JFL Pro calledRichard’s on stage Just for Laughs “In Conversation” with Trevor Noah “one of the best ‘In Conversation’ events ever.” Read all about it in the Hollywood Reporter! Some excerpts: “There are things to be angry about. There are reasons to mobilize. But some of this stuff Donald Trump does — hey, just laugh at that.” “The idea of him being in control of this country is a frightening thing. I also know you cannot be afraid when you’re laughing, but you also have to acknowledge there is a certain element of danger.”
“I got offered a lot of stuff in action movies that was either the girl behind the computer or the wife,” says Charlize Theron.
That was then, this is now. After dipping her toe in the action genre with Aeon Flux and Mad Max: Fury Road, the South African actress is kicking butt and taking names in Atomic Blonde, a wild spy thriller Variety calls “a mash-up of The Bourne Identity and Alias.”
Based on Antony Johnston’s 2012 graphic novel The Coldest City, it’s a Cold War thriller about an undercover MI6 agent sent to Berlin to investigate the murder of a fellow agent. “I didn’t just want to play a girly spy who depends on her flirty ways,” she says.
To prepare for the gruelling shoot Theron worked with eight personal trainers who taught her the stunt work.
“‘We’re going to pretend to do that, right?’” she asked director David Leitch during the preparation. “David was like, ‘No you’re actually going to throw big dudes.’ Alright, let’s throw some big dudes.”
Throwing big dudes around like rag dolls may look great on film but was a physical challenge for Theron. The Oscar winner twisted her knee, bruised her ribs and clenched her teeth so hard while shooting one of the over-the-top fight scenes she cracked two teeth, requiring dental surgery.
Theron joins a list of dangerous distaff action stars like Gal Gadot (Wonder Woman), Scarlett Johansson (Lucy, The Avengers), Michelle Yeoh (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), Jenette Goldstein (Aliens), Angelina Jolie (Wanted, Salt, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider), Milla Jovovich (Resident Evil) and Uma Thurman (Kill Bill, Parts 1 & 2) who give Jason Statham and Dwayne Johnson a run for their money.
All of those women owe a debt to two female action stars. Pam Grier and Tura Satana were larger-than-life pioneers, opening cans of whoop-ass on screen at a time when that was primarily the purview of the boys.
Quentin Tarantino directed Grier in Jackie Brown and says she may be cinema’s first female action star. Her films, like Foxy Brown and Sheba, Baby suggest he’s right. Grier could deliver a line and a punch, attributes that allowed her to cut a swathe in the male-dominated action movie market of the 1970s.
Perhaps the wildest female action movie of all time is 1965’s “ode to female violence,” Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! starring Tura Satana as the thrill-seeking go-go dancer Varla.
Experienced in martial arts, Satana did her own stunts and brought her unique style — black leather gloves, Germaine Monteil eyeliner and layers of Max Factor makeup — to the film.
She also supplied some of the movie’s most memorable lines.
When a gas station attendant ogles her cleavage while extolling the virtues of being on the open road and seeing America, Satana ad libbed, “You won’t find it down there, Columbus!”
Time critic Richard Corliss called Satana’s performance “the most honest, maybe the one honest portrayal in the (director Russ) Meyer canon and certainly the scariest.”
“I took a lot of my anger that had been stored inside of me for many years and let it loose,” Satana said of her most famous role. “I helped to create the character Varla and helped to make her someone that many women would love to be like.”
“I didn’t just want to play a girly spy who depends on her flirty ways,” Charlize Theron told W Magazine. Mission accomplished. Based on the wild ‘n woolly graphic novel “The Coldest City” by Antony Johnston and Sam Hart “Atomic Blonde” is a Cold War thriller that sees Theron dropkick Daniel Craig or Matt Damon out of the space they’ve occupied as film’s go-to super spies.
Set in 1989, just days before the fall of the Berlin wall, the film starts with the KGB assassination of an undercover MI6 operative in East Berlin. Theron plays Agent Lorraine Broughton, a high-ranking MI6 spy sent to the communist side of the wall to retrieve a dossier containing the names of other vulnerable British intelligence assets. “It’s an atomic bomb of information that could set the Cold War back 40 years!”
Toby Jones and John Goodman as MI6 and CIA head honchos respectively urge her not to trust anyone but she sparks up a personal and professional relationship with an inexperienced French agent Delphine Lasalle (Sofia Boutella). Because everybody wants the dossier she is teamed with shady Berlin station chief David Percival (James McAvoy)—a “feral” man who moonlights selling bootlegged Jack Daniels to tourists—to beat the US, UK, USSR and France to the punch. How? By folding, spindling, mutilating, punching, kicking and head butting. There’s death by cork screw, fist and bullet and everything in between in some of the most dynamic fight scenes we’re likely to see on screen this year (and that includes “John Wick 2).
The trailers make “Atomic Bomb” look like wall-to-wall action. It isn’t. It’s a cold war spy movie with intermittent wild and woolly fisticuffs. And that’s OK. The fight scenes definite highlights and get the pulse racing but to be truly effective all movies must have hills and valleys.
If it was all action it would be like a Jason Statham movie. All talking it would be “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.” As it is it hits the sweet spot between the two.
It’s a stylish film with visceral action scenes connected by an original cold war story, compelling characters and German versions of 80s pop hits.
This isn’t a Michael Bay style spectacular, it’s up-close-and-personal bare-knuckled warfare. Theron and her victims grunt and groan as fists hits faces and all manner of mayhem is unleashed. One particularly intense fight scene mixes and matches the above-mentioned grunts and groans with the catchy pop of George Michaels’ “Father Figure.” An even more effective sequence gets rid of the music completely.
The tour de force six-minute fight scene looks like a one-shot wonder. It’s hard to believe there isn’t some trickery involved but the sequence is dazzling nonetheless.
As Broughton, Theron is not a superhero. She comes out on top of most fights but emerges bruised and battered, which lends an air of unpredictability to the =storytelling.
“Atomic Blonde” is a violent, arty spy flick that doesn’t just open the door for Charlize Theron to create an effective spy franchise; it kicks it off its hinges.
“Lady Macbeth,” a new drama based on Nikolai Leskov’s Russian novella “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk,” is not your father’s period drama. Disturbing and diabolical, it’s an erotic thriller that examines gender politics, power and class.
Set in rural northern England in 1865 we first meet Katherine (Florence Pugh) when she is just seventeen-years-old, sold, along with a plot of land, into an arranged marriage with a much older man, Alexander Lester (Paul Hilton). Her job, according to the cruel and unyielding family patriarch Boris (Christopher Fairbank), is to provide an heir to the family fortune but their marriage is a sham, loveless and impotent.
When Alexander abruptly leaves for an extended trip abroad she is left behind in the rambling, damp manor home. Alone, save for a handful of servants, including Anna (Naomi Ackie), she is bored and unhappy until she meets groomsman Sebastian (Cosmo Jarvis). The two begin a torrid affair, unafraid of prying eyes. “He hates his father,” she says of Alexander, “he hates me. He won’t come back.” Except he does come back, pushing Katherine to extreme measures to preserve her relationship with Sebastian.
More “The Making of a Murderer” than “Wuthering Heights,” ice runs through the veins of “Lady Macbeth.” Cold and austere, the story of sexual rebellion is given life by Pugh’s mesmerizing performance. Her insolence and opportunism are fascinating to watch as she thumbs her nose at the social norms of the day. Don’t let the stillness of her performance fool you. Her calm, collected demeanour hides Katherine’s conniving nature but much is revealed in the small details. The fire in her eyes as Alexander says, “I do not like owning a whore,” the tilt of her head as Boris berates her. In her case, the devil is literally in the details. It’s tremendous work that should spell big things for her.
She is ably supported by Ackie and Jarvis. Ackie, in a performance of few words still manages to convey a great depth of feeling while Jarvis is compellingly plays a man torn between the physical pleasures Katherine offers and the metaphysical consequences of their actions.
Through Katherine’s power struggle “Lady Macbeth” deftly shows how the various hierarchies of class—patriarch Boris controls Alexander, Alexander dominates Katherine (or thinks he does) leaving her with power over the house staff—can be upended in a ruthless social coup. The oppressed become conquerors and vice versa in a story that treats vengeance like an everyday event.
All found footage films need to find a reason to exist, a reason why there is a camera set permanently to the on position. In the case of “Phoenix Forgotten” it’s a sister trying to make a documentary about her brother’s disappearance.
“Are you going to be filming the whole time,” asks her father.
“That’s the whole idea,” says Sophie (Florence Hartigan).
“I feel like Harrison Ford,” he laughs.
With that framework out of the way the story gets going, using the (now debunked) real life Phoenix, Arizona UFO sightings of March 13, 1997 as a backdrop for the action.
When sonic booms rocked the city Josh Bishop (Luke Spencer Roberts) didn’t buy his father’s explanation that the air force was doing a practice run overhead. Shooting some grainy footage, the teenager decides to investigate. With the help of school friends Ashley Foster (Chelsea Lopez) and Mark Abrams (Justin Matthews) and a borrowed school handy cam he sets off to into the desert filled with curiosity. The three never finish their make shift documentary. Disappearing after they left their car on the desert edge, extensive searches by a small army of law enforcement turn up no clues. Were they I they in the wrong place at the wrong time? Was it a fight over the girl? Or was it something otherworldly? “We didn’t find anything,” says a police officer involved in the search, “so who knows what happened. It’s hard to speculate.”
Twenty years later sister Sophie picks up the story, arriving in town with her ever- present camera. “What if Josh was on to something?” she says. “We always assumed he got lost or kidnapped or murdered. What if…” What if he got kidnapped by an alien? “I’m starting to sound like him,” she muses. When she finds Josh’s video camera, returned to the lost and found of the school he borrowed it from, more clues emerge.
As a genre found footage is showing it’s age. From the brilliant “Blair Witch Project” on it has been used, primarily in cheap-and-cheerful budget horror and sci fi films, to create a sense of urgency in a first person narrative. Trouble is, they’ve been done to death and their techniques don’t feel fresh anymore. At some point the screen will fill with static (check), the cast of unknowns will look panicked and confused (check), the protagonists will run, camera in hand, causing the picture to jiggle as though it was strapped to the back of a runaway horse (check), there will be Dr. Tongue-style close-ups (check) and the inevitable dropped camera freeze frame (check).
Despite the stylistic predictability “Phoenix Forgotten,” succeeds on several levels. Director Justin Barber has a nice ear for the rhythms of the character’s speech and draws good naturalistic performances from the cast of unknowns. The story doesn’t completely impress, and Barber takes way too long setting up the mystery, but the actors are engaging. He also does a nice job cutting together Sophie’s slick documentary footage with the grainy 1990s handy cam material.
“Phoenix Forgotten’s” mix of fact and fiction isn’t all that scary but Barber does whip up some intense and paranoid moments.
For many years I made my way through the world tending bar and chatting up customers in a handful of Toronto restaurants. I loved (almost) every minute of those jobs and the camaraderie that came from handing out drinks to thirsty people. It’s been twenty years since I stood behind a bar but that is about to change, sort of.
Drum roll please.
I am tickled to share the teaser trailer for my new Bell Media television show Pop Life. We go to air in September (details coming soon!) with an incredible list of guests and some surprises too. (Watch the teaser HERE!)
But what does this have to do with tending bar you ask? Let me tell you. It’s a talk and panel show where we toss around hot button topics from the worlds of show business, pop culture and the media. I thought that because I spent years talking about that stuff while working in bars, why not set the show in a bar?
I give you the Pop Life Bar. It’s a set (built on the hallowed ground where they shot the game show Definition and parts of the movie Network!) but I can honestly say it’s nicer than some of the real bars where I slung drinks.
I can’t wait to for you to see the show but for now here’s a taste… or, I guess, in this case, a sip. Pop Life, pout a little fizz in your night!
Director Christopher Nolan doesn’t remember the first time he was told about the events at Dunkirk.
“Like most British people I have grown up with this story,” Nolan says.
The first minutes of Dunkirk, Nolan’s big-screen adaptation of the evacuation of 400,000 soldiers from the beaches and harbour of Dunkirk, France, sets the stage. Early on in the Second World War the German army had driven the British, Belgian and Canadian armies to the sea.
“Dunkirk is where they will meet their fate,” the opening reads. “They are hoping for deliverance, hoping to find a miracle.” Between May 26 and June 4, 1940, allied soldiers were evacuated from the beset beach in Operation Dynamo.
“The resonance of the Dunkirk story to me has always been about a sense of communal heroism,” Nolan says, referring to the “little ships of Dunkirk,” a makeshift flotilla of hundreds of fishing boats, pleasure crafts and lifeboats called into service to aid in the evacuation.
“When I think about it now I realize we live in a time that bizarrely fetishizes individuality to the extent where we don’t even require ourselves to watch the same news as other people. We just watch the news we want to watch and hear what we want to hear. That is how fragmented our society has become. This elevation of the individual has come at the expense of the community and what community can achieve. There needs to be a balance and I think Dunkirk as a story is a wonderful reminder of the power of community. The power of what we can do, not just as individuals but together.”
Best seen large and loud, Dunkirk succeeds as pure cinema with minimal dialogue and electrifying visuals.
“I love the great silent films of the past,” he says. “I think that is the closest you get to pure cinema. We are now able to use sound and music and all kinds of things to enlarge the idea of what cinema can be but I wanted to strip away a lot of the theatrics we use as filmmakers in the sound era. The reason is, Dunkirk is such a simple story. It doesn’t need to be over-explained. It doesn’t need any excess of dialogue. I like the idea of using the language of suspense because suspense is the most visually based and cinematic of the movie genres.”
Dunkirk inspired Winston Churchill’s famous, “We shall fight on the beaches,” speech, an address that describes reaching for victory, “however long and hard the road may be.” It’s a journey Nolan understands both in a historical context and in his own decade-long attempt to get this film made. It’s a movie he feels passionate about, just don’t call it his passion project.
“That makes it sound like I didn’t give a s—t about the other ones,” he laughs before adding, “I find filmmaking really difficult. Yes, it’s not coal mining but I find it tough. I love it and I love movies so I don’t ever want to do it for something that I don’t really, really care about. There are filmmakers who find it easier than I do and so ‘one for me, one for them’ works, but I want to do the film I would want to see as an audience member.”
To some director/writer/producer Luc Besson is the French equivalent of Steven Spielberg, a big-budget filmmaker with populist appeal. To others he’s a retina-frying, turbo charged fantasist whose films are empty calories for the eyes.
Movies like the high gloss crime thriller La Femme Nikita, the assassin mentor flick Léon: The Professional and outré sci fi opera The Fifth Element have come to define his outrageous style. Kinetic blasts of energy, his films make eyeballs dance even if they don’t always engage the brain.
His work divides critics. The Fifth Element, and its huge, Earth-destroying ball of molten lava, was simultaneously called “an exhilarating, visual feast” and “boring and idiotic.” One critic called Léon: The Professional, “a wonderful character study,” while another said, “The Professional is strictly amateur-hour.” Different strokes for different folks.
His latest, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, is similarly polarizing. According to whom you listen to it’s either as “if someone projected an entire decade’s worth of sci-fi space epics on the same screen, at the same time” or “one of the best films of the year.” Based on a French comic book series and starring Dane DeHaan and Carla Delevingne, the story of special operatives Valerian and Laureline and their quest to save the universe is another wild, idiosyncratic ride from the director.
His movies may divide critics but there is no question his more-is-more style of filmmaking appeals to audiences. His Taken trilogy (he wrote and produced the Liam Neeson thrillers) has grossed near $1 billion worldwide and his Le Grand Bleu, a tale of love and friendship set against a backdrop of professional free diving, was so popular in France the International Herald Tribune called it a “film générationnel,” a defining moment in the culture.
More recently Lucy, a philosophical action movie starring Scarlett Johansson as a woman whose mind expands to ten times the usual capacity, grossed ten times its $40 million budget. It’s pure Besson. Imagine a mix of Limitless, La Femme Nikita, The Matrix and a Philosophy 101 textbook with half the pages torn out and you’ll get an idea of the film’s loopy feel.
Besson is a maestro at high-octane action but falls down somewhat in others genres. A rare comedy, The Family, is a basic fish out of water story with a gangland twist, starring Robert De Niro and Michelle Pfeiffer as a crime family in witness protection trying to fit in. Trouble is, they don’t blend. Besson is heavy handed with the paint-by-numbers story, the humour and the violence. It’s a movie without a genre, neither funny enough to be a comedy or interesting enough to satisfy as thriller.
Despite that movie hitting the box office with a thud, Besson seems to have the Midas Touch with audiences although he claims not to care much about money. He says people request sequels for two of his most popular turns behind the camera, The Fifth Element and Léon: The Professional. “If I was motivated by money I would have done it a long time ago,” he says. “But I don’t feel it.”
Instead, he’d like you to go see Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets at least twice. “I’m sorry, you can’t watch the film once. It’s impossible,” he said at a recent press day. ”You have to go twice.”
“Dunkirk,” the new war epic from director Christopher Nolan, could be one of those rare movies—rare like a unicorn or a modest Kardashian—that comes out in the summer and earns a Best Picture nomination. It is a complete cinematic experience, immersive, intense showing us things rather than telling us things.
From its haunting opening shot of five British soldiers on patrol, propaganda leaflets fluttering in the air around them, “Dunkirk” establishes itself as a high gloss look at one of the seminal events in military history. A minute later when gunfire erupts it becomes an intimate, you-are-there experience, placing the viewer in the middle of the action.
Opening credits set the stage. In the early stages of the Second World War the German Army drove the British, Belgium, Canada armies to the sea. “Dunkirk is where they will meet their fate. They are hoping for deliverance, hoping to find a miracle.” Between May 26 and June 4, 1940 allied soldiers were evacuated from the beset beach in Operation Dynamo.
Using a fractured timeline director Christopher Nolan brings three different facets of the story together. First is The Mole, the long stone and wooden jetty at the mouth of the port where Tommy (Fionn Whitehead) and Alex (Harry Styles) stow away on an evacuation ship.
Second is The Sea, and the story of Mr. Dawson (Mark Rylance), a British mariner, who like many others piloted his pleasure craft through dangerous waters to help transport stranded soldiers from the beach in France.
Third is the battle in the air, lead by Royal Air Force Spitfire pilot Farrier (Tom Hardy).
With a minimum of dialogue, electrifying visuals and ear-splitting sound design—the rumble of the spit fire engines will make your chest shake—Nolan has made a movie best seen large and loud. He uses the power of the image to create an immersive cinematic experience that offers up not only vicarious thrills but also ethical dilemmas, honour and personal drama. It is not a typical war movie. You never see the Germans and there is no victory march at the end. Instead it is a large-scale examination of the workings of war and warriors that blends epic filmmaking with intimate character work.
Best of the bunch are Cillian Murphy as a shell-shocked soldier rescued from the sea, haunted by what he has seen and Rylance who redefines stiff upper lip. The all-British cast of relative unknowns who make up the bulk of the evacuees shine a light on how young and inexperienced were the soldiers on that beach.
“Dunkirk” is an intense movie but it is not an overly emotional one. The cumulative effect of the vivid images and sounds will stir the soul but despite great performances the movie doesn’t necessarily make you feel for one character or another. Instead its strength is in how it displays the overwhelming sense of scope of the Dunkirk mission. With 400,000 men on the ground with more in the air and at sea, the sheer scope of the operation overpowers individuality, turning the focus on the collective. Nolan’s sweeping camera takes it all in, epic and intimate moments alike.
Dunkirk inspired Winston Churchill’s famous, “We shall fight on the beaches,” speech, words brought to poignant life in the film’s closing moments by Whitehead in one of the movie’s smaller moments. That speech describes reaching for victory, “however long and hard the road may be,” a journey brilliantly and memorably chronicled in the film.
