“IwishI had red hair.” – Richard Crouse, film historian, author
Known for his revealing and controversial feature length docs on media moguls, director Barry Avrich embarks on a new direction with Red Alert, a 9 minute short inspired by his daughter Sloan, that will have its World Premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF14) in the Discovery program.
In Red Alert, Sloan, a 10 yr old redhead, is distraught when she discovers on the internet that red hair will be extinct within one hundred years. She sets out to make a documentary on the subject and debunk the myth so she and her fellow gingers can relax with the assurance that their legacy is not under threat.
Red Alert is the first film collaboration by father, daughter team Barry Avrich and Sloan Avrich. One day while working in his home office Sloan asked him why he always made films about subjects she either didn’t know (Lew Wasserman, Bob Guccione) or wasn’t interested in (Harvey Weinstein, Garth Drabinsky). Barry challenged her to come up with her own ideas of what she’d like to see and proposed that they make a film together. Sloan had recently run across an article online stating that redheads would be extinct in 100 years , and, rather alarmed, she decided she had to get to the bottom of the matter to see if it was really true.
Thus Red Alert was born. Sloan began researching the subject, unearthing footage and online articles about Kick A Ginger Day, an anti-ginger episode from South Park and a 2007 NBC The Today Show interview with Steve Warrington redhead activist and founder of online community https://www.redhedd.com. Along the way Sloan finds arguments for and against the future of red hair and learns to not believe everything you read on the internet.
Sloan also researched, selected, recruited and prepared interviews with experts including film historian and critic Richard Crouse, who reveals how redheaded stars like Lana Turner and Myrna Loy became even more famous during the transition from black & white to colour film when their glamorous locks registered with audiences. Geneticist Amro Zayed explains the science behind red hair, and celebrity hair stylist Daniel Fiori, model Lucy Liberatore and fellow gingers give their best tips for redheads.
“Red Alert” is a World Premiere in Discovery at Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) 2014
There are things about Daniel Radcliffe that you probably already know.
Thanks to the Harry Potter series he’s one of the most recognizable actors on earth. He is 5’5” tall, a published poet and is the youngest person, other than royalty, to be honoured with a portrait in the National Portrait Gallery.
Here’s what you don’t know. He’s also remarkably reliable. In 10 years of shooting the Potter pictures, he only missed two days — and he’s polite.
For this interview he turned up early (when was the last time an international superstar was on time?) and greets your reporter with a hearty, “What a lovely surprise.”
He offers to help with my crossword — “I’m one of those people in life who probably really annoys serious crossword doers. I’m one of those people who comes up behind and goes, ‘That one you’re about to get? I’ve got it’” — and apologizes when he almost lets a curse slip.
He is not your typical superstar and his new romance, The F Word, is not a typical rom-com.
The 25-year-old actor says the story of a young man hopelessly in love with his best friend (Zoe Kazan) “has things a lot of films want, that combination of being sarcastic and quick and funny without being negative or cynical.”
“Zoe says a great thing,” he says of co-star Kazan.
“She talks about how in most romantic comedies the people meet and then there’s a getting-to-know-you montage, then they do whatever they’re going to do for the rest of the film. Our movie is basically that montage expanded to feature length, and that is what is so joyous about it. Those moments when you are getting to know someone and flirting with them, making them laugh, are so intimate and so exciting and so charged that as an audience it is wonderful to be allowed in to watch that and live through it again.”
Playing the lovesick romantic lead is something different for Radcliffe, who says he wants “to try my hand at as many things as possible.”
Since the final Potter film in 2011, he has appeared in everything from the beatnik drama Kill Your Darlings to the fantasy film Horns and will soon be seen as Igor in a new version of Frankenstein.
“Having played one character for a very long time,” he says, “that builds up in you a desire to play a number of different characters and do as much different work as you can. I want to show as many different sides of my ability as I can. Also I like that you can’t predict what my next thing is going to be.”
Seventeen-year-old Chloë Grace Moretz has 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. The weakest character, but also the strongest character, I’ve played is Carrie. She is two different characters in one, so diverse and so dark. There is so much to learn from her.”
In her new film If I Stay, she 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.
The character appealed to her because she saw some of herself in Mia.
“She’s an introvert until she plays the cello and the cello brings her alive. It’s how I am. I’m pretty shy, unless I’m speaking about my job. I’m really shy around teenagers my age. Sometimes it’s because they judge me and it kind of scares me. Crowds scare me, teenagers scare me, new people. I get really quiet and awkward.”
With that insight, she hoped to make Mia true to the character created by author Gayle Forman in the bestselling book that inspired the movie.
“My biggest thing was making her honest to the book,” she says.
“I have been a fan of book series, and then I’ll see the movie and think, ‘That was such a let-down.’ I hate that feeling because for me, I want to be able to be a fan of my own work.”
The movie is a tear jerker, but Moretz says she doesn’t like it “when people chalk up a movie to being all about crying. I like to walk out of a movie feeling like I have learned something, that something’s changed.”
After seeing If I Stay, she hopes audiences “leave feeling they felt something. It is a really beautiful movie about life and death and happiness and sadness and music.
“It is a beautiful story — a moment in time that doesn’t really have any boundaries.”
More people die in the first five minutes “The Expendables 3” movie than in any other two war movies combined. There is death by bullet, bazooka and bomb. It’s a wild but oddly bloodless beginning to the movie. Perhaps its because they have scaled back the rating to PG1the from the hard Rs the last two Expendables enjoyed, but removing most of the over-the-top violence leaves an absence of the over-the-top fun of the originals. Why arm Stallone and Company up the wazoo and then skimp on the fake blood and faux carnage?
A mission to stop a shipment of bombs brings grizzled mercenaries Barney Ross (Sylvester Stallone), Lee Christmas (Jason Statham), Gunner (Dolph Lundgren), Toll Road (Randy Couture) and Caesar (Terry Crews) face to face with their toughest adversary yet, arms dealer Conrad Stonebanks (Mel Gibson). Determined to bring down Stonebanks, Ross retires the oldtimers—“We aren’t the future anymore,” says Ross, “we’re part of the past.”— and recruits a fresh group of soldiers—Kellan Lutz, Ronda Rousey, Victor Ortiz and Glen Powell—but just may find that his old dogs have some new tricks.
“Great plan,” says Luna (MMA fighter Rousey) of Ross’s old-fashioned bulldozer approach to mercenary work, “if it was 1985,” and this might have been a great movie if it was 1985. Despite the lack of overly gratuitous blood and guts, it feels like one of those direct-to-video action movies from the Reagan years. With no sense of nuance and clichés aplenty, it ploughs ahead, relentlessly reveling in its own stupidity. Kind of the like everything, but especially the action movies, in the 1980s.
But for much of the movie, that’s OK. How could you not love Wesley Snipes saying that his character was put in jail for tax evasion? It’s art imitating life! Or something.
Most of the other performances aren’t so much performances as they are action star posturing. Kelsey Grammar, as a recruiter for a new batch of Expendables, stands out because he does some actual acting. So do many of the obvious stunt doubles. The rest are all bulked-up chunks of machismo floating in a sea of testosterone.
Still, as an old-school action movie, it works well enough, despite the lack of gallons of fake plasma. I liked the attempts of creating new catchphrases—which are a must in these kinds of films—like Crews yelling, “It’s time to mow the lawn,” before spraying thousands of bullets into a dock packed with baddies. Also, the action scenes are shot clearly and effectively, and unlike last week’s “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,” you can actually see who is shooting-punching-blowing up-kicking-garroting-etc who. It makes it easier to cheer for the good guys when you can tell who the bad guys are.
These days many speculative fiction films are set in dystopian cities, places ravaged by war, famine or man’s stupidity. “The Giver” goes a different way, setting the action in a utopian society where everyone is equal and no one, except for a young man named Jonas (Brenton Thwaites), questions anything.
Based on Lois Lowry’s young adult novel of the same name, “The Giver” is set in an ascetic world divided into climate-controlled communities. Climate isn’t the only thing that is tightly controlled, however. A strict set of simple rules—like “Use precise language” and “never tell a lie”—keep people in line but to make sure the citizens conform, they’re given a morning injection—the Prozac of the nation.
The docile population lives a colorless existence, where their every move is monitored and all choice has been removed because, as the Chief Elder (Meryl Streep) says, “When people have the right to choose they choose wrong every single time.”
When Jonas is chosen to be the Receiver of Memory, the recipient and keeper of all mankind’s darkest secrets and memories, he begins to realize that the world was not always monochrome, that it was once a colourful place where love—“ a word so antiquated it no longer has meaning”—and pain existed side by side with war, peace and all the other messy stuff that make humans human.
“The Giver” is George Orwell Lite, willy-nilly lifting from not only “1984,” but Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451” and a host of young adult novels. It’s an unholy combination of dystopian themes and tropes, banged together to create a convincing, if somewhat dull world.
Shot in austere black and white, the highly controlled community is like 1950s America on film, structured, monotone in race and idealized. The conformity on display is chilling, at least the idea of it is. The film is too restrained to show us the detrimental effects of the grinding monotony of living in a place where sameness is valued above all. We’re told that the memories of the past are agonizing, “Sometimes the pain of the memories is too much,” says The Giver (Jeff Bridges)—but the flashbacks to the wild, untamed life that came before the enforced conformity aren’t as revealing as they’re meant to be. Colorful stock footage shots of people dancing, animal cruelty and other slices of life are meant to shine a light on the human condition but are, for the most part, no more provocative than anything we see on the nightly news.
They are jarring, like a screaming barker commercial for Monster Trucks interrupting an episode of “Masterpiece Theatre,” but only because they’re such a break in tone from the rest of the film. These visions may rock Jonas’s world, but they don’t make much of an impression on ours.
Also not making much of an impression is Meryl Streep in a generic villainess role. The cast’s other Oscar winner, Jeff Bridges is in full-on old codger mode, reviving his gruff voice for “True Grit” and bringing some humanity to a movie that should be teeming with it, but isn’t.
The remaining cast, even the leads, Thwaites as the young man who longs for something more in life and Odeya Rush, his love interest who has a harder time imagining a world without bland orthodoxy, aren’t given enough to do to make us root for them. Ditto supporting actors Alexander Skarsgård and Katie Holmes.
“The Giver” is a small movie with big ideas about individual freedoms, memory, traditions and customs. Important themes one and all, but they’re wrapped in a movie that does not do them justice.
Four years ago a restaurant tour by two British comedians resulted in one of the most charming films of 2010. “The Trip” was an improvised journey not just through Northern England’s culinary scene but through the psyches of Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon as they comment on life, usually while doing spot-on Michael Caine impressions.
The Michael “You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!” Caine impressions are back in full force in “The Trip to Italy,” as are the laughs and the self-aware conversations.
This time around Coogan and Brydon rent a Mini Cooper and retrace the steps of the Byron and the other Romantic poets’ grand tour of Italy set to the music of Alanis Morissette’s “Jagged Little Pill.” They eat, banter and take in the view from Liguria to Capri. Between a hysterical re-imagining of the dialogue from “The Dark Knight Rises”—“I can Hardy understand what Tom’s saying.”—and a one-sided conversation with a preserved corpse in Pompeii, is a study on everything from fatherhood to fame to faithfulness.
Director Michael Winterbottom luxuriates in the chemistry between the two men. They are naturals, an intellectual version of The Two Ronnies, who riff on everything from pop culture hot buttons like Batman and pop music to the carnal exploits of Lord Byron. Their interplay is the key to keeping the rambling narrative on track and it is enough. They are the film’s glue and the sheer joy of watching them spar prevents the film from dipping into self-indulgence. That, and the gorgeous scenery.
“The Trip to Italy” is a riotous comedy that finds time for self-reflection, Roger Moore impressions and the timeless Alanis Morissette vs Avril Lavigne debate and it is intimate and infectious.
The old saying, “clothes make the man,” has been altered slightly for a new comedy starring “New Girl’s” alum Damon Wayons Jr. and Jake Johnson. The pair play friends Justin and Ryan, thirty-somethings trying unsuccessfully to make a go of it in Los Angeles.
A masquerade party changes everything for them. Suited up as policemen they soon realize that people treat them differently when they wear the badge. Walking down Sunset Strip they discover that women really do love a man in uniform and for the first time since they moved to California from small town Ohio, they aren’t invisible.
On a lark they use their fake badges to break up an actual crime, a shakedown by a gang on a small restaurant. The bad guys flee, and bolstered by his first bust Ryan embraces the charade, buying a cop car on eBay, sewing sergeant’s patches on his uniform and going on out real life police calls. Justin wants to hang up the uniform before the situation gets out of control, but Ryan is determined to bring down the leader of the shakedown gang, a violent thug named Mossi (James D’Arcy). When things get out of control Justin calls Officer Segars (Rob Riggle). “It started off as fun,” he says, “but now we need help from real cops.”
“Let’s Be Cops” isn’t really a police story, nor is it, by the ratio of minutes-to-laughs, really a comedy. It falls somewhere in between. It’s actually about self-worth, power, respect and getting in over your head with a bit of satire thrown in. The leads have great chemistry and Riggle is always worth a look, but as buddy-buddy as the characters are, it isn’t as funny as “21 Jump Street.”
The high energy screwball tone of the first hour makes way for a low-rent looking “Bad Boys” homage in the final half-hour, becoming the very kind of movie it attempted to satirize in the first place.
SYNOPSIS: The tough-as-nails Expendables are back. A mission to stop a shipment of bombs brings grizzled mercenaries Barney Ross (Sylvester Stallone), Lee Christmas (Jason Statham), Gunner (Dolph Lundgren), Toll Road (Randy Couture) and Caesar (Terry Crews) face to face with their toughest adversary yet, arms dealer Conrad Stonebanks (Mel Gibson). Determined to bring down Stonebanks, Ross retires the oldtimers and recruits a fresh group of soldiers—Kellan Lutz, Ronda Rousey, Victor Ortiz and Glen Powell—but just may find that his old dogs have some new tricks.
STAR RATING:
Richard: 3 Stars
Mark: 2 Stars
Richard: Mark, more people die in the first five minutes of this movie than in any other two war movies combined. There is death by bullet, bazooka and bomb. It’s a wild but oddly bloodless beginning to the movie. Perhaps its because they have scaled back the rating to PG13 from the hard Rs the last two Expendables enjoyed, but removing most of the over-the-top violence leaves an absence of the over-the-top fun of the originals. Why arm Stallone and Company up the wazoo and then skimp on the fake blood and faux carnage?
Mark: I kind of liked the first two but this installment felt…expendable. All the young guns recruited are interchangeable and even the old guys are pretty boring. Schwarzenegger exuded more danger as a governor of a state with18% inflation, Dolph Lundgren looks like a Dutch drag act and only Mel Gibson registers as a crazed billionaire bad guy, a role he ‘s been rehearsing for years.
RC: How could you not love Wesley Snipes saying that his character was put in jail for tax evasion? It’s art imitating life! Or something. I thought that most of the performances weren’t so much performances as they were action star posturing. Kelsey Grammar, as a recruiter for the new batch of Expendables, stands out because he does some actual acting. So do many of the obvious stunt doubles. The rest are bulked-up chunks of machismo floating in a sea of testosterone.
MB: Wesley snipes and his tax joke did make me smile but then he disappears from the story until the end. There are just too many characters to follow: even the poster is in widescreen. The movie felt like an abattoir populated by frisky sides of beef.
RC: Still, as an old-school action movie, it works well enough, despite the lack of gallons of fake plasma. I liked the attempts of creating new catchphrases—which are a must in these kinds of films—like Crews yelling, “It’s time to mow the lawn,” before spraying thousands of bullets into a dock packed with baddies. Also, the action scenes are shot clearly and effectively, and unlike last week’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, you can actually see who is shooting-punching-blowing up-kicking-garroting-etc who. It makes it easier to cheer for the good guys when you can tell who the bad guys are.
MB. Even with a high body count there’s this little thing called plot that I demand. I’m still waiting.
