Richard sits in with TIFF director Cameron Bailey, “Beeba Boys” star Ali Momen and “Canada AM” host Marci Ien to discuss the Oscar Boycott and how the Academy needs to change to stay relevant.
Watch the whole thing HERE!
Check out Richard’s “Canada AM” interview with “Agent Carter” star Haley Attwell.
Watch the whole thing HERE!
Here’s some IMDB info on her character, Peggy Carter: An officer with the Strategic Scientific Reserve and the love interest of Captain America. Regarding her preparation for the role, she said, “I’m training at the moment six days a week to make her a bit more military and make it convincing that I could kick butt.” About the character Atwell stated, “I likened her character to that famous Ginger Rogers quote. She can do everything Captain America can do, but backwards and in high heels. She’s an English soldier through and through, although she always looks fabulous. She might stand there with a machine-gun shooting Nazis, but she’s obviously gone to the loo beforehand and applied a bit of lipstick. She doesn’t need to be rescued. That’s exciting to me her strength”. “I think she’s quite stubborn, a slightly frustrated woman who struggles with being a woman in that time. But more importantly she’s a modern woman and she sees something in Captain America that she relates to, and becomes kindred spirits. He treats her very differently to how she’s been treated by lots of men, in this kind of dominated world she lives in. So she’s very much a fighter.”
If anyone outside the agency asks, she works at a telephone company.
Richard sits in with “Live at Noon” host Stephen LeDrew to discuss the Academy’s attempts to diversify their nomination process.
Watch the whole thing HERE!
Richard and CP24 anchor Nneka Elliott talk about Michael Bay’s latest, the action film “13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi,” a buddy cop flick called “Ride Along 2” starring Ice Cube and Kevin Hart and the Edsel of the animation world, “Norm of the North.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
Richard and “Canada AM” host Marci Ien talk about the Michael Bay action film “13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi,” the buddy cop flick “Ride Along 2” with Ice Cube and Kevin Hart and a contender for worst film of the year, “Norm of the North.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
By Richard Crouse – Metro Canada
Feeling down? You’re not alone.
Years ago Cliff Arnall, a tutor at the Centre for Lifelong Learning at Cardiff University, declared January to be the most depressing month of the year. “Following the initial thrill of New Year’s celebrations and changing over a new leaf,” Arnall said, “reality starts to sink in.” His study cited weather, debt, time elapsed since Christmas, average hours of daylight and unsuccessful New Year’s resolutions” as the reasons for the slump and named the third Monday of the month Blue Monday, the single most depressing day of the year.
Whether Arnall’s “sadness algorithm” passes scientific muster remains to be seen but there’s no denying January can be dispiriting. This year Cineplex is offering up a way to beat the January blahs—cheap movies. On January 18 Scene card members can redeem just 500 points to see any movie at Cineplex, from general admission auditoriums all the way up to the fancy-dancy VIP Cinemas.
In a recent survey Canada’s largest film exhibitor discovered 45% of Canadians say they typically feel rested after watching a movie while 38% say they feel “less stressed, like I took a mini vacation.”
Marston-Milbauer Eminent Scholar Emeritus at the University of Florida Dr. Norman Holland is an expert in psychoanalytic criticism and cognitive poetics, which in layman’s terms means he has made a study of how our brains translate activities like going to the cinema into pleasure. “It’s restful, no question,” he says.
“The parts of your brain that turn off are the parts that plan action because you’re not going to act on what you see on the screen in front of you. You turn off the systems that plan, that look ahead that evaluate futures. That explains the phenomenon of the willing suspension of disbelief. You accept the most improbable things, like Stars Wars or Spider-Man. At the same time the lower centres of your brain are generating emotions like mad in response to what you’re seeing. This is the peculiar phenomenon that you can feel and care about these people on the screen while at the same time knowing they are nothing but a fiction.”
The Cineplex survey indicates that when feeling blue 78% of Canadians look to funny movies to cheer them up. “We don’t want Ingmar Bergman on Blue Monday,” says Dr. Holland. “The idea is to do something for yourself. Do something that pleases you.”
Overall, according to Cineplex, Canada’s top two comfort movies are the Robin Williams comedy Mrs. Doubtfire and Pretty Woman with Julia Roberts and Richard Gere. Men chose the uplifting prison break movie The Shawshank Redemption as their favourite feel good flick.
Dr. Holland isn’t surprised the top movies are old favourites featuring big stars. “Familiar characters, familiar faces,” he says. “They’re people we’ve had good experiences with before and can expect [to have] good experiences with again.”
So what would the good doctor go see on Blue Monday? “8 ½ by Fellini,” he says. It’s a fanciful movie that engages both the emotional and intellectual sides of the brain. “I love Fellini.”
By Richard Crouse – Metro In Focus
Making a war movie is hard work with long hours and tough conditions. According to 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi star Pablo Schreiber making a war movie with Michael Bay is extra difficult.
“Everyone who has worked with Michael Bay has told me the set can be a challenging place to work,” he says of the Transformers director. “I got all these stories to prepare but ultimately nothing anybody says can prepare you for that experience. He works faster than any director working. We do about 75 set ups a day, which is massive especially when each of them is like its own action sequence. It’s an insane amount of work. He demands a lot from you. It’s very necessary that you come prepared, that you are ready to perform any piece of the movie at any given time.”
The Canadian born actor and winner of the We Love to Hate You Award at the 2014 Young Hollywood Awards for his work as George “Pornstache” Mendez on Orange Is the New Black, says Bay took him by surprise during the 2015 shoot in Malta.
“There’s a scene at the end where a convoy is rolling in and we don’t know if they are friendly or bad,” he says, “and it is one of the emotional peaks of the movie. For me it was a scene I had checked off as an actor as one I had to be ready and prepared for. Then he shot it a week before we were supposed to shoot it. I had about five minutes to prepare. He said, ‘Let’s go on the roof and get that last sequence.’ He started setting up cranes. To be ready at any moment for whatever he’s going to throw at you is very important. As actors all six of us ended leaving there feeling like if we had gotten through that experience we could deal with anything.”
When I ask if the chaotic set conditions were Bay’s way of not so subtly exposing his actors to the same kind of unpredictable situations their characters were dealing with, he laughed.
“I’m not sure how much forethought was put into that vibe, but it was definitely effective and it works. As actors we were constantly disoriented and didn’t quite know where we were and didn’t know where we were going to be on any given day.”
Schreiber plays Kris “Tanto” Paronto, a former U.S. Army Ranger who was one of six CIA security contractors working in Benghazi, Libya on September 11, 2012 when when well-armed Libyan militants—using weapons pilfered from former Prime Minister Muammar Gaddafi’s abandoned arsenals—invaded the American embassy. Their attempt to rescue ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and Foreign Service Information officer Sean Smith led to a harrowing thirteen-hour battle.
The thirty-seven year old actor met Tanto and says he felt a great responsibility in playing a real person who was on set and would eventually see the film but adds that director Bay tried to keep show the humanity of the story’s heroes.
“Michael Bay made this movie and he normally make these big extravaganzas but this is not a superhero movie,” he says. “This is a movie about very, very real human beings who behaved extraordinarily under the most difficult circumstances.”
There will be a time in the near future when “Inside Out” and “Norm of the North” will be listed on your Netflix queue as animated films, but make no mistake they don’t belong in the same category. Where “Inside Out” is a happy serving of eye candy topped with a transcendent story, “Norm” seems to exist not as a story but simply as a vessel for cute characters.
Set in the Arctic, where Ivory Gulls speak with English accents, lemmings are indestructible and polar bears twerk (and speak English) for the amusement of tourists, the movie wraps an environmental message for kids human encroachment in the Arctic around a feel-good story that left me feeling bad.
Norm (voice of Rob Schneider) is an insecure polar bear who must remind himself that he has top of the Arctic food chain. “You’re an animal, “he says, “literally.” He’s timid polar—he’s a “a bear with too much care and not enough scare”—but when an evil New York developer named Mr. Greene (Ken Jeong) plans to build condos in his corner of the arctic he springs into action. Overhearing the builder’s associate Vera (Heather Graham) say she’s looking for a symbol of the arctic who can talk to potential customers, Norm hatches a plan. He stows away to New York City (with three lemming henchmen in tow) to become the Greene’s spokesbear. His idea is to “use the Arctic to save the Arctic.”
“Norm of the North” is as entertaining as you’d think a children’s cartoon starring Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo will be. It’s cut rate Saturday morning cartoon level animation—some scenes don’t even look fully rendered—that relies on kid-friendly characters rather than story or jokes. In other words, if “Inside Out” is the Ferrari of kids animation, sleek and well-made, “Norm of the North” is the Edsel.
It assumes children don’t need entertainment that works on any other level than, ”Where can I buy a cute stuffed Norm doll?” Despite its family friendly messages about friends, family and loyalty, the movie doesn’t try and disguise its cynical heart. At the spokesbear audition Vera gushes over Norm, “He’s cute and marketable, it’s perfect.” You can only imagine a similar conversation in the design phase for this movie. Also, is Norm’s description of Mr. Greene as “a creepy one note villain” dialogue from the script or a passage from the stage directions that accidentally made it into the film? It’s hard to know.
“Norm of the North” has little to recommend it. Padded with dance numbers—two in the first fifteen minutes alone—and montages, the best that can be said is that bad movies like this are important to remind us that the Pixar movies aren’t flukes.
The word subtle is never used in reference to Michael Bay. On film the “Transformers” filmmaker has never left a bullet unfired or ever met a building he didn’t want to blow up. His films are frenetic odes to carnage and his latest one, “13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi” takes a page out of the recent past and gives it the Bay Bias.
Based on the 2013 nonfiction book “13 Hours” by Mitchell Zuckoff, the bulk of the film takes place on the eleventh anniversary of the September 11 attacks. Rone Woods (James Badge Dale), Jack Da Silva (John Krasinski), Oz Geist (Max Martini), Bub Doherty (Toby Stephens), Tanto Paronto (Pablo Schreiber) and Boon (David Denman) are tough guys with 1000 yards stares. They are former Navy SEALS, Marine Force Recon and Army Special Forces now working as CIA security contractors in in Benghazi, Libya in a top-secret facility so undercover it doesn’t officially exist.
The city is a hellhole known as the most violent place on earth. When well-armed Libyan militants—using weapons pilfered from former Prime Minister Muammar Gaddafi’s abandoned arsenals—invade the American embassy the contractors, located about a mile away from the attack, want to help but are ordered to stand down by their on-site CIA chief. As the fighting intensifies they spring into action—“Things change fast in Benghazi,” they snarl.—launching a rescue mission for ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and Foreign Service Information officer Sean Smith.
There’s more—things blow up and bullets fly—and it is public record, but there will be no spoilers here.
“13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi” is a fast and furious look at an event the ripples of which are still being felt today, but this is a Michael Bay movie so it is unburdened by the weight of controversy. Instead the politics are downplayed—there is no mention of then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton or President Obama—and it is presented as an action film.
On that level it works. Bay knows how to build tension and entertain the eye. He indulges his artier side with some beautifully composed photography and throws in some interesting details to bring the action alive. For instance, the city is such a chaotic place the locals barely notice the mounting violence as they watch soccer as buildings explode just down the block. “Just another Tuesday night in Benghazi,” says Da Silva.
Unfortunately Bay is so in love with his images he drops the ball on the story. This is a tale of men who stepped up and put their lives on the line despite bureaucratic interference. The contractors should be complex characters, balancing their stateside lives with their training as warriors and while the movie tries to explore that divide, it does so in the most Michael Bay way as possible. Instead of investigating the things that drive them we are treated to an sketchy subplot regarding Da Silva’s family that sheds little light on how his job affects his wife and daughters or vice versa. No amount of scenes showing these men Skyping with their families or lovingly gazing at photos of their babies will do enough to humanize them when they are so underwritten. Bay emphasizes the action in Benghazi, but choses to ignore the emotional side except in the most superficial of ways.
“13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi” could have been a fascinating and timely study of men juggling their jobs with complicated families lives but instead it is just another Michael Bay movie.
