hollywood is simply not interested in his brand of small movie. “In terms of business sense [the studio] is going to spend between 15 and 50 millions dollars to advertise it,” he says, “so the upside of the thing has to be so huge that they don’t want any modest hits. They don’t care if they strike out, but they are going for a home run every time.”

He adds his new film, Amigo, a period piece set in 1900 during the Philippine–American War, wouldn’t appeal to the studios because it has “not only subtext, but subtitles.” With no studio involvement Sayles set about telling the ambitious story of foreign incursion in his usual fiercely independent way—he packed up and moved the production to the Philippines where a small budget can yield huge returns.

“We went to the island of Bohol which is in the Visayas. I was able to afford six weeks of shooting. My last films were five and five and four, so I was like, ‘Oh my God! I have six weeks!” he says grinning at the thought.

“We built a 1900s rice growing village in a 2010 rice growing village so there weren’t too many things we had to hide or take down. We took down a couple of wires and we actually built a church over the one cinder block house we had to disappear. Then we bought the rice crop. So they actually got what they would have gotten if they were able to cut out all the middle men. We asked them to plant at a certain time so it would mature at a certain time. Then we could burn it down or trample it or harvest it or whatever. Quite honestly eighty percent of it was left when we left so they were then able to cut it down and resell it. It was a good deal for the village.”

And also a good deal for an independent filmmaker who has always made movies his way.

Let Me In gives the vampire flick a new spin
RICHARD CROUSE
METRO CANADA
Published: September 29, 2010

“As a young person horror films terrified me,” says Let Me In director Matt Reeve.

“To this day if you were to show me a picture of Linda Blair in her Regan MacNeil getup, and I wasn’t prepared, the hair would stand up on the back of my neck and my blood would run cold. I would have a visceral reaction, so it’s kind of ironic that that’s what I do now. I make genre films, and yet there is something about it that is a very exciting thing to do.”

Audiences and critics were certainly excited by his first film, Cloverfield, a movie one writer called “the closest a film has ever gotten to a roller-coaster ride.” It was a wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am reinvention of the “big monster” movie that mixed Godzilla with the immediacy of reality TV. His new film, a remake of Let the Right One In, the Swedish art house hit about a vampire trapped in a 12-year-old body and her bullied neighbour, is less frenetic, but throws a new spin on the vampire tale.

“It is a vampire film in a different tradition,” says Reeves. “That has everything to do with [novelist] John Lindqvist’s story. It is an incredible story in that he takes the vampire genre and uses it as a way to describe the pain of adolescence. It is a strange thing to say, but I found in reading it, and in the Swedish version and in what we tried to do, I actually think that it is a very realistic sort of tale even though it is a vampire tale. This film has a bit of naturalism to it.”

Let Me In, Cloverfield and the films that frightened him as a child, he says, are effective because they are “about something other than what the surface part is. The metaphor they are using is a way to explore a lot of real and frightening things and to explore our own fears and that’s why you can make a movie about a giant monster trashing New York and it’s really not about that at all. That is what makes it challenging and interesting as a filmmaker.”

Brolin skips the usual Woody substitute route
RICHARD CROUSE
METRO CANADA
Published: September 29, 2010

Early on in the shoot for You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, Woody Allen’s latest exploration of love and neurosis, star Josh Brolin told the director he wouldn’t try and play a thinly disguised version of Woody Allen in the movie, like Kenneth Branagh in Celebrity or even Scarlett Johansson in Scoop.

“I know some people have tried to (play the Woody Allen character),” he says. “I don’t understand why. Everybody writes from who they are, but I think because Woody has acted in his films, and is choosing not to act in this film, therefore you are taking his place. I didn’t see it that way.”    

The director was fine with that, in fact, he told Brolin to make the role his own. “Then I’d do a take,” says Brolin, “and he’d say, ‘You changed a word. You said cannot. The script says can’t.’ I’d say, ‘You’re not serious are you?’ and he’d say, ‘Yes, you broke the contraction.’ I said, ‘I thought you just said to make the part my own.’ He said, ‘I know. But the script says can’t.’”

Such is life on set with a genius.

Brolin, however, does have what most people would consider the Woody Allen role in the film; the part Woody might have played if he was 30 years younger. As a novelist with writer’s block and a taste for women, the Roy has the bulk of the film’s funny lines and best scenes, but Brolin says he couldn’t play Allen if he tried.

“Woody and I both said, ‘I could never pretend to be you nor could you possibly pretend to be me.’ If there are two more opposite people on this planet it is me and Woody Allen. For various reasons; which is why I think we come together and work together as well as we do, because we have the same sensibilities. We just have different structures.”   

Brolin, who has made two films with Allen, says when he watched You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, he wanted to slap Roy. “To me he is pathetic. He’s not the most redeeming character out there. The grass is greener on the other side and he is constantly looking over there for notoriety and fame and all that. It’s a strange character and when he asked me to play it, I was like, ‘Why? Why me?’ But I’m very happy I got to do it.”

Paul Giamatti: Not Your Average Star
PEOPLE
Thursday, September 23, 2010
By Richard Crouse

In February 2005 I saw Paul Giamatti, the self confessed “funny looking leading man” and star of Sideways and the upcoming Barney’s Version, waiting at a departure lounge at LAX. It’s not unusual to see a star at Los Angeles’s biggest airport, but it is strange to see one outside the First Class Lounge, reading a tattered science fiction novel with a knapsack shaped suspiciously like a SAG award. (He had won the Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture award the night before along with Sideways cast mates Thomas Haden Church, Virginia Madsen and Sandra Oh.)

“I prefer sitting down by the gate because I‘m afraid I’m going to miss the plane,” he says when I remind him of the day. “I get uncomfortable in those places. It just feels funny. There is no more classist place on earth than in an airport. It makes me uncomfortable.”

The 43-year-old actor is also somewhat uncomfortable with the fame Sideways brought him.

“You can’t avoid [fame] when you are exposed as much as you are in movies,” he says. “It made me uncomfortable at first. Would I prefer to be anonymous all the time? Yeah, I would because I like it and I also feel it is a precious thing as an actor. It goes away and you just have to go with it I suppose. At a certain point I tried to cop an attitude of saying, ‘Well these people come up and talk to me and so it is actually an opportunity. I don’t have the anonymity but I can observe these people now.’”

People watching is an important tool for an actor, but Giamatti admits that his adopted home town of New York—he’s from New Haven, Connecticut originally—while still interesting and diverse, isn’t as rich a source as it once was.

“New York has changed a lot,” he says. “I don’t know what happened to a lot of the people you used to see [in the city] that were absolutely jaws dropping. You would see things that weren’t just fascinating to study; you would see things that you could not believe you were seeing. People in a condition you couldn’t believe you were seeing. People behaving in ways you couldn’t believe. That doesn’t quite happen as much in New York anymore. It’s a little bit less insane than it used to be.”

His latest role takes him far away from New York, all the way to Canada. Montréal to be specific. In Barney’s Version Giamatti brings to life Barney Panofsky, one of the most iconic characters in Canadian literature. When he accepted the role, however, the Oscar nominee didn’t realize how well loved the book is in Canada.

“It was a gradual realization,” he said. “I did an interview in Rome [during the shoot] with Canadian television and somebody said to me, ‘Wow, you must be really nervous,’ and I thought ‘Jesus Christ, I wasn’t until now.’ I think I was mostly feeling that I’m an American guy and I don’t want to screw up something precious to Canadians.”

In his typical humble way Giamatti adds, “Part of me thinks that I don’t want everyone, when they read the book, to only see me,” he says. “I hope people can still see what they want to see in the book and separate the two. Hopefully they exist as two different beasts.”

Gory neighbours
RICHARD CROUSE
METRO CANADA
Published: September 17, 2010

Take one part Twin Peaks, mix with one part Roman Polanski and you have Good Neighbours. It’s a dark comedy set in an apartment building in Montreal’s Notre-Dame-de-Grâce that features a murder, which star Jay Baruchel calls “if not the goriest, then the most uncomfortable death scene in any movie this year.”

The events leading up to the grisly, but darkly amusing incident involve three young Montrealers, the wheelchair bound Spencer (Scott Speedman), cat lover Louise (Emily Hampshire) and Victor, an earnest school teacher played by Baruchel. As their lives become entwined it becomes difficult for them — and the audience — to know who to trust.

“It will be polarizing,” says Baruchel, who was last seen starring opposite Nicolas Cage in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, “but I think this movie really gets under your skin.”

It’s also the kind of movie that probably wouldn’t easily find funding in Hollywood.  

“The main reason this would never get made stateside is that it leaves too much up to the audience,” says Baruchel. “The studios don’t like that. They like to kind of give you a road map and let you know when you are supposed to be sad or happy and who you are meant to root for. Director Jacob Tierney says his favourite thing when talking to people after screenings is what they project on it. Some people will say that my character is so lovely and sympathetic and others think he’s really creepy. Your life will inform how you see our movie, I think.

“If I was to sum up the whole movie, and specifically my character it would be ‘Good depends on context.’ I really think this movie is nothing if not a grey area. It’s still going to be rewarding but there is this really uncomfortable sense of humour that permeates the whole thing. Jacob wants people to be on edge from beginning to end.”

One person, however, that Baruchel doesn’t want the movie to rattle is his mother. “There is a reason my mother is not coming to the movie (premier) tonight. I said ‘You can watch the movie just not beside me.’”

Canuck pride sidebar

“I’m very grateful for the career I’ve had in the states. It has afforded my mother, my sister and I lives we otherwise never would have had,” says Baruchel. “That being said … by and large the things I have been most proud of have all been here.”

Mongrel no mutt at TIFF
In Focus by Richard Crouse
FOR METRO CANADA
Published: September 17, 2010
 
One of the first images projected on a screen at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival was the Mongrel Media logo which popped up in the opening credits of Score: A Hockey Musical. Established in 1994 Mongrel has grown to become a powerhouse film distributor and TIFF regular.

“Playing a film at TIFF is every distributor’s dream,” says Director of Marketing and Theatrical Releasing Danish Vahidy. “Capote, Volver, Away from Her, One Week, A Prophet, An Education, The Lives Of Others. TIFF helped put all these films and Mongrel on the map.   Mongrel had one film at the 1996 TIFF (our first) and now fourteen this year.”

Of the bakers dozen plus one Mongrel movies at the fest this year, including the Mike Leigh comedy Another Year, Woody Allen’s latest You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger and the blistering financial meltdown documentary Inside Job, Vahidy says Score: A Hockey Musical provided two of his most memorable moments at this year’s TIFF.

“We were thrilled when we heard that Score: A Hockey Musical was selected as the opening night film,” he says. “How often do you get Olivia Newton-John and Walter Gretzky on the same red carpet?  

“To have the film receive a standing ovation was overwhelming.  And now I can’t get the finale song out of my mind.  ‘Hockey, hockey… the greatest game in the land.’”

When asked about his favourite Mongrel Media moment from past years at the festival he says it would be “the reaction from the crowd after the opening night screening of Water at Roy Thomson Hall.

“We knew that night that we had something special on our hands and it was great to see the progression of the film from that night to its Academy Award nomination.”

On a more personal note he adds, “Sharing the back seat of a limo with Penelope Cruz would have to come in second! I think our publicist would say that sharing the back seat of a limo with [Indian superstar and heartthrob] John Abraham is right up there as well.”

Up-and-comers hope to take advantage of TIFF launching pad
RICHARD CROUSE
METRO TORONTO
Published: September 13, 2010

The Toronto International Film Festival is a magnet for movie legends. This year Clint Eastwood, Robert De Niro and Robert Redford will decorate red carpets around town, but for every walking artifact of Hollywood history there are a dozen rising stars that come to TIFF to bask in the reflected light.

On the short list of TIFF up-and-comers bound for big things are Emma Stone who is sure to grab some eyes for her hilarious turn in Easy A, Kat Dennings, the voluptuous seductress of Daydream Nation and former CSI star Lauren Lee Smith, here with a breakout performance in A Night for Dying Tigers. Calling it a “very simple film with complex characters,” Smith says “it feels really good to be here with a film I’m proud of.”

Buzzed about names from the other side of the camera include Gareth Edwards, the young Brit director here with his micro-budgeted horror film Monsters and Michael Goldbach, the Canadian director of Daydream Nation. His debut film has attracted a lot of attention; already his next script has been optioned by the folks behind Juno and 500 Days Of Summer.

“The amazing thing about TIFF is that it has famously been the catalyst for a lot of filmmakers careers,” he says. “I'd love to tap into that tradition.”

A quick look at the madly prolific Woody Allen
RICHARD CROUSE
METRO CANADA
Published: September 10, 2010

You could be forgiven for thinking there is always a Woody Allen movie playing at your local theatre.

Since 1965 he has produced a stream of comedies, romances and dramas at the rate of about one a year.

To place his output in context, look at the film careers of two of his contemporaries; Mel Brooks has made only 12 films in the time it took Allen to direct 45 and Carl Reiner has only written seven pictures against Allen’s list of 49 (and counting).

His productivity is nothing short of amazing — his latest film, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, is at TIFF this week — but he claims to make films only because, “I don't know what else I would do with my time.

“I've made perfectly decent films,” he says, but admits, “some of them may be very good and some may be very bad. If I was the teacher, I'd give myself a B.” Here’s a look back at the films of one of the hardest working men in show business.

La-di-da
1977’s Oscar winning Annie Hall is Allen’s acknowledged masterpiece, a film Roger Ebert called “just about everyone's favourite Woody Allen movie.” The story of neurotic New York comedian Alvy Singer (Allen) and the ditsy title character (Diane Keaton) is a sweet and funny (“That sex was the most fun I've ever had without laughing.”) look at contemporary relationships.

Sex and death
Of all the themes Allen has covered, sex (“Is sex dirty? Only if it’s done right.”) and death (“On the plus side, death is one of the few things that can be done just as easily lying down.”) are his go-to topics. Of all his sex and death films, the chaotic Sleeper is the funniest. Billed as his “nostalgic look at the future,” it is a satirical sci-fi set to a soundtrack of Dixieland jazz. Funniest scene? Allen trapped inside an Orgasmatron.

Life is divided into the horrible and the miserable
He says he never watches his own films because, “I think I would hate them,” and in fact, there is one, considered a classic by many, he has watched and says he can’t stand — Manhattan. “I hated that one,” he says. On the flip side he does concede to enjoying Purple Rose of Cairo, Match Point, Bullets Over Broadway, Zelig and Vicky Cristina Barcelona.

The fine art of rhyming baloney with Zamboni
RICHARD CROUSE
METRO CANADA
Published: September 09, 2010

Does a country that already has a Hockey Hall of Fame and a ubiquitous coffee chain named after a defenceman really need a singing and dancing tribute to the sport? Director Michael McGowan thought so and the result is Score: A Hockey Musical, a parody of hockey violence set to a soundtrack that rhymes baloney with Zamboni.

“We do hockey well and we do music well in this country, and the fact that a hockey musical hadn’t been done seemed to me like a great opportunity,” he said. “It’s such a ridiculous idea on one hand, but it is instantly memorable as a film idea. In a crowded marketplace you’re always trying to stand out.”

Helping the film to stand out is a berth as the opening night film at TIFF and a host of stars on ice in leading roles and cameos. Headlining a musical for the first time in thirty years is Olivia Newton John, playing an overprotective hockey mom. “She’s funny and she doesn’t take herself seriously,” says McGowan, “but for her to say, ‘This is the film, a hockey musical shot in Toronto in February seemed virtually impossible.”

Joining John is Promiscuous singer Nelly Furtato, who plays Kelly, the “ardent hockey fan.”

“I had written in the script, ‘She licks the fat bellied man’s stomach,’” says McGowan. “There is not a hope in hell that I’m going to say, ‘OK Nelly, now you lick the fat bellied man’s stomach.’ But she completely embraced it. It was like, ‘If you’re going to play in this world of the hockey musical you have to embrace it fully.’”

Rounding out the cast are newcomers Noah Reid and Allie MacDonald, along with George Stroumboulopoulos, Evan Solomon, sports anchor Steve Kouleas, the world’s most famous hockey dad Walter Gretzky and former NHL star Theo Fleury.

“At the end I was shaking my head about who was actually in the film,” he says.

McGowan hopes that his mix of sports and song will score with audiences. “There are so few opportunities as Canadians for us to express our patriotism,” he says adding that the mix of “hockey and music, in a story that works, will hopefully be a communal experience.”

Adam West Reminiceses about his Days as the “Bright” Knight
zoomermag.com
Thursday, August 26, 2010

By Richard Crouse

Batmans come and go. For a time Michael Keaton wore the caped suit. Then in rapid succession Val Kilmer and George Clooney donned the cowl. In recent years Christian Bale has been fitted for the Bat-Suit, but of all the actors to have played the Dark Knight, one stands head and shoulders above the rest in our imaginations. For two-and-a-half heady years—and 120 episodes—from 1966 to 1968 Adam West was Batman on the most popular show on television.

“We never stopped,” he says. “I know a lot of TV series people complain about hours and pressure but we really had them. We worked fifteen, sixteen hours a day! We were on twice a week so you really had to run.”

The worst part for West wasn’t the hours or the pressure, it was the blue, purple and gray Batsuit. “It was a time when they didn’t have the materials they have today and it was just plain hot and itchy.”

Driving the Batmobile, the show’s sleek signature car—it’s stylish lines are said to have been inspired by the mako shark and the manta ray—however, was one of the job’s great pleasures, but not without its challenges. “Getting behind the wheel of the Batmobile was like driving a broken down old 37 Ford wheat truck. I gotta be honest. But you know what? I didn’t mind because it was so tricky and fun and funny and perfect on film and the kids loved it. It’s the most famous car in the world and everybody today that I meet still prefers that car to any other.”

The “any other” he refers to are the movie Batmobiles used in the Tim Burton and Christopher Nolan Batman films. His intonation begs the question, how does he feel about the recent movies?

“I don’t feel,” he says. “I really have no feeling because they are good for what they are. I can’t be a critic. They do their thing. They have The Dark Knight. We did our thing and I’m The Bright Knight.”

For all the memorable elements of the show—the crazy pop art KAPOWs! And BOFFs! that punctuated the fight scenes or the cliffhanger endings, “Tune in tomorrow—same Bat-time, same Bat-channel!”—West says, for him, two moments stands out above the rest—one professional, one personal.

“The defining moment of the character might be when he [Batman] sat at the disco bar and they slipped him a drug, or a Mickey in his orange juice. So with great abandonment he stood up and created The Batusi (The go-go dance later done by John Travolta in Pulp Fiction). That moment to me kind of summed up everything that it was. That it could be really funny, absurd, fun and yet serious,” he says, “and the kids would really take it seriously.”

“The other defining moment was when I first put on the costume for real and was about to leave my trailer on the stage and walk out in front of the crew and the press, and into the light. I thought, ‘Oh Lord! Are they going to laugh? What’s going to happen here?’ Well, I walked across the stage as dignified as I could and there wasn’t a sound. People stood there in awe and I thought, ‘Yes, this will work.’”

And more than forty years later it is still working. West hung up the itchy Batsuit years ago, but for a generation of fans he’ll always be the Bright Knight.

Fans in Toronto can get a chance to meet and mingle with Adam West this weekend when he makes special appearances at The Toronto Underground Theatre and Fan Expo.

George A. Romero: A Sucker for the Classics
zoomermag.com
Thursday, August 19, 2010
By Richard Crouse

You might imagine that horror maestro George A. Romero’s favorite film is The Exorcist. Or maybe Cannibal Holocaust. Or even The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It’s easy to picture the twisted mind behind Night of the Living Dead curled up in his Toronto home with the Saw marathon unspooling on his blood splattered DVD player. Easy to imagine, but far from the reality. Most nights you’ll find him rewatching a classic. Maybe The Brothers Karamazov, Casablanca or Dr. Strangelove. Nary a decapitated head or disembowelment in the bunch! He also loves The Quiet Man, High Noon and King Solomon’s Mines but his all time favorite is an obscure 1951 Michael Powell film called The Tales of Hoffman.

“It’s the movie that made me want to make movies,” he says.

“I was dragged kicking and screaming by an aunt and uncle. I wanted to go see the new Tarzan; the new Lex Barker movie to see how he stacked up against Weissmuller and they said, ‘No! We’re going to see this,’ and I fell in love with it. It’s just beautiful. Completley captivating. It’s all sung. It’s all opera. It’s not like The Red Shoes where there is a story running through it and then Léonide Massine does a ballet at the end. I just fell in love with it from the pop.

“He did it on a low budget. You could see the techniques he was using; he was reversing action, doing overprints, double exposures and it seemed accessible. I think at that age if I had seen Jurassic Park I would have said ‘Forget about it, I don’t know how to do this dinosaur thing’ but I could see how Powell made the film and it was accessible to me. It made me think that maybe someday I could do something like this.”

All these years later Hoffman and other films of that vintage still move him—“I’m a sucker for the old movies I loved as a kid,” he says. “I put them on and I get a tear in my eye when the overture starts.”—but don’t think he’s getting soft. The man known to fans as the “Grandfather of the Zombie” has a new gut wrenching (literally) movie called Survival of the Dead in theatres this weekend.

Like his previous movies it works on a couple of levels. “Goremets” will appreciate his signature style with the blood and guts but wipe away some of the red stuff and the social commentary of his work becomes clear. “I bring the zombies out of the closet when I have something I want to talk about,” he says.

His classic Night of the Living Dead touches on Cold War politics and domestic racism, while others in the Living Dead series shine a light on consumerism, the conflict between science and the military and class conflict. The new one, the sixth in the series, is a lesson in the futility of war. Inserting these ideas into the films is very important to Romero whether audiences get it or not. He says he knows most people are “there either to just take the ride or watch the gore, chuckle at the gore, and don’t care about the other stuff,” but his work has had a profound effect on a couple of generations of filmmakers.

Quentin Tarantino, who says the “A” in George A. Romero stands for “A f**king genius,” cites the director’s fierce independent style as an influence and Romero’s blend of speculative fiction and social comment is particularly apparent in the work of Guillermo del Toro.

When I mention this to Romero he says, “Guillermo is my man! He runs a close second to Michael Powell in my mind.”

Dolph Lundgren is Back with “The Expendables”
zoomermag.com
Thursday, August 12, 2010
By Richard Crouse

Considering what happened after the last time they appeared on screen together it’s a wonder Sylvester Stallone would consider working with Dolph Lundgren again. While shooting the boxing scenes for Rocky IV, the movie that made the 6′ 5″ Lundgren a household name, the Swedish actor hit Stallone so hard the Italian Stallion’s heart slammed up against his breastbone and began to swell, limiting the oxygen flow throughout his body.

An eight day stay in intensive care cured the problem, but may also explain why Stallone waited twenty-five years to invite Dolph back into the ring. The pair, along with action movie legends Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jason Statham (and that’s just the Ss!), star in The Expendables, an all star all action movie opening on August 13.

When asked why he’s reteamed with Stallone after so many years Lundgren says, “Well, first of all Mr. Sly Stallone. Anything he writes and directs is something I’d be interested in doing.”

He was cautious, however, of keeping up with some of the younger members of the cast. “All my roles are tough physically, but this one was different because I knew I was up against people like [former NFL footballer] Terry Crews and [wrestler] Stone Cold Steve Austin. Not small guys and pretty rough and developed so I thought I gotta do more weights. So I did a lot of weights for my upper body to get a little beefier. My arms were still smaller than Terry Crews, but I think I was somewhere up there.

“Physically, I do a lot of martial arts fighting, and that is pretty much what I did for this film although I can pretty much handle the fighting at any time.”

Lundgren has been practicing Kyokushinkai Karate (a Japanese style of martial arts) since age fourteen, has a third degree black belt and next year, at age 54, plans on getting his fourth degree and will do a demonstration at the world championships in Tokyo.

As a child he says the study of karate helped him to develop self confidence, discipline and a sense of who he was. Today he finds the practice aids him in keeping grounded and is “an antidote to Hollywood and the trappings of that lifestyle. It takes discipline, etiquette and you have to have a certain outlook on life that is simple and elegant. It’s not a self centered or egocentric type of sport.”

Lundgren still works out four or five days a week and has no plans to slow down on his work schedule of pumping out one or two action films a year. “It’s a way of making a living for me because people want to see me do it,” he says. “In an action movie you can have fun and be a kid and play with guns and cars… and a few beautiful women if you’re lucky. At the same time when you are directing you get an intellectual challenge as well because you are making all the decisions about music and editing. It’s is a great job. It’s hard work but very challenging and very rewarding.”

Could John Waters Be Your Role Model?
zoomermag.com
Thursday, June 24, 2010
By Richard Crouse

John Waters listens to Bobby ‘Boris’ Pickett’s Monster Mash every day. He claims dancing to the song keeps him happy.

“It’s even more fun to do with Kleenex boxes on your feet,” he says. “Howard Hughes used to do that. I was fascinated by that. I thought, ‘Why did he do that?’ until I put them on one day. Do the Monster Mash in Kleenex boxes and you will not need Prozac or any kind of drug. It will put you in a good mood even if you have chemical depression.”

The 64-year-old Waters, a provocateur once labeled “The Pope of Trash” by William Burroughs, is best known as the twisted mind behind Pink Flamingos and Hairspray, but he’s also a journalist with writing credits that range from pieces for Rolling Stone to Vogue.

On the surface his latest work, a book titled Role Models, is a compendium of pieces on people he admires—that’s everyone from Johnny Mathis, who Waters says is ”beyond fame, beyond race, beyond trying too hard” to Esther Martin, a foulmouthed Baltimore bartender—but what emerges from the pages is something different.

“It is really my memoir,” he says, “it is about me but it is told through other people. They had to relate to my life in some way. They had to lead extreme lives in a way I could relate to mine. Perhaps something awful happened or something good happened, or [they had] great success or great failure or notoriety.”

The spotlight he shines on his subjects also illuminates the man behind the words. The one-time “Pope of Trash” is revealed as a sharp-tongued, but loyal and compassionate friend.

Take, for instance, his 14, 000 word defense of Leslie Van Houten. As a nineteen year old Van Houten, under the spell of Charles Manson, stabbed Rosemary LaBianca sixteen times. Waters befriended her twenty seven years ago. “I told her, ‘I’ve known you for a long time and you are a role model to me, to [be able] to get through this terrible thing that happened,” he says. “Can she ever get better? Can she ever survive the terrible crime she was involved in? And I think she has and I think she deserves a second chance. This is my letter to the parole board.”

We also learn of his taste for people on the fringe, whether they be pornographers like Bobby Garcia, who shot hundreds of videos of himself having sex with Marines or Zorro, a legendarily drug addled Baltimore stripper. Waters treats them all respectfully and notes that he would be hurt if they took offence to anything he had written about them.

“I find people’s personalities fascinating,” he says. “I do try and understand everybody and that’s what this book is about. These people have had it worse or better than me and they’ve had to be brave and bravery is a complicated word, but they somehow have survived. Each one of those people taught me a lesson in a weird way.”

Need to make the most of movie night? There's an app for that
In Focus by Richard Crouse
METRO CANADA
Published: April 07, 2010

It used to be that going to the movies was simple.

Movie times were listed at the back of every newspaper, trusted critics pointed the way and with a minimum of effort—and for price of a ticket and a tub of popcorn—you’d have two hours of entertainment. That was then. This is now, and the whole experience of watching movies has become even simpler thanks to some high tech gadgets easily downloaded on your iPhone.

The whole process of locating, watching and enjoying films has been streamlined by a series of movie apps that range in price from free to $2.99.

“These apps make movie-going easier,” says CTV’s Tech Expert Kris Abel. “Certainly now it’s easier to find a theatre in your area that is playing the movie you want at the right show time. You have apps like the flixter app (free on itunes) which can use your GPS to find the closest theatre and then give you information about that movie.”  

Flixter can help get you to the theatre but two other apps come in handy once you get there. Alfred Hitchcock once said, “The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder,” but the fact is nature often calls in the most inopportune times—like in the middle of a movie. RunPee ($1.99 on iTunes) won’t quell those urges, but it will tell you the best points in the film to discretely sneak out to the restroom.

“It tells you the line you might hear the character say on the screen,” says Abel, “and then it tells you how much time you have. The best part is that after you’ve gone to the bathroom on your screen will be a quick little text summary of what just happened in the movie. Usually in any movie there will be about four different points where it is safe for you to get up.”

Also useful is the IMDB app (free on iTunes), a comprehensive database of movie info, news and reviews. It’s perfect for those moments when an actor’s face rings a bell but you can’t place them but please, don’t use it while the movie is playing.

“There is a certain amount of app etiquette,” says Abel, “and most apps are designed for use before you go to the movie or after. There is nothing that will take you out of the magic of the cinema faster than seeing someone’s screen out of the corner of your eye.”

Can’t make it to the theatre? Not to worry, there are even apps for people who don’t want to sit in the dark. The NFB iPhone app (free on iTunes) offers up hundreds of NFB films for temporary download and Location Scout (free in the Android Market) allows you to find the places where your favorite movies were shot.

Able notes that there are hundreds of apps out there, so buyer beware, but there is at least one to suit almost every movie fan.

Playtime with the stars of Toy Story 3
RICHARD CROUSE
METRO CANADA
June 16, 2010        

Toy Story 3 is about toys. All kinds of toys. Some familiar, like the hilariously vain Ken doll voiced by Michael Keaton, others less so, like Mr. Pricklepants, a small stuffed toy with a deep baritone supplied by Timothy Dalton.

The stars have come out to play toys in the film, but what toys did they play with as children?

Jeff Garlin
The burly Curb Your Enthusiasm actor who voices Buttercup the Unicorn says his most memorable toy wasn’t actually a toy, but the box it came in. “I used that box for a year as a fort, as a robot,” he says. “I loved the box. And now my kids, as they open up gifts, love boxes.”

Joan Cusack
“I had a Barbie head,” says Cusack, who returns to the Toy Story franchise for the second time as the voice of Jessie, the Yodeling Cowgirl. “Just the head. It was sold like that. It was her head and her neck was like a tray and we did make-up and hair on the head. That’s all I can really remember. The rest of it was all make-believe and forts and playing house and stuff. It wasn’t so much toys back then.”

Michael Keaton
The Batman actor didn’t play with Ken dolls as a kid — he just plays one in the movie — but he does fondly remember a baseball glove he had as a youngster. “I wish I still had it,” he says. “It was perfectly worked in.”

Kristen ‘Trixie the Triceratops’ Schaal
The baby-voiced actress best known as Mel on Flight of the Concords, says her favorite childhood toy also came in a box, but unlike her co-star, she actually played with the contents. “My great aunt gave me a box of costume jewelry that I used forever until I lost every piece,” she says. “I would pretend to be a madam! No! Just kidding! A princess!”

Timothy Dalton
The former Mr. Bond — now the voice of a stuffed hedgehog with theatrical ambitions — agrees with Cusack. “We made things up,” he says. “We played with tin cans, stones and bits of wood or paper. Or we played games or went on adventures like tramping across the fields thinking we were adventuring heroes. It was before the space age but we did what these guys in the movie were doing except we did it in our heads.”

Lehane is Not “That Guy”
By Richard Crouse
zoomermag.com
June 3, 2010

Given the Hollywood success novelist Dennis Lehane has had in recent years you’d expect him to live in the 90210 area code. No dice, says the blunt speaking author of Mystic River, Gone Baby Gone and Shutter Island (which comes to DVD and Blu Ray June 8).

“If you live in LA you’re suddenly that guy,” he says on the line from his home in Boston. “You get lost in it. Everywhere you turn everyone is a writer. Where I live now I’m it, at least for a couple of blocks there’s no other writers.”

Certainly there are no other authors in his area with a tinsel town track record like his. The film adaptations of his novels have put him on a first name basis with legendary filmmakers like Clint and Marty and have earned seven Oscars nominations. But don’t look to him to take all the credit for the success of the movies.

“There are only two things I can take credit for and I’m not being falsely disingenuous or anything,” he says, “I’m just being honest. I seem to write characters that actors are attracted to. I invest a lot in my characters, so my characters tend to have multiple dimensions. OK, there I go. I just pumped myself up.

“Other than that I will only get in business with the absolute crème de la crème talent wise and taste wise. Just look at my behind-the-credits people. Look at my producers; they are people that if you look at the CVs are extremely impressive. That spreads out to other talented people. Who are talented people going to pick to write your screenplays? They are going to pick talented writers. Who are they going to pick to do the director’s job? They are going to pick talented directors. Who are the directors going to pick? They’re going to pick talented actors and so on. That’s really what’s been going on.”

Talented though he may be, he’s never adapted one of his own novels for the screen.

“I’m not particularly interested in adapting my own work. It is just not something that I can do. I’m just not competent. I’m the last person you should trust. I don’t know how to cut. I just spent two or three years of my life trying to get a book to 401 pages. Not 402 and not 399 and then you are going to turn around and say that’s the guy I want to trust to cut it to 135?”
Shutter Island, Lehane’s ominous thriller turned Martin Scorsese film about a U.S. Marshal (Leonardo DiCaprio) investigating a disappearance at the remote Shutter Island hospital for the criminally insane, sprung from two separate incidents.

“When I was a little kid my uncle took me out to one of the harbor islands and pointed out where a mental institution—the skeletal remains were still there—and it just stuck in my head. Many, many years later I had a crazy dream one night. I wrote it all down and woke up the next morning and looked at my notes and those notes are pretty much what Shutter Island is.”

Watching Scorsese work, he says was “mind boggling,” but true to form he didn’t spend much time on the set.

“Sets are so unbelievably boring if you don’t have a purpose on them,” he says. “A caterer is far more important on a film set than a novelist. A caterer, hey man, they give you the food; a novelist is just standing there saying, ‘I thought this up.’”

He’d rather be at home, in Boston. “It continually fuels me plus Bostonians are just funny sons-of-bitches. How else would I get to hear great lines all the time?”

Vigilante tale returns Michael Caine to his roots
RICHARD CROUSE
METRO CANADA
May 14, 2010          

The director of Michael Caine’s latest film, the crime drama Harry Brown, says Caine is the only person in England who everybody loves.

“He is a great Briton,” says Daniel Barber, “and he is admired in Britain by everyone, high, low or whatever as being one of the great Britons. He comes from very humble origins; he is truly a man of the people like very few people are.”

In reaction, Caine laughs, “I dunno. They say, ‘You’re an icon now.' I say, ‘I don’t know how to do that.' There’s no lessons. There’s no special icon bar where you go, meet up and learn what to do. I just consider myself lucky.”

The humble routine is part of what makes Caine beloved, but his Harry Brown co-star, Emily Mortimer, adds, “People feel both in awe of him because he is an icon but he is, at the same time, somehow accessible. That’s an amazing combination. To be a big movie star but for people to feel that they know you and that you are a good bloke and you’d be a good person to have a pint with.”

Harry Brown takes Caine back to his roots. The film, about a widowed man who strikes back at the hoodlums who have terrorizing his community, was shot in his old stomping grounds.

“It’s amazing because we were working on the same estate that he grew up on,” continues Mortimer. “A lot has changed since then, but that was incredible for him; an inspiration for him. There’s a big wall in the Elephant and Castle with a big painting of him as his character from Get Carter on it. There were moments when the 76-year-old Michael Caine would walk past this wall in the projects, in the middle of real degradation with this iconic image behind him. Moments like that were fantastic.”   

“I always said I come from the slums,” says Caine of the E&C neighborhood where he was born, “and I do, but when I went back I didn’t realize how lucky I was. Because when we were shooting late at night, I’d talk to the neighbourhood boys and I realized I was quite lucky because I had two thing they didn’t have: I had a happy family life and I got an education. So I had two valuable things they didn’t have, and one thing they did have that I didn’t. That was drugs.”

Caine blames drugs for the rise in hoodlum culture that Harry Brown portrays. “In the end,” he says, “they wipe out all feeling for the other person.”

But despite strong feelings on the subject, Caine believes making Harry Brown taught him something.

“This movie changed me,” he said “in as much as I started out thinking, ‘Let’s go out and make a movie about killing all these scumbags,’ and then I met these people and realized they were helpless, just as much as the victims, and they had been neglected and they need help.”

Colm Feore channels Lenin in The Trotsky
RICHARD CROUSE
METRO CANADA
May 13, 2010          

Given Colm Feore’s habit of playing historical figures — he’s starred as everyone from Pierre Trudeau and Glenn Gould to Admiral Husband E. Kimmel on screens big and small — you’d imagine in a movie about the reincarnation of a Soviet politician called The Trotsky, he must be playing the legendary Bolshevik.

“I looked at Trotsky and he had hair, so that was out,” Feore laughs.

In fact, in the film the actor plays the authoritarian principal of Montreal’s (fictional) Jacques Parizeau English School who tries to prevent Leon Bronstein (Jay Baruchel) — a student who believes he is the reincarnation of revolutionary Leon Trotsky — from unionizing the school’s students.   

“I was between episodes of 24 so I hadn’t shaved,” he says, “and I thought, ‘Why don’t I just keep not shaving? I’ll present myself to (director) Jacob (Tierney) and say, ‘Would this work for you? I think this would this give us a certain Lenin-esque feel.’ I thought, ‘I’ll go Lenin, he’ll go Trotsky and it will be eerie.’”

Feore — who sprinkles his conversation with words like “supercilious” and self depreciating comments — has more than a passing resemblance to the Russian revolutionary.

“We had this huge Lenin poster behind Jay’s head at one point,” he says. “Jacob framed the shot so that when I turn away I’m perfectly framed in the poster.”

The actor, who jumps back and forth between big budget films like the upcoming Thor, TV work and small films to fill in the gaps was taken by the script the moment he read it.

“To me it seemed very springy,” he says. “It has a bouncy intelligence to it. Particularly since it came from young people. Right now I am surrounded by young people. I have my kids and I think, ‘What would flatter them in reflection?’ If they see themselves as smart and able to change their world, this is a message I would like to be able to send. There is something heroically quixotic about the way Jay’s character forces his way down his path.”

The movie has earned comparisons to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and other American teen comedies, but Feore says it “probably couldn’t have been made anywhere else. The Canadian-ness of this film is our genius for subversion while playing it straight. It’s not tongue-in-cheek. ... I like that the gags are layered in and it works on a second viewing. There are political statements under the political statements.”

Baruchel leads a revolution of his own in The Trotsky
RICHARD CROUSE
METRO CANADA
May 07, 2010

Jay Baruchel is Captain Canuck.

Despite having the kind of breakout Hollywood success most actors could only dream of — starring in the critically lauded She’s Out of My League, the number-one hit How to Train Your Dragon and headlining Disney’s upcoming Sorcerer’s Apprentice — the patriotic Canadian (he has a maple leaf tattooed over his heart) hasn’t taken up digs in Los Angeles or New York. In fact, he still lives in Montreal where his latest movie was shot.

“It was genius,” he says of making The Trotsky in his hometown. “If I go away to make movies it means I have to say goodbye to my mom, my cat, my friends, my bed, all that stuff, so to be able to go to my house every night and flip channels with my roommates and pet the cat was crazy.”

In the comedy, directed by actor-turned-director Jacob Tierney, he plays the budding Bolshevik Leon Bronstein, a 17-year-old who believes he is the reincarnation of Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky.

“When I talked to Jacob about this I told him I was scared to play a character 10 years younger than me,” he says. “I was trying to leave that behind, but then I came to the Ferris conclusion. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is my favourite movie of all time and I realized that Leon kind of is Ferris in regards to the way he affects change in other people’s lives and goes to war against his principal.”

Baruchel may have used Ferris Bueller as a muse, but to fully round out the character he cobbled together a “bunch of subtle tiles in the mosaic that make up this weird guy.”

First he looked back at himself. “In high school you just care about everything so much,” he said. “I was incredibly impassioned and prone to crying and punching stuff and throwing fits and getting really angry, so I had to channel that.”

Then he added in some physical comedy. “I had this overriding idea that because he’s such an odd bird, there was room for some physical comedy and that’s why I walk out of every scene like a cartoon character.”

More than anything, however, he says he’s thrilled to portray a side of Montreal that rarely gets seen on screen.

“If you watch English movies from the rest of Canada, you’d never know that there are Anglos in Montreal,” he says. “If you watch French movies from Quebec, you’d never know there are Anglos in Montreal. So either way we’re forgotten, but we’re back! Anglo Montrealers are back everyone! We’re coming at ya!”

Gross Hair Day
by Richard Crouse
zoomermag.com
Thursday, April 29, 2010

Writing in The Globe and Mail, theatre critic Ray Conologue said, “Paul Gross… is so good-looking that some women sitting near to me on opening night would forcibly argue that the only thing he could do wrong would be to go home alone afterward.” Mention that to the citizens of Osoyoos, British Columbia, however, and you may get a quizzical look or two.

“I’d go into the 7/11 to get milk and I looked unhinged,” says Gross. “The good people of Osoyoos [located in the southern part of the Okanagan Valley near British Columbia's border with Washington state] had never seen anything like this so they wouldn’t even sell me milk at the 7/11.”

No, Gross hasn’t been tragically disfigured or succumbed to the ravages of age. In fact, in middle age he’s looking as matinee idol handsome as ever, a fact he tries to hide in Gunless (which opens on April 30, his 51st birthday), by covering his famous face with a mop of matted, dirty hair. In this western comedy he plays The Montana Kid, an 1880s American gunslinger who comes North, finds nobility and becomes, well, gunless.

“You know, there are those decisions you make every once and while that are really stupid,” he says. “I woke up one morning before I went out to BC and I thought, ‘I think he should have long hair.’

“I said to Bill [Phillips, the film’s director], ‘It’ll work. Trust me. If it doesn’t we can just cut it.’ I don’t know if you’ve ever had really long hair or extensions, but don’t. If someone comes up to you on the street and says, ‘Hey I can give you long hair.’ Just don’t talk to the guy. It takes about 112 hours to get them in and they are applied largely with a nail gun. They are just driven straight into your skull and then you are stuck with this long hair. It’s appalling. It gets in your mouth, in your food…

“On top of that, we get out to the set and it was 312 in the Kelvin scale. That’s 45 degrees Celsius. 312 Kelvin. I looked it up. And something went wrong with the hair. It started to mat. Particularly on the right side. It looked like Princess Leia on meth… a cow patty set sideways on my head. We could not untangle it so then we just cut it off. So I had one short side and one ridiculously long side.”

No wonder he got strange looks at the convenience store, but the hair and the trouble shopping for milk weren’t the most difficult part of the shoot.

“The worst thing really was the dust. If you saw pictures of the crew they are all wearing bandanas, masks and ski goggles and the actors are all standing there sucking back clouds of it. It’s like the clouds out of Iceland. They stop planes in this kind of stuff, but we kept shooting.”

Thankfully the dust didn’t last for the whole shoot and Gross developed a fondness for Osoyoos.

“I didn’t know this area of the country existed and I’ve seen a lot of Canada. I encourage everybody to go. It is absolutely staggeringly beautiful.”

Avatar Meets Earth Day
by Richard Crouse
zoomermag.com
Thursday, April 22, 2010

The man who made the most technologically advanced movie to ever hit the big screen has just hung up on me. Not on purpose. Calling from his car, James Cameron was defeated by some very simple machinery—his cellphone.

A minute later, my phone rang again.

“Sorry about that,” he said, “it was totally my bad. I was reaching out to turn up the volume and I hit the disconnect, which is right next to it. I have to learn to keep my hands off the damn thing.”

Cellphone and their pesky buttons are one thing, but when it comes to big budget epics with complicated technology, nobody is as hands on as Cameron. Last December Avatar became the highest grossing movie of all time, making $2,712,115,019 on a budget that fell somewhere between $230 million (according to The New Yorker) to nearly $500 million (so says The New York Times).

“We’re very cognizant of the fact that it is a big expensive movie,” he says. “When you make a film at that highest level you know the imagery is going to be quite astonishing. That’s what I’m all about. That’s what my career has been all about, starting with the Abyss, then Terminator 2 and True Lies and Titanic. Every one of these films was decried in the largest way possible as being the biggest budget films in history. [But] as an artist, there is no second position on my throttle. It’s full throttle so it may as well be the highest grossing film in history because I’m working like it is anyway.”

Cameron may be the go-to guy for big budget spectacles, but despite his track record there are no guarantees of success.

“I don’t know if I knew it until it was really out there,” he says when asked when he knew he had a hit on his hands. “I had a suspicion that the film would perform beyond what its opening weekend would indicate. I thought our challenge was not the film itself as much as the marketing of the movie. We didn’t have Brad Pitt or George Clooney. It was an unfamiliar story. We had to create a brand from scratch and we had these characters that were blue and were maybe a little off putting when people first saw them. There were a lot of marketing hurdles. I was much more concerned about the 30-second TV spot than the film. I knew the film played fine.”

Now, just four months after its record breaking theatrical run Avatar and its eco friendly message is coming to DVD and Blu Ray just in time for Earth Day. This is a bare bones release, with no extras. (The “über edition” with extra footage and supplements will be out in time for Christmas.)

“It was going to take until November for us to do good supplement stuff and I didn’t think people wanted to wait until November to see an Avatar DVD,” he says, “so we put the plain wrap version out.

“By the way,” he adds with a swagger, “[Avatar] is the highest grossing film in history and has nine Academy Award nominations so people should acknowledge that that film needs to be in the marketplace before we start screwing around and getting creative.”

Need to make the most of movie night? There's an app for that
RICHARD CROUSE
METRO CANADA
April 07, 2010

It used to be that going to the movies was simple.

Movie times were listed at the back of every newspaper, trusted critics pointed the way and with a minimum of effort — and for price of a ticket and a tub of popcorn — you’d have two hours of entertainment.

That was then. This is now, and the whole experience of watching movies has become even simpler thanks to some high tech gadgets easily downloaded on your iPhone.

The whole process of locating, watching and enjoying films has been streamlined by a series of movie apps that range in price from free to $2.99.
“These apps make movie-going easier,” says CTV’s Tech Expert, Kris Abel. “Certainly now it’s easier to find a theatre in your area that is playing the movie you want at the right show time.”

You have apps like the flixter app (free on itunes) which can use your GPS to find the closest theatre and then give you information about that movie.”   

Flixter can help get you to the theatre but two other apps come in handy once you get there. Alfred Hitchcock once said, “The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder,” but the fact is nature often calls in the most inopportune times — like in the middle of a movie. RunPee ($1.99 on itunes) won’t quell those urges, but it will tell you the best points in the film to discretely sneak out to the restroom.

“It tells you the line you might hear the character say on the screen,” says Abel, “and then it tells you how much time you have. The best part is that after you’ve gone to the bathroom on your screen will be a quick little text summary of what just happened in the movie. Usually in any movie there will be about four different points where it is safe for you to get up.”

Also useful is the IMDB app (free on iTunes), a comprehensive database of movie info, news and reviews. It’s perfect for those moments when an actor’s face rings a bell but you can’t place them but please, don’t use it while the movie is playing.

“There is a certain amount of app etiquette,” says Abel, “and most apps are designed for use before you go to the movie or after. There is nothing that will take you out of the magic of the cinema faster than seeing someone’s screen out of the corner of your eye.”  

Can’t make it to the theatre? Not to worry, there are even apps for people who don’t want to sit in the dark. The NFB iPhone app (free on itunes) offers up hundreds of NFB films for temporary download and Location Scout (free in the Android Market) allows you to find the places where your favourite movies were shot.  

Able notes that there are hundreds of apps out there, so buyer beware, but there is at least one to suit almost every movie fan. 

Seyfried's star continues to rise with Chloe
RICHARD CROUSE
METRO CANADA
March 19, 2010
         
In Chloe, the new psychological thriller from Canadian director Atom Egoyan, Amanda Seyfried plays an escort hired by Catherine (Julianne Moore) to test her husband’s (Liam Neeson) fidelity.

Following starring roles in Mean Girls, Mama Mia and the popular HBO show Big Love, this is her first real adult part. It’s a complicated and showy role for the twenty-five-year-old actress, and she credits Egoyan with pushing her to deepen the character by exploring every facet of Chloe’s life.

“It’s a broad spectrum of emotions the audience feels about her,” she says, “and in order to make the audience feel that way you have to play it right and in order for me to play it right I had to have Atom Egoyan.

“Mr. Egoyan,” she continues, “is a genius and he’s what good filmmaking is all about. I know it’s going to be difficult for me to choose my next project based on what I just went through with him. It has raised the bar into a very high place.”

It’s obvious that Seyfried admires Egoyan, but it appears to be a mutual appreciation society. In a separate interview the director called the actress’s audition “exceptional.”

“There were a lot more famous people than her we considered but she was our gal,” he said. “We knew that from the moment we did the audition. There was just something about her. Fortunately in the intervening period she suddenly became a star with Mama Mia.”

Her star was on the rise before they made the film, but on the first day Egoyan had a moment of doubt.

“I have this reputation for hiring very young actresses,” he says, “and the day she arrived in Toronto, I thought, ‘My God, she’s a child. We’ve made a mistake.’ But we needed the separation in age between Julianne [Moore] and her. That was really very important.”

Any doubts were soon quashed when Seyfried went to work, however.

“She’s a really good actress. She really grew into the role,” he says. “It’s about a relationship you have with some actors. You feel like you are doing your job because you are able to ignite something they are capable of expressing. I don’t mean to in anyway objectify, but it’s like working with a beautiful instrument. That’s what she has.” 

Aniston and Butler hook up in The Bounty Hunter
RICHARD CROUSE
FOR METRO CANADA
March 17, 2010

In The Bounty Hunter, Jennifer Aniston and Gerard Butler work on the borders of their comfort zones. Butler is the titular character, a former cop so down on his luck he takes a gig tracking down his ex-wife (and alleged real-life girlfriend) Aniston, for a payday of $5,000.

“I felt this was a different role for her,” says Butler of his co-star. “She is the Queen of Comedy and done a lot of romantic comedies, but this doesn’t feel like a romantic comedy. It feels like an action driven comedy. She was playing a much bitchier, hard edged character than I think anyone has ever seen her do before and for me that is exciting.”

Aniston, best known as Rachel from Friends, or Brad Pitt’s ex wife, depending on your appetite for the tabloids, says she was attracted to the role because “it wasn’t your traditional run of the mill girl meets guy, guy meets girl.”

“It is an action comedy and a road movie with a little romance in there and a little suspense,” she said recently in a sit-down with Metro in New York City.

She was, however, taken by surprise by the physical demands of the production. Doing stunts in four inch heels isn’t as easy as it looks.

“Your adrenaline is going and you’re not really feeling it at the moment and then I’d get home and notice a bruise here and a callous here,” said Aniston, who adds she would consider other action roles in future. “Then there were the handcuffs. Try wearing those, attached to a car door for three days. Not fun.”

For Butler, a Scottish heartthrob best known for his sculpted abs and roles in violent films like 300, the challenge wasn’t the physical side, but breaking the action star stereotype.

“My break in America was Attila the Hun, which went into Time Line, Tomb Raider, Reign of Fire and at that point I loved doing that, but it’s not like when you are still making your way in the business that people go, ‘Tomb Raider, Oh my God, the guy should be in a comedy.’ I was waiting for the right opportunity. I thought I don’t want to dive in with something crappy. I wanted to wait until I’m lucky enough to get the right script that felt right.”

Predicting the winners at this Sunday's Oscars
RICHARD CROUSE AND STEVE GOW
METRO CANADA
March 05, 2010

Richard Crouse

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Mo’Nique (Precious)
I think this is as close to a ‘gimme’ as you are going to get this year.

BEST SUPPPORTING ACTOR: Christoph Waltz (Inglourious Basterds)
Again, this is a category where the winner is rather obvious. I love how Christopher Plummer says ‘I am happy to be nominated,’ but Christoph Waltz takes this one.

BEST ACTRESS: Meryl Streep (Julie & Julia) or Sandra Bullock (The Blind Side)
It’s a flip of the coin for me. I would like to see Meryl Streep win because I think she took Julia Child and turned her into an actual person rather than a caricature, but Sandra Bullock has been making amazing speeches. She took a movie that was deeply average and turned it into something that was Oscar-worthy.

BEST ACTOR: Jeff Bridges (Crazy Heart)
He is Hollywood royalty. He has put in an unbelievable performance that has thrown vanity out the window.

BEST DIRECTOR: Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker)
This is a race between the first two: James Cameron and Kathryn Bigelow, and I think Kathryn Bigelow is going to take this one.

BEST PICTURE: Avatar
It has been living at the very centre of popular culture since it came out, and not only has it made billions of dollars, but it has also changed the way Hollywood is doing business now.

Steve Gow

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Mo’Nique (Precious)
She really is a fantastic character in this movie. Great villain, which Hollywood really loves.

BEST SUPPPORTING ACTOR: Christoph Waltz (Inglourious Basterds)
The only chance that he won’t get it is that maybe some of the voters out there are sort of thinking that everyone else is going to vote for him so they kind of pick a secondary person.

BEST ACTRESS: Meryl Streep (Julie & Julia) or Sandra Bullock (The Blind Side)
This is a really interesting category. Some might vote for Meryl, some for Sandra. And up the middle you might see someone like Carey Mulligan.

BEST ACTOR: Jeff Bridges (Crazy Heart)
(The Academy) loves these kinds of roles where you see the star acting outside their element and a little grungy.

BEST DIRECTOR: Katherine Bigelow (The Hurt Locker)
I think voters really like that there is that ex-husband factor as well in James Cameron (he and Bigelow were married) … I think they really want to see her sort of beat him.

BEST PICTURE: Avatar
Maybe it is my heart here, but I kind of hope The Hurt Locker wins.

Defendor an undeniable, genre-busting good time
RICHARD CROUSE
METRO CANADA
February 19, 2010

In Defendor, Woody Harrelson plays a man whose rich inner life spills out into his real life. By day he is dead-end-job-Arthur, but by night he is Defendor, a masked superhero do-gooder.
His task? To clean up the streets of Hamilton, Ont. It sounds like the kind of thing we’ve seen before, but Canadian actor-turned-director Peter Stebbings puts a unique spin on Arthur’s story.

His goal is to infiltrate the lair of Captain Industry, the crime king-pin Defendor believes to be responsible for all of Hammer Town’s civic woes.
On his journey he befriends a drug addict with a heart of gold (Kat Dennings) and battles a corrupt cop (Elias Koteas).

On paper Woody Harrelson’s role looks unpromising. He’s a disillusioned man with mental health issues who sinks into a fantasy world to help deal with the pain of a troubled past.

We’ve seen this before, but Harrelson’s mix of sincerity and pathos in the reading of the character breathes life into a role that could easily have fallen into cliché.

He’s aided by a script—written by Stebbings—which gives him room to firmly establish the character, both as a superhero who believes guns are for cowards and as a real person who is tormented by his mother’s descent into a world of prostitution and drug abuse.

It’s a solid performance that provides an anchor for the entire movie.

Gritty and very funny, Defendor is a hard movie to categorize. It’s not exactly a comedy, nor is it a crime drama.

It’s somewhere in between. I’m not sure if that indefinable quality will make this a harder sell at the box office or not — people like to pigeonhole their movies — but for those willing to be go along for the ride, the movie is an enjoyably genre-busting good time.

Like its main character, Defendor is a bit delusional — it’s a low budget superhero flick going up against the Spidermans and Iron Men of the world — but like its main character, I like its spunk. 

Harrelson goes to battle with Captain Industry
RICHARD CROUSE
METRO CANADA
February 16, 2010

Just 24 hours before going into production on Defendor, a funny, genre-busting superhero movie, director Peter Stebbings got a mixed message from his star Woody Harrelson.

“Woody invited me to his place and said ‘I have never been more unsure about what I’m going to do on a movie as I am on Defendor, and I’ve never been as OK with that as I am on Defendor,’” says the director.  

Harrelson was prepping himself to play Arthur, an emotionally stunted man who, with the help of a homemade costume and makeshift weapons, embarks on a crime fighting spree to bring down his arch enemy, Captain Industry, in his hometown of Hamilton, Ont.

“My nerves were a jangle,” says Harrelson.

“I felt like I was out of my turf. It’s one of those things that you can study and look at it from a lot of angles, which I did, but that doesn’t mean you know what you’re doing on the day they say ‘Action!’”

Turns out the pre-game jitters were dispelled on the first day when Harrelson shot some of the film’s most difficult, emotional scenes — a series of psychological interviews opposite actress Sandra Oh.

“I’m glad it happened like that,” he says. “It pushed me. I didn’t know what I was doing but at the end of that day I told my buddy, ‘Rudy, I think I’m getting it.’”

Stebbings courted Harrelson for the part after seeing him in No Country for Old Men.

“I had two thoughts,” he says. “One: Where has he been? He took a six-year hiatus, and secondly, what a great jaw line. I thought he’s never been bad in anything he’s done and he’s always a sympathetic character so I was thrilled when he was excited to be a part of it.”

Despite his initial anxiety Harrelson is pleased with the result.

“I like the fact that Arthur is going after Captain Industry because, to me, I look at what’s wrong with the world and it’s the captains of industry — the greedy bastards who control the politicians.” 

A HARRISON FORD STORY FOR YOU: On January 14, 2010 Richard hosted a screening of Extraordinary Measures the new medical drama starring Harrison Ford, Brendan Fraser and Keri Russell. Backstage before the intro Ford jokes to Richard, "If you say nice things about me in the intro I'll say nice things about you." Richard nodded enthusiastically. "What would you like me to say?" Ford continued."Say whatever you want," Richard joked back, but if you can use the words 'brilliant' and 'beloved.'"

On stage Richard read the intro for Ford: "Our guest tonight is a master carpenter, a licensed pilot and ranked #1 in Empire magazine's "The Top 100 Movie Stars of All Time" list… his films have grossed approximately $5.65 billion worldwide… he has a species of Central American ant and spider named after him in honor of his conservation work (Peidole harrisonfordi) (Calponia Harrisonfordi)… but you know him better as CIA man Jack Ryan, as Indiana Jones, as Rick Deckard and Han Solo… tonight in Extraordinary Measures, a film he executive produces, he plays the gruff Dr. Robert Stonehill, a real life doctor who saved countless lives with his discovery of a treatment for Pompe disease… Would you help me welcome one of our favorite movie stars… Harrison Ford!"

Returning the favor Ford began his speech with, "Before I talk about my film I want to thank Richard for his 'brilliant' introduction... I know he is the most 'beloved' film critic in Canada... what he doesn't know about films ain't worth knowing..." then continued into his regular speech about film's ability to create a “common humanity” before wrapping things up with another joke about his "real" reason for making the film. “I’m in this," he said, "as always... for the money...” Awesome. Thanks Han Solo...

Hoodie hearthrob Michael Cera takes a step forward in Youth In Revolt
RICHARD CROUSE
METRO CANADA
January 08, 2010
Rating: ***1/2

Youth in Revolt is the new Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. It’s a film about the benefits of behaving badly and, like the famous 1986 John Hughes movie, it is headlined by an actor who brings charm and wit to the role of the rebel.

Hoodie heartthrob Michael Cera plays fourteen-year-old Nick Twisp, a mild mannered collection of raging hormones and quirky personality traits who loves Sinatra and foreign films.

When his family relocated to a Christian trailer park, he meets his dream girl, Sheeni Saunders (Portia Doubleday), a similarly anachronistic teenager with a taste for anything French and a dream of being swept off her feet by a bad boy named Francois.

When circumstance steps in to keep them apart he (with the help of an imaginary friend named Francois Dillinger) reverses his goody-two-shoes image and becomes a rebel with a cause — he wants to impress her.

Cera has a corner on the awkward coming-of-age movie, and as Twisp he doesn’t do anything he didn’t do in Juno or Superbad, but he’s charming and easy to watch. His work takes on a different dimension, however, when he slips into alter ego mode.

As the mustachioed Francois, he’s a refugee from a Belmondo film, equipped with a cigarette, and too tight white trousers. It’s not often that an actor gets to show his range playing two characters in one film, but this is a step forward for Cera, who has been locked into the wisecracking virgin stereotype since he left the small screen’s Arrested Development, grew some peach fuzz and started chasing girls on the big screen.

Michael Cera nervous about bringing Youth in Revolt to silver screen
RICHARD CROUSE
METRO CANADA
January 06, 2010

In Youth in Revolt, Brampton, Ontario-born actor Michael Cera plays an anachronistic Frank Sinatra fan who falls for the anachronistic Jean-Paul Belmondo loving girl who lives next door at the trailer park.

When circumstance steps in to keep them apart he -- with the help of an imaginary friend named Francois Dillinger -- changes his life to be with her.

Cera admits the idea of having one of his favourite books pared down from 500 pages to a 90-minute script made him nervous, but he couldn’t resist the opportunity to sign on to the project.

“I just love the book,” he says. “It’s very cinematic and I thought the humour of the book would work very well on screen. That was the thought behind the movie; to capture the humour on screen.

“You can’t tell the whole story of the book because it is so huge, but the book exists for that reason. The book is its own enjoyment.”

His character, Nick Twisp, appealed to the actor because it had a ring of authenticity often missing from teen comedies.

“I love the voice of the character,” he said, “and it’s nice when you’re reading the book because you’re reading his journal, so you are really tapping right into his mind. It feels like you are feeling the thought process of the author. I connected with that.

“The character was real,” he said. “C.D. Payne wrote it really personally. It felt like he wrote it in his own voice. He wasn’t trying to write like a fourteen year old kid. He didn’t add in any false naiveté or didn’t try and sound less intelligent he was just writing and it was personal. I think that’s why people connect to things; when they feel personal.”    

Cera hopes audiences will relate to Youth in Revolt. “I hope maybe people will feel inspired,” he says. “That would be the best case scenario. That’s the best feeling I have walking out of the movies. That’s a hard thing to accomplish but it is special when it happens.”

Recession leaves only a small dent in Hollywood
RICHARD CROUSE
METRO CANADA
January 04, 2010

In a year when “bailout” and “layoff” became buzzwords in everyday conversation there was good news in Hollywood.  Attendance at US theatres actually increased by five percent and research firm OTX reported consumers ranked movie going as the best value for their entertainment dollar.

That’s the good news, but even though movie money doesn’t seem to be in short supply it isn’t business as usual in Tinsel Town. The average moviegoer, however, probably won’t see a difference.

“In the end I don’t think the consumers will notice the difference at all,” says MovieCityNews.com editor David Poland. “It’s gotten to the point that there are so many studio movies in any given week there is often a lost movie or two. Customers may find it a little less frustrating [next year] because there may be fewer titles being advertised and fewer titles that make them think ‘I wish I could have gone to that if it was still in the theatres three weeks after I first saw the ad.’”   

The business, however, is changing. The buzzwords of the biz is “risk displacement.”

“My sense isn't that lower budget or riskier movies will dry up; instead, I see the big budget and low budget films continuing, but the middle dropping out,” says Cameron Bailey, Co-Director, Toronto International Film Festival. “Paramount's recently announced start-up of an ultra low-budget digital division on the heels of Paranormal Activity is one sign. Avatar is another. What I think we'll see much less of is the $15-$40 million star-driven drama, the kind that wins awards.”

2009 confirmed Bailey’s theory. Among the victims of downsizing were the $30 million Cate Blanchett vehicle Indian Summer and a film adaptation of Shakespeare's King Lear, starring Anthony Hopkins, Gwyneth Paltrow, Naomi Watts and Keira Knightley.

“I don't like that hollowing out sound I hear in the industry,” says Bailey, “and I hope it's just a stage in an ongoing evolution.”

Maple Pictures Co-President Brad Pelman has a more sanguine viewpoint.  “The economic conditions will be challenging for film makers to get their projects financed, but as can be expected, the cream will rise to the top, and the best projects will always stand out.  This year’s crop includes Precious and The Hurt Locker, two films Maple distributes in Canada. Our team will continue to focus on building relationships with film makers who clearly understand the end game of this business: entertaining the audience.”

SIDEBAR: MOVIES TO KEEP AN EYE OUT FOR IN 2010

Nightmare on Elm Street: Robert Englund is out but that’s OK, Watchmen’s creepy Jackie Earle Haley is in.

The Twilight Saga: Eclipse:  The third part of the series and one of only two guaranteed hits of the year.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I: Harry, Ron, and Hermione star in the year’s other guaranteed hit, the penultimate Potter movie.

The Three Stooges: Not a biopic, ynuk, ynuk, ynuk, it’s a brand new Three Stooges comedy starring Jim Carrey, Sean Penn and Benicio Del Toro.

Grown Ups: Former SNLers Adam Sandler, Chris Rock and David Spade play reunited high school friends.

The Last Airbender: Slumdog Millionaire’s Dev Patel stars in this M. Night Shyamalan film based on the popular anime television series.

The Book of Eli: Based on the trailer this Denzel Washington movie will be the coolest action picture of 2010.

Alice in Wonderland: Tim Burton directs Johnny Depp in what should be the trippiest fairy tale of the year. 

Inception: “A contemporary sci-fi actioner set within the architecture of the mind” is Christopher Nolan’s description of his first post Dark Knight project. Cool.

Date Night: TV’s funniest actors, Steve Carell and Tina Fey, team-up for this story of a romantic night out gone wrong.

Doctor Parnassus more surrealist art than a traditional movie
RICHARD CROUSE
METRO CANADA
December 24, 2009

Director: Terry Gilliam
Stars: Heath Ledger, Johnny Depp
Classification: PG

As you may have guessed from the title, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is an odd movie. Directed by Terry Gilliam, it’s the strange tale of a mysterious immortal who complicates his life by making deals with the devil.

Complicating Gilliam’s life during production was the unexpected death of his star, Heath Ledger, but, the show, as they say, must go on and here we are after the untimely January 2008 passing of the young actor with a completed film. How did Gilliam finish the movie? A new credit, A Film from Heath Ledger and Friends tells the tale.

Three of Ledger’s buddies, Johnny Depp (seen dancing on a leaf!), Colin Farrell and Jude Law, stepped in to play “through the looking glass” versions of the late actor.

Set in present day London, the film begins with a look at Doctor Parnassus’ (Christopher Plummer) bizarre travelling show that offers people a chance to step through Dr. P’s magical mirror into an alternate reality. He’s selling imagination, but his gift of mind’s eye manipulation came with a heavy price.

Eons before, he made a trade with the devil (Tom Waits): Remarkable power in exchange for his first born daughter on her sixteenth birthday. That anniversary is now days away but with the help of a mysterious stranger named Tony (played by Ledger, Depp, Law and Farrell) and the magic mirror, Dr. P just may be able to save her.

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is more a piece of surrealist art than a traditional movie. Imagine watching a Salvador Dali painting come to life and you’ll get the idea. Gilliam, who co-wrote the script as well as directed, has allowed his imagination to run riot.

While the story meanders to and fro he fills the screen with unforgettable images; Old Nick dangling Dr. P from the end of a branch or a multi-eyed hot air balloon shaped like a man’s head or the ensemble of skirt-wearing, dancing Bobbies. Visually, it’ll make your eyeballs do the Watusi.

The story, however, may leave some a bit baffled, but so what if it warps the brain a bit? The film oozes Gilliam’s trademarked anarchic spirit — he might be the only filmmaker who could replace his leading man with three other actors and actually pull it off — and is the most original movie of the year.

Terry Gilliam’s homage to Heath Ledger
RICHARD CROUSE
FOR METRO CANADA
December 18, 2009

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is a flight of fancy that was very nearly grounded in mid production. The untimely death of star Heath Ledger in January 2008 almost put the brakes on the film until Terry Gilliam had an idea: Why not continue filming with three of the late actor’s friends taking his place?

“I just started calling friends of Heath,” Gilliam said. “It’s as simple as that. Johnny (Depp), Colin (Farrell) and Jude (Law) turned up. It was important that they were friends, because I wanted to keep it in the family. I wanted people who were close to him because, as Colin said when he was doing his part, he was channelling Heath part of the time, so Heath was very much still alive in some sense.

“I didn’t know whether this would work until I got back to London. We were working on autopilot. Working because that’s what we decided to do and we got back to London and I showed the first cut to the post-sound guy, who hadn’t been involved in the process, and he just assumed it was written that way. I thought, ‘It works.’”

Co-star Christopher Plummer says he thinks it works better than the original script.

“The audience needs to be rejuvenated at the eleventh hour and they are by the presence of the three guys,” he said. “I think Heath would have thoroughly approved of that and probably have been relieved not to go, ‘OK fellas, it’s time I had a break.’”

One of Heath’s co-stars, however, had a harder time accepting the loss and the replacements. Lily Cole says she cried on the first day of shooting without Ledger, but soon realized that by stepping in Depp, Farrell and Law were doing a “brave and lovely thing” to honor the late actor.

Gilliam agrees, viewing the finished film as homage to Ledger. A credit where the director’s name usually sits is a tribute to the late actor and the respect he earned.

“Contractually, it was supposed to be a Terry Gilliam Film,” he said. “That’s what the lawyers said, but I said, ‘No way it’s going to be that. It’s going to be a film from Heath Ledger and friends.’ The cast sat around one night and that idea came up and I said, ‘This is it. Perfect. That’s how we do it.’” 

Scrooge reborn ... again
RICHARD CROUSE
FOR METRO CANADA
November 04, 2009

IMDB lists 70 entries for the character Ebenezer Scrooge. Everyone from Jack Palance to Vanessa Williams (her character was called Ebony Scrooge) have “bah humbugged” their way through the role.

This weekend Jim Carrey joins that list in a big budget Disney motion capture version of A Christmas Carol. But why have the character and the story of the man who hated Christmas stayed popular since Charles Dickens penned it 166 years ago?

The first reason may have appealed to old Scrooge’s frugal nature. The story is in public domain, meaning there are no pesky payments to the Dickens family for using the character, but to be made (the first film came in 1901) remade (21 times on film and dozens more made for TV) then turned on its head and remade again and again, there must be something else about the story’s humbuggery that resonates with viewers.  The Life and Times of Ebenezer Scrooge author Paul Davis says the story is one of those rarities that is so familiar it’s almost part of our collective DNA.

“My acquaintance with Scrooge seems preliterate,” he wrote, “different from my sense of ... Dr. Doolittle or Robinson Crusoe. I remember when I first met the Hardy Boys, but I feel as though I’ve always known Scrooge and Tiny Tim.”

Some scholars think the story’s ability to seem current, no matter when it is restaged, is a major selling point.  

“What it all boils down to is that A Christmas Carol is that rare and precious thing, a story for the ages,” said the Washington Post’s Jonathan Yardley, “like other such stories — the Bible ... the plays of Shakespeare — becomes a distinct and different entity in each age.”

Perhaps these days of  economic uncertainty have given the story a timely slant as Scrooge’s penny-pinching ways could be seen as something to be emulated. The bottom line, however, may be the simplest explanation of all; A Christmas Carol is a tale of redemption that confirms the fundamental spiritual nature of Christmas itself. In other words, it makes us feel good.

Horror Top Ten - Richard Crouse
From The Horror Blog

Canadian film critic Richard Crouse seems to have his hands full with regular gigs in mainstream television, radio and print journalism, yet still manages to find the time to indulge in his lifelong passion for cult cinema. His most recent tome is The Son of the 100 Best Movies You’ve Never Seen, a follow-up to The 100 Best Movies You’ve Never Seen, both of them containing a heavy amount of the macabre.

Making up a list like this is tough. I’m sure I’ll remember a classic or two that I should have included after I hit the send button, but, off the top of my head, here are my faves…

1. The Exorcist 1973, Directed by William Friedkin. The single scariest night at the movies this ten year old ever experienced.
2. Let the Right One In 2008, Directed by Tomas Alfredson. A vampire film without a castle, a cape or coffin. Loved it.
3. Bud Abbott and Lou Costello Meet Frankenstein 1948, Directed by Charles Barton. Perfect mix of corny laughs and scary stuff.
4. Ginger Snaps 2000, Directed by John Fawcett. Great reinvention of the werewolf myth.
5. Frankenstein 1931, Directed by James Whale. For my money the best of the classic Universal monster movies.
6. Dawn of the Dead 1978, Directed by George A. Romero. Probably the greatest zombie flick ever.
7. Rosemary’s Baby 1968, Directed by Roman Polanski. Evil atmosphere you could cut with a knife.
8. Psycho 1960, Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. I still get creeped out in the shower.
9. May 2002, Directed by Lucky McKee. Really underrated horror film that deserves to be better known than it is.
10. The Host 2006, Directed by Joon-ho Bong. Big bug movies don’t get much better than this.

More than just hair
Click here to find out more!
RICHARD CROUSE
FOR METRO CANADA
October 15, 2009

Tomorrow comedian Chris Rock adds a new entry on his resume: Documentary filmmaker.

After a career spent making people laugh, in Good Hair, Rock is tackling a subject that sounds light hearted, but has deeper roots — the relationship African-American women have with their hair.

“When people first heard I was doing it they kind of thought it was going to be frivolous,” he says. “They thought it would be some version of Punk’d where I exposed people for not having their own hair or whatever and they see the movie and they are surprised.”

Surprised perhaps that Rock uses the subject of a cultural obsession with hair as a starting point to address larger issues.

“It’s hair,” he says. “It’s self esteem. It’s race. It’s how we look at ourselves. It’s the beauty industry. It’s a black movie. It’s a white movie. It’s an American movie. It’s a world movie. It’s a really gay movie. It’s a lot of movie.”

Rock’s formal foray into the culture of hair was inspired by a question his daughter asked — “Daddy, how come I don’t have good hair?”— but he had his own experience with toxic hair relaxers years before.

“I’ve had my hair relaxed and it burned,” he said. “It feels like having your head set on fire. I stopped when I got Lethal Weapon. It was literally like, ‘I got a million dollars and burning my scalp ... that is not being rich.’ I dreaded it. I thought if I can’t make money without doing this then I’m just not going to make any money.”

He has, of course, made money without sacrificing his scalp.

His career is thriving — he has two features coming out next year, including Grown Ups opposite his old SNL partner Adam Sandler — and, he says, Good Hair may not be his last documentary.

“I just have to find the right topic,” he says. “You can’t just do it because you have a slot. ‘OK, it’s been a year!’ That doesn’t work for me. This one was really from my heart.

“I’m not gonna get rich off of this, but this really, really came from heart.”

Movies give thanks
RICHARD CROUSE
FOR METRO CANADA
October 07, 2009

If aliens learned about Thanksgiving from movies and television, they’d get a skewed idea of what the day is all about. In real life we express our gratitude for life’s bounty, but on screen it’s a different story.

“Thanksgiving is an emotional holiday,” joked Johnny Carson. “People travel thousands of miles to be with people they only see once a year and then discover once a year is way too often.”

Being less than thankful for family is a common theme in entertainment. The House of Yes saw queen of quirk Parker Posey ruin Thanksgiving when her favourite brother brings home his fiancée, and in Pieces of April a pre-Cruisized Katie Holmes not only has to deal with a broken stove but a broken family as well.

Home for the Holidays has a heart warming title that promises sweetness and light but director Jody Foster’s Thanksgiving tale is anything but an ode to the holiday. It’s the family reunion from hell for the Larson family, culminating in fist fights and emotional distress. The film’s tone is summed up by Robert Downey Jr. who invites everyone to the dinner table with the words, “Let’s eat dead bird!”

The Larsons didn’t gel on Turkey Day, but as James D. Turner remarked in Trading Places, “It ain’t cool being no jive turkey so close to Thanksgiving,” so I dug deeper for examples of film families enjoying the holiday.

No luck.

The Ice Storm’s backdrop of ’70s suburban ennui sets the tone for a tragic climax on Thanksgiving Day and Christina Ricci’s acidic prayer. “Dear Lord,” she says, “thank you for this Thanksgiving holiday. And for letting us white people kill all the Indians and steal their tribal lands. And stuff ourselves like pigs, even though children in Asia are being napalmed.”

Cheery stuff! But not as grim as the Thanksgiving horror trailer from Grindhouse. “White meat, dark meat,” cackles the announcer. “All will be carved.”

At least Planes, Trains and Automobiles, about odd couple Steve Martin and John Candy trying to get home for Thanksgiving, is jammed packed with laughs, even if Martin isn’t the most thankful man.

Also grin worthy is Hannah and Her Sisters, the Woody Allen film book ended by Central Park West Thanksgiving dinners.

If Thanksgiving really was like it is in the movies the only thing we’d be giving thanks for is that it only comes around once a year.

70 years on, back to Oz in Blu Ray
Original Munchkins celebrate release
RICHARD CROUSE
FOR METRO CANADA
September 29, 2009

“We always say the age range for The Wizard of Oz is from fetal to fatal,” jokes Oz expert John Fricke. It’s a funny line, but there is a ring of truth to it.

The movie, whose birthday is being commemorated by the lovingly restored Wizard of Oz: 70th Anniversary Ultimate Collector’s Edition Blu Ray, is beloved by old and young. For the surviving cast members the appeal is easy to define.

“Everybody can enjoy it,” says Karl Slover, age 91, who was just two feet tall when he played the first trumpeter. “There’s no filthy language in it. I don’t see no bikinis! No nudist colonies! Kids can watch it and parents don’t have to worry because there’s nothing bad in there.”

Slover is one of just six actors left of the 124 “little people” assembled to play the Munchkins in the film. He had some previous film experience but not all the actors were Hollywood regulars.

“I was in the movie because I was the right size and that’s all they wanted,” says Villager Munchkin Ruth Duccini, age 91, who adds that she can’t sing or dance very well.

“I grew up in a small town in Minnesota and I didn’t know there were other little people.” But once she got on set she found she wasn’t alone. “I remember all the little people and that was so great; 123 people that you could stand and talk to without talking to a bellybutton.”

Ruth adds that star Judy Garland was just as excited about having all little people in one place as she was and Munchkin Flowerpot Hat dancer Margaret Pellegrini (age 86) says Garland treated all the Munchkins to candy and a keepsake at Christmas.

“On Christmas Eve morning when she came to work she opened the door to her (dressing room) and there she had a whole stack of black and white pictures and she invited each and every one of us in and gave each a picture. Mine says ‘To Margaret from your pal Judy.’ I still have it.”

Garland’s daughter Lorna Luft says her mom loved working on The Wizard of Oz. “This movie was special for her. She told me the hardest thing about the film was being afraid of (Wicked Witch) Margaret Hamilton because she was very sweet. She also told me that unfortunately the dog had the worst breath.”

A tribute to Heath
RICHARD CROUSE
FOR METRO CANADA
September 17, 2009

The TIFF film The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is destined to become best known as Heath Ledger’s last movie.

The young actor passed away midway through production, but rather than scrap the film, director Terry Gilliam pressed on, replacing the Aussie actor with three famous faces.

“I just started calling friends of Heath,” Gilliam said. “It’s as simple as that. Johnny (Depp), Colin (Farrell) and Jude (Law) turned up. It was important that they were friends, because I wanted to keep it in the family. I wanted people who were close to him because, as Colin said when he was doing his part, he was channelling Heath part of the time, so Heath was very much still alive in some sense.

“I didn’t know whether this would work until I got back to London. We were working on autopilot. Working because that’s what we decided to do and we got back to London and I showed the first cut to the post-sound guy, who hadn’t been involved in the process, and he just assumed it was written that way. I thought, ‘It works.’”

It works not because Gilliam changed the script, but because of a quirk of the original story — a mirror that acts as an entry to a magical world of imagination.

“Nothing was changed from the original script after Heath died,” he said. “It was that lucky element of a magic mirror. Once you decide that faces could change as you go through the mirror, we were free. I’m simplifying it, but that’s effectively what happened. There was some kind of movie god, and the problem with gods is that they’re both evil and wondrous. There was one that got it made and one that punished us.”

Gilliam sees the finished film as a tribute to Heath, both as an actor and a man with many friends who stepped in to complete the film. A credit where the director’s name usually sits is a tribute to the late actor and the respect he earned.

“Contractually, it was supposed to be a Terry Gilliam Film,” he said. “That’s what the lawyers said, but I said, ‘No way it’s going to be that. It’s going to be a film from Heath Ledger and friends.’ The cast sat around one night and that idea came up and I said, ‘This is it. Perfect. That’s how we do it.’”

Cera hopes Revolt will be inspiring
RICHARD CROUSE
FOR METRO CANADA
September 16, 2009

Hoodie heartthrob Michael Cera doesn’t know who Jack Benny is. When I mention that Cera’s style puts me in the mind of Benny’s trademarked deadpan comedy the Brampton-born actor says, politely, “I’ve never gotten too familiar with Jack Benny.”

After a description of Benny’s low-key approach to selling a joke, Cera chimes in, “That’s such a secret in comedy. Charles Grodin is such an inspiration to me because he is so small, and yet you see everything he does. It’s really perfect and just enough.”  

In Youth in Revolt, his third TIFF film (he was here with Juno in ’07, and with Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist in ’08), Cera again displays his knack for subtle, gentle humour. He plays an anachronistic Sinatra-loving teenager who falls for the anachronistic Belmondo-loving girl who lives next door. When circumstance steps in to keep them apart, he changes his life to be with her.

For Cera the movie is a passion project.

“I just love the book,” he says. “It’s very cinematic and I thought the humour of the book would work very well on screen. That was the thought behind the movie; to capture the humour on screen. You can’t tell the whole story of the book because it is so huge, but the book exists for that reason. The book is its own enjoyment.”

His character, Nick Twisp, appealed to Cera because it had a ring of authenticity often missing from teen comedies.

“The character was real,” he said. “C.D. Payne wrote it really personally. It felt like he wrote it in his own voice. He wasn’t trying to write like a 14-year-old kid. He didn’t add in any false naiveté or didn’t try and sound less intelligent; he was just writing and it was personal. I think that’s why people connect to things; when they feel personal.”   

Cera hopes audiences will connect with Youth in Revolt. “I hope maybe people will feel inspired,” he says. “That would be the best-case scenario ... That’s a hard thing to accomplish but it is special when it happens.”

Seyfried’s dual roles
RICHARD CROUSE
FOR METRO CANADA
September 15, 2009

Since shooting her breakout performance in Mama Mia! in Greece, 24-year-old actress Amanda Seyfried has spent a lot of time in Canada.

Her two TIFF films this year were both shot in Maple Leaf land, but on opposite ends of the country. Jennifer’s Body was lensed in Vancouver and Chloe, her film with director Atom Egoyan, in Toronto.

“We actually got to use Toronto as a real setting,” she said. “You don’t normally get to do that because you’re usually using it to cover for another town or masking it as a made up town.

“(Using Toronto as Toronto) makes everything feel more real. It’s difficult for anything to seem completely authentic when you’re on a movie set but this is as real as it has ever gotten for me.”

In Chloe, Seyfried plays an escort hired by Catherine (Julianne Moore) to test her husband’s (Liam Neeson) fidelity. It’s her first real adult role and one that proves she’s capable of more than teen musicals or comedies.

She credits working with Egoyan with pushing her to deepen the character by exploring every facet of Chloe’s life.

“I’ve never worked with anyone who has discussed the character so in-depth with me,” she says. “Atom would reiterate things to me with different descriptions and with a twist from what he had said last time. Every time we’d go for dinner or have lunch or sit down for coffee the first thing he would go to was, ‘I was thinking that Chloe would do this or that.’

“It was almost completely overwhelming in the beginning but he couldn’t have said less because I don’t think I would have captured it otherwise.”

Chloe is a complicated character with many notes to her personality but with Egoyan’s help Seyfried brings her vividly to life on screen.

“It’s a broad spectrum of emotions the audience feels about her,” she says, “and in order to make the audience feel that way you have to play it right and in order for me to pay it right I had to have Atom Egoyan.

In order for a movie like this to work you have to have someone like Atom Egoyan and there aren’t many people out there like him.

“Mr. Egoyan is a genius and he’s what good filmmaking is all about. I know it’s going to be difficult for me to choose my next project based on what I just went through with him. It has raised the bar into a very high place.”

Brown ‘changed me’: Caine
RICHARD CROUSE
FOR METRO CANADA
September 15, 2009

In the TIFF film Harry Brown, Michael Caine plays a widowed man who strikes back at the hoodlums who have terrorizing his community. It’s close to a British take on Gran Torino, but don’t suggest to Sir Michael that it’s Death Wish U.K.

“It’s not like that at all,” he said. “It’s a complete work on its own. It was made by a young director named Daniel Barber. The first film of his I saw was The Tonto Woman, which got an Academy Award nomination for best short film. I liked it. It was a western and this is kind of like a western. It’s Gary Cooper in High Noon.”

So you could call it a Teabag Western if you like, but instead of being set on the wide open plain, the action in Harry Brown takes place in the decidedly more urban terrain of the Elephant and Castle section of London, an area Caine knows well.

“I always said I come from the slums,” he said of the E&C neighbourhood where he was born, “and I do, but when I went back I didn’t realize how lucky I was. Because when we were shooting late at night, I’d talk to the neighbourhood boys, ... I realized was I was quite lucky because I had two thing they didn’t have: I had a happy family life and I got an education. So I had two valuable things they didn’t have, and one thing they did have that I didn’t. That was drugs.”

Caine blames drugs for the rise in hoodlum culture that Harry Brown portrays. “In the end,” he says, “they wipe out all feeling for the other person.”

But despite strong feelings on the subject, Caine believes making Harry Brown taught him something.

“This movie changed me,” he said “in as much as I started out thinking, ‘Let’s go out and make a movie about killing all these scumbags,’ and then I met these people and realized they were helpless just as much as the victims and they had been neglected and they need help.”

It’s been a long time since Caine lived in Elephant and Castle. After six decades of making films, he’s a film icon, which, true to his humble roots, is a title he has trouble accepting.

“There’s not a special icon bar where you go, meet up and learn what to do,” he says. “I just consider myself lucky.” 

Q: How does one get their non-celebrity, non-media behind into a (good) TIFF film?

Richard: It helps if you strongly resemble someone famous. A few years ago a Bono look-a-like talked his way into screenings and parties and it wasn’t until much later that everyone realized he was an imposter. If you are not genetically blessed enough to look like Brad Pitt, however, you have to plan in advance and be prepared to stand in lines.

Q: So then what should we wear to the premiere (men and women)?

Richard: For men, a tuxedo. What, were you raised in a barn or something? For women, go on-line and see what Lindsay Lohan is wearing, then dress completely the opposite.

Q: What sort of persona should one adopt to make one self appear cooler and far wittier than they actually are?

Richard: Mine. It’s worked very well for me for years. Actually, I’ve always found that NOT adopting a persona works the best. Be yourself and don’t try too hard to impress and you’ll be fine. If that doesn’t work talk in film critic speak to get noticed. Say things like “Daybreakers is a meditation on violence,” and pepper your speech with words like “trope” and “zeitgeist.” You’ll fit in with the babbling festival party crowd. Don’t worry if you don’t understand what you’re saying, everyone will be too tired to notice.

Q: What are three things one must bring to the premiere?

Richard: A good attitude, a willingness to be swept away by the movie and, on a less ephemeral note, a snack. These things never start on time and there is nothing worse than watching a movie on an empty stomach.

Three things NOT to bring: a cell phone (unless you promise to turn it off before the movie stars), a snack wrapped in crinkly paper and a bad attitude.  

Q: What do you say to the stars if their movie is horrible?

Richard: Most people know when they’ve made a bad movie and don’t need to hear it from you at the after party when trying to enjoy their Apple Martini. If you must say anything refer to my comments above and fall into meaningless movie-speak. Label the film a “tone poem” or tell them it was “quirky but inspiring” or use any of the following in any way that seems appropriate at the time: avant-garde, unconventional, innovational or causative. You’ll have kept the conversation going without offending anyone or actually saying anything worth repeating. Perfect for the party circuit.

Q: What's the most indelible TIFF premiere memory you have?

Richard: There have been many. Falling asleep while sitting next to a very famous director during a screening of his film rates way up there. (I’m not saying who it was, but I was tired after seeing four other films that day and he was fine with it.) I think the most indelible memory I have from the TIFF premiers I’ve attended has to do with someone who is not a household name, but made a huge impression on me.

His name is Paul Rusesabagina and he was the real life inspiration for the movie Hotel Rwanda. I was tired and grumpy after a long festival stint of watching movies and doing interviews and a bit jaded by the whole affair but his uplifting attitude, particularly in light of everything he had been through in his life, wiped away all the world-weariness I was feeling. Chatting with him and watching him interact with others made me glad to be part of TIFF that year.

Seeing New York City through the eyes of Woody Allen
Richard Crouse
24 June 2009

Long before I saw the Statue of Liberty in person I felt like a New Yorker. Woody Allen’s movies were my initiation and his romantic, idealized view of the Big Apple planted the seed for my longtime love of the city.

His latest film, Whatever Works, is the first of Allen’s films to be set in Manhattan in four years, and you get the sense he’s glad to be home. It’s his love letter to the city, showcasing only-in-New-York locations like Chinatown’s fish markets and the Yonah Schimmel Knishery (137 E. Houston St. near 1st Ave., 212-477-2858).

The movie will make you want to jump on a NYC-bound plane ASAP, which is exactly what I did.

There are no official Woody Allen tours of Manhattan, so I created my own daytrip to see Allen’s New York with my own eyes. With a good pair of runners, a map, a Metrocard (get a 1-Day Fun Pass for $7.50 US at MetroCard Vending Machines and neighborhood stores) and some determination you should be able to do this tour in about six hours.

The first stop serves a double purpose. The Dean & Deluca Café (560 Broadway at Prince St. in SoHo, 212-226-6800) is the perfect place to fuel up on coffee to get the day started — it’s also where Mia Farrow has lunch with the newly-single Judy Davis in Husbands and Wives.

Now that you’re in a caffeinated, New York state of mind, exit Soho for the funkier streets of Greenwich Village.

You’ll pass the former home of The Bleecker Street Cinema (144 Bleecker St.) — where Allen’s character takes his niece to see movies that will improve her mind in Crimes and Misdemeanors — on your way to his favorite pizza joint, John’s Pizzeria (278 Bleecker St. in Greenwich Village, 212-243-1680).

John’s Pizzeria is also the place where Allen and his much younger girlfriend, played by Mariel Hemingway, have the “in six months you’ll be a completely different person” conversation in 1979’s Manhattan.

Moving north, our next stop is in midtown. The Carnegie Deli (854 Seventh Ave. between 54th and 55th streets, 212-757-9889) is virtually unchanged since Woody shot much of Broadway Danny Rose here in 1984.

In fact it hasn’t changed much since it opened in 1937 and Henny Youngman was a regular.

Take some time to check out the autographed pictures of celebrities have eaten there, and if you have the appetite of three people order The Woody Allen — “Lotsa corned beef plus lotsa pastrami; for the dedicated fresser only!” says the menu, and it’s not kidding. There’s over a pound of meat between two slices of rye.

Next, walk off the sandwich with a jaunt to the The St. Regis-Sheraton Hotel (2 E. 55th St., 212-753-4500). Woody has used this location twice. This is where Michael Caine and Barbara Hershey carried on their covert love affair in Hannah and Her Sisters and, in Radio Days, the hotel’s King Cole Room (with its Maxfield Parrish Art Nouveau mural behind the bar) was the site of the swanky New Year’s celebration Joe Needleman listened to on the wireless.

The next stop is the location of one of Allen’s most iconic New York images. The poster for Manhattan showing Woody and Diane Keaton sitting in silhouette on a bench was shot at Riverview Terrace on Sutton Square, just beneath the 59th Street Bridge.

It looks a little different than it did in 1979. The bench is gone (stolen by Woody fans perhaps?) and the landscape is a little different but the view is still spectacular.

You’ve seen the movies and the sights, now catch a glimpse of the Wood-man in person. Allen and his clarinet have been blowing up a Dixieland storm on Monday nights (from September to June) at the Café Carlyle (35 E. 76th St. on the northeast corner of Madison Avenue, 212-744-1600) since 1996. Reservations and jackets are required and tickets ($100 for the show, dinner is extra) go quickly so book ahead for the toe-tapping fun.

Not quite as exclusive or as pricey is Elaine’s (1703 Second Ave. between E. 88th and E. 89th St., 212-534-8103), which restaurant writer A. E. Hotchner  summed up with the words, “What Rick’s place was to Casablanca, Elaine’s is to New York.”

On film it’s the location of one of Allen’s most famous one-liners: In Manhattan, he’s at Elaine’s complaining about the difficulties of seeing a 17-year-old. “I’m dating a girl who does homework,” he says.

Off-screen, it’s one of his favorite restaurants. “I ate at Elaine’s every night for about 10 years,” he said. “I’ve eaten alongside everyone from Don King to Simone de Beauvoir. There was no celebrity that didn’t show up there.”

One of the celebrities who ate there was Mia Farrow, who asked Michael Caine to introduce her to Woody one night at the restaurant, thus beginning their long and tumultuous affair. Soak in that storied atmosphere for the price of an entrée.

The tour finishes up with a trip to Pomander Walk, (260-266 W. 95th St. through to 94th Street between Broadway and West End Avenue). This beautiful village — built to resemble the London stage set from a romantic 1910 play — is made up of 27 Tudor-style houses and is the location of the architectural tour Sam Waterston gives Dianne Wiest and Carrie Fisher in Hannah and Her Sisters.

You’ll have to peek through the gate (it’s locked to the public) but its Alice in Wonderland aura and the fact that Humphrey Bogart used to live there make it a must-see for movie fans.

By the tour’s end you’ll see why Isaac Davis, Woody Allen’s character in Manhattan, famously said, “This is really a great city. I don’t care what anybody says, it’s really a knockout, you know?”

The world’s most wonderful film set
Angels & Demons joins the many films that use Rome as a backdrop
RICHARD CROUSE
FOR METRO CANADA
May 13, 2009

From Anita Ekberg and Marcello Mastroianni splashing around in the waters of the Trevi Fountain in La Dolce Vita to Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck’s romantic street tour in Roman Holiday the Eternal City has provided some of the cinema’s most unforgettable images.

According to Italian director Federico Fellini, “Rome is the most wonderful movie set in the world.” Now with the release of Angels & Demons, shot on location in Rome, a new industry has emerged from the ancient city — movie tourism.

Patrizia Prestipino, head of Rome’s provincial department of tourism told the New York Times that “a film like this could re-launch American tourism. For us it’s like free advertising.” And it’s marketing that seems to be working. Tour groups like the Angels & Demons Path of Illumination Tour, angelsanddemons.it, Sienna Reid’s Angels and Demons Tour, italyhotline.com, and the Rome Angels and Demons Half-Day Tour, viatour.com, have been enjoying brisk business with packages that range from $75 per person to $550 for a personal excursion.

If you’re not a tour group kind of person you can arrange your own expedition of Rome’s Angels and Demons locations and other cinematic sites with a good map from your hotel’s concierge.

(Take note that several of the places mentioned in the book are not geographically accurate. It’s best to do some internet research before hitting the streets.) Here are some good starting points:
 
Castel Sant’Angelo
Built between 135 and 139 by the Roman Emperor Hadrian Castel Sant’ Angelo not only figures in the climax of Angels & Demons, but also has a spectacular panoramic view of Rome. The castle can also be seen in Roman Holiday’s barge scene.

Santa Maria della Vittoria
Santa Maria Della Vittoria is the setting for Angels &?Demons’ most gruesome and exciting scene — the “fire” killing — but in reality is the home to the beautiful Bernini sculpture of the ecstasy of St. Theresa.

Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi
Located at the center of Piazza Navona the ornate The Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi (“Fountain of the Four Rivers”) is one of Bernini’s most famous works and the backdrop for the film’s “water” assassination.

Other Rome movie must-sees include:

Mouth of Truth
The Mouth of Truth located in the portico of the church of Santa Maria in Cosmedin. The carved, grinning stone face which purportedly bites off the hands of liars most famously appeared in Roman Holiday but can also be seen in Only You starring Robert Downey Jr.

Trevi Fountain
At almost 26 metres high the Trevi Fountain is the largest Baroque fount in Rome and the inspiration for the 1954 hit song and movie Three Coins in the Fountain. Every day tourists throw almost 3,300 euros into the fountain — legend says that visitors who toss a coin into the fountain are guaranteed a return to Rome—money that is donated to charity.

Movie lovers will find much to see in Rome and many memories to take home. As Audrey Hepburn said in Roman Holiday, “I will cherish my visit here in memory for as long as I live.”

The Vatican rebuilt
Landmarks replicated on L.A. soundstage for Angels &?Demons
RICHARD CROUSE
FOR METRO CANADA
May 12, 2009

While sitting atop the Castel Saint Angelo in Rome waiting to interview Angels & Demons star Ewan McGregor, I had a panoramic view of the city and the beautiful chaos that makes life in the Eternal City tick.

The traffic is crazy and there are people everywhere. It’s an intense place, even more so, I imagined, if you were shooting a big budget Hollywood picture that takes place in some of the city’s busiest spots.

“The funny thing is I didn’t shoot any of it in Rome,” McGregor said when asked. “I shot in this place called Caserta. There’s a palace in Caserta that I thought it sounded really romantic, so I arranged for my wife to come over and spend a weekend with me, but it’s a dump, a horrible place. I’m sorry but it’s just a suburb of Naples that’s exploded around this old palace. It’s really nasty. Not a good place.

“Apart from that I did most of my stuff in L.A. because my character is mainly inside the Vatican and of course, the Vatican didn’t want us to shoot inside their buildings so they built the Sistine Chapel on the Sony soundstages in L.A. They also built the exterior of St. Peter’s Square, this huge, huge set, in the parking lot of Hollywood Park Racetrack in south L.A. That was cool. I saw it from an airplane. I was landing at LAX and I looked down and thought, ‘God, that’s a big set… look at that.’ Then I realized it was ours.”

Despite never having stepped foot in an actual church during the shoot, McGregor convincingly pulls off the roll of Camerlengo Patrick McKenna, a priest who acts as the pope’s right hand man in the film adaptation of Dan Brown’s novel.

“We had a priest from New Jersey who came over and was our religious advisor for any of the technical things,” McGregor said, “the ceremonies and the ritual stuff. But he also gave us a kind of idea of what would be going on behind the scenes during those ceremonies and humanized it for us.

“It looks so precise from the congregation’s point of view but in actual fact behind the table there is a guy with matches trying to light the incense. He put that into it for me which was great.”

The training paid off, he says, at least superficially.

“I didn’t get to understand the meaning of all the ceremonies; why everything is in a certain order, but I did learn enough to look like I knew what I was doing, hopefully.”

Demons 'a different beast'
Director Howard dishes on follow-up to record-breaking Da Vinci Code
RICHARD CROUSE
FOR METRO CANADA
May 08, 2009

Ron Howard, the flame-haired actor turned director of The Da Vinci Code, wasn’t surprised by the success of his adaptation of the best selling Dan Brown suspense novel.

“The idea at the centre of The Da Vinci Code was so provocative and such a hot button issue it really lived at the centre of popular culture for almost two years,” he said this week in Rome before the premiere of Angels & Demons, the follow-up to the record-breaking Da Vinci Code.

“Angels & Demons is a popular novel,” the director says, although he acknowledges that it isn’t as notorious as the other book. “What I’m finding, however, is if you like The Da Vinci Code you’re going to really like Angels & Demons. I feel like it could be a thrilling and exciting experience for audiences in of itself; separating itself from The Da Vinci Code movie or the novel.”

The new film, starring Tom Hanks in a reprise of his Da Vinci role as symbologist Robert Langdon, sees the Harvard professor work to solve a murder, unravel the mystery of an ancient secret brotherhood called the Illuminati and prevent a terrorist act against the Vatican.

The mix of intrigue and religious may sound familiar to Da Vinci Code fans but Howard maintains Angels & Demons is a different beast. “If I felt like it was a cookie cutter situation and I was being asked to repeat myself then it wouldn’t interest me,” he said, “but I just didn’t want to miss this next Robert Langdon adventure.

“I like the uniqueness of these Dan Brown stories. Sure they use the murder mystery genre, but in a way that is so fresh that these films stand on their own as something brand new.”

Something that certainly is new in Angels & Demons is the setting. Shot on location in Rome, the movie is a love letter to the Eternal City.

“For scheduling reasons we had to shoot in June,” Howard says.

“Everyone in Italy kept saying that we couldn’t have chosen a worse month but I’m very glad in a way it was so hectic and intense because it energized everything.”

• Angels & Demons opens across Canada next Friday.

Passion of the Christian Audience
National Post
Friday, December 08, 2006

Quentin Tarantino has said the sign of a good film is that it makes you want to go home, eat some pie and talk about it.
With that in mind, our Popcorn Panel features film buffs feuding in this space each week.

This week's panel
- Craig Courtice, a short filmmaker who isn't very tall
- Christa Oancia, mom of five, religion teacher and amateur movie critic
- Richard Crouse, host of Rogers Television's Reel to Real, Canada's longest-running movie review show and the author of The 100 Best Movies You've Never Seen (ECWPress, 2003). His Web site is www.richardcrouse.ca This week's pie Shepherd's

This week's subject: The Nativity Story

Craig: Whatever you might think of The Passion of the Christ, it was the work of an auteur. Director Catherine Hardwicke is a talented filmmaker, but she lacks the leverage and the ego of Mel Gibson, and as a result I'm not sure The Nativity Story is her vision. For one, there is nothing of the realism she made her name with in Thirteen. Part of the reason the birth of Christ still fascinates us today is the overwhelming odds Mary and Joseph overcame. Certainly, in their journey to Bethlehem, they must have forged an incredible bond, yet there are few scenes that give us a sense of their relationship. Instead, we are subjected to a history lesson featuring King Herod, Zechariah and Elizabeth in the first act and requisite scenes with shepherds and wise men in the third.

Christa: I don't think Mel Gibson is a good comparison because The Passion was truly his vision. Hardwicke was hired to direct someone else's vision. It appears that the team behind The Nativity relied primarily on the very limited two Gospel accounts of the birth of Jesus. There was a strong effort to show the evolution of Mary and Joseph's relationship from one of obligation to one of deep mutual caring and respect. I think Hardwicke did a great job making this story more realistic than most. This account is usually so romanticized that we rarely think beyond the basic details of that holy night. I didn't go to the movie with the same expectations as I did with The Passion, probably because I didn't expect the same quality from someone who doesn't completely live and breathe this story in their life.

Richard: Perhaps Hardwicke doesn't live and breathe this story, but she is a filmmaker charged with creating a compelling and interesting movie, and I think she let her audience down. Her last two films, Thirteen and The Lords of Dogtown, were edgy examinations of teenage life that dealt with young people in crisis. The Nativity Story covers the same ground, but this time her young protagonists, Mary and Joseph, have larger issues than acne or a spotty report card.

Craig: I think we can all agree The Nativity Story won't go down in history as a cinematic masterpiece with the likes of The Ten Commandments or The Passion. But just the fact this movie got made seems like a minor miracle. Although 77% of Americans identified themselves as Christian in 2001, Jesus-friendly titles aren't exactly flooding the multiplexes. Are most Christians just not interested in watching movies about their religion or is Hollywood not willing to back up these films? Let's not forget, that for all of The Passion's success, Gibson financed the project himself.

Christa: It won't hit page one of the paper that Hollywood is not exactly pro-Christian. A quick glance at the top all-time movies shows that Star Wars, Shrek, E.T. and Finding Nemo are the home runs in theatres, yet Hollywood keeps showing its love of R-rated releases. Not sure if it's about artistic dreams, shock value, Oscar envy or all of the above. Lately, the business side is figuring out that family-friendly, and yes, even Christian movies (thanks Mel) can be moneymakers. I think it's not really about whether Christians are interested in watching family-friendly movies as much as it is about the lack of interest of filmmakers in making them. Mel has helped raise the bar with artistic merit, quality and morality all in one -- what a concept! It's not a guarantee, however, and the Christian audience will still expect high quality for their movie dollar.

Richard: The success of The Passion should have paved the way for a tsunami of Christian themed films at the theatres, because the only thing Hollywood really understands is success. If a documentary about penguins can make a lot of money then why not make a kids' series about the little furry birds? But I think studio heads realized The Passion's success was a fluke. It was a great marketing strategy coupled with enough controversy to get people who hadn't gone to the movies in years interested to see what all the fuss was about. It is hard to capture that kind of lightning in a bottle twice, which is why we haven't seen a cavalcade of Christian films in mainstream theatres.
________________________________________
In Soviet Russia, Yakov Smirnoff would've killed for this publicity
National Post
Friday, November 10, 2006

Quentin Tarantino has said the sign of a good film is that it makes you want to go home, eat some pie and talk about it. With that in mind, our Popcorn Panel features film buffs feuding in this space each week.

THIS WEEK'S PANEL
- Basem Boshra, associate editor of Weekend Post
- Craig Courtice, a short filmmaker who isn't very tall
- Richard Crouse, host of Rogers Television's Reel to Real, Canada's longest-running movie review show, and the author of The 100 Best Movies You've Never Seen (ECW Press, 2003). His Web site is www.richardcrouse.ca

THIS WEEK'S PIE Chiburekki (a deep-fried dough cake from Borat's homeland)

THIS WEEK'S SUBJECT Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan

BASEM: As a guy who used to download clips of the British version of Da Ali G Show long before it made its way to the colonies, I'd like to think my Borat bona fides are unimpeachable, and I couldn't have been more excited about his big-screen debut. That anticipation was stoked even further by the rapturous reviews that preceded its release. But while the film made me laugh so hard at times that I hope the theatre staff steam-cleaned my seat after I left, I couldn't help feeling a bit let down by all the hype (which I allowed myself to be sucked into). Borat: Superfluously Long Title that Stopped Being Funny After I Read It the First Time is, in essence, some good-to-great Borat sketches strung together by a flimsy excuse for a plot. Then it dawned on me: The people penning those glowing notices must not have been all that familiar with Borat's small-screen oeuvre, the best of which, I'd argue, is stronger than anything in this movie. (If it sounds like I'm down on Borat, I'm not; it's hilarious, if a tad overlong, even at 84 minutes. It just served as another reminder to keep my expectations measured even in the face of such cheerleading reviews.)

CRAIG: In a nice bit of programming, Showcase had a Da Ali G Show marathon on last weekend, and I caught four or five episodes after watching Borat. Hard to fault Sacha Baron Cohen for going after the big bucks and exposure this film will bring him, but you're right, Basem, the material fits the TV format better. But I'm more interested in the hype machine that accompanied this baby. Kudos to the producers for a witty PR campaign: having Cohen appear as Borat, inviting George Bush to a screening -- this was like old-time hucksterism, and obviously the movie-going public loved it. But I have to admit I'm ashamed (again) of the pack mentality of entertainment journalists. In the Canadian media, just last week, we had stories comparing Borat to Archie Bunker (Maclean's) and Andy Kaufman (Toronto Star). I'm sure some hack somewhere pulled out the post-9/11 angle. It's a shame Yakov Smirnoff, Borat's comedic predecessor (sample joke: "In Soviet Russia, if a male athlete loses, he becomes a female athlete"), didn't get the same kind of PR in the '80s. He might have made it beyond guest starring on Night Court.

RICHARD: Hey Craig, you forgot to mention The Wild and Crazy Guys from vintage Saturday Night Live. Their accents and attitudes toward women predated Borat by a few decades. The Borat family tree branches off to include guerilla comics who specialize in accosting unsuspecting civilians -- Allen Funt is Borat's great granddaddy, Tom Green the red-haired stepchild, while the fish-out-of-water routine, the ethnic humour, mockumentary style and total immersion in the character owes thanks to The Beverly Hillbillies, Redd Foxx, Christopher Guest and Andy Kaufman respectively. So the character of Borat isn't a completely new thing. What is new is the way the film was promoted. Having Borat arrive at a red-carpet event in a rustic wagon pulled by peasant women was a stroke of genius. The stunt at the White House and Borat's offer to sell his grandchild to Madonna were as gut-busting as anything (except maybe the nude wrestling) in the movie and put to shame more conventional attempts at movie hucksterism. When you have risked the wrath of the White House, having a junket at the Four Seasons seems a little tame. What may have seemed like a series of frat-boy hijinks was actually a carefully orchestrated campaign. In terms of the future of the character the campaign may have worked too well -- the popularity of the movie and the public awareness of the character has destroyed any chance that Borat will return in his present form. He'd have to go to Mars and pull pranks on unsuspecting aliens because everyone on Earth knows who he is.

BASEM Another critical reference point I've heard thrown around (which makes no sense to me) is Jackass. Granted, there's one prolonged physical gag in Borat -- those who have seen it will know the one I'm referring to -- that's as excruciating to sit through as anything Johnny Knoxville and his depraved cohorts have ever conjured up. But that's where the similarities end. Cohen's much-dissected brand of social satire -- which he ingeniously wraps inside just enough wacky shtick to keep even the frattiest boys engaged -- operates on a level the Jackasses couldn't begin to fathom. (And I thought Number Two was one of the most cathartic and invigorating movie experiences of the year.) In any case, I think much of the (over?) analysis of Borat will soon be rendered moot. Unless Hollywood backs the Brink's truck up to Cohen's door -- a definite possibility, given the film's sensational box office -- I can't imagine he would ever want, or have any reason to, revisit Borat. B:CLOAFMBGNOK is about as far as you can take a character before self-parody sets in, and Cohen seems just too savvy to let that happen (he says hopefully).

CRAIG It's funny you mention Jackass because in the notes I scratched down after watching Borat I wrote: "Expectations too big for what is basically small-screen experience; at least Jackass has some truly big-screen moments." Which is to say that most Jackass watchers went in expecting video-shot stunts, but came out surprised, whereas most of the patrons who go to see Borat go without knowing it is a digital experience. Borat may top Jackass at the box office, but it will be in DVD sales that these expectations play themselves out. I would guess that those who watched Jackass in the theatre would be more likely to pay a second time to see it, whereas with Borat once you've seen it, you've seen it. You have to admit by the end of Borat the gags are as original as a Rick Mercer segment. Except for the nude wrestling, of course.

RICHARD Borat may be a boob-tube experience blown up for the big screen, but at least it's a good one. Jackass: Number Two has its moments but mostly reeks of Ben-Gay and "Look at me!" desperation. Borat, on the other hand, provokes real laughs and perhaps -- gasp! -- even some real thought. The Jackass oeuvre only makes us chuckle because it is so stupidly brutal. While brutal can be funny, on the big screen I find the act of watching these movies as punishing as participating in one of Johnny Knoxville's more sadistic stunts. At just 84 minutes, Borat does what good movies do; it doesn't overstay its welcome and leaves the audience wanting more. With such a lean running time the jokes don't have time to get stale and, while some of the gags may be from the Rick Mercer school of comedy, most aren't. Mr. Mercer might attempt to see how much gas 17 cents will buy, but has he ever offered a dignitary cheese made with milk from his wife's tit? I don't think so. As for DVD sales, who knows, but I think the extras and outtakes on the Borat disc will be worth the 20 bucks.

NEXT WEEK'S PIE Dark chocolate macadamia nut wedge

Unpopped kernels: More on Borat flick
National Post

Basem: You know what. I officially think I'm Borat-ed out. (I knew that would happen, but not so soon.) So how about this news that Universal is shelling out US$42.5-million for the distribution rights to Cohen's next project, a Bruno movie, featuring the third and, to my eyes, least interesting of his Da Ali G Show triumvirate. The one accusation you regularly hear levelled at Borat is that he's a one-note character — although I prefer to think of sexism, racism and anti-Semitism as three separate notes, thank you very much — but he's a complex comic creation next to Bruno, who's an aggressively gay fashion reporter and ... er, that's about it, as far as I can tell. He has his moments, don't get me wrong, but are there enough of them (say, 80 or so) to string together for a feature film? I hate to doubt Cohen, who's certainly one of the most nimble comic minds in the business today, but I just don't think so. Actually, what I'd love to see him do one day is revisit Ali G in a Borat-style mockumentary, if only to wash away the bad taste left by his atrocious Ali G Indahouse film, hands-down the lamest thing SBC's been affiliated with (give or take a Madonna video.)

Craig: Maybe I’m just farther to the right on the Kinsey scale, but I look forward to a more in-depth, er, exploration of Bruno. There’s certainly enough homoeroticism in Borat, I figure why not just get it all out there. Besides, while every Bruno segment isn’t comedy gold, there is something much darker, and to my mind, more interesting in probing (there I go again) the not-so-hidden homophobia that runs rampant in North America. I’m thinking of the segment in which Bruno goes to a gun show and interviews an aficionado. The redneck-meets-rainbow shtick is just as savvy as Cohen’s other stuff, but it has something more — danger. It’s all fun-and-games when the gun guy goes off about his love of big calibres, but the punch line here is just that — when Bruno tells him he’s from Gay TV, Colt .45 threatens to knock his teeth out if he mentions the word “gay” one more time. My point is, Bruno’s a lot edgier than Borat or Ali G because of the less-accepted subject matter. It wouldn’t be as popular as Borat, but it could be better.

Richard: Edgy, schmedgy. I fear a Bruno movie would be more of the same. He's funny enough, but I always thought his segments were the weakest on the television show. Having said that I don't really want more Borat either. I agree with Basem. The more people quote him to me, the more people say "Nice!" in that Kazakhstani lilt the more I realize very soon I'm going to need a rest from it. I look forward to spending some time with Bruno, but not just yet. I need time. I'm not ready for another SBC essay into America's heart of darkness whether it is from a gay perspective, a British-Jamaican b-boy standpoint or the point of view of SBC in a bear suit. Let's allow him to take some time off, recharge and come up with a new idea, perhaps one that doesn't see him doing another mock doc with a different character.
________________________________________
Watch out, guys! It's all a set-up!
Craig Courtice, Richard Crouse, Jason Chow 
National Post
Friday, August 04, 2006

Quentin Tarantino has said the sign of a good film is that it makes you want to go home, eat some pie and talk about it. With that in mind, our Popcorn Panel features film buffs feuding in this space each week.

THIS WEEK'S PANEL:

- Craig Courtice, a short filmmaker who isn't very tall
- Richard Crouse, host of Rogers Television's Reel to Real, Canada's longest-running movie review show, and the author of The 100 Best Movies You've Never Seen (ECW Press, 2003). His Web site is www.richardcrouse.ca
- Jason Chow, a TV columnist for the Ottawa Citizen and axe man for pop rockers The Good Soldiers (www.myspace.com/thegoodsoldiers)

THIS WEEK'S PIE: Key Lime

THIS WEEK'S SUBJECT: Miami Vice

CRAIG: Vice is like a drug bust gone wrong. That's not to say it's not an interesting picture; all the parts are here, it's just that they don't add up. Literally, there is no way Michael Mann's latest will make back its US$125-million budget at the box office. Sure, it opened in first place last weekend with just over US$25-million. But that's about the same number Collateral, Mann's previous effort, opened at during the summer of 2004. That movie ended up with just over US$100-million in ticket sales, but cost only US$65-million to make. Vice won't even make it that high, and here's why.
1) Collateral featured studio golden boy Tom Cruise playing against type as a villain. People wanted to see Scientology's mouthpiece get killed, even if it was only his character. Vice stars Colin Farrell, who has never proved himself as a big draw. The most popular film he was in was Minority Report (US$132-million), in which he played second fiddle to Cruise.
2) Jamie Foxx is in both pictures, but while he played a cab driver with a heart of gold forced into action in Collateral, here he plays Ricardo Tubbs, a mean mutha vice cop who already got the girl.
3) Collateral was a high-concept movie with a Crash-like ending in which everything ties up neatly. Vice drops you immediately into the headspace of a south Florida undercover police officer, which means lots of adrenaline, but also lots of disorientation and tedium.

RICHARD: Wow, Craig, I'm guessing you were disappointed by the movie. I agree with you that the individual parts of Vice don't seem to add up to much -- the lead actors have little chemistry, the story is unoriginal, convoluted and borders on not making much sense -- but the beauty of the movie is in the telling, not the story itself. Mann makes cool-looking movies. Unlike the television show, the movie is dark, grainy and jumpy. He has turned the Sunshine State's emblematic city into a dark, menacing paradise where the good guys don't always win and the bad guys don't completely lose.

JASON: Dark and menacing, sure, but you can't just categorically exclude sunshine and heat when you're in Florida. The film is stylish, indeed, but Mann's relentless intent on making a noirish antithesis to the TV series made the movie so one-dimensional that things got left by the wayside, like, as Craig said, character and story. To that list, I'd add location -- the film could have been shot anywhere (e.g. Los Angeles). I expected an in-depth look at Miami-as-faux-paradise, but instead all I learned is that the town's an hour's speedboat ride away from Havana. Chico, Scarface is more Miami than Vice.

CRAIG: Like Alonzo, the informant played with harrowing elan by Deadwood's John Hawkes, you two have been set up. I actually thought the picture was an excellent piece of art. I was just pointing out that it will be a bitter disappointment for fans expecting an easy blockbuster. The International Movie Database user rating, for example, is only 6.3 out of ten.
But on to a new topic. Scott Holleran of Boxofficemojo.com writes of Vice: "this dark, grainy picture needs subtitles to be understood. That's not just because actress Gong Li (Crockett's love interest) struggles with the English language in each scene, though that is a problem. As an Asian stereotype, she juts her head like a 16-year-old gangbanger flashing signs at the mall." Normally, I'd just ignore this as the ramblings of some hack, but the criticism shows up in many reviews. News to the English-speaking press: Most people in the world don't speak your language as their mother tongue. Is Mann trying to say something with this casting choice or was it a mistake?

RICHARD: Was casting a beautiful, talented actress in a major role a mistake? I don't think so. Her performance oozes sensuality and the obvious age difference between Gong and Farrell makes their relationship even more interesting. Usually Hollywood tries to sell the idea that it's perfectly normal for ancient, wrinkled men to date young women, but casting Gong turns that idea on its head, although she is far from ancient and wrinkled.
My issue is not with the casting, but with the underuse of other actors. Mann has assembled a great cast -- Foxx, Ciaran Hinds, Justin Theroux, to name a few --and given them very little to do other than brood. Farrell shines, in an unshaven kind of way, because at least his character has some spunk. He gives a performance of mock seriousness that sometimes borders on camp, barking his tough-guy lines in a way that would knock the pastel off the original Crockett. Don Johnson's Crockett was unhappy and angry, but in this movie seems to have turned his life around. Now he's angry and unhappy.

JASON: The problem isn't Gong; the problem is the premise of her character: A pseudo-femme fatale who is the child of a diplomatic translator from Angola who somehow is hooked up with a Castro look-alike drug mogul with whom she communicates in stilted English while reading the business sections of Spanish newspapers? I admit I made the same comments about subtitles after I left the theatre. I had to strain to hear some of the lines uttered by the ESL actors. That said, Mann deserves credit for attempting to cast a global village for his movie -- not because I believe in affirmative action but because he's breaking out of the regular Hollywood racial cliches. Crockett and Tubbs aren't the only multi-ethnic working couple in play here; bad guys can be racially cool, too.

© National Post 2006

Unpopped kernels 
National Post
Published: Friday, August 04, 2006

First Tom Arnold in McHale’s Navy now Miami Vice. The boys broach the best and worst of movie adaptations of TV shows and make the case for programs that haven’t been given the big-screen treatment. (Hint: Mr. T, we’re ready for your closeup)

Craig: It appears for better or worse that movie adaptations of TV show are here to stay. Compared to such winners as Bewitched, and the Tom Arnold-in-a-sea-captain's-outfit McHale's Navy, Miami Vice looks like a masterpiece. Are there any other adaptations you would make the case for that worked (Starsky & Hutch?)? More importantly what shows haven't been done that you would like to see? My choice is The A Team — and pronto while Mr. T can still reprise his role as B.A. Baracus. In lieu of the deceased George Peppard I suggest another suave George for Colonel "Hannibal" Smith. “If you have a problem and no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire the Clooney…” Cue the best theme song in TV history!

Richard: The leap from the small to big screen is usually quite painful, although when the people involved in the television show are left in the loop the results can be OK. I thought the South Park movie worked well and the recent sci-fi film Serenity was actually better than the show it was based on, Firefly. In both cases the guiding hands on the movies had also created and directed the television shows. The most prolific of the television based movies, the Star Trek series, really has only two winners out of the bunch — Wrath of Khan and First Contact, both of which were based on stories that originated on the small screen (Space Seed, and Best of Both Worlds). But for every Untouchables that works, there's a S*W*A*T that sucks the life out of its source material. For every Fugitive, there's a Dragnet — you get the idea. They are the ying and yang of television-to-film adaptations.
Craig wants to see The A-Team revived. I'm not so sure. I survived that one as a youth and I'm not sure I'm up to it again. I'd rather see Bosom Buddies, starring Eddie Izzard and the guy that played Angel in Rent. Or maybe WKRP with Paris Hilton as Jennifer Marlowe, Bart the Bear as Mr. Carlson and an IKEA swivel chair as Johnny Fever. Actually I'd rather see someone in Hollywood flick off the TV and come up with an original idea.

Chow: The studios are apparently working on a movie adaptation of Knight Rider with David Hasselhoff reprising his character, Michael Knight, and KITT, once again, as the rational talking car. According to IMDb.com, it's slated for 2008 release, but keep in mind this project has been in the making for four years and no script has been agreed upon just yet, so sit tight, boys. As for past remakes, I thought the Brady Bunch was fantastic and Starsky & Hutch was pure turkey. My vote for a movie adaptation: Rockford Files. Starring, of course, George Clooney.

More film jaune than noir?
Craig Courtice, Richard Crouse and J. Kelly Nestruck
National Post
Friday, September 22, 2006

Quentin Tarantino has said the sign of a good film is that it makes you want to go home, eat some pie and talk about it. With that in mind, our Popcorn Panel features film buffs feuding in this space each week.

THIS WEEK'S PANEL
- Craig Courtice, a short filmmaker who isn't very tall
- Richard Crouse, host of Rogers Television's Reel to Real, Canada's longest-running movie review show, and the author of The 100 Best Movies You've Never Seen (ECW Press, 2003). His Web site is www.richardcrouse.ca
- J. Kelly Nestruck, National Post Arts & Life reporter

THIS WEEK'S PIE Whoopee

THIS WEEK'S SUBJECT The Black Dahlia

CRAIG I'll be honest, I'm not sure I'm qualified to comment on the plot of The Black Dahlia because after the banana truck drove by during the first shootout, I spent the entire film trying to decipher the meaning of yellow. Now I don't have ADD, so I'm guessing this was intentional on director Brain De Palma's part. If you see this movie just for the art direction and cinematography, you won't be disappointed. (Yellow means caution, by the way.) Of course, the film critics who panned Dahlia are almost all failed English majors, not sensualists. They might very well have a point about the story; the whodunit of this movie is more like a whatthef---? But the same is true of David Lynch's Mulholland Drive, which was universally praised for its sensuality and creepy tone. Then again, who amongst us wants to make love to a film critic?

RICHARD You'd be surprised. Where do you think all those little film-critic kids come from? I think it is possible to be a sensualist and film critic, but watching The Black Dahlia taxed both the corporal and analytical sides of my brain. Without a doubt the movie is stunning to look at, filled with beautiful crane shots and even more beautiful people, but De Palma forgot one thing -- to get his actors to act. I don't expect much from Josh Hartnett other to stand around and look good, but Scarlett Johansson and Hilary Swank are two performers who usually rise above their good looks and deliver the one-two punch of being gorgeous and talented. Here they both seem to be on autopilot. That's the film critic side of my personality. My sensualist side admires De Palma's aesthetic choices, but beauty without brains leaves me cold.

KELLY I don't even know if I admire De Palma's aesthetic choices here. The point-of-view shot when we met Swank's family was jarring, and the gory bits were over-the-top, especially for a movie otherwise filmed like a fairy tale. Even the long crane shot from Elizabeth Short's murder scene to the first shootout was a bit disappointing. If I can defend something about this incredibly bizarre movie it would be Hartnett's performance. He gets dumped on a lot, but there's a reason why directors like Sofia Coppola, Ridley Scott and De Palma cast him in their flicks. Hartnett's blank demeanour and beady little eyes were perfect for a character called Mr. Ice. He was the calm amidst a storm of scenery chomping, the anchor on this banana boat.

CRAIG I'm willing to admit I might have missed what was so bad about this film. How about you two? Is it possible you guys are in the dark about what this movie is saying about noir? Because like Mulholland Drive, I think Dahlia is working on a completely different level, referencing shots and even acting styles from the genre. Let's not forget that one of De Palma's most famous scenes, the baby-carriage-on-the-stairs scene from The Untouchables, was heavily inspired by Russian film pioneer Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin.

RICHARD De Palma has always borrowed heavily from other filmmakers, most notably Hitchcock, but usually with more success than is on display here. The baby-carriage-on-the-stairs scene is a classic, but I didn't see anything in The Black Dahlia that matched the excitement or beauty of that scene. If he is trying to reference classic film noir in visual and acting style, I don't see it. The film isn't structured like a classic noir, which usually worked backwards from a murder, and the femmes in the classic noirs were more believably fatale than Swank and Johansson.

KELLY What's the big deal about directors referencing other movies in their shots, anyway? If the result holds together like, say, The Big Lebowski, another noir homage full of inside jokes, then that's great. But your first duty as director is to tell a coherent story in a compelling manner, not impress everyone with your winks to Raging Bull and Lady in the Lake. If you want to know why I liked being confused by Mulholland Drive, but not The Black Dahlia, Craig, you only have to look as far as the directors' intentions. I bet dimes to doughnuts to Dahlia dames that De Palma was trying to make a movie that made sense -- as James Ellroy's novel does -- not trying to emulate Lynch's lush lunacy.

© National Post 2006

Unpopped kernels: Return to the print review?
National Post
Published: Friday, September 22, 2006

Craig: One of the reasons we started the Popcorn Panel was to have a different forum for film comment. The idea was that conversations about movies are often more revealing (and entertaining) than reviews. With Web sites such as RottenTomatoes and IMDb, often films are reduced to a raw number without a serious discussion of the merits. These ratings certainly serve a purpose, but too often distract from the message a film is trying to convey. My question to you two Web-savvy gents is that in this era of DVDs with making-of features and insta-pundits is it time to revisit the traditional print movie review? One thing I’d like to see is retractions by reviewers who might have had a chance to reflect on a movie after their deadline and realize they might have missed the mark. There is no shame in this, newspapers print clarifications every day, and I think it would humanize the reviewer. Maybe they had a headache, maybe they talked about the film at a dinner party and came to a different conclusion, the point is to encourage dialogue with the reader not polarize. For example, when I walked out of Caché earlier this year I was angry. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that’s exactly what director Michael Haneke wanted me to feel; just because the feeling you have is not the one you wanted to have or expected to have should not cloud your judgment as to the filmmaker’s success. Caché made me want to read more about it, to hear other opinions, to see if I might have missed something. In the end, I admit, I did.

Richard: We live in an era where everything is reduced to a soundbite, a headline or in the case of reviews, often just a star rating and that's a shame. In the quest to be first with entertainment stories and reviews media outlets are too quick to print or air stories that haven't been thought through properly. I'm not sure that the speed at which we consume information nowadays will allow for really thoughtful reviews. I would prefer to read reviews that were well thought through, not just first, but when five, six or seven movies are being released each week it is impossible to give each of them the time they deserve to write a meaningful review before you have to run off to see another one and then write another review. The days of long Pauline Kael style pieces are gone, and I don't think that's a good thing.

Kelly: If a critic does decide that he or she has made an egregious error in judgment in a review, I don't see anything wrong with them revisiting the subject in a future column. But, you know, a daily newspaper is just a daily newspaper and a review is just a review. People who read critics should understand that what they are reading is a first attempt to grapple with a film, often under a tight deadline. For 95% of film fare that does that trick — I have yet to hear any convincing arguments on the merits of Little Man — but, as New Yorker critic Anthony Lane titled his book of reviews, nobody's perfect. No one should expect the definitive assessment of a film to be written the week it is released, just as we don't expect the full significance of a political event to become apparent for days, if not years, if not decades. We're just the first draft of film history and it's not really our job to second-guess ourselves all the time. That's what blogs are for.
National Post
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Forget it Jack, it's Beantown
National Post
Friday, October 20, 2006

This week's film: The Departed

THIS WEEK'S PANEL
- Craig Courtice, a short filmmaker who isn't very tall.
- Tracey Lazos, former deputy Arts editor at the Post who now works at the Boston Herald.
- Richard Crouse, host of Rogers Television's Reel to Real, Canada's longest-running movie review show, and the author of The 100 Best Movies You've Never Seen (ECW Press, 2003). His Web site is www.richardcrouse.ca

This week's pie Boston cream

This week's subject The Departed

Craig An open letter to Jack Nicholson: Dear Jack, The Departed was a great film -- too bad you missed it. Your performance was so off base I wonder if you even read the script. You took, for example, a wonderfully designed scene in a porno theatre and turned it into an improv blooper from Anger Management. A dildo? Seriously? This isn't The Witches of Eastwick or Batman, buddy. You're supposed to become the character, not a caricature. All I could think of after watching this was "Was Brian Cox too busy to play this part?" Because if he had played this Irish crime boss, he would have paid the same attention to craft that Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio did to their roles.
Those two were revelations, as was Mark Wahlberg. Honestly, if Marky Mark is out-acting you, don't you think it's time to devote yourself full-time to something you're actually passionate about -- after all, the Lakers should be pretty good this year.

Tracey You'd think that Nicholson, finally getting to work with Scorsese, would have thought to himself, "Now here's a chance to do something really important." Instead, he devours a big plateful of ham and lets his hair do all the acting. But I didn't think his performance was as egregious as you did, Craig -- the guy can still command a scene, and you have to admit, he was menacingly hilarious at times and a pretty scary villain. I wouldn't want to run into him in Southie. The one thing he failed to bring to this movie that the other players contributed in huge dollops of Boston cream was class. Damon as the smooth-talking rat was a standout for me. That guy has cornered the market on duplicitous nasties you still want to take home to meet your mum.
But back to Jack. The Boston media is in a huge tizzy over the fact that Nicholson appears to channel Beantown's most obsessed-over mobster-cum-fugitive, Whitey Bulger. Methinks they need to get out more.

Richard I'm with you Tracey. Nicholson's performance is kind of cockamamie, but it shows that the old coot can still blow younger, prettier actors off the screen. His Costello is a modern day King Lear, an autocrat very much aware of his importance in the world and who uses that knowledge as a licence to behave badly. He's at least partly crazy, but he's no Boob McNutt. His madness is used like a parlour trick to unbalance those around him. Like Lear, it appears Costello made the decision to go 5150 to preserve command over his own life and the lives of those around him. The dildo and eating-the-fly scenes are ridiculous, but they are ridiculous on a grand scale. They show Costello's volatility. I thought Nicholson's blazing eyes captured that unhinged quality really well. There is a reason why some people are legends and in The Departed we are reminded why Nicholson is acting royalty.

Craig There's no doubt Nicholson could act -- in the '70s. But now he seems content with shtick rather than the nuance he brought to films like Five Easy Pieces and Chinatown. Heck, if you really want to see what Nicholson is capable of you don't even have to go back that far; The Pledge (2001) represents some of his finest work. There is a reason this guy has won three Oscars.
And speaking of Oscars, will The Departed finally win Scorsese his? As a huge fan, I'm of two minds on this. First, I think he obviously deserves one, and The Departed is good enough that it wouldn't be a total sympathy trophy. Marty could also get back to making more artistic pictures like Kundun instead of pandering to the Academy with schlock like The Aviator. On the other hand, while the first 30 minutes of The Departed is the best film I saw this year and the last 30 ain't half bad either, the middle hour-plus drags. I'm not saying it's as painful as watching DiCaprio spell out "quarantine" in The Aviator, I'm just saying the whole erectile dysfunction theme was a little limp. (Sorry, couldn't resist.)

Tracey I'm almost ashamed to admit this, but I'm not a Scorsese connoisseur. I mean really not. A quick check of IMDb revealed that I've seen exactly four-and-a-half of his films. (I never made it through Raging Bull, but I think that's because the sound on my rental was horrible.) Perhaps I'm just a big girlie-girl, but I've just never had much interest in Scorsese's mean streets. And I enjoyed The Aviator a lot. (Told you -- big girlie-girl.) So I was a bit hesitant about watching The Departed. But I loved this film. I loved that it was at once charming and shocking. I loved the fact that there was an intricate story but I didn't need to wheel out the Universal Plot Explainer to figure out what the hell was going on. I love that Scorsese left his New York comfort zone, came to Boston and captured it so well -- rats and all. Sure, there were a couple of scenes that bordered on farce, but we'll just go ahead and blame Nicholson for those. I think Scorsese should win an Oscar for this movie, regardless of whether he deserves one for his body of work. But with Clint Eastwood breathing down his neck again with his latest epic, who knows?

Richard It would be a cruel twist worthy of a Paul Haggis script if Eastwood beat Scorsese again this year. I was weaned on Scorsese -- one of my earliest film memories is sneaking into Boxcar Bertha when I was nine -- and as much as I admired his last couple of movies, I didn't love them, and Scorsese is the kind of filmmaker who should inspire fanatical praise. The last two were handsome, big-budget epics but it felt like he was making movies to please Academy voters and not himself. The Departed is a departure from those sleek studio efforts and places the director firmly back where he belongs -- on the mean streets surrounded by gangsters, duplicity and violence. He's comfortable there among the sleazoids and crazies, and it is that comfort level, and not the sympathy vote, that will earn him at least a best director nomination if not a win. The Departed is Scorsese in top form -- effortless, (although I'd guess he watched Pulp Fiction a time or two during production) and brutally cool.
© National Post 2006

Unpopped kernels
Craig Courtice
Friday, October 20, 2006

Craig: The Post's Vanessa Farquharson said of the 2004 film, which The Departed is based on: "Infernal Affairs may be the lamest-titled film to hit theatres this year, but will probably be the only one of its kind that doesn't sell out with psychological melodrama and clichéd copspeak — if anything, it at least deserves bigger profits than the upcoming Hollywood remake."
This remake business is always a bit tricky. On the one hand I remember being horrified at Bridget Fonda and Dermot McDumbass in Point of No Return, a truly awful remake of La Femme Nikita, one of my favourite films. But I liked what Cameron Crowe did with Vanilla Sky, a remake of Abre Los Ojos, which oddly also starred Penelope Cruz. Scorsese, of course, updated Cape Fear and paid homage to a number of classic Hollywood films in The Aviator. But this is the first time he's tried his hand at remaking a film from another country and culture. Since I haven't yet seen Infernal Affairs I can't really comment, but I'd still like to hear your comments about whether this was a good idea. I suppose you could make the case that The Departed will get more people to watch the original, but isn't this a bit backward? What is the recipe for good remakes? Is simply switching the setting from Hong Kong to Boston enough?

Tracey: What, no mention of director Leonard Nimoy's stellar work turning Trois Hommes et un Couffin into Three Men and a Baby? It's interesting that we focus on The Departed as a remake. I'm not suggesting it's anything else, but I wonder how many people in the multiplex, cinema buffs aside, realize Scorsese's flick is based on an apparently great Hong King thriller (I haven't seen it either).
And even if they do know, does that affect the way they rate the movie? I came to The Departed having heard of Infernal Affairs and that's about it. And I can't say I'm any more interested in seeing it now, although I'm sure it's no less deserving of praise. Perhaps if The Departed hadn't been such a triumph, I'd be more inclined to rent its precursor. There's obviously more to foreign-film remakes than location switching, although Scorsese's decision to cast Boston in this case proved insightful. But how do you judge when the originals are seen so seldom here? And is there really any point in doing so anyway?
Ultimately, Scorsese has made a thrilling genre piece that stands on its own.

Richard: Remakes are a Hollywood tradition. Moviemakers have been recycling ideas and remaking movies for almost as long as they have been threading film through cameras. The Maltese Falcon's story was a two-time hand-me-down before a third version made Bogart a star, proving that while most remakes aren't successful — think The Omen, Mighty Joe Young or Psycho — they can occasionally triumph. I think Scorsese's re-do of Infernal Affairs actually outdoes the original.
William Monahan's script borrows heavily on the Hong Kong film for structure, but ups the ante in almost every other way. His dialogue is sharp, acerbic and funny. Scorsese seems really connected to the material and his actors, in several cases drawing surprising award- calibre performances out of them — I'm thinking Marky Mark here. The movie hits all the right re-make notes. It's well cast, well directed and uses the source material as a starting point, paying homage to it, with slavishly adhering to it. Will it get more people to rent Infernal Affairs? I don't know, but perhaps it will lead to a Martin Scorsese renaissance in Hong Kong.
© National Post
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ELVIS’ TCB RING
Excerpt from a story originally published in Elvis International Forum, Summer 1994

Elvis Presley lived by the maxim that it is better to give than to receive. He loved to give presents. Very expensive presents. Lowell Hays (Elvis’ favorite jeweler), remembers that the singer spent a fortune on other people. “Elvis,” he said, “would take rings right off his fingers and give them to people.” Mr. Hays owns a fine jewelry shop in Memphis and for the last ten years of Elvis’ life was the only man the rock legend would buy jewelry from. “Elvis had done business with other jewelers,” Lowell says, “but I don’t think he was very happy with them.”

Hays often traveled as part of Elvis’ entourage. On tour, he would bring a case stuffed with trinkets which Elvis would purchase and dole out to friends and fans. “Money was not an object with him. To Elvis money was to be spent for his enjoyment and he liked big jewelry pieces. Elvis bought considerable amounts of platinum rings, baguettes and colored stones like sapphires, rubies and diamonds—he loved colored diamonds.”

One night, while on the road Hays was sitting on the side of the stage taking in the show when Elvis requested to see the case. “I set the case up on this big black speaker and Elvis started taking jewelry out of the case and handing it people in the front row,” said Hays. “Elvis gave away two hundred and fifty thousand dollars worth of jewelry that night.” As Hays sat and watched Elvis hand out dozens of diamond rings and rubies he became upset. He told the singer that he felt he was taking advantage of his money and good nature. Elvis looked at him reassuringly and told him not to worry. “I’ll only have to sing five minutes longer tomorrow night to pay for that.”

The only thing Elvis loved more than giving away jewelry was occasionally treating himself to an expensive bauble. His most famous—and outrageous— piece was the TCB ring—an acronym for Elvis’ favorite saying, “Taking Care of Business.”

Elvis asked Hays to design a TCB ring to wear on-stage. He wanted an eye-catcher of a ring that could be seen from the third row. “I have never made anything, or even seen anything the equal of the TCB ring as it finally turned out,” said Hays. “It is still the number one best looking ring I have ever made.”

The Crown Jewel of the Presley Collection, it was encrusted with diamonds and rare stones, and took months to design. Hays won’t divulge how much the ring cost, but will allow that the price tag was astronomical. When the ring was ready Hays took it to show Elvis. Under the chandelier in the dining room at Graceland Hays opened the box and watched as Elvis’ eyes grew wide. “Man,” the singer said, “Sammy Davis Jr. is going to shit when he sees this.”

“Elvis didn’t get excited about too many things, but he just went crazy over the ring,” said Hays.
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Word on the Street Speech Excerpt: September 2003

Introduction: Hello and welcome to the Great Books Tent at Word on the Street... I thought I'd start by telling you a bit about why we're all here today...
In addition to having just written The 100 Best Movies You’ve Never Seen for ECW Press, I also host a movie review show called Reel to Real… it's Canada's longest running show about movies, and each year my co-hosts (Geoff Pevere and Katrina Onstad) review 200 plus movies, which means that I spend most of my time alone, and in the dark... and then, when I emerge into the light, I have to come up with -- hopefully -- clever things to say about them, which is harder sometimes than you would think...

I find the top 10% of movies and the bottom 10% the easiest to discuss... in other words the best and the worst are easy to review, but it is the middle 80% of mediocre films that are really, really hard to discuss... so when I was choosing the movies in the book I dismissed about 80% of the movies I have ever seen... much like most of the movies that were released this summer... so many  sequels, it seemed like every movie that came out this summer had a number in the title... Charlie's Angel's 2... Legally Blonde 2... Bad Boys 2... Jeeper's Creepers 2... there was a lot of number two at the theatres this year, if you know what I mean... anyway, I ruled out sequels from the book...

It seems that we are surrounded by bad movies... so to remedy that we go to the video store to find alternatives and generally all we find are more bad movies! Stats say that most people spend about 12 minutes in the video store when searching for something to rent, and never even make it past the new releases rack... so where do you think the chain stores put most of their energy???

So, keeping this in mind, and considering my job as a film critic, although I prefer "consumer advocate"... the Ralph Nader of cinephiles... I decided to put this book together, to help people choose good movies to rent... but keep in mind you must choose your video store very carefully!!! If everyone in the store is wearing the same colour t-shirt -- a uniform -- you're probably in the wrong place... The corporate stores aren't likely to embrace the movies contained within...

Look for the mom and pop shows and stores run by people who try and engage you in some kind of conversation... IE: When you try and rent Pearl Harbour... if the video store clerk doesn't look at with a disappointed look on his or her face and then try and steer you toward maybe picking up Tora! Tora! Tora! instead then you are in the wrong store... anyway… 

There are other reasons I wrote this book, and one of them is detailed in the introduction to the book...