Posts Tagged ‘Deep Throat’

CTVNEWS.CA: “THE CROUSE REVIEW LOOKS AT “Happy Death Day” & MORE!

A new feature from from ctvnews.ca! The Crouse Review is a quick, hot take on the weekend’s biggest movies! This week Richard looks at the killer birthday blues of “Happy Death Day,” Jackie Chan’s return to adult drama “The Foreigner” and Liam Neeson in the self explanatory “Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down The White House.”

Watch the whole thing HERE!

RICHARD’S WEEKEND MOVIE REVIEWS FROM CP24! FRIDAY OCTOBER 13, 2017.

Richard and CP24 anchor Jamie Gutfreund have a look at the weekend’s new movies including the birthday blues of “Happy Death Day,” Jackie Chan’s return to adult drama “The Foreigner” and Liam Neeson in the self explanatory “Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down The White House.”

Watch the whole thing HERE!

RICHARD’S CTV NEWSCHANNEL WEEKEND MOVIE REVIEWS & MORE FOR OCTOBER 13.

Richard sits in with CTV NewsChannel anchor Marcia MacMillan to have a look at the birthday blues of “Happy Death Day,” Jackie Chan’s return to adult drama “The Foreigner” and Liam Neeson in the self explanatory “Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down The White House.”

Watch the whole thing HERE!

MARK FELT: THE MAN WHO BROUGHT DOWN THE WHITE HOUSE: 2 STARS. “stoic!”

The name Mark Felt was one of Washington DC’s best-kept secrets for years. From 1972 to 2005 theories and rumours echoed through the halls of power as to the real name of Deep Throat, the pseudonym given to the secret informant who provided information to Bob Woodward that kick started the Watergate scandal. Now that it’s known that the mysterious figure was actually Mark Felt, the Deputy Associate Director of the FBI, how is it possible to make a cloak-and-dagger thriller out of the story when even the name, the lengthy, “Mark Felt – The Man Who Brought Down the White House,” gives away the plot?

The film begins as stone-faced keeper of secrets Felt, played by Liam Neeson, learns his boss of thirty years, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, has died. It is presumed that, given his years of experience and service—he’s the G-man’s G-man—that he’ll be offered the top job. “You’re the chief dragon slayer and keeper of the American dream,” says his wife Audrey (Diane Lane).

His new case looks promising as well. He and his team are investigating a break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office complex in Washington. It’s a case that Felt feels will have major repercussions, perhaps leading to the very top office in the land, President Nixon’s Oval Office.

His dreams of running the F.B.I. and breaking the explosive Watergate case are scuttled when Hoover’s job goes to an assistant attorney general from Nixon’s Justice Department, L. Pat Gray (Marton Csokas). “Hoover is gone,” Felt is told. “You’re alone now holding the end of your own leash.” Felt, once the second in command is now the odd man out. More than that, Gray wants the Watergate investigation shut down. “You are never going to find what you were looking for,” says Gray. “End it. Shut it down.”

Felt knows the burglars are all ex CIA and FBI with connections to the Committee to Re-Elect the President so rather than let it drop he turns to the press and becomes the most famous—and for a time anonymous—whistleblower in American political history.

“Mark Felt – The Man Who Brought Down the White House” is a timely look at the role of the FBI versus the White House. Much of Felt’s dialogue—lines like, “No one can stop the driving force of an FBI investigation. Not even the FBI.”—feel like they could have been lifted from James Comey’s Congressional testimony. The story predates Presidents Ford, Jimmy Carter, two Bushes, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama but feels ripped from today’s headlines.

Déjà vu aside, there isn’t much else here of interest. Neeson is the very model of a company man, someone who gave his life to the FBI only to see outside forces—i.e. Nixon’s White House—compromise the Bureau’s effectiveness. “We don’t answer to them,” he grunts. “The White House has no authority on the FBI.” It’s a compelling reason but Neeson is so stoic he’s barely a character and more a mound of finely sculpted grey hair with an attitude. As Felt he has a very particular set of skills. Skills he has acquired over a very long career. Skills that include stoicism. If you don’t give him what he wants he will hunt you down and tell you secrets.

A grafted on story about his missing, possibly radicalized daughter, does nothing to humanize the man who has spent a career as a cipher and only distracts from the intrigue.

“Mark Felt – The Man Who Brought Down the White House” is based on an explosive story and should be an engaging picture of the backrooms of power and the machinations that brought down a government. Instead it is a talky affair that relies on exposition rather than thrills.

LOVELACE: 2 STARS

Lovelace-UK-Quad-PosterFor a brief period in the mid-1970s the name Linda Lovelace lived at the very center of popular culture, particularly if the alphabetical listings in your movie collection weighed heavily toward the XXX.

We first meet Linda Boreman (Amanda Seyfried) as a naïve twenty-year old, living at home with her strict parents (Sharon Stone and Robert Patrick). Her ticket out of the oppressive household is Chuck Traynor (Peter Sarsgaard), a strip club owner who sweeps her off her feet, marrying her just six months after they first met at the Moonlight Rollerway.

He’s a charmer until an IRS audit for tax fraud throws his life into a downward spiral. To crawl out from under the weight of debt he sells Linda into pornography, accepting $1250 to showcase her special sexual skills in a film called “Deep Throat.”

The ploy worked. The film became a sensation with everyone from Walter Cronkite to Johnny Carson and Bob Hope commenting on about it on television. Called the “Gone with the Wind” of pornography, the movie grossed an estimated $600 million and made Linda, now renamed Lovelace, the “postergirl for the sexual revolution.”

With success, however, came humiliation, physical and sexual abuse and a loss of personal identity.

Based on Linda’s tell-all “Ordeal,” “Lovelace” should be a cautionary tale, warning of the dangers of controlling spouses among others things, but plays more like a semi-raunchy Movie of the Week.

There are some good performances. Seyfried hits a career high, playing Lovelace as a vulnerable, innocent and fragile woman swept away by an obsessive man who tries to pass off sexual violence as passion.

Sarsgaard hams it up as Traynor, the wild-eyed psycho who, in one scene takes out his anger on a blow up effigy of Linda. He’s a bad man, but too broadly played to be truly convincing.

Solid supporting work from a who’s-who of indie film—Juno Temple, Chris Noth and Hank Azaria, among others—impresses, but Sharon Stone, unrecognizable as Linda’s cruel mother, is a stand out.

The film’s period details grab the look of the time—Crushed velvet jackets! Flares! Shirts open to the navel!—and archival news footage sets a tone, but it’s all veneer. The script, which features not one but two “6 Years Later” title cards, is relatively linear in its telling of the tale, but relies on big moments rather than insight to get its point across. With so many damaged people on display, it would have been interesting to explore how a man like Chuck can come to dominate those around him.

Documentary filmmakers turned feature directors Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman also invert the First Rule of Cinema, “show me, don’t tell me,” loading up scene after scene with unnecessary exposition. In one superfluous scene a radio announcer begins an interview with the words, “This film has become a phenomenon,” seconds after a montage visually showed us the movie’s success.

“Lovelace” attempts to tell an edgy personal story, but squanders good performances from Seyfried, Stone and supporting cast, in a movie that is too, simplistic, too tame and too timid to do justice to Lovelace’s horror story.