Nominated this year for an Oscar as Best Documentary Feature, Raoul Peck’s “I Am Not Your Negro” draws from an unfinished book by novelist, essayist, playwright, and poet James Baldwin. Deeply personal, “Remember This House” was meant to be a remembrance of his friends and civil-rights titans Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X. Voiced by Samuel L. Jackson, using Baldwin’s own words and a smattering of archival footage, the film isn’t a biography of the man but a biography of a lifetime of experiences, experiences that reverberate today.
As timely in 2017 as when the words were written in 1979, it’s a portrait of race relations in America, a place Baldwin calls, “a complex country that insists on being very narrow-minded.” To hammer home this point Peck uses archival footage from Baldwin’s lifetime as well as ripped-from-the-headlines images of Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Black Lives Matter and Michael Brown.
With no talking heads Peck relies on news footage, movie clips and archival talk show tape, intercutting them with the fluidity of jazz. Posters and graphics punctuate the narration, subliminally driving home Baldwin’s points. More striking than the visuals is the arresting eloquence of Baldwin’s words. When he makes—and Jackson verbalizes—statements like, “To look around America today is to make prophets and angels weep,” it is impossible to not to be moved by both the beauty of the language and the underlying message.
Baldwin lived at a tumultuous time but as his words remind us, “History is not the past it is the present. We are our history.”
You may not actually die laughing from watching the new talking head documentary “Dying Laughing” but you will get a closer look into the psyche of the people who stand on stages to make us laugh.
The premise is simple. Directors Paul Toogood and Lloyd Stanton have assembled a who’s who of comedians—Chris Rock, Kevin Hart, Jerry Seinfeld, Amy Schumer, Sarah Silverman, Billy Connelly and Garry Shandling to name just a fraction of the faces represented here—to discuss what it is like to be a comic. One after the other, in front of a white screen, they tell the kind of stories about being on the road, about bombing and how to deal with hecklers that you imagine comics only share with one another in seedy hotel rooms and backstage at gigs.
Occasionally revealing—being a comedian is “too painful and difficult if it isn’t a calling,” says Shandling while Seinfeld clarifies that it isn’t audience approval he wants but audience sublimation—occasionally funny, it is more often than not occasionally repetitive. In story after story the details change—Connelly was once punched in the face in the middle of a set!—but the gist remains the same. “You’ve got to die to get good.” “The more pain you go through the better you’ll be.” Sometimes the language is quite colourful—“Bombing feels like being slapped by your dad at a BBQ.”—but it does go on longer than it should.
Judging by the off camera laughter during the interview segments this was a fun film to make. Too bad it isn’t quite as much fun to watch. A judicious editor, perhaps one a little less in love with the material probably could have cut this down to the bone, mining the interviews for new insight.
Check out Josh Elliot’s ctvnews.ca story “Oscar Hype: If You Don’t Like the Best Picture Noms, You’re Not Alone,” to hear Richard’s rebuttals to the naysayers!
“Don’t feel bad if you thought “Arrival” made no sense, “La La Land” was pretentious or you fell asleep during “Moonlight,” because you’re not alone.
“Hollywood voters will spend Oscar night praising all nine of this year’s Best Picture nominees, but that doesn’t make them perfect. In fact, it’s easy to find voices of dissent on the internet.
“CTVNews.ca rounded up some of the most common complaints about each movie and put them to film critic Richard Crouse, to see which ones held up…” READ THE WHOLE THING HERE!
From Marilyn.ca: Jimmy Kimmel hosts the 89th annual Academy Awards this Sunday, February 26th at 9pm on CTV. For your best shot at winning your office Oscar pool, Richard Crouse lays out who he thinks will be walking away with the coveted statues. And when in doubt, pick La La Land.
Three audience members get ambushed by Alexis Honce with a purse intervention; Five steps to glowing skin; Actress Malin Akerman on season two of “Billions”; Malin cooks sweet potato burgers with Chef Rodney Bowers; Must-see films before the Oscars.
RIP Richard Schickle. Richard interviewed him on stage about Clint Eastwood and later wrote this for an unfinished book about the best movie lines ever:
“I know what you’re thinking. ‘Did he fire six shots or only five?’ Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement I kind of lost track myself. But being as this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you’ve got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?” – Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood) in Dirty Harry, 1971
Before Dirty Harry Clint Eastwood was a star. He worked his way up from playing uncredited characters in b-movie turkeys like 1955’s Revenge of the Creature to supporting roles in everything from a Francis the Talking Mule comedy to a string of westerns and war pictures. Television’s Rawhide made him a household name in America and his trio of spaghetti westerns with Sergio Leone—A Fistful of Dollars, For A Few Dollars More and The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly—made him an international star, but it took an urban vigilante movie to make him a legend.
Loosely based on real life San Francisco police inspector Dave Toschi, one of the investigators of the Zodiac murders, Dirty Harry, is the story of SFPD Inspector Harry Callahan (Eastwood) charged with bringing a serial killer to justice. Callahan lives by his own code of ethics and is unafraid to bend the rules to get the bad guy. He’s generally cool, calm and collected, but he took cool to a whole new level early in the film.
Seeing a bank robbery in progress Callahan approaches the scene without waiting for back up. Pointing his .44 Smith & Wesson Model 29 Magnum revolver in a robber’s face he says the words (written by future Apocalypse Now screenwriter John Milius) that made Clint Eastwood a superstar.
“I know what you’re thinking. ‘Did he fire six shots or only five?’ Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement I kind of lost track myself. But being as this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you’ve got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?”
“It’s a very commanding moment,” says former Time critic and Eastwood biographer Richard Schickel. “I mean he’s already a star, there’s no question about that, but in that moment the command of the screen, the command of himself, the strange humour of it, which is a real Clint kind of sense of humour working in that scene, it’s just great. That’s the moment. [After that] there’s no question that this guy is going to be, for a long time a major, major star. So I think in terms of his career, that’s the important line.”
Dirty Harry became Eastwood’s signature role, but it almost didn’t happen. Written for an older man the part was offered to Robert Mitchum, John Wayne, Burt Lancaster and Frank Sinatra (who had to pass because a wrist injury prevented him from convincingly holding the weighty .44 Magnum). Then it was put forward to Steve McQueen (who turned it down, saying, “I’m only good doing authority my way.”) and Paul Newman who thought it was too right wing for him but suggested Clint.
“Like most pictures that I’ve done I had no idea if anyone would want to see it,” Eastwood says in the documentary The Eastwood Factor (directed by Schickel). “I figured I’d like to see it. If I hadn’t played in it I’d like to see it with somebody else. I just went at it from that angle.”
It was a perfect marriage of character and actor. Jay Cocks of Time wrote that Eastwood gave “his best performance so far, tense, tough, full of implicit identification with his character.” But not all critics liked the movie.
Roger Ebert condemned the film for its “fascist moral position” even though he grudgingly admitted it was well made. Not so with Pauline Kael the doyenne of film criticism. She called Dirty Harry a “right-wing fantasy [that is] a remarkably single-minded attack on liberal values” and labeled it “fascist medievalism.”
“It is suspenseful, it has a moral that I think is very potent, not at all what Pauline Kael thought it was,” argues Schickle. “She’s so full of shit. That woman. I mean, she persisted with that on every movie [Eastwood] made. I think the last one she reviewed was Unforgiven and she didn’t like that. Well crikey, that’s absurd.
“[Dirty Harry] is a movie that gets left off the My Favorite Clint Movies list that people make, but I think it is such a great movie. It holds up beautifully. It is the movie that projected him out of the ranks of stars and into the much smaller rank of superstars.”
Welcome to the House of Crouse. Today “Fist Fight” director Richie Keen talks about sneaking on to the sets of John Hughes films and how it made him feel like he finally found the place he belonged. Then Natalie Brown swings by to chat about making “XX,” a new horror anthology film written, produced, directed and starring women! Pull up a beab bag by the fireplace and hang out with us. You’re always welcome at the House of Crouse. No walls here.
Richard sits in on Zane Caplansky’s “Let’s Eat” radio show with Southern Accent restaurant owner Frances Wood to talk about the legendary restaurant’s new location at 839 College Street in Toronto and his days spent working at the original location as a waiter.
Richard and CP24 anchor George Lagogianes have a look at the weekend’s new movies, the Ice Cube high school comedy “Fist Fight,” the Matt Damon white saviour flick “The Great Wall,” Dane DeHaan in the incomprehensible “The Cure for Wellness” and “My Scientology Movie.”
