Mr. Holmes” stars Sir Ian McKellen as the world’s most famous detective, Sherlock Holmes, but the game that’s afoot isn’t so much a mystery as it is a revelation. “It is my business to know what other people don’t know,” Holmes said in “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle.” Here, he discovers something many people know, but was unknown to him.
Set in May, 1947 Holmes is a lion in winter. The once great detective is 93 years old, retired for many decades after a case went awry and drove him out of the business. He’s in self imposed exile, living in the country far from 221B Baker Street, accompanied only by his stern housekeeper Mrs. Munro (Laura Linney) and her young son Roger (Milo Parker).
As his memory fades he tries to piece together the true story of his last case, not the embellished version made popular by his former associate Dr. John Watson. “I told Watson if I ever write a story myself it will be correct the million misconceptions created by his writing.”
Told in flashbacks between the present and a recent trip to Japan—to collect some Prickly Ash, a rumoured remedy for senility—coupled with the fragmented memories of his last case in 1919, Holmes comes to the startling realization that human nature is not a mystery that logic alone can unravel.
There are no hounds, very few deerstalker hats and his signature pipe is nowhere to be seen. Arthur Conan Doyle’s character, the way we’re used to seeing him, is gone save for a glint in McKellen’s eye. “Mr. Holmes” is a contemplative movie about aging, friendship and human frailty.
As the title would suggest, this is a character study and McKellen makes the most of the opportunity to play the man at various times in his life. From the sharp edged Holmes in the flashbacks to the diminished detective in Japan to the reflective, frustrated and struggling man in later years, he fits them together like pieces of a jigsaw to form a whole. It’s a tour de force performance—actually three—that provides the fireworks in what is otherwise a deliberately paced story.
Director Bill Condon, reteaming with McKellen for a second time after “Gods and Monsters,” once again presents a radically rethought story of a man’s life. While a bit more drama would have been welcome, there is not mystery why the reflective nature of the material and McKellen’s graceful work are so appealing.
Read about the documentary series “Reelside” at Dork Shelf!
“I think that the series is really beautiful, if you look at them all together, which you’ll be able to do once they’ve all had their first run on TMN, you’ll see as you go though VOD and see them all together just how beautifully they fit together.” says Crouse, “I like to think of them like Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown, they all look a little different, they all have a slightly different point of view, but they feel like a series. That was the important thing to all of us.”
The new Hugh Jackman movie could have been called Wolverine Goes to Ethiopia.
Instead, the documentary of Jackman’s trip to the African country to raise awareness about the benefits of fair trade coffee and ethical consumption is called Dukale’s Dream and debuted on iTunes yesterday.
The story began six years ago when Jackman and his wife Deborra-Lee Furness teamed with World Vision as ambassadors. On their first trip to Ethiopia they met a coffee farmer named Dukale, a man who would inspire them personally and professionally.
“When we met Dukale there was definitely a sense that he and Hugh had a great and immediate connection,” says the film’s director Josh Rothstein.
“There is just something about his personality and Hugh’s personality. By default they both lead with smiles and warmth. There is something amazing about watching these two people from such different cultures just having this immediate connection. They both got a kick out of each other.”
The connection made with this Ethiopian farmer deepened Jackman’s commitment to using his fame to raise awareness for fair trade coffee. “He’s well aware he has that profile and that’s part of what we document,” says Rothstein, “his sense of a responsibility. Of saying, ‘I have this profile, what do I want to do with it?’”
Dukale’s Dream is part of the mission but, as the film shows us, Jackman also put his money where his mouth is with the establishment of Laughing Man, a coffee company that only sells fair trade coffee and tea — products farmed using ecologically friendly methods and sold for the benefit of the farmer and consumer, including coffee that comes directly from Dukale’s farm.
All Jackman’s profits are donated to the Laughing Man Foundation, which supports educational programs, community development and entrepreneurs around the world.
Laughing Man demonstrates how consumers can be directly linked to the coffee chain to create jobs and better lives for people the world over, but Rothstein hopes the film opens eyes as well.
“I’d love to be able to look back and say the film really helped to move the needle in the space of making coffee a one hundred per cent sustainable commodity,” he says.
“It has such a profound impact on global poverty and the environment. (We) can impact various industries with (our) purchase choices. That is the larger agenda. I think it is possible and I think there is something contagious about the idea that in our everyday lives we have power.”
Pete Docter, the visionary director of Pixar’s Up, Monsters, Inc. and Inside Out, joined host Richard Crouse in March for this onstage discussion of his extraordinary career in animation and screenwriting.
Where is the House of Crouse? It’s everywhere and nowhere. It’s in your imagination and in your headphones and now it is on iTunes!
Hosted by Richard Crouse, it’s a gathering place for interesting people to hang out and share stories. Upcoming guests to the House of Crouse include Amy Schumer, Josh Gad, Daniel Radcliffe and many more!
Come by every Monday for a new episode, curl up on the coach and see who has stopped by.
Asif Kapadia’s documentary Amy features never-before-seen footage and over 100 interviews with people from singer Amy Winehouse’s personal and professional life. It is a heartbreaking up-close-and-personal look at a woman who, as Tony Bennett says in the movie, didn’t live long enough to learn how to live.
Kapadia may be best known as the filmmaker behind the BAFTA winning documentary Senna but says, “It’s funny, but I am really a drama guy.”
His docs are structured like feature films. Amy, for instance, plays on a few levels, featuring several dramatic arcs. It’s a cautionary tale of the effects of international stardom. It’s a portrait of drug addiction, exploitation and a woman who looked to men for protection, and chose badly. It’s the story of Amy, a fiercely talented person who laid her heart bare in her art only to have the thing that should have been her saviour, her music, ultimately be her undoing.
When I asked Kapadia if he looked at other music docs before beginning work on Amy he said, “I don’t have references I look to. I just kind of make it up as I’m going along. For example, in the sequence with the paparazzi, I’m thinking of Raging Bull, with flashguns going off. I’m not thinking of a doc where you have someone’s life and then they pick up a guitar and sing.”
Here’s a list of other music bios—some docs, some features—that take a dramatic approach and give a complete look at the personal and creative lives of their subjects.
Anvil: The Story of Anvil: It would be easy to call Anvil a real-life Spinal Tap. The story of the heaviest heavy metal band you’ve never heard of bears a strong resemblance to the legendary fictional band, but it is so much more than that. It is a story of passion, of trying to beat the odds, of friendship, of hope against hope. It’s also quite funny and the music will peel the paint off your home theatre walls.
I’m Not There: It’s an elliptical and metaphoric retelling of Bob Dylan’s life, but none of the characters in it are called Bob Dylan. Most of them don’t look like Dylan, and the one who most looks like Dylan is a woman, played by Cate Blanchett. Yet I felt I knew more about what makes Bob Dylan tick when I left the theatre than I did about Johnny Cash following Walk the Line or Ray Charles after Ray.
Something from Nothing: The Art of Rap: A vibrant look at the art of hip hop, the first documentary from Ice-T profiles the passion of the grandmasters of rap: Afrika Bambaataa, Treach Criss, Doug E. Fresh, KRS-One, Dr. Dre and more. Worth it to hear Snoop Dogg’s (now Snoop Lion) songwriting methodology: “I need to smoke a lot of weed, and have a couple girls there because I like looking at them.”
Get on Up: James Brown was known as many things; The Godfather of Soul, Soul Brother No. 1, Mr. Dynamite and The Hardest Working Man in Show Business but he preferred to be called Mr. Brown. His rise from poverty to the top of the R&B charts is brought to life in a knock out performance from Chadwick Boseman, who plays Brown from age 16 to 60.
When Finnish director Jalmari Helander saw his new film Big Game at the Toronto International Film Festival’s Midnight Madness, he was reduced to tears.
“It was one of the nicest moments of my life,” he says on the line from Helsinki. “It was a really big theatre with a lot of people and they were giving it applauses in the middle and shouting and really loving the film. I was crying in my seat with pure happiness. It was really amazing.
“If you think about rock stars, they play for an audience and get feedback at all times. But for a moviemaker it’s really, really rare you can see the reaction of the audience.”
The movie is a 80s style POTUS-with-a-problem action flick starring Samuel L. Jackson as the U.S. President stranded by terrorists in the wilds of Finland. He’s kept alive by Oskari (Onni Tommila) a teen who demonstrates his bravery by keeping the president alive despite great odds.
Big Game is an homage to the kinds of movies Helander grew up watching, “the old Indiana Jones films or Spielberg.” The kind of films, he says, that “stretch the limits of what’s believable and what’s not.”
Being a director, he adds, also gives him the chance to impart the euphoric feeling he felt the first time he saw Escape from New York or Die Hard.
“That’s the reason I want to make movies, to try and give the same feeling to someone else.”
Big Game’s star is Jackson, but the movie’s beating heart is Helander’s nephew and favourite actor Onni Tommila, who was just thirteen when he shot the film.
The role is very physical, but Onni says the one stunt he was allowed to do was cut from the film and “when I am shooting with the bow that was done in a green screen. It wasn’t that cool.”
What was cool was working with his co-star. Just not the one you might expect. “At first I was nervous in front of Samuel L. Jackson but in the end I think I was more nervous in front of my father.” His dad co-stars as a villager and they share several scenes together. “I want him to feel like… I can’t explain it. In some ways working with my father is harder, but in another way it is easier.”
Mr. Holmes” stars Sir Ian McKellen as the world’s most famous detective, Sherlock Holmes, but the game that’s afoot isn’t so much a mystery as it is a revelation. “It is my business to know what other people don’t know,” Holmes said in “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle.” Here, he discovers something many people know, but was unknown to him.
