From torontopublliclibrary.com: “Come meet the writers everyone’s reading. Seven branches across the city offer you the chance to meet a great Canadian writer. All events followed by book signings.
Launched in 2009 with funding from Canada Council for the Arts, The eh List is a premiere destination for lovers of Canadian literature, hosting award-winning authors and exciting new voices including Scotiabank Giller Prize winner Will Ferguson, Governor General’s Award Winner Nino Ricci, Trillium Book Award winner Camilla Gibb and RBC Taylor Prize Winner Plum Johnson in 2015.”
The eh List presents author Richard Crouse discussing his new biography, Elvis is King: Costello’s My Aim is True. Crouse delves into the story of the creation of the groundbreaking album, focusing on Costello’s musical upbringing, the recording of the legendary songs, and the marketing behind the music that would redefine youth culture. Book signing to follow.
Call to register; seating is limited: 416-395-5639
Richard’s “Canada AM” look at the early holiday movie “Love the Coopers” featuring more stars than on the top of the tree, “By the Sea” from Brangelina and the Oscar bait of “Spotlight.”
The movies have looked to the news for inspiration almost since the first time film was projected on screens.
As far back as 1899, a film called Major Wilson’s Last Stand dramatized scenes from the First and Second Matabele Wars, including the death of Major Allan Wilson and his men in Rhodesia in 1893.
The trend of reel life emulating real life continues this weekend with The 33, an Antonio Banderas film based on a famous mining accident. In 2010, 33 men spent 69 days trapped underground in a copper-gold mine located near Copiapó, Chile when a rock the size of the Empire State Building blocked their exit.
“I can’t think of a better story than this one to bring to the screen,” says producer Mike Medavoy.
The trick is getting the story right. Director Patricia Riggins worked with the miners, Medavoy and screenwriters to create a story that, according to everyone involved, features more fact than fiction.
That isn’t always the case.
According to IMDb the Jim Sturgess movie 21 calls itself a “fact based” story about a group of MIT students who used a complicated card-counting system to fleece Las Vegas casinos for millions of dollars.
The bare bones of the story are true — blackjack was played and MIT students counted cards — but Hollywood diverged from reality when casting the leads. In truth the main players were mainly Asian-Americans, including ringleader Jeff Ma who consulted on the movie.
Ma called the controversy surrounding the casting of Sturgess and Kevin Spacey “over-blown,” adding “I would have been a lot more insulted if they had chosen someone who was Japanese or Korean, just to have an Asian playing me.”
The Michael Bay film Pain & Gain is listed as an action-comedy and stars Mark Wahlberg, Dwayne Johnson and Anthony Mackie certainly play up the jokes. Everyone laughed, except for Marc Schiller, the real-life inspiration for the film’s kidnap victim.
“It wasn’t that funny when they tried to kill me,” he said. “They did run me over with a car twice after trying to blow me up in the car. The way they tell it made it look like a comedy. You also gotta remember that not only I went through this, but certain people were killed, so making these guys look like nice guys is atrocious.”
Last year’s Oscar winner Whiplash saw Miles Teller as a young drummer driven to extremes by a fanatical music teacher played by J.K. Simmons.
The movie draws parallels to the famous story of Jo Jones and Charlie Parker. The legend goes that Jones threw a cymbal at Parker’s head after a lackluster solo, prompting the sax player to go away, practice for a year and return as one of the greatest musicians of the 20th century. Trouble is, the story isn’t true. A cymbal was let loose, but according to eyewitnesses it was dropped on the floor at Parker’s feet and not at his head.
“Not attempted murder,” wrote Richard Brody in the New York Times, “but rather musical snark.”
How does Hollywood get away playing fast and loose with the facts? Black Mass director Scott Cooper says, “I don’t think people come to narrative features for the facts, or for truth. I think you go to documentaries for that. What you do come to narrative features for is psychological truth, emotion and deep humanity.”
In “By the Sea” one of the most famous couples in the world play a world-weary couple. Written and directed by Angelina Jolie-Pitt, who also co-stars with hubby Brad, the film is a study of unhappy, beautiful people.
Jolie is Vanessa, a former famous dancer, now a pill popper on vacation in France with her writer husband Roland (Pitt). Both are looking for inspiration, she to wake up the next day, he for his next book. It’s a portrait of a couple who are falling apart.
“Have a nice day!” he says to her on his way out the morning after they arrive.
“I won’t,” she replies.
He spends his days drinking and trying to soak up the local flavour. She sits and broods, alone until she discovers a small hole in the wall that separates her suite with the room next door. She becomes obsessed with the newlyweds (Mélanie Laurent and Melvil Poupaud) in the other room, spying on them for entertainment. When Roland discovers the peephole the voyeurism becomes a couple’s game. The hole in the wall begins to make their relationship whole again.
“I like to watch it with you because it makes me want to be with you,” says Roland.
The hole gives them a shared experience and a glimpse into a “normal” life but it doesn’t last long and soon their troubled relationship reaches a tipping point that also threatens the happiness of the other couple.
An exercise in sun-dappled dysfunction “By the Sea” is a mood piece about broken people. Ripe with plaintive looks and veiled dialogue, it presents Roland and Vanessa as vampires sucking vitality of those around them. There is a simmering undercurrent of tension throughout that unfortunately never comes to a boil.
Jolie-Pitt keeps a steady hand—perhaps too steady—in her handling of the story. She slowly peels away the beauty and glamour of the place and people to reveal the ugly personalities that lie underneath the glitzy surface. Trouble is, it takes forever. The movie wallows in Vanessa and Roland’s pain. Their marriage is failing because they can’t communicate with one another anymore, which is not exactly the stuff of great drama. They stare at one another, fall asleep and have tersely worded arguments. Mostly they spend a great deal of time observing other people and internalizing the emptiness of their lives.
It’s as exciting as it sounds.
“By the Sea” does have a message, a dull as dishwater lesson about going with the flow, but the moral isn’t worth the work it takes to get there.
The Christmas season doesn’t start when The Bay puts up wreaths and ornaments for sale in mid-October or when Starbucks introduces the red cup. Nope. Paradoxically, on the big screen, Christmas begins in November with American Thanksgiving. This year along with the turkey and the yam-topped sweet potatoes comes sage Christmas advice from Grandpa Bucky (Alan Arkin): “Everyone thinks you can schedule happiness, but you can’t.” Listen and learn. It’s Christmastime at the movies so cue the yuletide family dysfunction.
Four generations of Coopers are headed to Mon (Diane Keaton) and Dad’s (John Goodman) place for Christmas dinner. What the kids and grandchildren and assorted others don’t know is that the rents are splitting after 40 years of marriage but want to give the kids “one last perfect Christmas” before announcing the divorce.
Among the guests descending for holiday vittles are an unemployed sad sack son (Ed Helms) and his children. Olivia Wilde as Eleanor, the philosophically inclined but reckless daughter accompanied by Bailey (Jake Lacy), an Iraq-bound soldier she meets at the airport and convinces to be her dinner date and a kleptomaniac sister (Marisa Tomei) who apparently can look to people souls. There’s more, like the excellently named Aunt Fishy (June Squibb) and Ruby (Amanda Seyfried), an angelic waitress at Bucky’s favourite diner, but there’s so many characters the movie starts to lose track of them and so does the audience. “Love the Coopers” is so jam pacekd with people it takes 20 minutes of narration to introduce them all. Imagine a Christmas tale written by Leo Tolstoy, with a dozen or more characters weaving in and out of the narrative—plus a dog flatulence joke!—and you get the idea.
Sting songs decorate the soundtrack as life times of regret and resentment boil over. Before you can say, “Pass the stuffing,” a litany of hardships—unemployment, divorce, empty nest syndrome, longing and underwear soiling to name a few—have been touched on and while there are moments of actual raw emotion they’re buttressed by enough schmaltz to fill eight CDs worth of Celine Dion Christmas ballads. For instance Eleanor’s meet cute with Bailey is the stuff of a solid rom com. Her out-of-control run through a hospital—knocking over patients and grieving visitors—is not.
There are too many stories happening at once—but don’t worry there’s “helpful” narration to explain the details—for you to become invested in the characters. Characters come and go and by the time they’re all in the same place story threads are left hanging like twisted tinsel on a wilted Christmas tree. Director Jessie “I Am Sam” Nelson tidies everything up in the final moments, putting a pretty bow on the package, while throwing story credibility out the window.
Much of “Love the Coopers” is as appealing as last year’s fruitcake, but in the odd moment where it leaves the emotional manipulation in the background and focuses on the story’s sense of melancholy and messages about the power of family, it casts a warm glow.
Like “All the President’s Men,” the new Michael Keaton drama is a story about newspaper reporters taking on the establishment. Instead of going after the highest office in the land, as Woodward and Bernstein did in their Watergate exposé, in “Spotlight” Keaton, Mark Ruffalo and Rachel McAdams play Boston Globe reporters delving into the Catholic Church’s cover-up of abusive priests.
Following a buyout the Boston Globe has a new editor, Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber), who assigns the investigative Spotlight bureau to look into a delicate subject, a priest accused of molesting 80 kids. It’s a hot button story in the city of 1500 priests, where 53% of Globe subscribers are Catholic. The plan is to examine sealed documents, which requires legal action. The Bostonians view it as suing the church, a sacrilege in their city, whereas the outsider Baron sees it as simply making sealed documents public.
As the investigation plods along—“ The church thinks in centuries,” says lawyer Mitchell Garabedian (Stanley Tucci), “does your paper have the resources to take that on?”—the story becomes much larger than originally thought, uncovering a far reaching conspiracy that includes not only the church but lawyers and possibly newspapermen as well.
“Spotlight” is set just fourteen years ago, but feels of another age. The internet has, by and large, rendered this kind of methodical reporting obsolete. The door knocking, working-the-phones investigation with months to form and write stories is now the kind of thing that exists only in the movies. We see it all here in detail and much of it is very interesting. The reporter’s investigation allows for huge loads of exposition in the form of interviews with witnesses and victims and exports and while there’s a bit too much, “Are you telling me..?” the slow and steady unveiling of details is compelling stuff.
Director and co-writer Tom McCarthy keeps it simple and straightforward, allowing the occasional “gotcha!” revelations speak for themselves. Clues and information are uncovered slowly, with a minimum of red herrings. The result is portrait of the kind of grunt work the Spotlight team used to break the story, not nearly as flashy or verbose as Aaron Sorkin’s overwritten and over sentimentalized look at news gathering, “The Newsroom.”
Keaton has dialled it down a few notches from his recent turn in “Birdman” while Ruffalo kicks out the jams, all jittery energy and Hulk-like anger.
“Spotlight” is a refreshingly barebones movie that allows the story to provide the fireworks.
I could write a nostalgic piece about how, once upon a time in a far away time and place, Robert de Niro’s name on a marquee was a sign of quality. Or I could write a snarky article about paycheque movies and taking roles for the cash. Maybe a generic What the heck happened to Robert de Niro? Column would be in order.
Either way, any of those topics could be easily folded into a review of “Heist,” a flaccid new crime drama that adds nothing to Mr. De Niro’s legacy except, perhaps, for a dollars in his bank account.
The great thespian plays Mr. Pope— famous as The Pope to all those who know and fear him. For thirty years he’s run The Swan Casino with an iron fist. No compromises. Bottom line, if you steal from him you die. Ten dollars to ten million dollars, the consequences are the same. “Nobody steals from The Swan not because it’s Fort Knox but because everyone is afraid of The Pope,” says Vaughn (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), but that doesn’t stop him from coordinating a robbery that will net him and his co-conspirators Cox (Dave Bautista) and Dante (Stephen Cyrus Sepher) three million in cash. Vaughn needs the money to pay for an operation for his daughter and he’s desperate enough to cross The Pope to get the money.
Things go wrong and soon Vaughn, Cox and Dante are on a bus filled with civilians zooming their way to freedom with The Pope’s henchmen (Morris Chestnut) and the police (led by fighter Gina Carano) in hot pursuit.
The first time De Niro starred in a heist movie directed by someone with the last name Mann we got “Heat,” a genuinely exciting action movie. This time around director Scott Mann has cast De Niro in a movie with a generic title to match its characters and direct-to-video feel. Part “Speed” and part every other heist film ever made, “Heist” relies on implausible plot twists—like cops who break the law to aid the bad guys because one of the hijackers had “a reassuring voice”—and clichés to tell its weak-tea story.
One exchange between The Pope and his henchman sums up the entire movie.
There is a perversity to the title of Rick Alverson’s new film. The ironically named “Entertainment” isn’t, as the title would imply, an all-singing-all-dancing extravaganza or, despite having a comedian as a central character, a funny look at life. Instead it is a grim-faced portrait of a man staring into the abyss.
Gregg Turkington is playing an amplified version of his onstage comedic persona, Neil Hamburger. With a comb over that makes Donald Trump look like the model of follicular restraint, a hacking cough that punctuates his ‘jokes’ and an abrasive attitude he’s Don Rickles on steroids. On tour in the California desert, playing a series of dive bars and prisons he’s slowly working his way to reunite with his estranged daughter. He’s a broken man who briefly stays with his cousin (John C. Reilly) and is in danger of drinking himself to death.
Not exactly a barrel of laughs but one of the most original and uncompromising movies to come along in some time. Alverson’s film is as volatile and surreal as its main character which makes for an unsettling cinematic experience. Is it enjoyable? Not exactly, but it does what good movies should do, it challenges the viewer. A study in the mundane “Entertainment” is a story about isolation and anonymity that takes its time, giving the audience time to ponder the emptiness in the Comedian’s life… and maybe even their own. It’s an existential drama perhaps best suited for fans of Franz Kafka.
From torontopublliclibrary.com: “Come meet the writers everyone’s reading. Seven branches across the city offer you the chance to meet a great Canadian writer. All events followed by book signings.
