The Grand Seduction premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last September, but the movie’s star was more concerned about an audience a little east of there.
“I felt they would let us know if they didn’t like it,” says Brendan Gleeson.
The film is set in a small Newfoundland harbour named Tickle Head where the town fathers have a bid on a petrochemical byproduct repurposing plant that makes … well, it doesn’t matter, as they say in the movie, it makes jobs.
One key element that’s missing, however, is a local doctor.
When Paul Lewis (Taylor Kitsch), a city slicker plastic surgeon, lands in the harbour for a month-long residency, the entire place (population: 121) bands together to convince him to stay — by any means necessary.
“I really wanted to be at the premier in St. John’s,” said Gleeson, who is best known as Alastor ‘Mad-Eye’ Moody in the Harry Potter series, “because to me, if the movie worked there, I could let it go.
“That’s all I cared about, really. It needed to have the imprimatur of the Newfoundlanders on it for me. Their reaction was quiet until they felt the reassurance that it was OK, that they could trust it a little bit more.”
The production spent seven weeks shooting on The Rock.
“The land and the sea in Newfoundland has a way of worming itself into your heart where you don’t feel quite complete without it,” said Gleeson.
Co-star Kitsch concurs. “It’s a very simple (way of life),” he says, “and obviously the pace is a lot slower, but once you get into that, you don’t want to leave it.
“They are very in the moment when you’re talking to them.
“You feel like they are incredibly genuine and grounded and there’s no ulterior motive,” he said. “Maybe I’m a bit jaded because of the business, but it is refreshing. It is kind of what it means to be a Canadian.”
Kitsch spent his off hours training for Lone Survivor, a Mark Wahlberg war film he shot immediately after wrapping on The Grand Seduction but he took some time to enjoy a great Newfoundland pastime — fishing.
“My best friend is an avid fisherman,” he says, “so he’d be figuring out what was going on with the moon and what the best tide is and when we should go and would get genuinely upset if we weren’t there at exactly 6:12 a.m. dropping lures into the water.”
The Kelowna, B.C.-born Kitsch is an in-demand actor these days and can currently be seen in the HBO movie The Normal Heart, but says he’d love to do more work in Canada. “I absolutely loved being in Canada,” he says, “working on home soil with a bunch of Canadians. “If the opportunity presents itself and it’s right, I’m in.”
Be sure to listen in to Entertainment Extra on Saturday afternoon from 4 to 5 pm on NewsTalk 1010 in Toronto and worldwide on the web! This week Teddy Wilson from InnerSpace, The Grand Seduction director Don McKellar and Teri Hart and Richard discuss many earth shatteringly important things.
“X-Men: Days of Future Past” offers up two for the price of one.
Merging the young versions of Magneto and Professor X with their older counterparts is a cool idea, and certainly gives the movie a boost in the marquee department, but I felt the old timers were left with their own heightened sense of drama and not much else. It seems a shame to have McKellen and Stewart, the Martin and Lewis of mutants, on screen together and not give them much to do.
Based on a 1981 two-issue special of the X-Men comic series the new film begins in a post-apocalyptic future. “A dark and desolate world,” according to the narration. “A world of war, suffering and loss on both sides—mutants and the humans who tried to help them.”
The causing all the trouble are indestructible robot warriors called Sentinels. Able to adapt to any mutant power they’ve created chaos for the mutant race, bringing them to the edge of extinction.
In an effort to “change their fate” long time enemies Professor X (Patrick Stewart) and Magneto (Ian McKellen) team up with Storm (Halle Berry), Blink (Fan Bingbing), Bishop (Omar Sy) and use Kitty Pryde’s (Ellen Page) teleportation ability to send Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) back in time to change history and prevent the creation of the murderous automations. His first task is to convince the 1973 versions of Magneto (Michael Fassbender) and young Professor X (James McAvoy) that they are stronger together than apart.
The only things larger than the movie’s lengthy list of stars are the big ideas contained within. Wrapped around a simple time travel story—the kind of thing “Family Guy” does once or twice a season—are timeless ideas about racism, tolerance, war and rebellion. Not usually the stuff of summer blockbusters, but the X-Men franchise has always been a bit brainier than most. At times it’s a bit too ponderous, but I’ll take that over the flash-and-trash of most CGI epics.
Not that it’s a total head trip. It’s a movie about time travel, mutants and serious actors like Michael Fassbender saying lines like, “We received a message from the future,” so, of course, it’s a little preposterous. That’s part of the fun. It plays with the conventions of big time summer entertainment—check out the spectacular time-shredding sequence featuring the lightening-fast mutant Quicksilver (Evan Peters) that’s both eye-popping and cheeky—but tempers the bombastic stuff with thought provoking notions.
In fact, it could be argued that the ideas are the stars of the film. Jennifer Lawrence is the a-listiest actress in Hollywood right now, but in her second outing as Mystique she almost gets cut adrift in a sea of characters. Ditto Peter Dinklage as the closest thing the film has to a villain.
They’re all good, but Magneto, Professor and Wolverine are complex, cool characters that bring the film’s themes to life; all the rest is set dressing, except for the Quicksilver scene. That was like The Matrix without Keanu’s hangdog expression.
“Blended” reunites “cinematic soul mates” Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore. Of course, this is a romantic comedy, so even though they hate one another in the first couple of reels, they end up thrown together on an exotic vacation to Africa. From the first time they mention the journey you know it is just a matter of time until they put their acrimonious feelings aside and someone says, “It’s great we came on this trip.”
So how do Sandler and Co. spice up a predictable story? Easy, they add a dash of “The Brady Bunch,” some beautiful scenery and an all monkey show band.
Sandler is Jim, a widower with three girls (Bella Thorne, Emma Fuhrmann and Alyvia Alyn Lind) who manages a sporting goods store when he’s not missing his late wife. He’s a guy’s guy who named one of his daughters after his favorite network, ESPN.
Barrymore is Lauren, a single mom with two rambunctious boys (Braxton Beckham and Kyle Red Silverstein) who miss their deadbeat dad (Joel McHale). She’s the buttoned-down owner of a closet reorganization company called Closet Queens.
A blind date brings them together but is so disastrous it almost keeps them apart forever. That is until circumstances conspire—it’s too “meet cute” to detail here—to place them both at a ritzy African resort for a Blended Family retreat.
“Is this a sick dream?” Jim says when he first sees Lauren. “What is happening here?”
“We’re here for the zero romance package,” she informs anyone who’ll listen.
Feelings of disgust and hate between the two melt away as their kids do cute things and they learn not to rely on first impressions.
“Blended” is one of Sandler’s sweet family comedies. Well, it’s as sweet as a comedy with Tampax gags can be, but it is a step up from the gross out tone of “Jack and Jill” and “That’s My Boy.”
A small step up, but a step nonetheless.
It’s a heartfelt dose of humor with slightly less vulgarity than Sandler’s recent movies. Add in a few wide-eyed kids with mommy and daddy issues and you have a slightly off-kilter version of “With Six You Get Egg Roll” filtered through Sandler’s juvenile sensibility. He’s a bigger kid than the children in the film and never met a bathroom joke he didn’t like, but he has good chemistry with Barrymore and “Wedding Singer” fans—I’m still trying to expel “50 First Dates” out of my memory—will enjoy seeing them reunited.
The usual Sandler crowed also appears. Shaquille O’Neal brings some awkward charm to lines like, “When she gets flappin’, things happen,” and Kevin Nealon does some enjoyable double-speak, but the scene stealer here is Terry Crews as the leader of a singing group who acts as the Greek Chorus at the resort. His performance lends new meaning to the term over-the-top, but his brand of unbridled silliness is an antidote to the sentimentality the movie occasionally finds itself moving toward.
Sandler has been hit-and-miss lately—mostly missing with big laugh-free comedies—but the goodwill he and Barrymore bring to “Blended” puts it a notch above his recent work. Although much of the humor is Sandler boilerplate stuff but a musical montage when Sandler realizes his daughter isn’t just a tomboy anymore is funny and worth a look.
It would be easy to mistake “Fading Gigolo” for a Woody Allen film. First there’s the obvious stuff—it’s set in New York, has a jazz score, younger women flirt with older men and, of course, Woody is in the center of it all cracking wise.
But it’s not a Woody Allen film. It was written and directed by John Turturro, who is a formidably talented actor but as a director, suffers in comparison to his co-star and obvious inspiration.
Allen is Murray Schwartz, a New York bookseller—he sells “rare books for rare people”—is forced to close his store and let his single employee Fioravante (Turturro) go. Fioravante is a soulful jack-of-all trades, but master of none until he embarks in a new gig that suits him to a tee—gigolo. Murray becomes an unlikely pimp, setting Fioravante up with older, bored rich women (Sharon Stone and Sofía Vergara) who become smitten with his puppy dog eyes and sweltering sensuality. Trouble is, although his bank account is full, Fioravante finds the job personally unfulfilling. That changes when he falls for Avigal (Vanessa Paradis), the demure widow of a rabbi.
“Fading Gigolo” attempts to find the balance of humour, pathos and romance that seems to come so easily to Allen, but is more “The Curse of the Jade Scorpion” than “Annie Hall.” From the sexual shenanigans of the gigolo scenes to the more repressed romance of the Avigal storyline, the muddled story fails to generate any real heat. Add to that a subplot involving Liev Schreiber as a neighborhood ranger with feelings for the widow who reports Murray for breaking Jewish law and you have enough stories for two movies crammed into one.
Performance wise, Turturro is so stoic it’s as if he’s planning the next shot in his head while also trying to act in the film, but Stone, Vergara, Paradis and Schreiber each have a moment to shine. Stone, playing a doctor with a philandering husband, becomes more than a stereotype as she quietly cries, from trepidation and nervousness the first time Fioravante stops by to ply his trade. It’s a revealing moment in a movie that could have used a few more of them.
Since this is a de facto Woody Allen movie it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Allen walks away with the whole thing. There is a thrill that goes along when he describes Fioravante as “disgusting, but in a very positive way.” It’s a Woody-ism that provides a whiff of nostalgia that makes the audience long for the good Woody Allen movies, not imitations like this one.
Richard will be in Liverpool, Nova Scotia to host the 112 year-old Astor Theatre’s celebration of its new digital projector, for an evening titled Setting the Stage for the Digital Age.
He grew up just a few minutes walk from the theatre, and has fond memories of taking in matinees, sneaking out of the house to see movies during the week and being in the theatre practically every weekend.
Watch Richard’s interview with CTV’s Morning Live host Heidi Petracek HERE!
Richard hosted a screening of Academy Award winner Roger Christian’s “lost” movie “Black Angel” at the Royal Theatre in Toronto in May, 2014. They discussed the film, the creation of R2D2 and the light sabres and Roger’s intimate connection with the “Star Wars” universe.
Check out the film at iTunes. Here’s some info: The mythological drama follows a Knight returning from the wars to find his land destroyed and his family dead from a great sickness. Returning to the wars with nothing to live for, he falls into a river and is dragged down by the weight of his armour. At the last breath, he manages to pull off his armoured helmet. Swimming to the surface he ascends into a strange land where he meets a maiden bound to the Black Angel. He vows to save her and fulfil his Knights quest to rescue a maiden. In a fight to the death he confronts the Black Angel, a mysterious figure, an angel of death. Especially commissioned by George Lucas to accompany STAR WARS; THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK on its world release wherever a short film was programmed. The 25min medieval fantasy was written and directed by Roger Christian.
“It’s the thing that won’t go away,” says journalist-turned-screenwriter-turned-playwright Thomas Hedley Jr. of his most famous work, Flashdance.
Sitting at the grand Ed Mirvish Theatre on Yonge Street, just blocks away from the strip bars that inspired him to write the original story, he talks about bringing Flashdance to the stage.
“If you are going to do this for the stage, you have to play by the rules of the stage,” he says.
“You need a great love story and the singing and the dancing has to advance the story and you are locked into those techniques. It’s happening in front of your eyes. It’s not three or four body doubles. It’s more honest. That makes it play stronger.”
In 1983, Flashdance was a phenomenon. The story of a welder-by-day, exotic-dancer-by-night Alex Owens (Jennifer Beals) and her dreams of going to ballet school, made off-the-shoulder sweatshirts fashionable and became the number one R-rated movie of the year.
“It was a zeitgeist thing,” he says. “It just clicked.”
Hedley conceived the story years before at a bar called Gimlets in downtown Toronto.
“My friend Robert Markle taught painting at the New School. Like de Kooning, he wanted to have movement in all of his nude studies, so he found this place and these girls were doing it. He said, ‘You gotta come. It’s my Sistine Chapel but you have to behave. I don’t want jerky behaviour.’ I went there and watched him draw them. We were very avuncular. We weren’t like guys on the make or anything. We were the genteel, older men in the back. We got to know (the girls) very well. I’m always drawn to girls 18 to 20 who want to make something dramatic out of themselves and need to be an outlaw before they go off and marry the plumber. There is an enormous energy from those creatures and they were like that.”
The story’s provocative origins grabbed Hollywood’s attention but didn’t guarantee that the story would get turned into a film.
“It was not on the track to being made,” says Hedley, “and then a couple of movies fell out at Paramount and they had a big meeting and said, ‘What do we have?’ (Frank) Mancuso, who was the head of marketing, said, ‘I could sell this one, with the naked girls. Let’s do that one.’ It was lucky that it got made at all. It was a random thing.”
The new stage musical, lands at Ed Mirvish Theatre (formerly The Canon) on May 27, 30 years after the movie was released. It features all the songs from the film — hits like Flashdance What a Feeling, Maniac and Gloria — alongside new songs by Canadian composer Robbie Roth.
It’s a labour of love that has kept Hedley busy for almost 10 years.
“It’s like Sammy Davis, Jr. singing Candy Man,” he says. “If I were him, I’d never want to sing Candy Man but you have to stick with it because it has its own life.”
Richard hosted a screening of the lost fantasy epic “Black Angel” with Academy Award winner Roger Christian at The Royal Theatre (608 College Street) in Toronto on Tuesday May 20, 2014 at 7 pm.
From the royal.to: AT LAST! THE LOST FANTASY EPIC THAT ONCE PRECEDED THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK!
Sir Maddox, a medieval knight, returns from the Crusades to find his home rife with sickness and his family gone. As he journeys through this mystical realm he encounters a mysterious and beautiful maiden, who appears to him as he is drowning. Sir Maddox learns that the maiden is being held prisoner by a black knight and in order to free her must confront her captor, the Black Angel.
Black Angel was a 1980 short film that was shown before the theatrical release of Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back in certain locales. It was the directorial debut of Star Wars art director Roger Christian and was thought to be lost until the film was rediscovered in December 2011. Witness the return of this extraordinary fantasy film to the big screen, in the company of its director and on a newly minted and restored digital print!
By Richard Crouse – Metro Canada
