Posts Tagged ‘Rick Yancey’

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

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

Watch the whole thing HERE!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are her top three career defining roles:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is a hodge podge of ideas and genres.

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

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