Archive for February, 2018

NEWSTALK 1010: THE RICHARD CROUSE SHOW FROM FEBRUARY 24, 2018!

Check out the Richard Crouse Show on NewsTalk 1010 for February 24, 2018! This week Richard welcomes director, producer and writer Ingrid Veninger who talks about her new film Porcupine Lake.

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 9 to 10 pm. 

For Niagara, Newstalk 610 Radio – airs Saturdays at 6 to 7 pm 

For Montreal, CJAD 800 – Saturdays at 6 to 7 pm 

For Vancouver – CFAX 1070 – Saturdays 6 to 7 pm. 

For London — Newstalk 1290 CJBK, Saturdays 10 to 11 pm

CTVNEWS.CA: THE CROUSE REVIEW LOOKS AT “GAME NIGHT” & MORE!

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 comedy thriller “Game Night” with Jason Bateman and Rachel McAdams, the romance-in-the-age of instalove, “Every Day” and the berserko “Mom and Dad” with Nicolas Cage and Selma Blair.

Watch the whole thing HERE!

RICHARD’S WEEKEND MOVIE REVIEWS FROM CP24! FRIDAY FEBRUARY 23, 2017.

Richard and CP24 anchor Nathan Downer have a look at the weekend’s new movies including the comedy thriller “Game Night” with Jason Bateman and Rachel McAdams, the romance-in-the-age of instalove, “Every Day” and the berserko “Mom and Dad” with Nicolas Cage and Selma Blair.

Watch the whole thing HERE!

RICHARD’S CTV NEWSCHANNEL WEEKEND MOVIE REVIEWS FOR FEBRUARY 23.

Richard sits in with CTV NewsChannel anchor Marcia MacMillan  to have a look at the weekend’s big releases, the comedy thriller “Game Night” with Jason Bateman and Rachel McAdams, the romance-in-the-age of instalove, “Every Day” and the berserko “Mom and Dad” with Nicolas Cage and Selma Blair.

Watch the whole thing HERE!

Metro In Focus: No matter how low rent the movie, Nicolas Cage is compelling.

By Richard Crouse – Metro In Focus

It’s no secret that Nicolas Cage’s taste in movie roles has changed from the days when he starred in A-list films like Raising Arizona, Moonstruck and Leaving Las Vegas. The 54-year-old actor appears to flip a coin when deciding what to make these days. Sometimes he gets lucky — The Croods has a sequel on the way and Joe made some box office bank — while other times he ends up in films like Outcast, a period piece whose outlandish story careens through Europe and Asia like a drunken soldier on shore leave.

It’s trendy to write Cage off as an actor throwing his talent away, more concerned with cash than art. YouTube brims with videos like Crazy Cage Moments and Cage Rage. Between them they’ve racked up millions of views, which is certainly more people — give or take several zeroes — that saw his recent bizarro-world revenge film Mandy or direct-to-oblivion domestic thriller Inconceivable. And yet, no matter how low rent some of his recent output is, he’s usually compelling.

The vids are an eye-opening compendium of Cage’s trademarked brand of extreme acting — a method of over-emoting perfected in the more than 80 movies he’s made since his debut (under his real name Nicolas Coppola) in 1982’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Citing The Incredible Hulk star Bill Bixby as a major influence, he has always been, for better and for worse, one of our most completely fearless actors.

This weekend’s Mom and Dad promises an extra helping of full-throttle Cage. He calls it his favourite movie in a decade, while Glen Kenny, writing in the New York Times said, “In this morbid satire about parents trying to kill their kids, Mr. Cage has plenty of opportunity to go full him.” Cage, who forever will be best known for hits like Adaptation, National Treasure and Leaving Las Vegas, has made many other movies that are worth a second look.

One writer called Cage’s work in 1989’s Vampire’s Kiss “a grand stab at all-out, no-holds-barred comic acting or one of the worst dramatic performances in a film this year,” but decades later the movie has earned cult status because of Cage’s edgy work. The story of a man who may — or may not — be turning into a vampire is best remembered as the film in which Cage ate a live cockroach, but also features one of his most unhinged performances.

A few years later, somewhere between Honeymoon in Vegas and Guarding Tess, came Red Rock West, a genre-busting movie — Ebert said it “exists sneakily between a western and a thriller, between a film noir and a black comedy” — that unfairly barely made it to theatres. Cage hands in some of his best work as a broke but honest drifter, but only took the role after Kris Kristofferson turned it down.

Existing at the intersection of Vampire’s Kiss and Red Rock West is Wild at Heart, a film that perfectly showcases Cage’s manic energy. As Sailor, a lover boy on the run from hit men hired by his girlfriend’s mother, he’s a one-of-a-kind, an Elvis wannabe with a snakeskin jacket and an attitude. It’s a bravura performance. Like the jacket, which he says “represents a symbol of my individuality,” Wild at Heart is a symbol of his artistic individuality.

Metro Canada: In Game Night it’s Jesse Plemons like we’ve never seen him.

By Richard Crouse – Metro Canada

This is Jesse Plemons like we’ve never seen him. Best known for a trio of dramatic roles on television—Landry Clarke in the football drama Friday Night Lights, Todd Alquist in crime series Breaking Bad and Ed Blumquist in Fargo—he has made a name playing characters he describes as “intense or creepy.”

On the phone from Los Angeles to chat up his new comedy Game Night, he’s neither of those things. Friendly and soft-spoken, he says his latest character Gary, a cop with a broken heart and a suspicious nature, “feels like he was in his own movie or had snuck from some other movie and just seemed really out of place.”

Game Night sees Plemons as the oddball neighbour to Max and Annie, played by Jason Bateman and Rachel McAdams. The hypercompetitive couple host weekly game nights, get-togethers Gary used to be invited to before he divorced their friend Debbie. When an innocent murder mystery game escalates to real life danger Max and Annie welcome Gary’s expertise in law enforcement.

Plemons hasn’t done a lot of comedy but says he liked Game Night immediately.

“You read a lot of scripts,” he says, “and I find that you know pretty early on whether you respond to it or not. It is pretty rare to read a comedy script and actually laugh out loud sitting by yourself.”

To create the character Plemons, who will soon be seen alongside Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and Joe Pesci in the Martin Scorsese movie The Irishman, mixed deadpan delivery with a thousand-yard-stare that is as unnerving as it is funny.

“I watched a lot of cops for inspiration,” he says. “Not to say I ever found a Gary per se, but I felt like it was an easy world to step into.”

When I mention that Gary’s situation—he’s a lonely sad sack, still pining for his ex wife—might make it easy for an audience to feel sorry for him and not laugh, he shudders.

“I didn’t even think about that,” he says. “I should have been worried about that but somehow I wasn’t. I could immediately picture him. I feel like everyone has come across someone in their lives who is a great person but you don’t necessarily want to talk to them. There is something really sweet and innocent about Gary that I really liked and I think maybe that’s what people will respond to.

“No matter what genre I am doing I still try and try to bring truth and honesty to it. That is also the kind of comedy I respond to. Not that I don’t like broad comedy but this is something I haven’t been able to play around with in the past.”

Ultimately, however, he says the only difference between playing drama and comedy is “that it is hard to escape that, ‘I hope people laugh,” thought in the back of your mind.”

He says Game Night, like his recent appearance in Oscar nominated The Post, offered up the chance to do something new and stretch as an actor.

“That’s what I love about acting,” he says. “I don’t feel like you ever really arrive or feel like you’ve done it all. There is always a new part, a new story to try and figure out.”

Metro Canada: Allan Hawco gets Caught up in adaptation of Giller Prize finalist.

By Richard Crouse – Metro Canada

“I was totally burned out at the end of Republic of Doyle,” says Allan Hawco. “When we finished six seasons every cool idea I ever had, every cool line I ever had, every cool plot idea, everything, I’d used it. My charm was gone. I was happy to have something to fill up the well again.”

That something was St. John’s writer Lisa Moore’s crime novel Caught. A finalist for the 2013 Scotiabank Giller Prize, the book is a period piece, set in 1978, that follows drug smuggler David Slaney’s prison escape and attempt at creating a new life. Described as loyal, paranoid, driven and resilient, Slaney is a charismatic and complex character with a plan for one more heist and to rekindle a romance with the woman he loves.

“I read the thing in three hours,” says Hawco on the line from his home in Newfoundland. “I was just completely taken by it. By the characters, the innocence of it, the injustice of what the characters were put through. I could see it all in front of me as to how it would go as an adaptation for television.

“I called Lisa shortly afterwards because everyone was having a hard time getting the rights to this book. A lot of people wanted it, which is often the case with a great novel. Lisa and I know one another. We live in the same city not far from one another. So I called her and said, ‘Please, I want to do this. I want to make this into a television series.’ It’s a small town. She knew our track record as a company here. I had faith that she would feel confident I would do right by her story.”

Though “rich in character and situation,” Hawco says bringing the story to the small screen — the first of the five hour-long episodes, co-starring Paul Gross, airs on CBC television February 26 — required some changes.

“It wasn’t going to work for me unless I could find a way in authentically as a writer first,” he says. “In the novel there is a beautiful innocence to their discovery of the world and their openness to what fate may bring. That works really well in the novel because you can internalize it. You can identify with it and go with it. I couldn’t see a way to paint that picture for the screen. For me the stakes had to be different and in order for them to be different Slaney had to be older. This had to be a last opportunity for him. That became the spine of the entire adaptation.”

The lead role was tailored for Hawco, who is 40.

“In the book there is a beautiful innocence to him that is still very much at the core of who I eventually created, but their ages are 10 years apart. My David Slaney in the adaptation is 35, in the book it is his 25th birthday. As much moisturizer as I can put on my face, there’s no playing 25 again. Nor do I want to.”

How do you make a character like Slaney, who dabbles on the wrong side of the law, likeable enough to carry a television series?

“Luckily I never think that way,” he laughs, “or I might not get out of bed!”

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