“Carol,” a new film starring Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara, is a love story but one painted in shades of loneliness and longing. It’s about love at first sight and how that love that may be too good to last.
1950s New York. Therese Belivet (Rooney Mara) is an aspiring twenty-something photographer making ends meet as a shop clerk at a big New York department store. The first time she meets Carol (Cate Blanchett) the older woman is a customer looking to buy a gift for her child. When Carol leaves her gloves behind Therese has them bundled up with the gift and sent to Carol’s home. In thanks Carol invites Therese for lunch. Over a martini, eggs and creamed spinach sparks fly and the two agree to meet again.
Love is in the air but at a terrible cost. Suspicious that his wife has taken up with a woman, Carol’s estranged husband Harge (Kyle Chandler) threatens to take their daughter and severely limit visitation. Carol must choose between her love for her child and her passion for Therese.
Based on a 1952 Patricia Highsmith novel titled “The Price of Salt,” “Carol” is a haunting romance, elegantly directed by Todd Haynes. Blanchett and Rooney subtly play out the story, making the most of gestures and tentative looks that in most movies wouldn’t register but here convey a richness of emotion. It’s about nuance not grand gestures.
Both Blanchett and Mara do much with limited dialogue. The real performances here are happening internally and their faces and eyes convey as much as any lines of dialogue could hope to.
“Carol” is first-class filmmaking— cinematographer Ed Lachman even uses Super 16mm film stock to create the grainy feel of a 1950s period piece—with beautifully wrought, timeless performances and a love story for the ages.
“Youth,” the second English language film from “The Great Beauty” director Paolo Sorrentino, takes on some of life’s great questions, life and death stuff painted with remorse, hope and, most importantly, a large helping of whimsy.
Set in a chic hotel in alpine Switzerland, retired composer Fred Ballinger (Michael Caine) and his childhood friend, film director Mick (Harvey Keitel) are plotting the next moves in their careers and lives.
Ballinger wants to disappear, fade away from public life and live quietly. He refuses repeated requests to perform his best known work at a command performance from Queen Elizabeth’s envoy (Alex Macqueen) and tells his assistant, Lena (Rachel Weisz) who also happens to be his daughter, to turn down a French publisher who desperately wants him to write a memoir.
Mick is in a different place. After a string of flops he’s writing a new film to feature his greatest star, Brenda Morel (Jane Fonda). They’ve made a dozen films together but he sees the new movie, “Life’s Last Day,” as a comeback and their greatest collaboration.
“Youth” is a study of these two men. Other things happen of course; Lena’s husband leaves her for a pop star—in a po-mo twist real life singer Paloma Faith plays herself as the home wrecker—a movie star (Paul Dano) researches a new role at the hotel and Miss Universe (Madalina Diana Ghenea) makes a memorable appearance, but the attention is focussed on Fred and Mick and their divergent paths to happiness.
Their journeys are bathed in Sorrentino’s impeccable images. The film is a lush tapestry of beautifully composed frames and optical delight. Ornate and elegant, the visuals are as complex as the film’s multilayered look at life’s rich pageant. Fred and Mick have lived life, and now in their final years try and assess the value of their experience. Sounds heavy but its not. It’s fleet footed, taking time only to luxuriate in the details of their lives and surroundings.
“Youth” is a mediation on life and age that succeeds by the director’s craft. Talking to a young colleague Mick demonstrates the effects of age by having her look at the distant mountains through a telescope. The mountains appear to be close. Then he flips the scope around and changes the perspective. “Being young makes everything close,” he says. “Being old makes everything far away.” Like the rest of the film it’s simple and subtle but is perfectly realized by Sorrentino’s mastery of blending story, ideas and images.
Scott Hammell did the unthinkable. He asked someone to load a gun, point it at him and pull the trigger. He doesn’t have a death wish, he’s a magician and the subject of a new documentary, The Trick with the Gun, that details the planning and performing of the most dangerous illusion ever devised, the Bullet Catch.
Fourteen magicians have died attempting it and the most famous conjurer of all time, Houdini, never even tried it. Hammell says the trick is risky but, “there are safe ways of doing things that are seemingly extremely dangerous.”
He adds, “obviously things can go wrong and that can have a catastrophic chain reaction.”
There is always room for error and sometimes magicians get hurt or even killed on stage.
Hammell gave Metro an exclusive list of the five most dangerous — and potentially fatal — tricks ever performed on stage.
Spike
“It starts with a spike sticking through a piece of wood covered with a paper cup or a paper bag. The audience mixes them up and one-by-one the magician slams his or her hands down on the other identical looking cups or bags. The idea is to leave the last bag and you remove it to show the spike still there.
“I cringe whenever I see that. Magicians work with their hands and you screw that up and there goes your career.”
Russian Roulette
“A mentalist from Britain called Maurice Fogel used six guns all with live bullets. He would take one of the guns and fire it at a balloon or dinner plate to prove it was loaded.
“He’d then mix up the guns and choose the gun he wanted pointed at him. On the count of three the marksmen would pull the triggers and hopefully the one pointed at him is empty. He screwed that one up three times.
“Got shot just above the eye one time and in the chest another time.”
Houdini’s Water Torture Cell
“The underwater stuff can be really dangerous because it’s hard to communicate with your assistants if something goes wrong.
“If something does go wrong chances are you’re finding out about it at the last minute, which does not give them much time to get you out and resuscitate you.”
Buried Alive
“This trick dates back thousands of years and has definitely cost a few magicians their lives. Joseph Burrus attempted to perform it on Halloween, the anniversary of Houdini’s death. I guess he didn’t account for the weight of the cement he was being buried in.
“They couldn’t get him out in time and unfortunately he suffocated.
“Sometimes you get so wrapped up in a trick you forget the little details which turn out to be the big details.”
The Bullet Catch
“This is the one that has certainly cost the most magicians their lives.
“Penn and Teller call it the most dangerous trick in show business, beyond just magic. I would tend to agree.
“I’m not too familiar with the stunt world but I don’t think there are too many stunts in movies or television that have cost so many people their lives and yet people continue to do it.”
Watch Hammell perform the world’s most dangerous trick in The Trick with the Gun on Vimeo-On-Demand or on Super Channel starting Tuesday, December 8.
Richard joins etiquette expert Karen Cleveland and Canada AM hosts Marci Ien and Dan Riskin to discuss holiday dos and don’ts, including drinking too much and re-gifting!
Like Wrigley’s “Double your pleasure! Double your fun!” gum, this weekend’s movie Legend is two Tom Hardys in one. He plays the dual roles of Britain’s most notorious gangsters, Ronnie and Reginald Kray, identical twins and violent thugs who ruled London’s underworld during the 1950s and 1960s.
Previously real-life siblings Martin and Gary Kemp of ’80s new wave band Spandau Ballet impersonated the brothers in the 1990 film The Krays, but these days special effects allow Hardy to play both brothers. “The movie’s a testament to the Krays’ ability to get away with everything, for a while, anyway,” wrote Ty Burr in the Boston Globe. “But it’s better evidence of Tom Hardy’s ability to do just about anything.”
Already this year we’ve seen the talented actor in the Mad Max reboot Fury Road, the musical London Road and the crime thriller Child 44. Soon he’ll play opposite Leonardo DiCaprio in The Revenant and is currently shooting Taboo, a new BBC mini series scheduled to air next year.
He’s also made waves as The Dark Knight Rises’ brooding hulk Bane and dream-dancer Eames in the megahit Inception.
In between these box office busters he’s appeared in smaller, edgier films that deserve a look. Here are some of the other films that have helped Tom Hardy become legend.
Hillbilly Hardy:
Lawless takes place during Prohibition. The bootlegging business is booming, run by hillbillies who’ll sell to anyone with a buck and a thirst. The most notorious are the Bondurant family; headed by Forrest (Hardy) who engages in a knock down, drag out moonshine war with a corrupt lawman played by Guy Pearce. Hardy leads the cast as a soft-spoken thug with a brainy bent. “It’s not the violence that sets men apart,” he says, “it is the distance he is prepared to go.”
When he isn’t waxing philosophical he’s busy earning most of the film’s few laughs. It’s a natural, unaffected performance that really shows what he can do without a mask strapped to his face.
Solo Hardy:
In these days of maximalist moviemaking Locke goes the opposite way, trimming the movie down to one claustrophobic setting and a single on-screen actor. Locke is the first movie in recent memory that would probably work as well as a radio drama as it does a film. Hardy is Ivan Locke, a straight arrow construction foreman determined to be at the birth of his child. In his car, he’s battling traffic for the hour-and-a-half drive to London and the mother-to-be’s hospital. Trouble is, the child is the result of a lonely one-night stand and he’s a married man.
The entire film takes place in the front seat of Locke’s car, in real time, as he drives the M1. We see through the windshield, into the backseat and the display screen of car phone and GPS. Most of all we see Hardy’s face, which, even though obscured by a beard, still allows his charisma to ooze through. His face is the engine of the film, his talent the driver.
Hardheaded Hardy:
In the Drop, Hardy he plays Bob Saginowski, a mild mannered bartender at a Brooklyn neighbourhood pub owned by the Chechnyan mafia. Like many of the borough’s bars, Marv’s is sometimes used as a “drop,” a place where gangsters secretly hide money until it is collected by their crime bosses.
As Bob, Hardy is a cypher; kind to dogs, shy and lovesick, he is an average neighbourhood guy. Except in this neighbourhood average guys have pasts, and Hardy does a nice job of playing a man who is trying to move on while the past tries to stop him in his tracks.
For many of us Queen Elizabeth is a face on a stamp, someone we see every day on our money. For Sarah Gadon, the Canadian actress who plays H.R.H. in A Royal Night Out, the figurehead is “an icon and it is really always kind of difficult to humanize someone who is embalmed in icon status.”
The Dracula Untold star plays the Queen before she took the throne, when she was a 20-year-old headstrong woman known to friends as Lillibet. It’s May 8, 1945, VE Day in England, the biggest party London has ever seen and Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret (Bel Powley), or P1 and P2 as the princess sisters are called, want in on the action.
“For six years we’ve been cloistered,” says Princess Elizabeth. “Like nuns,” adds Princess Margaret.
“I fell in love so much with this script,” says Gadon. “I was charmed by the story and its portrayal of her at that point in her life. It was this beautiful coming of age story about this woman faced with her future. That is something I really related to. That feeling of when you are growing up and you have all these ideas about the world, all these ideologies you are associated with and then you are confronted with reality and you have to decide for yourself what you want. I thought that was an interesting entry point.”
The slick talking Liz manages to convince Mom (Emily Watson as the Queen Mum) and Dad (Rupert Everett as King George) to let them mingle with the real people, listen to the King’s victory speech and report back.
Royal Night Out is part royal romcom, part urban adventure, and only loosely based on real events. In truth the princesses went out, accompanied by an entourage of 16 people and were home by curfew.
“Julian Jarrold, the director, was so conscious of what he wanted the tone of this film to be,” says Gadon. “We all knew it wasn’t a biopic, and none of us wanted to make that film. It is very much a fantasy, very much an adventure chase film. Being more North American in my approach to the part, my tendencies were to indulge the humour and indulge in the slapstick moments. Julian held the reins tight and really captured the reserve of Elizabeth. He really walked that line between going off too far in either direction. The film has very real feelings but a lot of tongue-in-cheek.”
To capture Queen Elizabeth’s posh accent Gadon studied footage of the princess at that age, the movies Roman Holiday and Brief Encounter and worked with dialect coach Brett Tyne. “Brett worked with all of us,” she says. “It wasn’t just me. She worked with Bel, Emily and Rupert because even though they’re British they certainly don’t walk around talking like that.”
The dialogue coaching worked. A Royal Night Out is already open in England and Gadon notes, “The reviews were great, very generous. And most people had no idea I was Canadian! It was exciting for me.
“I was really, really nervous. To have it received so warmly was such a relief. Now, with the North American release, I’m like, ‘I’m good! I got the stamp of approval from the Brits!’”
When Dane DeHaan was studying acting at UNC School of the Arts he had a poster of James Dean on his dorm wall.
DeHaan graduated in 2008 and has gone on to star in the HBO series In Treatment, and films like Chronicle, The Place Beyond the Pines, Kill Your Darlings and The Amazing Spider-Man 2 but one thing hasn’t changed.
“The poster is still on my wall,” he says on the line from his home. “I’m looking at it right now.”
In new film Life the twenty-nine-year-old actor plays Dean in 1955, just months away from the release of East of Eden. After a chance meeting a photographer played by Robert Pattinson becomes convinced the actor is the perfect subject. The two have an undeniable bond but Dean is hesitant, leery of exposing himself to the publicity machine.
DeHaan, who gained twenty-five pounds to play the screen icon, calls Dean one of his favourite actors.
“I was learning about acting and my acting teacher told us to go home and watch Marlon Brando and James Dean movies. I started watching them and he was just amazing. It was amazing to watch someone start the revolution of the kind of acting that most people do today but do it in such a beautiful way.
“It’s so exciting to watch those movies and see James Dean existing in this world with all these other over-the-top actors and just take them to school. The contrast was so jarring. Now you see a movie and there are obviously people who are better than others, but generally they’re trying to do the same kind of acting. In those movies that’s not really happening.”
DeHaan, who will soon be seen playing another real life character, Karl Rove in Young Americans, says “people think they know a lot about Dean but not many people really know much about him at all,” and hope Life will change that.
“Ultimately that was one of the reasons I took it on,” he says. “I realized that there are a lot of young people who don’t know who James Dean is, and that’s a sad fact. I would hope you would watch his movies first and then watch our movie or watch our movie and then watch his. I hope it opens a door for a lot of people to rediscover him not just as a persona but as an amazing talent.”
JAMES DEAN SIDEBAR:
Dane DeHaan joins a long list of people who have played Dean since the icon’s death in 1955
James Franco became a star, and won a Golden Globe, playing the rebellious actor in the TV biopic James Dean. Franco got so into character he went from non-smoker to a two-pack-a-day habit — in real life Dean smoked more than two packs of unfiltered Chesterfields a day — and learned to ride a motorcycle.
In 1976, Stephen McHattie won praise playing Dean in the TV movie James Dean written by William Bast, Dean’s best friend and roommate.
Also interesting is the video installation piece Rebel which features a female James Dean in the form of performer Nina Ljeti, and an Animaniacs episode featuring Slappy Squirrel giving Dean a class in method acting.
