“Mr. Right” is a rom crime com that plays a bit like “Pitch Perfect” with a very high body count.
Anna Kendrick is Martha, a twenty-something who dumps her boyfriend when he cheats on her. The morning after a wild bender—”I want to do something terrible,” she says.—she it’s love-at-first-sight with a stranger (Sam Rockwell) she meets at a supermarket. He’s a babyface assassin who cold bloodedly murders for money. “Killing is wrong,” he says, “but I’m not perfect.” Part Bruce Lee, part James Bond, he’s as lethal as he is charming. Ignoring the obvious warning signs—he won’t tell her his name and jokes about killing people—she falls for him and is only slightly conflicted on their third day together when she sees him shoot a man. “Are you upset that I killed that guy?” he says. “How I feel about that guy has nothing to do with how I feel about you.” They flirt, banter back and forth and after some metaphysical weapons training are a committed couple. “When I was little I had a dream I was dating Lex Luther,” she coos. Now if only the squads of hitmen sent to kill him would lay off, the couple could decide whether she is his weakness or the Bonnie to his Clyde or both.
Other movies have trod this path. “Something Wild,” “Grosse Pointe Blank” and “True Romance” all mix affection with offing, and all do it better than “Mr. Right.” What this movie has going for it is a handful of clever lines—for instance, Rockwell’s dusty charm is described as “fancy homeless”—and two people who know how to deliver them, Kendrick and Rockwell. Despite a seventeen-year age gap, or maybe because of it, they click.
The first half of the movie, before it turns into a shoot ‘em up, has many funny, charming moments. The preposterousness of the story aside, there are enough effervescent screwball moments in Max Landis’s screenplay to carry the day. But just about the time bad guy Johnny Moon (Michael Eklund) says, “Don’t let this become unfun… This is supposed to be fun,” it’s hard not to disagree with him. What was once a light and fluffy—if a little bloody—confection loses its way in a hail of bullets and beatings.
“Mr. Right” doesn’t get everything right, but in between the quirky trying-too-hard moments are some amiably charming moments.
Richard will interview “Moguls, Monsters and Madmen” author Barry Avrich on Monday May 30, 2016 at Temple Sinai Congregation of Toronto (210 Wilson Ave, Toronto, ON). Doors open at 6:45 pm. Program starts at 7:30 pm.Get up close and personal for an exclusive look at one of the most explosive show business memoirs featuring the famous and the infamous!
Welcome to the House of Crouse. We go to extremes today. You’ll learn how and why to plan an orgy in a small town with the stars of the film with the most provocative name of the year, Ennis Esmer and Kristian Bruun and then, in an interview from the vault Mia Wasikowska talks about playing Alice Kingsley. The movies How to Plan an Orgy in a Small Town and Alice Through the Looking Glass are in theatres now but the conversations about them are right here! C’mon in and sit a spell.
“A Tour De Force,” Richard’s look at the history of “Star Wars” has been nominated for a RTDNA Award in the category of Dave Rogers Award – Long Feature – Radio.
RTDNA Canada, The Association of Electronic Journalists, is pleased to recognize excellence in electronic journalism for the Network stations. Read more HERE! Listen to the Tour De Force series HERE!
Richard and CP24 anchor Nneka Elliot do a refresher on “Captain America: Civil War” and then talk about the weekend’s big releases, the seedy charm of “The Nice Guys” with Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling, the kid’s cartoon “The Angry Birds Movie,” and the Seth Rogen sequel “Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising.”
Richard and “Canada AM” host Marci Ien talk about the weekend’s three big releases, the shady charm of “The Nice Guys” with Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling, the kid’s cartoon “The Angry Birds Movie,” and the Seth Rogen sequel “Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising” and the debauched “High-Rise” with Tom Hiddleston.
How to describe High-Rise, the darkly funny film from director Ben Wheatley?
Here goes; imagine the love child of Lord of the Flies and The Towering Inferno. An adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s novel about class segregation in a luxury condo, High-Rise is chaotic and completely bonkers.
“There’s material in here that is difficult and there’s structure in here that’s difficult but there’s also fun,” says Wheatley.
“There’s anarchy and sex and dancing and music. I always like to think about it like those 40s and 50s Hollywood movies and what they used to look like. There’d be no contradiction in a cowboy movie stopping for someone to sing a song.
“You don’t think about the pacing being really odd. The idea behind it was that those films were broken up into chunks. There’s a variety to them that make them really enjoyable. That’s what I was hoping for with this.”
Wheatley says the story of social warfare in the closed environment of an apartment building is just as relevant now as it was when Ballard wrote it in 1975.
“Ballard used to describe it that he was standing by the side of the road waving that there is danger ahead. But when I reread it when I was 40, it’s like, Crap, it’s not a warning anymore. It’s like it was taken from the newspaper. This is actually happening, which is kind of shocking but also kind of interesting.”
Known for his uncompromising films like Kill List and Sightseers, movies that critic Sheila O’Malley described as “black comedy thrillers involving crime, murder” and notable for their “absence of a moral compass,” the 44-year-old director is the cinematic spawn of mavericks like Nicolas Roeg, Ken Russell and John Boorman, British filmmakers who broke taboos in big budget movies like Don’t Look Now, The Devils and Deliverance.
“That was the mainstream,” he says. “When you dig into the BFI archive and look at the Jack Bond stuff and see the other end of the avant guard cinema that was being made at the same time, it was absolutely crazy. It’s a real shame that has been lost. What also makes me chuckle is you see reviews saying that High-Rise is insane or incredibly experimental and you think, ‘This film wouldn’t have stood out as all that strange in the ’70s.’ It would have been a more conservative film of that period.”
Today it’s a little tougher to raise money to get challenging films like High-Rise made. He says Hollywood-y or famous actors help, and to that end he signed Tom Hiddleston, Jeremy Irons and Mad Men’s Elisabeth Moss to tell his outlandish tale.
“I like what (producer) Jeremy Thomas says about it. His whole career has been about smuggling weird into the mainstream and I think that’s about right. It’s a deal between you and the audience.”
Part of that audience is Ballard’s considerable fan base.
“The Ballardian website have interviewed us a few times and they seem to be convinced that we haven’t totally pissed up the leg of the memory of J.G. Ballard. There was never any intention to rile those people. They are partly the reason we are able to do the film, they are the fan base. Why would you go out of your way to irritate people like that?”
Are you among the 200 million people that play Angry Birds on your smartphone? If so you’re in good company.
Angelina Jolie, Jack Black and Jon Hamm are fans and British Prime Minister David Cameron has admitted to being “mildly addicted” to the game. Since December 2009, folks have been flinging flocks of birds at pig’s fortresses, downloading more than 3 billion versions of the app.
This weekend the Angry Birds game takes the next logical step, catapulting onto the big screen with their very own movie.
Jason Sudeikis, Josh Gad and Maya Rudolph star in The Angry Birds Movie, a story that tells us why the annoyed avians — like flock leader Red Bird, Bomb the Black Bird and Slingshot Stella the Cockatoo — are so angry. Turns out they feel betrayed by the tittering piggies that pretend to be their friends but are really only interested in stealing their eggs. Cue the catapults and mountains of TNT.
It’s a brand with a built-in audience, a combination Hollywood finds irresistible, and while it has colourful, easily marketed characters, the game itself doesn’t offer much in the way of story. But that has never stopped producers before.
Remember Super Mario Bros? Siskel & Ebert gave that one two thumbs down and star Bob Hoskins, who played Mario, called it “the worst thing I ever did.”
Despite brutal reviews and box office failure, Nintendo Power magazine praised the film, calling it a trailblazer in the genre of videogame movies.
Which leads us, 23 years after Mario and his brother Luigi stunk up movie theatres, to The Angry Birds Movie. Why is a game from a developer in Espoo, just outside Helsinki, Finland, popular enough to take flight as its own movie?
The success of Angry Birds has to do with something called schema formation, a five-dollar term for mentally grasping and embedding how the game’s interface works the first time you play it.
The addictive part comes in as the action of the game changes. In Play at Work, engineer Charles L. Mauro explains the appeal: “These little birds are packed with clever behaviours that expand the user’s mental model at just the point when game-level complexity is increased.”
The game’s genius is in adding playing details at just the right moment to increase user engagement. In other words, it’s fun. I guess that’s why gamers spend 200 million minutes a day flinging Angry Birds at various targets.
According to marketers AYTM, that’s “equal to 16 years of gameplay every hour of every day.” They also note that players have flung over 100 billion angry birds, a number equal to the amount of real birds on the planet. Those are the kind of statistics Hollywood can’t ignore.
One person unlikely to pass the time with Angry Birds is U.S. communications surveillance whistleblower Edward Snowden. In 2014 he claimed the app was “leaky,” and was vulnerable to the harvesting of information by outside groups.
Mikael Hed, CEO of Rovio Entertainment, the makers of Angry Birds, denied Snowden’s claims.
“We do not collaborate, collude, or share data with spy agencies anywhere in the world,” he said, which must have come as a relief to another of the game’s biggest fans, former Vice President of the United States Dick Cheney, who, apparently, also enjoys hurling a bird or two in his spare time.
When we last saw thirty-something new parents Mac (Seth Rogen) and Kelly (Rose Byrne) they had just called a truce in a Hatfield and McCoy’s style feud with their unruly Delta Psi frat boy neighbours led by Teddy (Zac Efron) and Pete (Dave Franco).
Time has moved on.
Mac and Kelly have happily figured out how to balance fun and parenthood but Teddy is struggling to find his place. The final straw? He realizes he is the oldest Abercrombie & Fitch employee by six years. He finds purpose when he joins forces with party animal and grrrl power advocate Shelby (Chloë Grace Moretz) who brings him back to the scene of his greatest work—right next door to Mac and Kelly—to liven things up at her newly formed Kappa Nu sorority. “I have finally found something I am good at,” says Teddy.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Or so the old saying goes. In the case of “Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising” the title and party animal gender has changed but everything else is pretty much identical to the first movie. There are sex toy jokes, loud parties, elaborate plans to put an end to the partying and even an air bag gag or two. The familiar elements raise a laugh or two and even made me slap my knee a couple of times, but the thing that makes “Neighbors 2” worth a look isn’t Efron’s abs, which are on ample display, but the relationships between the main cast.
Rogen and Byrne have the easy, kooky camaraderie of a long time couple. Individually they are funny, but together they radiate humour and warmth, even when they’re talking about being horrible parents to their two-year-old child.
That likeability trickles down to the supporting cast. Selby, Teddy, Ike (Ike Barinholtz) and Paula (Carla Gallo) may do ill-advised things—Selby comes just this side of kidnapping and Ike gets REALLY high at a party—but they aren’t terrible people. Just folks placed in extraordinary situations. When it comes right down to it they all do more or less the right thing. That kind-and-gentle approach is a change from Rogen’s earlier shock-and-awe films but doesn’t diminish the laughs.
“Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising” isn’t quite as funny as the first time, but it’s genial just as good neighbours should be.
“Mr. Right” is a rom crime com that plays a bit like “Pitch Perfect” with a very high body count.
