Richard will host a “JFL42 In Conversation” with comedian John Mulaney on Thursday September 21 at The Sony Centre Lower Level Lobby. Tickets are sold out for this event!
Why John Mulaney?
Because he’s fresh off an incredibly successful run on Broadway in Oh, Hello alongside his pal Nick Kroll
Because he’s an Emmy Award-winning writer currently writing for IFC’s Documentary Now and for Netflix’s Big Mouth on which he voices the character of Andrew
Because he began writing on Saturday Night Live where he appeared as a Weekend Update correspondent and co-created characters such as “Stefon” with Bill Hader, and that’s pretty darn cool
Film critic and pop culture historian Richard Crouse shares a toast with celebrity guests and entertainment pundits every week on CTV News Channel’s all-new talk show POP LIFE.
Featuring in-depth discussion and debate on pop culture and modern life, POP LIFE features sit-down interviews with celebrities from across the entertainment world, including superstar jazz musician Diana Krall, legendary rock star Meatloaf, stand-up comedian and CNN host W. Kamau Bell, actor and best-selling author Chris Colfer, celebrity chef Jeremiah Tower, and many more.
Watch the first episode with Diana Krall and panellists Anthony Lemke, Marci Ien and Denise Donlon HERE!
There are many types of movies about people who deal in death to make a living. There’s the cold-blooded killer story, the revenge drama and even comedic takes on killing for fun and profit. Assassins can be men, women, children and even robots.
In this weekend’s American Assassin Michael Keaton is the teacher, a Cold War veteran who trains undercover executioners. He teaches counter-terrorism operative Mitch Rapp, played by Dylan O’Brien, the ropes of the killing game.
A quick look back at decades of death merchant movies reveals a set of rules and philosophies assassins will always follow.
When we first met John Wick he resembles the Sad Keanu meme. He’s a broken hearted man whose wife has recently passed away. He’s a loner until a package arrives at his door. It’s a puppy, sent by his wife just before she died, in the hopes that the dog’s love will help ease his pain. For a time it works, but when some very bad men break into his house to steal his Mustang, the dog winds up as collateral damage. With the last living touchstone to his late wife gone, Wick reverts back to his old ways as a mad, bad and dangerous to know assassin bent on revenge. We learn that you can quit, but you’ll always get pulled back in.
“People keep asking if I’m back and I haven’t really had an answer,” says Wick. “But now, yeah, I’m thinkin’ I’m back. So you can either hand over your son or you can die screaming alongside him!“
Charles Bronson, as the skilled slayer in The Mechanic teaches his young protégé, played by Jan-Michael Vincent, some basic hitman lessons. “Murder is only killing without a license,” he says, adding that when you shoot someone do it right. “You always have to be dead sure. Dead sure or dead.”
That’s key killer advice, but slow down, there is a progression to becoming a hitman.
In The Professional Leon (Jean Reno) details the system. “The rifle is the first weapon you learn how to use,” he says, “because it lets you keep your distance from the client. The closer you get to being a pro, the closer you can get to the client. The knife, for example, is the last thing you learn.”
Along the way movie assassins also learn that relationships are verboten.
Remember what happened to Mr. and Mrs. Smith (Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie)? “Your aim’s as bad as your cooking sweetheart,” taunts John to Jane, “and that’s saying something!”
Day of the Jackal’s would-be Charles de Gaulle assassin (Edward Fox) adds, “In this work you simply can’t afford to be emotional,” although sometimes feelings inevitably get in the way. Just ask Prizzi’s Honor’s Charley Partanna (Jack Nicholson) who memorably said, “Do I ice her? Do I marry her?”
Once they’ve learned the ropes, one question remains: Why do movie assassins kill?
Max Von Sydow plays one of the great movie killers in Three Days of the Condor, Sydney Lumet’s classic story of conspiracies and murder. His reasoning for doing what he does is chillingly simple. “The fact is, what I do is not a bad occupation,” he says. “Someone is always willing to pay.” The Matador’s Julian Noble (Pierce Brosnan) agrees, “My business is my pleasure,” he said.
Your interest in seeing “mother!,” the new psychological thriller from “Black Swan” director Darren Aronofsky, may be judged on your keenness to watch American sweetheart Jenifer Lawrence flush a beating heart down a toilet. Doesn’t appeal? Perhaps get your pulse racing with “It” instead. If it does, read on.
Lawrence and Javier Bardem are “mother” and “him,” a May-December married couple living in a remote and rambling countryside Victorian mansion. It’s a house with a history. Partially destroyed by a fire—which also claimed him’s first wife—the place has memories. Him, a poet, has been blocked ever since the fire, but finds solace in one of the few things to survive the blaze, a crystal that he now displays in his home office. Despite mother’s efforts to make the house a home—“I want to make a paradise,” she says.—a pall hangs over her wannabe Eden.
The weird factor amps up when a man (Ed Harris) shows and is invited by him to stay the night. He’s oddly antagonistic and inappropriate—“Your wife? I thought it was your daughter!”—but him treats him well, like a long lost friend. She feels like a third wheel in her own home.
The next day the stranger’s wife (Michelle Pfeiffer) arrives, making herself at home. She asks unusual, probing questions—“Why don’t you want to have kids? I have kids. That is what’s gonna keep your marriage is growing.”—and likes to booze it up during the day. Mother, unable to understand the new guests or her husband’s behaviour toward them, is further alienated when their aggressive, argumentative sons (real life siblings Brian and Domhnall Gleeson) show up. It begins to feel like a home invasion rather than a visit.
Paranoia grows as Mother becomes pregnant and a celebratory dinner turns to violence and murder. That’s not a spoiler. ‘mother!” is so bonkers mere words on a page can barely do it justice. Is that my failing or the film’s?
Aronofsky makes movies that refuse to cater to audience expectations. “mother!” is an uncomfortable watch, an off-kilter experience that revels in its own madness. As the weight of the weirdness and religious symbolism begins to feel crushing, you may wonder what the hell is going on. Are these people guilty of being the worst houseguests ever or is there something bigger, something biblical going on?
Aronofsky is generous with the biblical allusions—the house is a paradise, the sons are clearly echoes of Cain and Abel, and there is a long sequence that can only be described as the Home-style Revelation—and builds toward a crescendo of wild action that has to be seen to be believed, but his characters are ciphers. Charismatic and appealing to a member, they feel like puppets in the director’s apocalyptic roadshow rather than characters we care about. Visually and thematically he doesn’t push button so much as he pokes the audience daring them to take the trip with him, it’s just too bad we didn’t have better company for the journey.
“mother!” is a deliberately opaque movie. Like looking into a self-reflective mirror you will take away whatever you put into it. The only thing sure about it is that it is most confounding studio movie of the year.
In this weekend’s American Assassin a Cold War veteran trains undercover executioners. Movies like “The Mechanic” and “The Professional” have breathed similar air, but the new movie updates the tale, adding in a terrorism subplot.
Based on the bestselling novel of the same name by Vince Flynn, the film stars Dylan O’Brien as Mitch Rapp, a student whose life is changed forever when his girlfriend Katrina (Charlotte Vega) is killed by terrorists while on vacation. Stricken with grief and hungry for revenge he trains himself in the art of counter terrorism to the point where he is able to go undercover and infiltrate an Islamic terrorist cell.
Turns out, however, he’s not as undercover as he thought. The CIA, have their eye on him, impressed by his MMA skills and general hatred of terrorism. To fine-tune his kill skills he is teamed with black ops expert Stan Hurley (Michael Keaton). Why did they bring him on? “To kill people who need to be killed.”
Hurley teaches his student the fine art of slicing and dicing for fun and profit, prepping him for a giant mission involving a nuclear device and an ex-American Navy officer (Taylor Kitsch) turned bad and looking for revenge on his fellow service members.
The opening scene is harrowing. The full-scale attack on a beach is so tense because we’ve seen footage like this in real life in recent years. It kicks the movie off with a realistic bang. Too bad everything that follows barely rises to the level of cartoon cliché that borrows heavily from everything from “The Karate Kid” to the JBs—Jason Bourne and James Bond.
In as generic and unmemorable a role as Keaton has ever played—and that includes a bit of cannibalism—he redefines tough guys, spewing platitudes word for word from the 1984 edition of the Macho Man Handbook. O’Brien is stoic, yet reckless in the most profoundly uninteresting of ways. There’s sullen and then there’s this guy.
The action scenes have a bit a snap to them, but would have benefitted from the “John Wick” treatment; fess frenetic editing, more focus on the handiwork involved.
“American Assassin” has one too many revenge plots but not enough thrills.
There aren’t too many differences between an interviewer and a bartender, says Richard Crouse. To be good at their jobs, both need to possess a couple important skills.
“Knowing when to talk, and knowing when to just be quiet and listen,” says Metro’s movie critic. “Where I really learned how to interview people was talking to people in bars. You talk to people who are sometimes ‘over refreshed’ and you have to learn to deal with that, so you have to learn to deal with wherever the conversation goes.”
Crouse returns to his bartending roots this Saturday night with the premiere of Pop Life, a bar-set interview series airing on CTV News Channel. The show will feature celebrity interviews along with panel discussions on popular culture.
“I did it from the time I was too young to bartend — because I looked like this and sounded like this when I was 17,” says Crouse. “I had never been in a real bar before. I talked my way in, and I got trained, and I worked for years, and then bopped around from bar to bar,” Crouse says. “I loved it, I love talking to people. There is something about people coming in to relax, and there is something about that I could facilitate as a bartender.
“More than 20 years later I am happy it’s something I can bring back to TV.”
Among the guests appearing Pop Life are rocker Meatloaf, jazz musician Diana Krall, comedian and CNN host W. Kamau Bell, actor and best-selling author Chris Colfer, and celebrity chef Jeremiah Tower. Each episode also features a panel discussion — featuring members of the media, authors, actors and musicians — on a topic from popular culture.
Crouse says the idea behind the show was “to bring back real conversation to television. So often now, everything is a sound bite or it has got to be less — less is more.”
“What I want to do is have a show that feels like you are in a bar talking to somebody,” says Crouse, who adds real wine is being sipped on the show (the set is a bar). “Everyone has a story, you just have to ask them for it and let them tell it. Don’t constantly interrupt. Be there for them, move the story forward with questions, but listen. Listen to what people have to say.”
HOUSE DRINK
What is the signature drink at the Pop Life bar? It’s a Negroni, “cause it is the king of cocktails,” says Crouse. One part each of gin, Campari and red Vermouth. “It sounds like it is going to be bitter, but it is the most delicious drink. And, if you want something a little lighter, you take out the gin and you put in Prosecco or sparkling wine or champagne.”
To direct the exterior scenes of the award-winning 2012 movie Wadjda filmmaker Haifaa Al-Mansour, the first woman from Saudi Arabia to make a feature film, was hidden away inside a van. Her home country does not allow women to work in public with men so she watched the action on monitors and communicated with her actors via walkie-talkie.
“I remember the first day she came on the Mary Shelley set she started crying because she’d never been on a film set,” says Elle Fanning who stars in Al-Mansour’s latest movie, Mary Shelley. Shot on location in Dublin and Luxembourg, it is an exploration into the Frankenstein author’s battle to assert her voice in 19th-century England.
“One of the most interesting things about approaching this movie for me was the fact that (Al-Mansour) had gone through a very similar journey to Mary Shelley in her creative process,” says Douglas Booth who plays Percy Shelley. “She came from a world where she had to break through misogyny and people thinking she didn’t have a voice or didn’t deserve a voice because of her gender.”
Mary Shelley is playing at the Toronto International Film Festival this year placing Al-Mansour alongside filmmakers like Alanis Obomsawin, Agnès Varda, Jennifer Baichwal, Dee Rees, Greta Gerwig, Brie Larson, Molly Parker and other female directors who make up one-third of all films programmed at the fest this year.
“There is something different that happens on set when I am being directed by a woman,” says Stronger star Tatiana Maslany. “The cameras aren’t the gods. There isn’t idolatry of the machinery. I don’t know if that is a female thing specifically or just the women I have worked with. There is a deep interest in mining the internal life of something, the dynamic between men, between women, between a person and their surroundings, between a person and their own body. It’s not exclusive to women but it is something that I feel is a new thing I’m experiencing and it is often on female-led sets.”
Fanning says she often works with female directors like Sofia Coppola, who directed her in The Beguiled, but “it’s not a strategic thing. Without thinking about it I worked with four women directors in a row.”
“The way women tell stories about women – it’s real,” she says. “It needs to be shown, especially for young girls, to relate to all different types of women. I think it’s important to have women characters that are true to how women are and women directors get that.”
To ensure that a new generation of filmmakers like Al-Mansour are given a chance to have their voices heard TIFF has made a five-year commitment to increasing participation, skills and opportunities for women behind and in front of the camera. Through the initiative Share Her Journey TIFF is placing emphasis on mentorship, skills development, media literacy and activity for young people. To help them hit their financial goal of $500,000 for 2017 donations can be made through tiff.net.
“By supporting female filmmakers, you can make sure the stories women are longing to hear are told truthfully,” says Share Her Journey ambassador Omoni Oboli on the TIFF website. “Not only does it empower the filmmakers, but it also helps an audience to see the possibilities of women, instead of our limitations.”
