What to watch when you’ve already watched everything Part Eight! Binge worthy, not cringe worthy recommendations from Isolation Studios in the eerily quiet downtown Toronto. Three movies to stream, rent or buy from the comfort of home isolation. Today, newsrooms, vigilantes and a twelve-year-old vampire. #Christine #HarryBrown #LetMeIn
Listen to the whole thing HERE!
Welcome to the House of Crouse. Put on your jumpers or your nicest frock! It’s “Rule, Britannia!” Day around the HoC. Gemma Arterton pops round to talk about cannibal ants who can change species and her zombie movie “The Girl with All the Gifts.” Then it’s sit-back-and-listen-to-a-legend time as we raid the vault to bring you Michael Caine speaking about his revenge flick “Harry Brown.” It’s great stuff, so never mind the bollocks, drop in for a cuppa and take a load off.
In this weekend’s movie Prisoners a father, played by Hugh Jackman, kidnaps the man he thinks abducted his daughter and her young best friend. It’s a classic case of vigilante justice, a practice another movie character, Foxy Brown, called “as American as apple pie.”
It’s also illegal, dangerous and morally unsound, but that doesn’t stop Hollywood from featuring vigilantes in their stories.
Comic books have supplied the movies with vigilantes for years. According to comicbookmovie.com, “It is important to state one truth,” they write, “[and] that is, all comic book heroes, unless sanctioned by the government, are vigilantes.” That’s a wide group that includes, among others, Batman, Spiderman and Iron Man.
Lesser known is Rorschach, the anti-hero of the graphic novel The Watchmen and played by Jackie Earle Haley in the movie of the same name. He’s a masked crime fighter who believes in only good and evil. This black-and-white morality drives his ruthless need to punish evil-doers at all costs.
“Were it not for costumed vigilantism,” says the actor, “he’d have nothing.”
Rorschach is effective and lethal, but Paul Kersey didn’t wear a costume to earn his star on the Vigilante Walk of Fame. As played by Charles Bronson in five Death Wish movies, he cleaned up the streets with an efficiency that would make the Watchmen envious.
In the original 1974 film Kersey is an architect driven to taking the law into his own hands following the brutal murder of his wife. “If the police don’t defense us,” he says, “maybe we ought to do it ourselves.”
Star Bronson was quick to say that he didn’t “advocate anyone taking the law into their own hands,” but knew that the Death Wish movies were popular because, “Audiences like to see the bad guys get their comeuppance.”
Harry Brown is a gritty Gran Torino with British accents and a dash of Death Wish. Michael Caine plays the title character as High Noon’s Gary Cooper, but instead of being set on the wide open plain, the action in this Teabag Western takes place in the urban terrain of the Elephant and Castle section of London.
“This movie changed me,” Caine said. “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.”
Harry Brown is a common name, like John Smith or Greg Jones. It’s the kind of name that doesn’t draw attention to itself, but in the hands of Michael Caine, who plays the lead character in the revenge thriller “Harry Brown,” the name, the character and the movie become memorable.
“Harry Brown” is a gritty “Gran Torino” with British accents and a dash of “Death Wish.” Caine plays Brown as High Noon’s Gary Cooper, but instead of being set on the wide open plain, the action in this Teabag Western takes place in the urban terrain of the Elephant and Castle section of London.
Caine plays a widowed man who strikes back after a gang of feral yobs kill his best mate and confidant Len (David Bradley). D.I. Alice Frampton, (Emily Mortimer), a persistent but ineffectual detective with the thankless job of policing the council estate, suspects Harry is a part time vigilante but can’t prove it, and even if she could her partner is ambivalent to the pensioner’s gun slinging ways. “As far as I’m concerned, Harry Brown is doing us a favor,” says D.S. Terry Hicock (Charlie Creed-Miles).
“Harry Brown” is a lurid picture of a crime ridden society. Its bleak worldview effectively illustrates the flip side of the Swingin’ London Caine came to personify in the 1960s. It’s a dark and menacing world where Len admits, “I’m scared all the time, Harry.” But all the atmosphere in the world wouldn’t be worth a hill of bangers and mash if you didn’t believe that an 80 year old man with an inhaler could effectively turn vigilante, take the law into his own hands and go all Dirty Harry on kids a fraction his age.
In a film ripe with nice performances—Mortimer is marvelous and Jack O’Connell is frightening as a young thug—Michael Caine shines, giving us a well rounded portrait of a man who is a trained killer—he was a marine—with a “certain set of skills” and as a defeated old man who has seen too much death and strife in his life.
He’s at his best when he plays the extremes—the heartbroken pensioner on one hand; the lethal killer who tosses off Tarantino-esque one liners like, “You failed to maintain your weapon, Son,” to a drug dealer whose gun jammed at the wrong moment, on the other—and it is his performance that humanizes the film’s often passionate pontificating on “Broken Britain.”
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.”
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.”
According to movieweb.com, 648 movies were released in 2010. Here are some of 2010’s releases you may have missed but are worth a look.
Scott Pilgirm vs. The World
Scott Pilgrim vs. The World stars Michael Cera as a 22-year-old Torontonian who must defeat his girlfriend’s Seven Evil Exes if he wants to be with her. It’s a wild ride that nails the pop culture zeitgeist but also tells a universal human story.
Cyrus
Cyrus is an odd movie. It’s about a lonely guy, the woman of his dreams … and her quirky son played by Jonah Hill. Not quite a comedy, not quite a drama, it falls somewhere in between. Just like real life.
Splice
In Splice, a creature goes from newborn to troubled teen in just a matter of weeks. Starring Sarah Polley and Adrien Brody, it’s giddy good fun; the rare sci-fi flick that revels in its B-movie roots while also offering up something to think about.
Harry Brown
Michael Caine has rarely been better than he is in Harry Brown, a gritty Teabag Western about an old man in the Elephant and Castle section of London who strikes back after a gang kills his best mate.
Flipped
Rob Reiner’s Flipped is coming-of-age Rashômon filtered through Leave it to Beaver with a dash of The Wonder Years thrown in for good measure. In other words, it’s a touching, but idiosyncratic film about growing up.
Get Low
Get Low, the unlikely story of a man arranging his own funeral, took on three hankie status as Robert Duvall played an old man looking back on his wasted life.
The Disappearance of Alice Creed
This kidnapping drama features three characters, three, maybe four sets and one hundred minutes of unrelenting tension. It’s a nasty little piece of work, remorselessly bleak but carefully crafted enough to be intriguing.
Winter’s Bone
Winter’s Bone should be seen not only for its uncompromising story of an Ozark girl who will do anything to keep her family together, but also for the breakout performance of its star, Jennifer Lawrence.
Defendor
In Defendor, Woody Harrelson plays a man whose rich inner life spills out into his real life. By day he’s dead-end-job-Arthur but at night he’s superhero Defendor. Gritty and funny, Harrelson breathes life into a role that could easily have fallen into cliché.
Marwencol
Marwencol, a documentary about a man with a severe brain injury who creates his own world as therapy is one of the funniest, most touching and inspirational films of the year.
