Richard and CP24 anchor Jamie Gutfreund have a look at the weekend’s new movies, “Patriot’s Day,” “Live By Night” from director-actor Ben Affleck and the terrible “Monster Trucks.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
Richard sits in with Marcia MacMillan to have a look at the big weekend movies, Peter Berg’s ripped-from-the-headlines “Patriot’s Day,” “Live By Night” from director-actor Ben Affleck, the terrible “Monster Trucks” and the sublime “20th Century Women” and “Paterson.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
By Richard Crouse – Metro In Focus
Meryl Streep has a body of work that speaks for itself and, as she proved last Sunday night from the stage of the Golden Globes, is unafraid to challenge the status quo. But last week while the world formed opinions about Streep as she mouthed off about Donald Trump—She’s an icon! She’s overrated!—I had my eye on someone in the audience.
During Streep’s speech the camera landed on Annette Bening, who, for my money gives the Grand Dame a run for her money acting wise.
This weekend Bening adds 20th Century Women to her already stellar IMDB resume. As free-spirited single mother Dorothea she is, as writer David Edelstein wrote, irreducible. In other words she’s complex, loving yet stand-offish, warm but steely, a hippie who studies the stock market and Bening brings her to vivid life.
It’s that density of character that sets Bening apart from her peers, Streep included. Warren Beatty, her husband and sometimes director says she has, “talent, beauty, wit, humility and grace,” a combination that makes her “the best actress alive.”
Biased? Likely, but the evidence is on the screen. Bening works sporadically, sometimes taking years between projects or taking small supporting roles in idiosyncratic independent films like Ruby Sparks, but her characters are always compelling.
She became a star playing femme fatale Myra in 1990’s con artist caper The Grifters. Gleefully embracing her character’s deviousness, she stole the movie away from vets John Cusack and Anjelica Huston. Then came intricate portrayals of everything from a muckraking lobbyist in The American President and neurotic real estate broker in American Beauty to Bugsy’s tough-talking Hollywood starlet and In Dreams’ psychic vigilante. Each performances is a polished gem even when the movies aren’t as good as she is.
The last of her Best Actress Oscar nods came with 2010’s The Kids Are Alright. At the center of story are Nic (Bening) and Jules (Julianne Moore), a long time lesbian couple raising their two kids. It’s a happy family until their daughter contacts her biological father Paul (Mark Ruffalo) via the sperm bank.
A scene near the movie’s end displays the complexity of Bening’s work. Nic and Paul sing a Joni Mitchell song at a dinner party. Their wild act is joyful, ridiculous and poignant simultaneously and is a perfect microcosm of Bening’s performance. Bening is unpredictable, sometimes funny, sometimes not, just like real life. It’s her well-drawn character that keeps the basic story afloat with its lived-in, realistic feel.
Less known is Bening’s fine work in The Face of Love, a 2014 film about a widow obsessed with a man who looks exactly like her late husband Tom. Trouble is, she never tells him about his resemblance raising the question, Is she in love with Tom or a memory?
Another question: Is she a selfish conniver, a grief stricken widow or one brick short of a load? The movie allows for interpretation, but regardless of your take, Bening’s performance is so raw and vulnerable it’s difficult to completely condemn her behaviour.
Bening’s name may not always be mentioned in the hushed tones as Streep, but I suspect she doesn’t care for the accolades as much as shattering the clichés of how women are portrayed on film. On that score she is at the top of her field.
By Richard Crouse – Metro Canada
Paterson, the new movie from director Jim Jarmusch is a week in the life of Paterson, the man and the place.
Adam Driver plays Paterson, a poetry writing New Jersey bus driver from Paterson, New Jersey. He lives with Laura (Golshifteh Farahani), a dreamer who wants to open a cupcake shop and make them rich and their dog Marvin.
Paterson is a wonderfully leisurely movie. There are small conflicts sprinkled throughout, a bus breaks down and lovers quarrel, but Paterson isn’t about that. It’s about gentle, loving performances from Driver and Farahani and the beauty of overheard conversations and the day-to-day of regular life.
After the success of Star Wars and everything else you’ve been in recently, you must get offered every script out there. Why choose this one?
Jim [Jarmusch]. It’s a director’s medium so if I get lucky enough to work with great directors, that’s the only thing as far as a game plan I have. I have gotten to do that with really great people and it feels good. I’m lucky in that I get to choose things now, but choose things from what I’m offered. The scale doesn’t matter.
So it doesn’t matter whether you’re shooting for twenty days or you’re gone for six months? Is it just the love of acting?
Yes. It’s a very strange job. It seems you get to do your job twenty percent of the time and then you talk about it forever. For me the doing of it is the best. The things surrounding it don’t matter. Trailers, money, they don’t matter if you get to work with really great people. Then hopefully what you’re making is bigger than any one person and it feels relevant, as much as you can attach meaning to your job. The love of collaborating with people who are on the same page and want to make the best version of it is really exciting.
I think you can attach meaning. Movies like this are worth talking about…
I don’t like to say what meaning I attach to my work. Half of the experience of watching a play or something in a movie theatre is that everyone is coming from somewhere else. No one lives inside the movie theatre. They’re bring all their baggage and if they’re coming there not ready to be affected then they probably won’t be affected. But whatever meaning they pick out of the movie, that means something to them or doesn’t mean anything to them, is completely subjective.
A movie like Paterson is a beautiful slice of life but it is probably going to speak to the audience that will be very different from say, Suicide Squad, but Paterson isn’t going to make $165 million in its opening weekend.
WHAT?!
But for me that makes it valid and interesting.
Really great movies have a longer shelf life. You come back to them later and find new things in them. So many times, and this is so obvious, you watch a movie and you’re not ready for it and you come back to it later because you’re a different person and suddenly it speaks to you in a different way. When they are well crafted they have that shelf life whereas a lot of things are made for one weekend.
By Richard Crouse – Metro Canada
Overrated is the last word I would use to describe Meryl Streep as an actress or interview subject. Like everybody else I’ve admired her work from the early fresh-faced roles in films like Manhattan to the emotional catharsis of Kramer vs. Kramer, through her accent phase and beyond.
I’ve also interviewed her several times. In our conversations, as in her controversial speech at the Golden Globes, she’s always been forthright, fearless and nothing less than gracious.
Our first chat was eleven years ago at the A Prairie Home Companion television junket in Minnesota. I’ve done dozens, probably hundreds of these things and the only thing they have in common is the amount of time wasted sitting in hotel hallways, cooling heels until the stars are ready to speak. Experience taught me to always bring a book, the thicker the better, to pass the time.
I read until it was time to talk with Streep. With a list of questions and my book I sat opposite her under hot TV lights and the unblinking gaze of the cameras, familiar but formal territory. Then she did remarkable. Before my first question she asked me one.
“What book are you reading?” No actor had ever asked me about my ever-present book. She then asked me what I liked about it. As we chatted amiably I realized I was being seduced by the Streep charm.
She was working her magic, doing what she does in her work; taking our time beyond the professional and into the personal. She took a moment to make a connection with me before we got down to the task at hand. That bond to her audience and her characters is what makes her great, not just as an actress or speechmaker but also as a person.
Overrated? I think not.
By Richard Crouse – Metro Canada
Don McKellar is best known as a movie director, writer and actor but says, “I’ve always found the feature film format slightly restrictive.”
The director of big screen gems like Childstar, Last Night and The Grand Seduction is behind the camera once again, this time for Michael: Every Day, a CBC television comedy debuting Sunday, Jan. 15.
“I’ve always been interested in television and whether it is attention deficit disorder or something, I’ve always liked short formats,” he says. “My first films were short and then I did 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould. I like the road movie format because it is episodic, so fracturing narratives is always something I have always been interested in.
“Television is a natural home for me. I like breaking up stories. In a way I think it throws off the viewer’s expectations. If it is done well in some ways it can have more surprises than a feature film which you know, one way or another, is going to wrap up after a couple of hours. We don’t know anymore with television how long the narrative is going to be. It could go on forever or just a few episodes.”
The new show is a revival of sorts. Michael: Every Day is the continuing story of the relationship between title character, played by Matt Watts, and his psychiatrist, played by long-time McKellar collaborator Bob Martin. In 2011 the first season, then titled Michael: Tuesdays & Thursdays, was nominated for a Canadian Screen Award before being cancelled.
“I can’t pretend it was our idea [to bring the show back],” says McKellar. “There was a regime change at the CBC and as I understand it when the new people came in they said, ‘OK, let’s look and see how the CBC has been doing over the last while.’ They looked at our show and said, ‘That’s the kind of show we should be doing.’ They reordered it and we said yes. It was not our intention but it was very exciting once we had the option. The five-year gap, once we thought about it, was an interesting hook. What happened to these characters in five years?”
It’s an unusual trajectory for a show and McKellar thinks it is a brash move.
“As has been discussed widely, TV is having a moment and I think Canada is catching up,” he says. “I think there was a feeling for a long time that the American cable shows were doing something interesting and now, finally, it has tilted down to network television. In Canada the CBC has realized they have this licence to do more ambitious stuff. I give them credit for going for it. They have made some bold choices and this is one of them. I hope the audience responds because these things don’t last forever.”
The new climate in television offers more interesting shows for the viewer and, according to McKellar, a new freedom for the creative side.
“For me as a director, I think that people are just now staring to realize that directors can actually do things in television. It’s not just mechanical.
“It gives me a bit of space to get in there and try some more filmic stuff. I think that is happening in television in general.”
By Richard Crouse – Cineplex.com
Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen may be adversaries in the X-Men films but they are best friends in real life.
The pair met while working at Stratford-upon-Avon’s Royal Shakespeare Company in the 1970s. McKellen remembers they eyed each other from afar, but adds, “we didn’t become close friends until much later.”
“I probably could have attempted a friendship but I was so intimidated by my friend at that time,” Stewart says playfully. “That’s all gone now.”
The two bring their personal chemistry to a West End remounting of their 2013 Broadway hit, Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land that will be broadcast live to Cineplex cinemas from Wyndham’s Theatre, London.
“People say, ‘Why are you doing No Man’s Land again?’” says McKellen. “We did it in New York and no one has written a play for us since! We’re back with the old material.”
The BFFs play two ageing writers, the alcoholic, upper-class Hirst and the “failed, down-at-heel poet” Spooner. They are strangers who meet at a pub before going back to Hirst’s stately home to continue drinking and, as McKellen says, “affect each other’s lives.” The hilariously tragicomic power struggle contains some of Pinter’s most poetic writing. “It’s like overhearing long conversations in a pub,” says McKellan, “but written in the most exquisite language possible. Very funny.”
Stewart’s love affair with No Man’s Land predates his friendship with his co-star. First performed in 1975, the play starred theatre legends John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson as Stewart watched from the audience of London’s Old Vic Theatre.
“We both saw it, not together because we didn’t know one another then,” he says. “I went on a Monday night and was so dazzled by the performances and also by the script, much of which I could not fully understand. So I bought a ticket for the next night and then I bought a ticket for Thursday as well. I saw it three times and I would have gone on the Saturday night but I couldn’t afford to.”
Reviews for McKellen and Stewart’s take on the play are glowing. “Unmissable,” raved The Telegraph while The Independent called it “the funniest account of the play I have seen without underselling its scariness, mystery or bleak vision of the twilight zone between life and death that is old age.”
“It’s one of the great plays of the last century,” says McKellen.
Director Peter Berg is remarkably consistent.
His trademarked approach involves beginning his films with long slice-of-life scenes.
There’s no story really, just people doing everyday things—playing with their kids, buying muffins for their wives—before being exposed to unspeakable tragedy. His last two films, “Deepwater Horizon” and “Lone Survivor” were built around that template, one he revisits in the real life drama “Patriots Day.”
In this case the movie begins on April 15, 2013 in Boston. Mark Wahlberg (Berg’s go to heroic everyman) is Sgt. Tommy Saunders, a cop with a bad knee and a caring wife (Michelle Monaghan), assigned to traffic duty at the Boston Marathon finish line. As he takes his place across town two brothers, Dzhokhar (Alex Wolff ) and Tamerlan (Themo Melikidze) Tsarnaev, prepare homemade double boiler bombs and a plan to spread terror at the all American event.
With the character introductions out of the way the race begins with hundreds of people running through the streets, careening toward the finish line and devastation.
Berg, like Hitchcock, knows that showing the bomb but not saying when it will go off is almost unbearably tense. You know it’s there, you know what will happen, but the waiting is the thing that builds suspense.
When the two bombs do explode, maiming and killing dozens of people as the brothers slip off into the crowd, Berg recreates the mayhem, splicing together hundreds of shots, many only four or five seconds long. It’s hellish collage that places the viewer amid the action.
The remainder of the running time is spent making sense of the situation and tracking the terrorist brothers.
Berg fills the time with several very tautly staged scenes—a carjacking is memorable for its quiet menace—but the violence, especially an extended shootout on a residential street is not glamorized. It’s raw and tremendously tense.
Wahlberg is the film’s conscience—he says things like “We can’t go back to all these families with nothing. We owe them better.”—but the movie’s beating heart is Berg’s celebration of the indomitable spirit of victims and law enforcement alike. He is an unapologetic champion of everyday heroes, people who don’t flinch in the face of adversity. His heroes are the real greatest generation types who live next door and always do the right thing.
In Berg’s last film, “Deepwater Horizon,” the explosions were the stars. In “Patriots Day” the action and the fireworks propel the story, showcasing instead of overwhelming the heroics.
The new Jim Jarmusch movie is a week in the life of Paterson, the man and the place.
Adam Driver is Paterson, a poetry writing New Jersey bus driver from Paterson, New Jersey. He lives with Laura (Golshifteh Farahani), a dreamer who wants to open a cupcake shop and make them rich or, maybe, become a country singer and their dog Marvin.
For Paterson, every day is pretty much the same as the lone before it. He wakes up early and eats Cheerios before packing a lunch into a metal lunch box and heading to work. A William Carlos Williams—the famous New Jersey poet—fan, he pens carefully worded free verse poems in an ever present notebook. The only things that change in Paterson’s life are the ever-shifting faces of his passengers and Laura’s career choices. When she isn’t painting black-and-white geometric designs on every surface of their small home she is dreaming about whatever it is that may come next for her. When his notebook is damaged Paterson must rediscover the possibilities of the blank page.
“Paterson” is a wonderfully leisurely movie. It’s not in a hurry to get where it is going, instead luxuriating in the mundane aspects of Paterson’s life punctuated by on-screen depictions of his poetry. What could have been insufferable turns into a beautifully rendered portrait of people who find beauty and art in every day life.
There are small conflicts sprinkled throughout, a bus breaks down and lovers quarrel, but “Paterson” isn’t about that. It’s about gentle, loving performances from Driver and Farahani and the beauty of overheard conversations and the day to day of regular life.
