Like “Every Breath You Take,” the wedding band standard Police tune from 1983, the new film “Passengers,” depending on your point of view, is either an ode to romantic love or the story of an obsessed stalker.
The action takes place aboard the Avalon, a massive spaceship on a 120 year mission to deliver 5,259 people to Homestead II. All passengers are asleep, suspended in time until they arrive on the planet colony. “Don’t get homesick! Get Homestead!”
Among the travellers is Jim Preston (Pratt), an engineer anxious to start a new life in a new world. His deep slumber is interrupted when an asteroid slams the Avalon, waking him up ninety years too early.
Alone, save for android bartender Arthur (Michael Sheen), Jim is at loose ends. After a year drifting around the empty ship on an extended, lonely boys night out—he boozes-it-up, eats whatever he wants, plays video games and doesn’t shave—Jim becomes convinced he will die in a spacy solitary confinement long before the ship arrives at its destination. To alleviate his loneliness he goes about choosing a mate to pass the time. After some research he settles on Aurora Lane (Jennifer Lawrence), a pretty journalist from New York City. “Say you figured out how to make your life a million times better,” he asks, “but it was wrong. What would you do?”
That is the big quest=ion at the heart of “Passengers.” Is Jim a hopeless romantic looking for love or a stalker who plucked Aurora out of her safe bubble to essentially hand her a death sentence? Answer that question to gauge your “Passengers” enjoyment level.
“Passengers” could easily have played as a horror film. Imagine a different cast, the loneliness of space and a little less romance and you would have a perfectly creepy vehicle for Ben Foster. Instead we have a strappingly handsome presence in Chris Pratt who is does, to be fair, seem conflicted about what to do and later sorry for what he did. He’s a charismatic and likeable star and that is supposed to make it OK that he makes life and death decisions for her without first asking for consent.
Add to that some epic scale special effects—a gravity free swimming pool and a misfiring nuclear reactor—and you have one of the strangest movies of the year. It should work. Individually Pratt and Lawrence are spark plugs; unfortunately no sparks fly between them on screen. Each are reliable, amiable additions to almost any other movie, but here they fall flat failing to draw the audience into their strange new world.
The film is at it’s best when Pratt is prattling around the snip on his own, having trite conversations with Arthur. Sheen is wonderfully perfunctory as the android who (almost) always has the right thing to say and the sense of boredom and growing ennui that arises is effectively portrayed. It’s the misguided “romance” that comes afterwards that doesn’t seem to fit. Lawrence, the very model of grrrl power in the “Hunger Games” movies, allows herself to be relegated to the fantasy girl role here, inexplicitly easing Jim’s guilt when the movie runs out of ways to have the pair interact.
“Passengers” desperately wants to be a feel good romance but never quite gets there. A few tweaks could have turned it into a creepy look at Jim’s desperation or an amusing film about technology gone wrong—imagine if Hal from 2001 was an automated customer service attendant—but instead its done in by the story’s sexist undercurrent.
“Sing,” like the name would suggest, is a jukebox musical. The hits of Taylor Swift, Elton John and even the late, great Leonard Cohen are all present and sung by a lounge singing mouse and an elephant, among others. Think of it as the “Jersey Boys” of the animal kingdom and you’ll get the idea.
“Sing” is Matthew McConaughey’s second animated movie of the year after Kubo and the Two Strings, but the first film featuring his unique vocal stylings. As Buster Moon, a koala who throws a singing competition to save his failing theatre, the Oscar-winner does an a cappella version of Carly Rae Jepsen’s earworm “Call Me Maybe.”
Before the warbling, however, comes the story of Moon’s show business aspirations. As a child he saw Miss Nana Noodleman (Jennifer Saunders) live on stage and immediately fell in love with the theatre. So much so that he, with the help of this father, saved up and purchased the theatre with dreams of becoming an impresario. Trouble is, he isn’t much of a showman. Filled with passion but short on talent, he staged flop and after flop and by the time we meet him he’s dodging calls from his bank as he tries to figure out a way to pay the mortgage. “None of your shows have worked Mr. Moon!” says Judith from the bank. “Better settle your account by the end of the month!”
His great idea? Throw a singing competition with some of the city’s best undiscovered talent and pack his place to the rafters with people willing to hear them sing. It worked for “American Idol,” so what could go wrong? How about an arrogant lounge singing mouse (Seth MacFarlane) with ties to some nasty underworld bears? Or a stage struck elephant (Tori Kelly)? Perhaps an ill-conceived stage design involving hundreds of shrimps and thousands of gallons of water?
Featuring 85 hit songs from the 1940s to the present day, “Sing” also contains a brand new track by Stevie Wonder and Ariana Grande called “Faith” and good messages for kids about not letting fear get in the way of the things you love, never giving up, about following your dreams. It’s a frenetic package that zips along very quickly you hardly notice it’s a ninety-minute movie stretched to a two hour running time. The songs—many of them earworms that will linger for hours after the end credits roll—pad out the action, prolonging the inevitable happy ending.
Two hours for an animated movie that offers something more than catchy tunes and platitudes is fine. Unfortunately “Sing,” while beautifully animated is too concerned with being a crowd pleaser to be about much of anything. It rises to the level above ‘cute’ on the Animation-O-Meter. Some Pixar level subtext is missing. It’s pretty good eye candy and some giggles but not so much funny stuff as you might imagine in a movie that features a pig in gold lamé.
“Assassin’s Creed” may have the highest end cast ever for a movie based on a videogame. Ripe with Oscar nominees and winners like Michael Fassbender, Marion Cotillard, Jeremy Irons, Brendan Gleeson and Charlotte Rampling, it’s the poshest piffle to ever leap from the gaming consul to the big screen.
Based on the wildly popular Ubisoft videogames of the same name, the movie is a standalone that does not follow the storyline of the games.
When we first see Fassbender it’s the time of the Spanish Inquisition. He is Aguilar de Nerha, head of a stealthy brotherhood of assassins charged with making sure that rivals Knights Templar don’t get their hands on a holy relic called The Apple of Eden. “We work in the dark to service the light!” The stakes are high as the mystical device contains “the seed of man’s first disobedience.”
Jump forward to 2016. Fassbender is now Cal Lynch, a career criminal set on a bad path as a child when he saw his father murder his mother. On death row for the murder of a pimp he is to be executed. Instead he is whisked away by multinational corporate conglomerate Abstergo. “What do you want from me?” Callum asks. “Your past,” says lead scientist of the Animus project at Abstergo Foundation Sophia Rikkin (Cotillard).
Using something called the Animus Abstergo unlocks Cal’s genetic memory, essentially seeing through Aguilar de Nerha’s 15th century eyes as they look for clues as to the location of the Apple.
It’s ancestry.ca gone wild! It’s also an almost incomprehensible story about ancient rivalries and, more confusingly, “the genetic code for free will.” What, exactly does that mean? Who knows? The plot, such that it is, is essentially a load of gobbledygook that fills the gaps between the action scenes. Plot points are delivered with Fassbender’s trademarked intense glare and solemn intonations from Irons and the rest of the cast, so they must mean something, right? If you figure it out, let me know.
Richard and “CP24 Breakfast” host Steve Anthony talk about “ET: The Extra-Terrestrial” in advance of the December 29 and 30 screenings of the film (with a full orchestra) at Toronto’s Sony Centre. Find out how to get tickets HERE!
When I think back to the worst moment of the 2016 Toronto International Film Festival I will be transported back to a noon the screening of “Rats,” Morgan Spurlock’s documentary on history of rat infestations in the world’s biggest cities. Going in hungry and trying to eat a sandwich while watching the skin-crawling creatures blown up to the size of a football field did nothing for my appetite, and in fact may put me off eating for ever. Not since “Willard” or “Ben” have rats enjoyed a close up as vivid as the one Spurlock gives them in his new doc.
If I was doing the advertising copy for “Rats” I might write something like this, “Rats, coming to a city near you… actually they’re probably already there,” because apparently the beastly rodents are everywhere. They’ve been in Manhattan for 250 years and it is estimated there are more rats in New York City than people. And that is just one of the metropolises Spurlock focuses on.
In New Orleans researchers, checking for pathogens the rats might be carrying and spreading in the aftermath of Katrina, find a smorgasbord of disease and parasites. In Mumbai, India rat catchers kills hundreds of rats by hand and in Cambodia we see how rats are prepared as a dinnertime treat. “It’s important to get the rats while they were still alive,” says the chef, “that way you know they’re fresh.” In one a small Indian town rats are worshipped at a 600-year-old Hindu temple teeming with 35,000 of the long-tailed rodents. “We all die and in in the next life we become rats,” says one man. “They die and in the next life they become man.”
Presented as a horror movie, complete with scary movie music cues, “Rats” tells us pretty much everything we need to know about the creatures we share our cities with. They taste like chicken but sweeter, they are diabolically clever and when the food runs out they start eating their babies. No detail is spared in the depiction of life among the vermin, get ready for an eyeful of parasites and bloodthirsty terriers tearing rats limb from limb—“Terriers are bred for vermin control,” we’re told, “you don’t have to train a terrier to kill rats.” Yet the scary stuff isn’t the blood and guts of rat autopsies but the scientific data derived from them. Rats mutate quickly, becoming immune to rodenticides and diseases. In other words they are carriers of nasty stuff that will kill a human but not its rodent host.
Like Jason Voorhees they are relentless, breeding quickly and constantly on the lookout for food. But why are they so hard to get rid of? They learn from their mistakes and every action on our part will cause a reaction on their part. That is scary stuff. “We are hardwired to be repulsed by these animals,” says one rat expert, “probably for our own survival.” Another urban rodentologist with almost 50 years experience says, “When a rat jumps at me I still jump back.”
“Rats” is often more unsettling than anything you can make up because these little horrors aren’t hidden. They’re everywhere. “I’ve even seen them in graveyards,” says a ratologist ominously, “I wonder what they’re eating?” If that doesn’t put you off your sandwich, nothing will.
Welcome to the House of Crouse. Last week we teased you with a taste of Riz Ahmed. Today you get the long version were we talk about Star Wars, The Night of and much more. David Frankel, director of Collateral Beauty, talks about working with an all star cast and how Will Smith controls the weather to get his way on set. C’mon in, sit a spell!
Richard and CP24 anchor Nathan Downer have a look at the weekend’s new movies, the first Star Wars stand-a-lone movie “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” and the latest Will Smith tearjerker “Collateral Beauty.”
Richard sits in with Marcia MacMillan to have a look at the weekend’s new movies, the first Star Wars stand-a-lone movie “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” and the latest Will Smith tearjerker “Collateral Beauty.” Find out which one of us has never seen a “Star Wars” movie. (Here’s a hint… it’s not Richard.)
