A weekly feature from from ctvnews.ca! The Crouse Review is a quick, hot take on the weekend’s biggest movies! This week Richard looks at the latest YA adaptation to hit the screen, “The Maze Runner: The Death Cure,” Annette Bening in “Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool” and the thriller “Hollow in the Land.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
By Richard Crouse – Metro In Focus
In March 2016, production was shut down on Maze Runner: The Death Cure when star Dylan O’Brien was hurt filming an elaborate stunt. O’Brien, who rose to fame as the resident heartthrob on Teen Wolf, was strapped in a harness on top of a moving vehicle when he was suddenly thrown and struck by another car. WorkSafeBC reported his injuries included “concussion, facial fracture and lacerations.”
With production postponed, O’Brien’s publicist Jennifer Allen said, “His injuries are very serious and he needs more time to recover.”
Director Wes Ball tweeted, “Well, it’s been a whirlwind of emotions these past few days. I’ve been overwhelmed with feelings of anger and sadness and guilt. But, ultimately I find myself left with just a deep love and respect for Dylan. He is one tough cookie.”
The film, originally scheduled for release on Feb. 17, 2017, was delayed until this weekend.
O’Brien says he was “in a really fragile, vulnerable state,” and during the early days of his recuperation thought he may never act again. “I’ve gotten to a place where I’m OK with it,” he told People, “but it was definitely a rough year.”
The 26-year-old isn’t the first actor to be hurt performing a dangerous deed. Jackie Chan is famous for doing all of his own stunts — and breaking almost every bone in his body in the process — while Mission: Impossible 6 was recently put on hold after Tom Cruise broke his ankle attempting a jump across a building gap.
Sylvester Stallone broke ribs on the First Blood set and Charlize Theron herniated a disc in her spine while shooting Aeon Flux. Jason Statham joked about almost being drowned during the making of The Expendables 3, but it is serious business. How far should filmmakers go in the search for realism in stunts?
Industry insiders say the best way to keep everyone safe is to let the professionals do their jobs. Arnold Schwarzenegger, no stranger to films with wild action scenes, said, “With stunts, we have a rule that if you can get injured or killed, you let a stunt guy do it, because they are much more skilled in how to do the falls, being on fire, how to deal with all those things.”
Stunt driver Richard Lippert asserts that, stunt-wise, actors only have to know how to do three things: first, how to convincingly fake a punch; second, how to drive on and off a mark; and finally, how to credibly handle a weapon. Other than that, he says, “actors shouldn’t plan to do their own stunts no matter how ‘cool’ or exciting it may seem.”
Other than personal danger for the actor, one wrong move can shut down a set costing everyone their livelihoods. “Taking a job away from someone to stroke your ego is not a good way to become popular,” says Lippert.
CGI is another option, although many top directors prefer real action. After years of “following the CG evolution,” using computer-generated images to create beautiful animated films like Happy Feet and Babe: A Pig in the City, director George Miller used actual stunts performed by stunt men and women in his action epic Mad Max: Fury Road. “It was like going back to your old hometown and looking at it anew,” he said.
By the time actress Gloria Grahame passed away in 1981 at age 57 she was largely forgotten. A new film, “Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool,” aims to remind of us of the Oscar winner’s—she won the Best Supporting Actress award in 1952 for The Bad and the Beautiful—life, legacy and love.
When we meet Grahame (Annette Bening) she’s in the “whatever happened to” phase of her career. Hollywood is a distant memory and she’s now trading on whatever cache her name still holds, performing “The Glass Menagerie” in English regional theatres. Ailing, she calls on Peter Turner (Jamie Bell), a former lover and much younger man who once moved to New York to be with her. He’s now back at home in working-class Liverpool, struggling to make it as an actor.
As Grahame becomes sicker and sicker the movie moves along a fractured timeline to tell the story of their love affair and how sickness shattered their bliss and eventually brought them together again.
Director Paul McGuigan uses some slick camera tricks to jump around in time from the first blush of their relationship to the end and every point in between. Doors open in the present to reveal a scene in the past. It’s showy but dreamy, as though we are hopscotching through Peter’s memory.
Bell is a sweet, sensitive and thoughtful boy-toy whose sparks with Bening. He’s very good but this is Bening’s movie. Her Grahame is a wonder, effervescently flirty one second, frail the next. She is the keeper of a heartbreaking secret agenda and a vain woman facing the abyss. It’s remarkable stuff that sits comfortably alongside her stellar recent work in “The Face of Love,” “20th Century Woman” and “Rules Don’t Apply.”
“Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool” is a three Kleenex film that will make you want to go back and check out Grahame’s real life movies. If you haven’t already, check her out as the temptress with an eye for James Stewart in “It’s a Wonderful Life” or as Ado Annie in Oklahoma! She was a great talent and Bening does her justice.
You may be forgiven if you, like me, thought about going to see “The Maze Runner: The Death Cure” to catch up on what happened to Shailene Woodley’s character Tris Prior.
Please be advised you have the wrong franchise.
Back in the day of the young-adult-in-peril dystopian trilogies screens were filled with good looking young actors fighting for survival in movies like “The Maze Runner” and “The Divergent Series.” Of the bunch of them only “The Hunger Games” distinguished itself as a go-to movie. The others kind of blended together to form one long post apocalyptic action series that resembled an anti-utopian Guess ad with automatic weapons and artfully tousled hair.
Since the new film, “Maze Runner: The Death Cure,” assumes you’re up to speed with the story I’ll save you the trouble of having to binge watch the first two movies.
Here’s the catch-up:
Based on a series of wildly popular YA books, 2014s “The Maze Runner” sees Thomas, played by “Teen Wolf’s” Dylan O’Brien, plopped into a community of young men surrounded by a labyrinth. The rebellious Thomas wants to see if there is a way to navigate through the ever-changing maze that stands between the boys and whatever is happening in the outside world.
The following year “The Scorch Trials” saw the virtuous Thomas and his gang take on the worst people in the world, W.C.K.D., a group of evildoers that appear to use an Instagram acronym as their name.
After a three-year wait Thomas is back with his stylishly dishevelled hair and chiselled face to break into The Last City, a fortified town where doctors work to find a cure for a plague that turns people into snarling zombies. The good doctors, including Thomas’s former flame Teresa (Kaya Scodelario), are experimenting on the Maze Runners who are immune to the disease. In particular Thomas wants to rescue Minho (Ki Hong Lee), a pal being mercilessly poked with needles in search of a cure.
“Maze Runner: The Death Cure” features lots of ominous music, attractive stars in motion, dusty dystopian landscapes and something gets blown up or shot at every 10 minutes or so. What’s missing is the emotional content that might make you care about Thomas and Company. The movie really wants you to love the characters. The camera endlessly caresses their determined and often tearstained faces but the ham fisted big emotional moments are as empty as the jars of gel thrown in the trash after being used to poof up the cast’s hair. The characters are mannequins mouthing generic dialogue—speeches begin with, “I knew I know you have no reason to trust me,” and every few minutes someone says, “We have to get out of here!”—for two hours and twenty minutes. Think what else you could do with that time!
Look the word hardscrabble up in the dictionary and you’re likely to find a picture of “Hollow in the Land’s” Alison Miller (Dianna Agron). She lives in the kind of backwater industrial town where everyone knows her business. And there’s a lot to talk about. Her father is locked up, jailed for an alcohol fuelled crime spree that ended in the death of the son of the local mill owner.
Mom is a long distant memory, having run off, leaving Alison to care for her teenage brother Brandon (Jared Abrahamson). He’s a handful. “You know one of these days you’re going to do some real damage, smart ass,” a local cop (Michael Rogers) tells him when he’s picked up for fighting, “and you’ll have bigger problems than some paperwork. You’ll be sharing a cell with your old man in no time.”
When the neighbours aren’t talking about the Miller’s troubled family history they’re gossiping about Alison and her girlfriend Charlene (Rachelle Lefevre).
Alison’s life is further scrutinized when Brandon lands in deep trouble. The day after his girlfriend Sophie’s violent, drunken father (John Sampson) walked in on them having sex, the old man winds up dead and Brandon is the chief suspect. Convinced of his innocence she launches her own investigation only to wind up under the microscope herself.
“Hollow in the Land” is more of a snapshot of life in a small town than it is a murder mystery. The procedural aspects of the story are less interesting than the characters, which are brought to vivid, scrappy life. Agron, best known as high school cheerleader Quinn Fabray on “Glee,” brings grit to Alison, playing her as determined yet emotionally damaged.
“Hollow in the Land” will be compared to the equally grungy “Winter’s Bone.” Like that movie writer-director Scooter Corkle paints a drab picture of life in this town, creating a backwoods neo-noir with some nice details, but never really satisfies narratively.
From reelz.com: Take an unnerving dive into the cases of stalkers whose unrelenting obsession with a celebrity led to jarring and sometimes tragic ends. Episodes of this new series include the chilling stalking cases involving Erin Andrews, David Letterman, Gwyneth Paltrow, Michael Douglas, Steven Spielberg, Jodie Foster, Christina Grimmie, Rebecca Schaeffer and Brooke Shields. In the series premiere see the stalker story involving Madonna. Every hour-long episode unfolds with two seemingly separate timelines building to a climax of fear and violence with each story presented through expert interviews, recreations, actual case files and insights from seasoned law enforcement officials.
Richard appears on the following episodes on Reelz (U.S. 0nly):
Paltrow – Feb 10 @ 8pm
Spielberg – Feb 17 @ 9pm
Foster – Feb 10 @ 9pm
Douglas/Zeta-Jones – Feb 17 @ 8pm
Shields – Feb 24 @ 8pm
From cineplex.com: The Terminator. Back to the Future. Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Shaun of the Dead. The Big Lebowski. The Iron Giant. All classic movies with one thing in common: they’re coming back to the big screen! For one week only from Feb. 2-8, select Cineplex theatres are hosting the Flashback Film Fest, a once-a-year festival that offers you the chance to revisit fan favourite movies, all for a special lower ticket price. If you’ve been yearning to see your favourite classic movie on the big screen, or to introduce a friend or family member to a film that spawned a generation of catchphrases, now’s your chance!
To gear up for this event, we asked film critic Richard Crouse and our own Pre-Show host Tanner Zipchenwhat movies they’re most excited to see in this year’s FBFF. Watch the video HERE!
From geekhardshow.com: This week, we get into all kinds of fun!
Don’t miss this Friday as we bring you a review of an upcoming series and interviews with guests galore! Joining Andrew and Mr. Green via phone will be actor Abigail Winter. Abigail can currently be seen as Jess on the new season of Mary Kills People. She’ll be on to talk about what’s been going down on season two and so much more!
Also returning to Geek Hard for another phone interview is film critic and host of Pop Life, Richard Crouse. Richard will be joining us to talk about the 2018 Flashback Film Fest, coming to select Cineplex Cinemas February 2nd to 8th. Richard will be on to chat about the lineup for this year’s fest as well as his adventures while interviewing celebs. We’re talking films, films and more films with Richard this Friday.
Richard and CTV NewsChannel anchor Merella Fernandez to talk Oscars.
Watch the whole thing HERE!
