If the word ‘lurid’ didn’t already appear on page 489 of my Oxford English Dictionary it might have been coined to describe “The Bad Batch,” a new slice of misery from director Ana Lily Amirpour. This dystopian cannibal freak out isn’t really very good but if Amirpour’s intention was to make an unpleasant, slackly paced look at life after a calamity, she has succeeded spectacularly.
Arlen (Suki Waterhouse) is part of the Bad Batch, a large group of murderers, drug dealers and other deplorables no longer wanted in the United States. In Amirpour’s post apocalyptic world the unwanted are numbered, tattooed, escorted to a wasteland in Texas and dropped off outside of an electric fence to fend for themselves. Arlen’s new, dusty world is a wasteland, a dangerous place where Keanu Reeves is a Jim Jones figure called The Dream and if you’re not careful you might end up as a main course for the cannibals who now eat humans to survive.
Soon she is kidnapped, carved up, her arm and leg becoming an entrée for vicious flesh eaters who keep her in chains until she escapes with the help of a gnarly old hermit played by Jim Carrey. She lands at Comfort, the ironically named compound run by cult leader The Dream. On the outskirts of Comfort Arlen exacts revenge on one of the cannibals who turned her into a midday snack. Grabbing the woman’s child she returns to the compound. When the little girl disappears her father, the mountainous and muscly Miami Man (Jason Momoa), comes looking for her. Arlene, high on acid, meets him and the two form an unlikely bond as they search for his daughter.
Amirpour is a gifted director—her “A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night” is like no other vampire movie—but her ideas here echo a little too loudly with reverberations from “Mad Max” and other dystopian movies. “The Bad Batch” starts strong with startling images but every time it works up a head of steam it veers off track. Its languid pace and stretched-out story makes the two-hour running time feel much longer.
Writers Joshua Ostroff and Marina Nemat join Richard and Beverly Thomson and CTV NewsChannel’s ‘Behind the Headlines’ panel. This week they weigh in on Colorado’s plans to arm teachers, a university course to help you become a social media star, and is the Queen sending a hidden message with her choice of hat?
Welcome to the House of Crouse. This week we get our motors running and head out on the highway. It’s our classic cars episode. To celebrate we welcome Nathan Fillion, one of the stars of “Cars 3.” We chat about everything from car design to soap operas and naming your kids after TV characters. Then Edgar Wright pulls into the parking lot. We talk about his twenty-two-years-on-the-making pedal to the metal movie “Baby Driver.” C’mon in and fill up your tank!
A new feature from from ctvnews.ca! The Crouse Review is a quick, hot take on the weekend’s biggest movies! This week Richard looks at “Cars 3,” the latest adventures of Lightening McQueen, the bachelorette party from hell in “Rough Night” and the life and legacy of Tupac Shakur in “All Eyez on Me.”
Check out the Richard Crouse Show on NewsTalk 1010 for June 17, 2017! This week Richard welcomes legendary filmmaker Tony Palmer.
Here’s some info on The Richard Crouse Show!: Each week on The Richard Crouse Show, Canada’s most recognized movie critic brings together some of the most interesting and opinionated people from the movies, television and music to put a fresh spin on news from the world of lifestyle and pop-culture. Tune into this show to find out what’s going on behind the scenes of your favorite shows and movies and get a new take on current trends. Richard also lets you know what movies you’ll want to run to see and which movies you’ll want to wait for DVD release. Click HERE to catch up on shows you might have missed! Read Richard NewsTalk 1010 reviews HERE!
The show airs:
NewsTalk 1010 – airs in Toronto Saturday at 6 to 7 pm.
For Niagara, Newstalk 610 Radio – airs Saturdays at 6 to 7 pm
Richard sits in with CTV NewsChannel anchor Marcia MacMillan to have a look at the big weekend movies including “Cars 3,” the latest adventures of Lightening McQueen, the bachelorette party from hell in “Rough Night” and the life and legacy of Tupac Shakur in “All Eyez on Me.”
It’s only June but this year Nathan Fillion already knows what his nieces and nephews are getting for Christmas.
“I have enough little kids in my life and they are all getting Sterling Hot Wheels for Christmas,” laughs the Cars 3 star.
In his second gig for Pixar — he also appeared in Monsters University — the Edmonton-born star lends his voice to the character of Sterling, a slick-talking coupe and CEO who becomes the new sponsor of racer Lightning McQueen.
“I had some of the classic toys,” he says. “The G.I. Joe with the Kung Fu Grip. The Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots and Smash Up Derby. Do you remember those? You’d pull the cord and wheel them at each other. Those are the fantastic toys I remember having as a kid. Otherwise it was Lego or a stick and your imagination. But to go from saying, ‘Isn’t this a neat little Hot Wheels,’ to actually being one? I can’t even.”
Fillion came to Cars 3 fresh off of 173 episodes playing mystery novelist Richard Castle on the crime comedy series Castle.
“As far as taking on a new character goes, the only danger is falling into any habits,” he says of leaving Richard Castle behind. “When you do a character for eight years there are things you will start to do habitually. I think a little more focus is appropriate to make sure you are not recycling anything from your last gig.”
The actor honed his skills on the daytime soap opera One Life to Live. For three years he was Joey Buchanan, the son of original protagonists Joe Riley Sr. and Victoria Lord. His work on that show earned him a 1996 Daytime Emmy Award nomination.
“It wasn’t like one show a week,” he says, “it was every day. We didn’t do cue cards. I’ve heard rumours of cue cards. Even the older, older guys did not use cue cards. They were seasoned pros. Anyone who talks down on daytime (television), and I never will, has never done daytime. It is a mountain of work. It is 40 pages a day.
“It’s a muscle. It’s like you start doing pushups. If you do pushups every day for three years by the end of it you can do a lot of pushups. I’m pretty sure by the end of three years that memorizing, that taking of the words and letting them live, was a muscle I flexed pretty well.”
Despite guest spots on popular shows like Modern Family, Big Bang Theory and Desperate Housewives, he will likely always be best loved for playing the hilarious anti-hero Captain Malcolm Reynolds on Joss Whedon’s short lived but influential futuristic space western Firefly.
“It was almost 15 years ago that show came out and people are still loving it,” he says, “and dressing up like the characters. I will be sad on the day they stop doing that. If anyone wants to name their kid after my character on that show the kid will have to say, ‘Yes, I was named after a character on that show.’ Then there is a chance that someone may still watch it and love it and still dress up like that guy and I’ll still be relevant and everybody will be happy. Especially me.”
“All Eyez on Me” presents several sides of Tupac Shakur, the iconic rapper whose life came to a violent end at age twenty-five. Coming to theatres on June 16—which would have been the rapper’s 46th birthday—we see Shakur both as a devoted mother’s boy, a poet and gun toting tough guy accused of sexual assault.
Shakur (Demetrius Shipp Jr.) lived several lifetimes in the brief period he was here and the film wastes no time getting us up to speed. Director Benny Boom uses an interview led by a TV reporter (Hill Harper) to skip through the major events of Shakur’s formative years. From being raised by Black Panther leaders and auditioning to be a high school Hamlet to writing poetry and watching his parents arrested by the FBI, the film spends twenty minutes establishing the unsettled background that gave him a lasting urge to expose the underbelly of life on the street.
It’s familiar biopic device that allows filmmakers to quickly cover a lot of ground by creating vignettes based on the interviewer’s questions. Here it feels clunky and while it provides background info it does so in a perfunctory way. We get scene after scene with little real insight into what made Shakur tick.
The film improves when it drops the interview premise and keeps the film in real time. The compelling story of Shakur’s legal and financial problems and his fateful decision to sign on with Suge Knight (Dominic L. Santana) and west coast hip hop label Death Row Records takes up the film’s second half to better results. It is still content to offer up platitudes—“Its amazing Pac,” says manager Atron (Keith Robinson). “You’re on your way.”—but by the time Shakur finds out the hard way that “there’s more to this business then recording records,” the story finally finds it pace.
There is a great movie to be made of Tupac Shakur’s life but “All Eyez on Me” is not it. His short but eventful life is the stuff of legend, his dual nature a fascinating character study but Boom has a rough time condensing the life of such a complex man into two hours.
Shipp Jr. (whose father produced Pac’s “Toss It Up”) bears such an uncanny resemblance to the late rapper he almost legitimises the conspiracy theory that the rapper’s death was faked. In his first acting gig what he lacks in technique Shipp Jr. makes up for in looks.
Structurally the film has problems, but the movie finishes strong with Boom doing a good job of building some tension in the final moments leading up to the fatal Las Vegas drive-by shooting.
“All Eyez on Me” is a near miss. A little depth to the storytelling could have added context to the importance of Shakur as a cultural figure. There is talk about the gap between the civil rights generation and the hip-hop era and rap music’s objectification of women but neither is satisfactorily explored. The most telling line in the film comes early on when the young rapper is negotiating a record deal with Interscope Records. “There are people who want to be entertained,” he says, “and there are people who want to be heard.” It’s too bad the movie doesn’t give voice to the real spirit of the hip hop icon.
If the word ‘lurid’ didn’t already appear on page 489 of my Oxford English Dictionary it might have been coined to describe “The Bad Batch,” a new slice of misery from director Ana Lily Amirpour. This dystopian cannibal freak out isn’t really very good but if Amirpour’s intention was to make an unpleasant, slackly paced look at life after a calamity, she has succeeded spectacularly.
