Richard sits in with Beverly Thomson to have a look at the weekend’s new movies, the boozy thriller “The Girl on the Train,” the courtroom drama “Denial,” the rebellious “The Birth of a Nation” and “Two Lovers and a Bear,” starring Tatiana Maslany.
Watch the whole thing HERE!
Richard and CP24 anchor Jamie Gutfreund have a look at the weekend’s new movies, the Emily Blunt thriller “The Girl on the Train,” the Nate Parker historical drama “The Birth of a Nation,” Rachel Weisz in a slice of legal history called “Denial” and “Two Lovers and a Bear,” starring Tatiana Maslany.
Listen to the whole thing HERE!
By Richard Crouse – Metro In Focus
The first time most of us noticed Emily Blunt she was “’on-the-edge of sickness thin.” To play Emily Chalton, the prickly first assistant to the editor in The Devil Wears Prada, Blunt dropped pounds from her already slight frame. “It wasn’t like doughnuts were snatched out of my hand,” laughs the 5’ 7½’’ actress, but she was encouraged to slim down. So much so she would occasionally cry from hunger during the shoot. Luckily, though rake thin, she still had the energy to steal the movie from her more seasoned co-stars, Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci.
Although the character fell directly into the love-to-hate-her category, audiences found Blunt irresistible. Her mix of vulnerability and fork-tongued charm—crowned by crystal clear blue eyes and a face anchored with a cleft chin that would make Kirk Douglas envious—earned the title Best Female Scene-Stealer from Entertainment Weekly and nominations for everything from a Teen Choice Award to a Golden Globe.
This weekend she plays a much different character in the much-anticipated thriller The Girl on the Train. Based on the Paula Hawkins bestseller—11 million copies sold and counting—it’s a dark cinematic journey into a missing person’s case. The thirty-three year old actress says playing an alcoholic divorcée who witnesses a crime from a train window, “the most challenging thing I’ve ever done.”
Early reviews are strong. Variety raved she “excels as the broken-down heroine.” Those kind of kudos are an echo of her much-admired, though lesser seen work, in the UK.
After dabbling in drama at age 12 to help conquer a stutter she jumped to the small screen with praised performances in British television period pieces. It was, however, only when she left the lace-bonnets behind and took on a role in the critically-acclaimed My Summer of Love that she really made a splash. The story of a teenage infatuation between Mona (Nathalie Press) and the manipulative and cynical Tamsin (Blunt) earned both Press and Blunt equal shares in an Evening Standard British Film Award for Most Promising Newcomer.
Since then we’ve seen her as an oversexed young women opposite Tom Hanks in Charlie Wilson’s War, warbling Stephen Sondheim’s rich Into the Woods score, riding a polar bear in The Huntsman: Winter’s War and dressed as Princess Diana in the quirky rom com Five-Year Engagement.
She’s done action in both Sicario and Edge of Tomorrow (later renamed Live. Die. Repeat. for home release). Big budget blockbusters don’t usually make room for female characters unless they are sidekicks or girlfriends. In Edge of Tomorrow Blunt avoids being objectified and is as strong, if not stronger than co-star Tom Cruise.
In Sicario she’s part of an elite task force stemming the flow of drugs between Mexico and the US. A multifarious mix of vulnerability, stone cold confidence and outrage, she delivered the most interesting female action star since Mad Max: Fury Road’s Imperator Furiosa.
Next up her diverse career is the lead in Mary Poppins Returns. She says she’s nervous because the flying nanny is “such an important character in people’s childhood,” but has been given the thumbs up by the original Mary, Julie Andrews. “It was lovely to get her stamp of approval. That took the edge off it, for sure.”
By Richard Crouse – Metro Canada
“I can’t understand why people don’t always say what they are thinking,” says Emory University professor Deborah E. Lipstadt. “I’m missing a certain filter. I say what I think.”
Lipstadt, a specialist in modern Jewish history, emerged into public life from academia as the subject of a 1996 lawsuit brought against her by self-taught British historian and Holocaust denier David Irving. Irving, upset she singled him out in a book as a less-than-reputable historian, launched a libel lawsuit claiming Lipstadt and her publisher were part of a worldwide conspiracy to rob him of his livelihood.
Donations from benefactors like Steven Spielberg paid for the gruelling eight-week, £3,000,000 trial which boiled down to one main question: Is Irving a liar and a falsifier of history or simply a historian who sees things from Hitler’s point of view? The stakes were high; if Irving won, his account of history would be given credence.
The sensational court case is chronicled in Denial, a new film starring Rachel Weisz as the outspoken academic.
“In the story of this trial and this case, a lot of very good people said to me, ‘Don’t do it,’” Lipstadt says. “A lot of people didn’t want me to do it because they thought I’d be giving him publicity. How do you fight bad people without building them up and giving them a billion dollars of free publicity?”
But the publicity helped expose Irving and other deniers, says Weisz.
“I think the more people who know that the better. Most people don’t know who David Irving is. He has his core group of followers and they’re going to be very happy about this publicity. Or not. I don’t know how they’re going to feel about this, but it is more important that people should know about it. And nobody does. It doesn’t really bother me that he’s getting publicity. It’s not good publicity.”
“I think Rachel is right,” says Lipstadt. “It’s a balance. I knew fighting him would give him publicity but it would serve a purpose.”
The British actress says capturing Lipstadt’s essence — from the heavy Queens accent to her personal boldness — was “a beautiful, delicious challenge.”
“Deborah came and hung out with me in New York,” says Weisz, “sat in my kitchen for two days straight. I filmed her on my iPhone so I would be able to look back at it. Deborah told me stories about her childhood, her parents and about the trial. It was just being able to be near her and soak up her spirit and attitude and find the places were we intersect as people. There are some (people) when you find that you think, ‘I could be this person if my life had gone differently.’ It became imaginable to me then that I could be Deborah had my life gone that way.”
Lipstadt describes watching Weisz’s performance as “an out-of-body experience,” adding that her friend, legal eagle Alan Dershowitz wrote her a note, saying, “She catches your accent but even more she captured your attitude.”
“It’s fun being you,” says Weisz. “I enjoyed it. You get to say what you think. I like it, it’s very healthy. Get it out.”
By Richard Crouse – Metro Canada
The story of two star-crossed lovers on the run from bad memories is at the heart of Two Lovers and a Bear, a new Arctic-set film from Rebelle director Kim Nguyen.
Counselling the couple is a talking polar bear, a philosophical addition to a movie that is part romance, part thriller and all icy cold isolation.
Montreal native Nguyen says the script for the film evolved over time, but many of the elements, including the talking bear came to him on a stopover at the Amsterdam airport.
“I was reading Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami,” he says. “There are weird gods in the book, kind of like imperfect Greek gods with flaws. It dawned on me that I should have something like an imperfect, flawed deity in the film.”
At the same time he noticed the airport’s giant brass teddy bears and voilà, the idea of an advice-giving polar bear was born.
The bear, played by a real polar bear named Agee and voiced by acting legend Gordon Pinsent, is the most fanciful part of a film that sees Lucy and Roman, played by recent Emmy winner Tatiana Maslany and Dane DeHaan, embark on a physical and metaphysical journey to confront their troubled, violent pasts.
“I’ve seen a lot of people like that,” Nguyen says of the people he met in Nunavut, “(people) who just can’t connect with an organized, dense, compact society. They have to go up North and that’s why you meet very interesting, unique characters up there. Often it is the people who don’t cope with societal norms.”
Nguyen’s unpredictable story intensifies with every twist, finding depth as the volatile Lucy and Roman explore the vast white expanse of their home and their innermost fears.
The lead actors have some heavy lifting to do to navigate the film’s many shifts from comedy, to psychological drama and isolationist horror.
To survive the inhospitable cold of their home both must be strong willed characters but both also wear their fragility on their parka sleeves. As such, Maslany and DeHaan are perfectly cast.
“We met a lot of people,” says Nguyen. “At the beginning it wasn’t defined exactly who Lucy was going to be; where she would come from. We wanted to keep it open with the casting. Tatiana came a little later on. We didn’t even think about her. Coming off of Orphan Black the casting director said, ‘Why don’t we try her? She’s versatile. She has range.’ She was gracious enough to do a screen test. She blew us away. She was totally way up there in the truthfulness and the authenticity. She is really someone who is able to connect. Kind of like Dane.
“I discovered Dane when I saw Place Beyond the Pines. When I saw that, I was certain that Dane wasn’t a trained actor. He was so authentic I assumed he was this guy who had this one role in him. Then I learned he was a trained actor and was really impressed by his performance.”
The six-week Nunavut shoot was gruelling for all, requiring physical stamina and a trait Nguyen calls “one of the biggest, most important qualities”— fearlessness.
“Dane and Tatiana have that,” says the director. “They dive in and they are not analyzing their performance as they’re playing it.”
In recent years we’ve seen Emily Blunt warbling Stephen Sondheim’s rich “Into the Woods” score, riding a polar bear in “The Huntsman: Winter’s War” and dressed as Princess Diana in the quirky rom com “Five-Year Engagement.” She’s done big budget action, sci fi, period dramas and now she adds Hitchcockian thriller to her list of conquered genres.
In the much-anticipated thriller “The Girl on the Train” she is Rachel a woman whose life has taken a downward dive since her divorce from Tom (Justin Theroux). Alcoholic, unemployed and despondent, she obsesses about Tom, Anna (Rebecca Ferguson), his new girlfriend—and former mistress—and their new baby.
To pass the time on her extended Lost Weekend she drinks vodka and rides a commuter train from the suburbs into Manhattan, even though she lost her high paying PR jobs ages before. Sitting in the third car from the front affords her the perfect view of her favourite house. It’s the home of Megan and Scott Hipwell (Haley Bennett and Luke Evans), a good looking couple with a seemingly perfect life to match their optimistic last name. “She’s everything I want to be,” says Rachel of Megan.
One afternoon as Rachel looks out the train window at the Hipwells she is enraged what she sees. A blur of booze later, she wakes up the next day, hungover and foggy, covered in bruises, to discover Megan has gone missing. Brain beating, blocking memories of the night before, she tries to piece together the events of the night before. Enter Mr. Hitchcock.
Based on the Paula Hawkins bestseller—11 million copies sold and counting—“The Girl on the Train” is not so much a psychological drama as much as it is a boozological one. Rachel is hammered for much of the first half of the film, making her an extremely unreliable narrator. What’s true and what’s not? That would involve giving away plot details that are best left unspoiled, but suffice to say that while there are ups and downs, they are more red herrings and misremembered clues filtered through a haze of booze. There are no “Gone Girl” flourishes here, just straightforward thriller elements banged together to point to an inevitable conclusion.
“Girl on the Train” has some elegant moments, and aspires to be an art house thriller/morality tale—no action, lots of internal dialogue—but to properly tell the story of infidelity and murder it should have embraced its down-and-dirty summertime beach reading origins.
Rising above the languid pacing and uneventful storyline is Blunt whose gut-wrenching, vanity-free performance carries the movie through its slow patches. She’s a raw nerve and if the movie had followed her lead and been just a bit more bleary eyed and blotchy, it may have been a more effective thriller.
Based on the book by Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies at Emory University Deborah E. Lipstadt, the new film “Denial” chronicles a real-life court case that could have made it acceptable to deny the Holocaust.
The action in “Denial” begins with Lipstadt (Rachel Weisz) giving a lecture in support of her latest book. In the audience is David Irving (Timothy Spall), a self-taught British historian and Holocaust denier. Because Lipstadt steadfastly refuses to debate deniers, Irving, upset she singled him out in her book as a less than reputable historian, brings the argument to her. He theatrically offers a $1000 reward for any printed link between Hitler and the Final Solution.
Rebuffed, he launches a libel lawsuit claiming Lipstadt and her publisher are part of a worldwide conspiracy to rob him of his livelihood as a historian. The case, filed in England, left the burden of proof on the accused, Lipstadt. Baffled by the foreign legal system the American is led through the complicated case by Richard Rampton (Tom Wilkinson) and Anthony Julius (Andrew Scott), the solicitor who handled Lady Diana’s divorce. “We have no strategy,” says Julius, “we’re trying to box him in with the truth.”
Donations from benefactors like Steven Spielberg paid for the gruelling eight-week, £3,000,000 trial which boiled down to one main question: Is Irving a liar and a falsifier of history or simply a historian who sees things from Hitler’s point of view? The stakes are high, if Irving wins his account of history will be given credence. “The man is a liar and someone needs to say so,” Lipstadt says.
For much of its running time “Denial” is a taut court procedural—kind of like the last half of a great “Law and Order” episode—with colourful characters. Weisz, a feisty force of nature amid the more reserved Brits, holds the center of the film with a combination of grit and concern. Scott is the epitome of the stiff-upper-lipped lawyer but it is Wilkinson who shines, hiding a sharp legal mind behind a grandfatherly façade. As the villain Irving, Spall brings desperation, indignation and condescension to a man who wants respect for his opinions.
“Denial” moves along at a zippy pace, exploring the pertinent details but taking the time to add an emotional wallop with a research trip to Auschwitz. A drawn out ending slows things down a bit in an attempt to add drama to a verdict that is historical record but satisfies both as a precedent setting slice of legal history and a big screen entertainment.
Out of Sundance “The Birth of a Nation,” a biopic of slave, preacher and revolutionary Nat Turner written, directed and starring Nate Parker, was being touted as an Oscar contender. It set a record as the biggest distribution deal ever made at the Sundance Film Festival and won rapturous reviews.
Then the news broke that Parker was accused of raping a drunk, unconscious 18-year-old Penn State University student in 1999, orchestrated campaign of harassment and that although he was cleared in a 2001 trial, the alleged victim was so traumatized by the incident that she went on to commit suicide in 2012 at the age of 30.
Word around Tinsel Town is that these revelations have torpedoed any Oscar hope the film might have had, but the question is, will Nat Turner’s tale prove more potent than Parker’s own story?
From a young age Nat Turner (Parker) is told he is a child of God, someone with purpose. Growing up on the Turner plantation, he is taught to read but nonetheless is sent to work as a field hand. As a young man the seeds of his discontent are sewn when he is sold to unscrupulous plantation owners, sent out to teach the godly value of servitude to his fellow slaves. “Slaves submit yourself to your masters,” he preaches. His words make his owner rich and lift some broken spirits, but soon the hypocrisy of his proselytizing seeps in after a series of unspeakable events. He witnesses rape, brutality and after he baptizes a white man he is whipped to within an inch of his life. Beaten but not broken, he decides to fight back just as David, Goliath and Sampson did. Where he was once a spiritual leader he is now a rebellion chief. “With the help of our father we will cut the head off the serpent!”
It took Parker seven years to bring “The Birth of a Nation” to the screen and his passion is writ large on every frame. He has made an audacious film, a brash epic that borrows its name from D. W. Griffith’s racist 1915 blockbuster.
It is Turner hero’s moral journey from slave to rebellion leader. It’s a coming-of-rage story that spares few details. We are shown the casual cruelty that turned Turner from a peace-loving preacher to a man pushed to violence. On screen Parker is at the center of the action, appearing in almost every scene and bearing the emotional brunt of the narrative. He is the story’s engine and with an understated, powerful performance he keeps us along for the ride.
It’s the filmmaking that falls short. There are moments of singular imagery—a slow tracking shot of bodies hanging form a tree set to Nina Simone’s “Strange Fruit” is unsettling and unforgettable—but Parker has paced the film at a deliberate, monotonous tempo that doesn’t do the story any favours. It feels like a missed opportunity to not build tension, to not allow the remarkable story to lead the way.
Turner was a remarkable man, whose actions led directly and indirectly to the Civil War. Parker fails to fully place the man into historical perspective and by doing so ignores dramatic opportunities.
“The Birth of a Nation” is an important story of a man in an inhuman world. Parker treats the material and the man respectfully but could have used more urgency.
The story of two star-crossed lovers on the run from bad memories is at the heart of “Two Lovers and a Bear,” a new film from “Rebelle” director Kim Nguyen. Counselling them is a talking polar bear, a philosophical addition to a movie that is part romance, part thriller and all icy cold isolation.
Set in Apex, Nunavut, just shy of the North Pole, “Two Lovers and a Bear” is the tale of Lucy (Tatiana Maslany) and Roman (Dane DeHaan), angst-ridden lovers, tormented by recollections of their abusive pasts. The mere thought of Lucy’s father inspires panic attacks and Roman finally put his violent father in the rear view mirror by fighting back and leaving home. Still the thought of it haunts him. When Lucy is accepted into a school program in the south, the pair split, only to be brought back together by tragedy. Together they embark on a journey that forces them to confront their pasts while solidifying their bond.
The emotional stakes rise throughout as Nguyen weaves together magic realism—the silky voice of the polar bear is supplied by Gordon Pinsent—romance and the hard realities of Northern life. It’s an unpredictable story that intensifies with every twist, finding depth as the volatile characters explore the vast white expanse of their home and their innermost fears.
Maslany and DeHaan are an intoxicating combination. Lucy and Roman are strong willed characters, they have to be to survive the inhospitable cold of their home, but both wear their fragility on their sleeves. Desperately in love, the couple can’t live without one another but, paradoxically, are bad for one another. That contradiction at the heart of their relationship feeds the narrative thrust of the film, binding the story’s mishmash of genres.
“Two Lovers and a Bear” covers the kind of troubled relationship we’ve seen in other indie films—two young lovers battling demons—but Nguyen’s bold use of the setting and the strong, naturalistic and soulful performances at the heart of the film make it quite unlike anything we’ve seen before.
