The worst part of writing reviews is regurgitating the synopsis. Perhaps that’s one of the reason I liked “Free Fire,” the new shoot-em-up from director Ben Wheatley, so much. His follow-up to the psycho sci fi movie “High Rise” can be described with an economy of words: Ten bad people meet, a grudge emerges, bullet fly. The End.
For those craving more detail, the story begins at a rundown warehouse in Boston with Irish Republican Army out-of-towners Chris (Cillian Murphy) and Frank (Michael Smiley) and their henchmen Bernie (Enzo Cilenti) and Stevo (Sam Riley) buying thirty rifles from Vernon (Sharlto Copley). Vernon’s team includes Martin (Babou Ceesay), Gordon (Noah Taylor) and Harry (Jack Reynor). Bringing them together are Justine (Brie Larson) and Ord (Armie Hammer) fixers who stand to make mucho bucks.
The deal goes south, however, when a beef erupts between Stevo and Harry. Words, then punches and finally bullets are exchanged as the situation spins out of control. Soon it’s every man or woman for himself or herself as everyone exchanges bullets and barbs.
The gun battle makes up the bulk of the film but this is no average bullet ballet. Wheatley and co-writer Amy Jump carefully calibrate the action, mixing gunfire with sharp dialogue and plenty of irreverent, dark humour. Their best trick is keeping it real. When people get shot in “Free Fire” they don’t shake it off like most action movie characters. Instead they shriek, whine, wince and in pain, putting the strong silent type clichés of most first person shooters in the rear view mirror. As the situation grows more desperate so do the characters as they struggle to stay alive long enough to grab the elusive suitcase filled with cash, settle old scores and trade schoolyard taunts.
It’s hard not to see echoes of “Reservoir Dogs” in “Free Fire.” The warehouse setting and sketchy characters suggest Tarantino but Wheatley has done something else here. He’s packed away all pretension, all sentiment and focussed on making a down-‘n-dirty but wildly entertaining b-movie.
It’s Canadian Film Day, a time to celebrate our films and filmmakers and have a hard look at our home-grown industry. I asked some of our brightest and best three simple questions: What is the state of the Canadian film business this year? Is it better or worse than a year ago? What is the future of the biz? From Bonavista to Vancouver Island, from the Arctic Circle to the Great Lakes waters the responses were uniform: Act local, think global and get ready to stream.
“One thing for sure is on demand and very targeted content,” says director April Mullen on the future of CanCon film. “Basically, audiences are dictating which platform they want to consume content on and the immediacy of watching that content is surging.”
“The future,” says John Barnard, a Winnipeg based director whose film Menorca opens April 21, “holds the possibility for more and better streaming options that pay for content and are reliable enough to be bankable. People have been saying this for years but now everyone actually has the box attached to their TV.”
“Filmmakers need to abandon the idea of, ‘I want my film in the cinema,’” said Amal director Richie Mehta. “When I first started making feature films I got my films into the cinema and it was an amazing feeling. I got the tail end of that in a way. Now I’m very comfortable if I make a film and it goes straight to VOD and it is available in livingrooms the day we release it. If somebody asks, ‘How do I see it?’ I say, ‘Watch it happily in the comfort of your own home.’”
Along with a changing distribution system comes a new attitude expressed by Montreal-born The Other Half director Joey Klein. “People are making films more on their own terms now and less about the idea of what a movie should be per our neighbours to the south and more what a film could be given the resources we have.”
Streaming and VOD can expose domestic films to potential new audiences here in Canada and worldwide, offering up new metrics in determining a movie’s commercial value.
“At an information session this month, Telefilm staff said they will be placing less emphasis on box office as a measure of success,” said Maritime filmmaker Thom Fitzgerald. “It will be interesting to see how policy catches up to technology and viewing habits.”
Mullen, whose film Below Her Mouth hits theatres and VOD simultaneously on April 28, says while the digital platforms are “not as profitable as I’m sure they might be in the future,” she’s adds that, “there’s always room for innovative content, in all forms, and so much is possible for storytellers to breakthrough with the technology available nowadays.”
Mehta notes the scope of Canadian film has expanded. “Canadian films are being done and they are being done all over the world,” he says. “In India, China, Latin America which is really exciting because there is more diversity in the expression.”
That globalization and the accessibility offered by VOD technology has created a borderless audience for our films.
“Because there is diversity in the expression and films are being made in different languages around the world,” says Mehta, “I’m not sure that people around the world know they are watching Canadian films. Which is kind of interesting because people are watching them.”
In Maudie, a biopic of Nova Scotia folk artist Maud Lewis, Ethan Hawke plays Everett, the artist’s brusque husband. “You walk funny,” he says when he first meets her. “You a cripple? You sick?”
In other words, he’s not exactly a charmer.
“It’s always fun and such and such a great experience to get to play a character that audiences love,” says Hawke. “It feels really good but often to tell a really interesting story you have to play people who are badly behaved. I feel that as gruff and as unacceptable as a lot of Everett’s behaviour is, it is not uncommon at all of men of that time period. I remember my grandmother always accusing my grandfather of not wanting a wife but a maid. He’s somebody that in the course of that relationship learns how to love.”
As romance blossoms between them Maud’s art—handmade postcards, paintings—slowly gains fans, including Vice President Richard Nixon who purchased a landscape by mail. As Maud’s increasing recognition threatens Everett’s simple way of life their union becomes strained.
“I found that story really surprising and the subtle details of their internal power shifts, I thought, were really true to life. All long term relationships have strange power dynamics and the behaviour within the couple is always shifting about who’s in charge and in charge of what, and what that does to their love and how that changes.”
The couple is, as Maud says, “like a pair of odd socks.”
“I thought it was a beautiful journey to go from someone who was abusive to somebody who knew how to love and care for another person. That’s an interesting character to get to play.”
The script caught his eye not only because of the chance to play a complicated character but also because of his affinity for Nova Scotia.
“I bought a place in Nova Scotia probably in the late nineties. I’ve been going up there once or twice a year every since then. I love it up there.
“Through a friend of a friend they thought I might like the script just because I like Nova Scotia so much. They were right. Of course then they tricked me and the shooting ended up being in Newfoundland. I thought I could shoot this movie and live in my house, but I couldn’t.”
Maudie is a movie about small moments, an exchanged look, a caress. Like its real life inspirations the film is unpretentious, occasionally gruff but always honest and truthful.
“Most of us aren’t in giant espionage battles or helicopter chases. Most of us don’t need a superhero,” Hawke says. “For most of us the real events of our lives correspond around love. The losing of it, the gaining of it. How we feel about any given time period of our life has to do with that and I think it is very difficult to make love stories for adults because they’re very complicated.
“Arthur Miller has a great quote about how everybody is interested in stories about falling in love and getting married, or stories that start with a break up but end in somebody finding resolution but what is very difficult to do is show the actual relationship and I love this story for the messiness of the real life in it.”
“Success is counted sweetest, By those who ne’er succeed,” wrote Emily Dickenson in one of the seven poems she published during her lifetime. Those lines must have played on the minds of the filmmakers behind A Quiet Passion, a biopic of the reclusive nineteenth century poet, who suffered setback after setback while bringing the story to the screen.
Five years after being offered the role Cynthia Nixon said, “I never thought it would come together. I thought, ‘Thank you for thinking of me, it is a good part for me but I don’t see how you are going to get this made.’”
The former Sex and the City star often thought about the project but claims she was never impatient at the film’s lack of progress.
“I started acting as a twelve year old and I went to a very tough school and what that taught me was that when I was up for a job that I really wanted and I didn’t get, I would think to myself, ‘At least I don’t have to do double duty. I don’t have to do school and work.’ Now I have three children and am married. I run a household so when I am not working I feel it less than other people.
“If you are in something for the long haul you are not constantly taking its temperature.”
It took years but Nixon and director Terence Davies succeeded in telling Dickenson’s story, bringing to cinematic life not only the facts—she was reclusive and never married—but also the essence of a person with an insatiable need to question societal norms.
“The questions she is asking as a person and as a woman,” says Nixon, “they are big questions. How do I deal with all this love I feel? What does it mean to be intimate with another person? Will I lose myself and do I want to lose myself? I think she was so ahead of her time in thinking these things were an option, like whether she would marry or not. For her that was a question. It wasn’t like she was dying to get married and didn’t. She chose not to. Whether she was going to be a mother or not. These are questions that women today deal with as a matter of course but most nineteenth century women would not have even stopped to consider.”
Nixon says Dickenson’s ideas and words have been a constant in her life. “We had a record at home of Julie Harris reading some of the poems and the letters. I would listen to them again and again so some of the better-known poems and letters I learned by heart.”
Dickenson died 130 years ago but Nixon feels there are timely elements in A Quiet Passion for today’s audiences.
“If you think about the mid nineteenth century in America and you think about the issues we were dealing with in terms of women, it is a straight line from there to here. We’ve obviously come very far but it is exactly the same issues. Are women going to be treated equally? She saw the jump between the way things are supposed to be and the way things are, and she didn’t try to wallpaper over anything.”
A movie star is someone who can carry a movie, a person audiences will line up to see no matter what the film. There’s no formula, just equal parts talent, charisma and staying power.
For years Tom Cruise and Will Smith ruled the Hollywood roost, but Cruise’s couch jumping tarnished his star (unless he’s headlining a movie with the words Mission Impossible in the title) and Smith has hit a box office rough patch.
These days Hollywood’s biggest movie star—both physically and metaphysically—is a former wrestler who made his acting debut playing his own father on an episode of That ’70s Show. Since then Dwayne Johnson’s paycheques have blossomed along with his popularity and in 2016 he was the world’s highest-paid actor, in part due to his reputation as “franchise Viagra.”
It’s a simple formula. Take a flagging franchise; add Johnson and flaccid box office numbers suddenly grow. Case in point, the Fast and Furious series. Johnson signed on for the fifth instalment, playing Diplomatic Security Service agent Luke Hobbs, helping that movie make north of six-hundred million dollars. His over-the-top presence—who else could remove a cast from his broken arm simply by flexing his oversized biceps?—drove the grosses of the next two F&F movies to the stratosphere. This weekend’s The Fate of the Furious is poised to shatter even more records.
His is a varied filmography—a resume containing everything from the hi brow, abstract sci fi of Southland Tales and the bloody b-movie Walking Tall to the family friendly Tooth Fairy and the pedal-to-the-metal Fast & Furious flicks—bound together by one thing, his innate star power.
Haters, like a recent commenter at Variety.com, who complained that Johnson, “has never done a compelling complex character, only mindless good vs evil roles,” miss his populist appeal. Despite his Greek God physique, he’s an everyman, a charismatic crowd-pleaser with a cocked eyebrow.
His appeal continues off screen as well. He’s a big deal now but that wasn’t always the case and he’s positioned himself as an inspirational figure, a muscle bound Tony Robbins. “I started w/ $7 bucks. If I can overcome, so can you,” he tweeted when he was crowned the World’s Highest-Paid Actor.
“I have enjoyed a good amount of success and I’m very grateful for everything I have,” the bulky actor told me a few years ago.
“I’m very grateful for being who I am. I make sure to approach every project and everything I do as if it is going to be my last.
“There was a time when I was in Canada, playing for the CFL and sleeping on a mattress that I got from the garbage of a sex motel. I’ll never forget it. True story. So, for me, those times are kind of in the forefront of my mind. The wolf is always scratching at the door. It’s good to remember that. It’s important.”
Johnson is Hollywood’s biggest earner but a recent viral video shows his core connection to his fans. Dressed as mascots of themselves Jimmy Fallon and the artist formerly known as The Rock photobombed folks at Universal Studios in Orlando. One man, with a tattoo of Johnson on his leg, was brought to tears when meeting the hulking actor. “Stuff like this will always be the best part of fame,” said Johnson.
Preposterous is not a word most filmmakers would like to have applied to their work but in the case of the “Fast and Furious” franchise I think it is what they are going for. Somewhere along the way the down-‘n’-dirty car chase flicks veered from sublimely silly to simply silly.
Perhaps it was the wild train heist in “Fast Five,” or the entirety of “Tokyo Drift” or the skyscraper-to-skyscraper jump from “Fast and Furious 7.” What ever it was, at some point in the sixteen years someone decided more is really more. Bigger stunts, more stars and more pedal-to-the-metal action, which leads us to “The Fate of the Furious.”
This latest slab of preposterous bombastity begins in Havana. Dom (Vin Diesel) and Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) are honeymooning when, surprise, surprise and unexpected car race breaks out. Although clearly out gunned (SPOILER ALERT ONLY IF THE OUTCOME WASN’T SO PREDICTABLE) Dom wins, his car speeding backwards and engulfed in flames.
As if that wouldn’t be enough for most movies, we’re then introduced to criminal mastermind Ciper (Charlize Theron). As her name implies, she’s a tricky one, and soon Dom has turned his back on his crew—Letty, Roman (Tyrese Gibson), ramsey (Nathalie Emmanuel) and Tej (Ludacris)—to work for her. Why? Not sure. She shows him something on a mobile phone screen that changes his once unbending loyalty to his peeps. “You’re going to abandon your crew and shatter your family,” Cipher snarls. “Your team is about to go against the only thing they can’t handle—you.” She has highfalutin ideas about holding the world accountable for it’s sins ands who better to help her than a grease monkey with a raspy voice and a can-do attitude?
In another part of the story covert ops team leader, the excellently named Mr. Nobody (Kurt Russell) convinces Dom’s old crew to work for him again. The plan this time involves tossing Luke Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) in prison to aid the escape of assassin Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham).
Throw in a series of exotic locations—he movie zips from Cuba to New York City to Russia and every where in between as Hobbs and crew try to understand Dom’s defection while at the same time stop him from amassing an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. That’s right, a series once satisfied with fast cars and socket wrenches now concerns itself with WMDs.
“The Fate of the Furious” is fast, furious but it’s not much fun. It’s an unholy mashup of James Bond and the Marvel Universe, a movie bogged down by outrageous stunts and too many characters. Someone really should tell Diesel and Company that more is not always more.
The love of family is the subtext that that bonds the all the movies together is given lip service but little else. Despite aspiring to be “The Brothers Karamazov” with muscle cars, the movie is little more than a preposterous demolition derby that values vehicular wham bam thank you ma’am over anything else.
In the classic sense it does prove the old theory that for every action there’s a reaction… and a one liner. “They’re going to flank us!” “No they ain’t,” yelps Hobbs as he punts a military vehicle into outerspace. It’s a catchphrase-a-looza where the characters don’t actually talk to one another, they trade quips.
“Gifted” is the story of a fractured family. Like a hybrid of “Kramer vs. Kramer” and “Little Man Tate” (with a taste of “Good Will Hunting” thrown in), it bases a family custody story around a child prodigy.
Chris Evans leaves his Captain America mask at Avenger’s HQ to play Frank Adler, a single man trying to give his niece Mary (Mckenna Grace) a normal life in a Florida coastal town. As the seven-year-old’s guardian, he enrols the high-spirited girl in public school. “Please don’t make me go,” she says. “No more argument, we’ve discussed this ad nauseam,” he replies. “What’s ad nauseam?” “You don’t know? Looks like someone need school.”
In school she outpaces all her classmates academically, particularly in mathematics. When her teacher (Jenny Slate) tries to stump her, asking what 57 multiplied by 135 is, the little girl pauses and says, “7695” off the top of her head. Then goes on to supply the square root. “87.7 plus change.” It is clear she is gifted, but her abilities raise concerns for Frank. “I promised my sister I’d give Mary a normal life,” he says. “She has to be here,” and not in the special school her grandmother (Lindsay Duncan) wants to place her in. “You are denying her potential.” Cue the custody battle.
“Gifted” doesn’t exactly reinvent the family drama wheel. Frank is the “quiet damaged hot guy,” Mary the precocious kid with a snappy line and many a heart tugging moments. We’ve seen all that before but it’s the chemistry between Evans and Grace that elevates the material. The poignancy of their relationship cuts through the film’s clichés, taking some of the saccharin edge off the story.
Evans is a superhero of a different sort in “Gifted.” As the protective uncle of a brilliant niece he is a fully engaged father figure. He’s a man who saw his sister’s brilliance turn her life upside down and does everything he can to avoid the same fate for his niece. It’s a nice, sensitive performance that provides a nice break from his Avengers’ work.
Grace offers up a nicely balanced blend of brains and childhood behaviour. She’s the smartest person in the room, but she’s also a child, prone to temper tantrums and confusion. Still she is capable of great insight. Why does she want to stay with Frank? “He wanted me before I was smart.”
The movie works best when it focuses on the surrogate dad and niece. There is nice supporting work from Jenny Slate as Mary’s teacher, Octavia Spencer (in her second film about gifted mathematicians) as the girl’s much older best friend and Duncan as the stern Evelyn do solid work, but this is a basically a two hander.
“Gifted” is a warm and funny family drama, a film so well cast it overcomes its conventional idea.
“Maudie,” the true story of folk artist Maud Lewis, is a romantic movie about a physically challenged woman who found beauty in life’s simplicity.
Born with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis that left her undersized and frail, Maud Dowley (Sally Hawkins) was shunted around to relatives in her youth. Told she couldn’t look after herself she was treated like an outsider by her family and rural Nova Scotian community. “Some people don’t like it if you’re different,” she says. In a bid to get out from under the thumb of her controlling aunt she answers a help wanted ad at the local general store. It leads her to Everett Lewis’ (Ethan Hawke) rundown one-room shack. He’s a man of few words, raised in an orphanage, now a loner who ekes out a living selling fish and chopped wood.
“You walk funny,” he says, unsure she’ll be up to the job. “You a cripple? You sick?”
“I was born funny,” she replies.
The circumstances are rustic in the extreme but for room and board plus $0.25 a week spending money she agrees to try and turn the shack into a home. To pass the time when she isn’t cooking and cleaning, she retreats into her art, painting colourful landscapes on the walls of the house. She paints flowers, birds and a portrait of their prize chicken—now a long ago digested meal—so, “we can remember his happier days.”
As romance blossoms between this odd couple Maud’s art—handmade postcards, paintings—slowly gains fans, including Vice President Richard Nixon who purchased a landscape by mail. As Maud’s increasing recognition threatens Everett’s simple way of life their union becomes strained.
“Maudie” is a quiet movie with nicely wrought moments. The excitement and joy that spreads across Hawkins’ face as she negotiates her first big sale—$5 a painting plus $1 for postage—is infectious and touching. Later, a muted but emotional reconciliation is heartfelt without being showy or obvious. This is a movie about small moments, an exchanged look, a caress. Like its real life inspirations the film is unpretentious, occasionally gruff but always honest and truthful.
Hawkins is remarkable as the determined Maud. Frail but indomitable, she is a classic movie heroine, a woman who succeeds against all odds. Hawke is a solid presence, gruff on the outside and, if not exactly mushy on the inside, then at least open to love. They are, as Maud says, “like a pair of odd socks.”
Director Aisling Walsh is unafraid to tug at the heartstrings. He sometimes errs on the emotional quality of the score, pushing towards the saccharine, but Hawkins and Hawke always rein it in before we get too much of a sugar rush.
On film war heroes are usually seen dodging bullets or rescuing wounded comrades from the field of battle. Rarer are the stories of those who stayed behind, never touched a gun or saw the front lines. “Their Finest” is one of those tales, a World War II drama about people who pitched in by raising morale.
It’s 1940, bombs are falling, decimating London and confidence is at an all time low. In an effort to boost the public’s confidence The British Ministry of Information, Film Division commissions a propaganda film that will be both “authentic and optimistic.” To this end they recruit Catrin Cole (Gemma Arterton) to provide “a woman’s touch,” or as they less politely call it, “the slop.”
Working alongside the cynical lead scriptwriter Buckley (Sam Claflin) she comes up with the mostly true story about two sisters who stole their father’s boat to help rescue soldiers from the siege at Dunkirk. Their story isn’t quite as exciting as promised but it does provide two details they can use. The sisters remember a French GI who tried to kiss them and an English soldier with a dog in a tote bag. It’s perfect they say, it has, “authenticity, optimism… and a dog.”
As they toil to craft a script that will please both the Ministry of Information and the movie’s star, aging matinee idol Ambrose Hilliard (Bill Nighy), Mrs. Cole and Buckley’s relationship turns from testy to tender.
“Their Finest” is a feel good movie almost as melodramatic as the film within the film. Luckily the melodrama—unexpected romantic twists and deaths—is wedged between Arterton’s steely-but-sweet performance, a showy turn from Nighy—“The war has slipped off the cream and we’re left with the rancid curds,” he says, complaining there are no good waiters left in Soho—and a vivid portrait of the casual condescension heaped on women, even as they took on an expanded role in the work place.
The melodrama also helps sidestep the obvious inspirational landmines this kind of story usually offers up. The rousing ”when life is precarious it’s a shame to waste it,” message is none too subtle but is gently pushed aside by Mrs. Cole’s character development as she learns to trust herself and accept that heroes aren’t always only on the battlefield.
“Their Finest” is a love letter to film—the source novel’s title was “Their Finest Hour and a Half”—with grand statements about the magic of movies. “Film,” says Buckley, “is real life with the boring bits taking out.” But more than that, it’s a tribute to the women who kept the home fires burning… and the movies playing.
