The Return of the Secaucus Seven sees a group of college friends come together 10 years after they were arrested on the way to a 1970 peace protest in Washington D.C.
In the 1979 film they reminisce about the good old days, flirt and establish the basic theme of all reunion movies: “What’s a little reunion without a little drama?”
This weekend Terrence Howard, Sanaa Lathan, Taye Diggs and Morris Chestnut are part of a core group of college friends who put that theory to the test in The Best Man Holiday. As IMDB says, expect “long-forgotten rivalries and romances to be ignited.”
The idea of seeing old friends and frenemies after a long break offers loads of opportunities for drama and comedy.
Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion played their high school 10th anniversary get together for laughs. The pair of friends big up their post Grade 12 adventures in an effort to intimidate their old friends.
“Well, I thought the whole point of going to the reunion was to impress people,” says Michele (Lisa Kudrow). “I mean, how am I gonna impress anybody by selling ban-lon smocks at Bargain Mart.”
National Lampoon’s Class Reunion takes a different comedic approach to the subject.
Mixing murder with nostalgia, it’s the story of Walter Baylor (Blackie Dammett, father of the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ singer Anthony Kiedis), an unhinged nerd seeking revenge during his 10th high school reunion as payback for a mean prank played on him during senior year.
“One more move and she gets a hole where she doesn’t need one,” says Walter.
Grosse Pointe Blank takes a more wistful approach to post school socials. John Cusack plays a mysterious graduate who has a life changing epiphany 10 years after graduation.
“You know,” he says, “when you started getting invited to your 10-year high school reunion, time is catching up.”
Complicating matters is his job. He’s a hit man.
“What am I gonna say? ‘I killed the president of Paraguay with a fork. How’ve you been?’”
He’s hired to bump off the father of his high school girlfriend for whom he still has feelings.
More somber is Young Adult, a Charlize Theron dramedy about Mavis Grey (Theron), a ghostwriter of novels for teens who accepts an invite for a baby shower from her high school ex-boyfriend, hoping that he will fall back in love with her during their reunion.
“Sometimes in order to heal,” Charlize Theron says, “A few people have to get hurt.”
On November 12th, in partnership with the School of Creative Industries at Ryerson University, Metro will hold a free reader event at the Ted Rogers School of Management, in support of TEMP, a very exciting Metro News initiative.
TEMP is a twenty part work of serialized fiction written by Douglas Coupland that began appearing in Metro on November 4th.
The evening will be hosted by Metro’s Reel Guys and In Focus columnist, Richard Crouse, and include discussion of the TEMP project, a reading of Temp by Douglas Coupland and a book signing.
We hope you can join us and look forward to a wonderful evening!
Playing Odin, the one-eyed king of Asgard and father to the main character in Thor: The Dark World, was a part time job for Oscar winner Anthony Hopkins.
“I was doing another movie at the same time, Red 2 with Bruce Willis,” he says. “So I didn’t know where I was. Sometimes, while I was waiting for the pick up I’d wonder what I was doing that morning. Today I’m with Bruce until 4 o’clock in the afternoon and then go do a little bit of Thor.”
Although he says Thor’s Marvel comic book roots “is a world that is alien to me” he relished the chance to play Odin for one simple reason. “I love acting,” he says.
“It’s interesting, you go from one actor in a different kind of movie to playing a god in another. I love it.
“People always ask me this, ‘What drew you to the part?’ I say, ‘Well, they offered it to me.’
“The generic answer is, I just like to work. I can’t analyze why a part is good or not. Dress me in the armor and cloak and it makes me look handsome, I guess. I hope.”
He adds the new film “feels different, in a good way,” from the original 2011 installment. “No better, no worse, just different. More earthbound because we filmed in England and the weather is always very dreary and grey there. That’s why I live in California.”
Synopsis: Each year on Nov. 11 we remember and celebrate “the men and women who have served, and continue to serve our country during times of war, conflict and peace.” Remembrance Day is a time to pay respect to the sacrifices brave soldiers have made for our country. In observation The Reel Guys have compiled a list of movies to serve as a backdrop on this solemn day.
Richard: Mark, the first war-themed film to really make an impression on me was The Best Years Of Our Lives. When I was a kid I watched it on television every November and although it’s almost 70 years old the story of servicemen struggling to rebuild their lives after the Second World War is still timely and relevant. Perhaps it feels so authentic because the crew were all Second World War veterans and the main character, who faces discrimination after losing both hands in combat, was played by real-life disabled vet Harold Russell.
Mark: Don’t know the movie, Richard. I grew up in a family of cowards and war movies were forbidden. And I don’t know who said it — probably not Snooki — that “all great war movies are anti-war movies.” That being said, I like the P.O.W. genre, with incarcerated soldiers plotting to get out. The Bridge On the River Kwai is one of the greatest, with a fine performance by Alec Guiness, but let’s also include The Great Escape with Steve McQueen, and a left-field choice, Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence starring David Bowie. Waaaay left-field, Richard, if you get my drift.
RC: War films come in all shapes and sizes. If P.O.W. movies are your thing check out The Hill, a little known British film that features one of Sean Connery’s best performances. Set during the Second World War in North Africa, it’s the story of a stockade run by Brits to punish deserters. Connery wedged it in between Goldfinger and Thunderball and it is a stark contrast to the work he was doing in the Bond films at the time. As for your second thought, which I suspect should be attributed to Steven Spielberg and not Snooki, two films pop to mind. Saving Private Ryan and the First World War drama All Quiet on the Western Front. Both are masterfully made films that show the brutal reality of war from the point of view of the soldiers.
MB: I’ve seen The Hill. It’s great. But the best anti-war movie might be Johnny Got His Gun, a minimalist squirmer told from the point of view of a blind, mute quadruple amputee. Fun times! And as far as soldiers on the ground, I would nominate Black Hawk Down, or Platoon, both of which put you right in the centre of a battle you may not be winning.
RC: We can’t talk about war films so close to Remembrance Day without paying tribute to Canadian soldiers on screen. Paul Gross’s Passchendaele is probably our best-known homegrown look at Canadians in battle but Hollywood has never shied away from depicting fighting Canadians. Canuck heroes are portrayed in the Devil’s Brigade, The Battle of Britain and Attack on the Iron Coast among many others.
MB: Yes, Canadians excel in battle. Canadians also excel at harbouring war resisters, but I’ve yet to see THAT movie.
In the first “Thor” movie Marvel superhero (Chris Hemsworth) and his magical hammer fell in love with Natalie Portman, argued with his father Odin, the one-eyed King of Asgard (Anthony Hopkins) and saved Earth from the super chill Frost Giants.
This time around he’s still in love with Portman (who plays astrophysicist Jane Foster) and fighting with pops but now he must not only save Earth but all Nine Realms from an ancient enemy.
Led by Malekith (Christopher Eccleston) these evil Dark Elves have a bone to pick with Odin. Thousands of years ago Odin’s father banished the Elves and seized their secret weapon, the Aether, a deadly WMD with the power to destroy the universe. Unable to extinguish the Aether the folks of Asgard bury it in a secret location “between the realms.”
Eons later Thor’s girlfriend Foster discovers the Aether in an abandoned warehouse in London, attracting the attention of the vengeful Malekith and his army of angry Elves.
You know what comes next. Hammer time! Thor makes a deal with his untrustworthy (but undeniably compelling) brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston) and hatches an elaborate plan to save Jane, defeat the Dark Elves and save the universe from the Aether.
“Thor: the Dark World” is a much better movie than 2011’s “Thor.” The love story that bogged down the middle of the first movie is replaced with more double crosses, vengeance and daddy issues into its two hours than any three Norse myths.
There’s a lot going on, but “Game of Thrones” director Alan Taylor nimbly juggles the mythology and the action, peppering the movie with amusing cameos from Stan Lee and a certain other superhero and some light comedy.
It feels slightly generic, as though bits and pieces were cribbed from the Superhero Blockbuster Playbook, but redeems itself in the inevitable showdown between Thor and Malekith. It’s wildly entertaining as they zip to and fro through wormholes, literally punching one another into next week—or at least into a new dimension. It’s tighter and way more fun—check out Thor on the subway!—than the endless dustup that bogged down the last forty-five minutes of “Man of Steel.”
Hemsworth and Hiddleston, the film’s yin and yang, are charismatic and while they don’t do anything much different than they did in the first movie or in “The Avengers,” they both seem to really grasp the film’s semi-serious tone.
“It’s not that I don’t enjoy our little chats,” Loki says to Odin. “It’s just… that I don’t.” It’s a good line and Hiddleston delivers it with perfect timing, half villain, half comedian.
Unless you’re a comic book geek you might need a quick trip to https://marvel.wikia.com/Thor to make sense of the first twenty minutes of “Thor: The Dark World” but once the movie gets the exposition out of the way and gets into the gags and the action it hammers home the good stuff.
If “Kill Your Darlings” was a superhero movie it would be an origin story. Like “Batman Begins,” or “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” which detail the formative years of Bruce Wayne and James Howlett before they made their mark on the world, “Kill Your Darlings” looks at the lives of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs before they became the superheroes of the Beat Generation.
Set in 1944 the film follows Ginsberg (Daniel Radcliffe) through his rebellious years at Columbia College. “There’s more life in this paper, “ he says handing his work into a stuffy college professor (John Callum), “than in all the sonnets you’ve had us read this year.”
The shy wannabe poet falls in with a crowd of intellectuals—William Burroughs (Ben Foster), David Kammerer (Michael C. Hall), Jack Kerouac (Jack Huston) and Lucien Carr (Dane DeHaan)—whose ethos rubs against the grain of “square” societal norms. They experiment with drugs, booze, sexuality and their art, laying the groundwork for the Beats, (although that term didn’t come into use until 1948), a loose collective who valued free expression over the accepted communal and political systems of the West.
But all that came later. “Kill Your Darlings” is the groundwork; the opening of Ginsberg’s eyes. Thirteen years before he wrote “Howl,” one of the most famous and controversial American poems, he first explores his homosexuality through an attraction to Carr and opens his mind to new ideas.
It’s a slick, stylish movie that captures the excitement of the time through fast paced editing and lots of shots of Ginsberg furiously typing and smoking. That we’ve seen before in almost every period piece involving writers, but I’d have hoped for more revolutionary filmmaking in a movie about revolutionaries. (For that rent David Cronenberg’s “Naked Lunch.”)
Clichés aside director John Krokidas has good performances to work with.
As the manipulative, troublemaking Lucien, DeHaan is perfectly cast. He’s the engine that drives the movie, both thematically—“You were ordinary like every other freshman and I made you extraordinary,” he says to Ginsberg—as well as dramatically. His (SPOILER ALERT) arrest for the murder of his lover Kammerer, and the questions of personal responsibility it raises, takes over the last half hour of the film.
It is Ginsberg’s story, however, and Radcliffe sheds off any hint of Harry Potter to hand in a very good performance. He brings Ginsberg to youthful life, from nebbish to rebel to confident man who proclaims in the film’s final moment, “I am a poet.”
“Kill Your Darlings” makes a few missteps—the closing song by Bloc Party would make jazz fan Kerouac turn over in his grave—but allows the performances to bring the characters to vivid life.
This Palme d’Or winning French film may be one of the most frank depictions of sexual awakening to ever hit mainstream screens. It certainly is one of the longest. In three hours it establishes the attraction between Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulos), a high school student and artist Emma (Léa Seydoux). It is love at first sight, passionate and fiery, but will passion be enough to sustain the relationship? The film will provide some answers, but despite its length and beautiful raw performances from its leads, it is more content to voyeuristically detail the action than delve into the heart of the story.
Despite starring in two movies based on a Marvel hero Natalie Portman says, “I’ve never gotten in to comic books.”
This weekend she reprises the role of Jane Foster, scientist and love interest to the God of Thunder in the Thor: The Dark World.
Portman may not have spent time reading comics but she can understand the obsession fans have with Thor’s characters because she was once a fangirl herself.
“The one thing I ever got into like that is really dorky,” she says. “Until I was twelve or thirteen I was obsessed with the Babysitter’s Club, a series of books for girls. There was a new book every month and the day the book would come out I had to go to the bookstore and get it and read it on the way home.
“The writer’s name was Ann M. Martin and my friends and I would look in the phone book and call every Ann Martin trying to get her.
“One time she came to our bookstore and did a signing. The week before I wrote a packet about what her next book should be about, with drawings, and I waited in line for three hours and gave it to her and she was like, ‘OK weirdo.’”
Playing heroine Jane Foster is miles away from her Academy Award winning role in the dark psychological drama Black Swan. Portman admits she “never thought I’d get the chance” to act in a superhero movie, “which is why whenever they ask I say yes.”
Also appealing is the chance to work with Anthony Hopkins, who she describes as “a giant among actors.” She shares several scenes with the veteran actor and says she was “completely intimidated” by him.
“I kept messing up lines around him because I was so nervous but he was so sweet about it. He’d say, ‘That’s a really hard line to say.’”
Many of her scenes with Hopkins take place on Asgard, the celestial planetoid home to Thor and family, which raises the question, Do you believe there is life on other planets?
“That question makes me think of another movie. In Antz all the insects are around a campfire,” she says, laughing, “and they say, ‘Do you think there’s something bigger than us out there?’
“It totally feels like that. Of course there has to be something else out there. I don’t know what it is but it would be completely silly to think that we’re ‘it.’”
Thor: The Dark World opens in theatres, bringing with it Chris Hemsworth as the sledgehammer wielding superhero with his rippling muscles, crazy mythology and Dark Elves.
The Marvel comic series borrowed the character from Norse mythology, coopting the God Of Thunder’s most famous weapon, the Mjölnir. In myth the name translates to “that which smashes,” and refers to his hammer, a fearsome club capable of leveling mountains, causing lightning flashes and boomeranging back when he throws it.
“The power within Mjölnir,” he says, “doth rage like the winter storms bursting upon the shore in furious assault!”
According to Nordic legend the mallet was forged by dwarven brothers Sindri and Brokkr but Marvel embroidered the lore, adding to the story the fictional Asgardian metal uru as the main component of the basher and an inscription that reads, “Whosoever holds this hammer, if he be worthy, shall possess the power of Thor.”
The image of Thor flying through the air, propelled by Mjölnir, is the iconic picture from the comics and movies, but not from mythology.
According to legend Thor’s preferred mode of transport was a chariot drawn by two 1700-pound warrior goats named Toothgnasher and Toothgrinder. But they didn’t just provide transport, they also frequently provided dinner as well—literally.
After a long day of battle a tired Thor would be too tired to hunt for food, so he’d kill and eat the goats. When he was done, he’d carefully wrap the bones in their pelts, wave Mjölnir over the bloody mess, and before you could say “By the Hammer of Thor!” the goats would come back to life, ready for more adventures.
In the comics Thor has unlimited power when it comes to controlling the mighty hammer, unlike in mythology where he often used a magical belt called a Megingjörð and iron gloves to give him the strength to employ Mjölnir to its full effect.
The hammer has also had an influence outside of the movies, mythology and comics. The sci fi show Stargate SG-1 used the Mjölnir as a plot device, The Thor’s Hammer Organization are the bad guys of the Silent Storm video game series and the dramatic lyrics “And out of the forge of dwarfs, To hold in your hand now, And for evermore, I give you the Hammer of Thor,” came from the Viking folk rock band Týr.
The Return of the Secaucus Seven sees a group of college friends come together 10 years after they were arrested on the way to a 1970 peace protest in Washington D.C.
