In the dog days of summer comes “Dog Days,” starring a cast of folks including Vanessa Hudgens, “Stranger Things’s” Finn Wolfhard and Eva Longoria brought together by their canines. Expect bastardized cover versions of pooch songs like “Walking the Dog” and “Who Let the Dogs Out?” and more easy sentimentality than you can shake a dog bone at.
Set in modern day Los Angeles the story follows a litter of characters. There’s the host of a TV morning show (Nina Dobrev), her co-host (Tone Bell), a dog rescue owner (Jon Bass) with eyes for a barista (Hudgens) who has a crush on the vet next door (Michael Cassidy). That should be enough, but there’s also a couple (Thomas Lennon and Jessica St. Clair) who leave their unruly dog in the care of her even more unruly brother (Adam Pally) while another family (Longoria and David Cross) whose family is completed by a stray. Meanwhile, in another part of town, an elderly man (Ron Cephas Jones) and his pizza delivery boy (Wolfhard) bond over the love of a pug. Eventually, everyone finds either love or a sense of purpose or both through their dogs.
“Dog Days” is so predictable it’s as if the studio forced a bot to watch hundreds of hours of rom coms and Garry Marshal movies and then sat back as the machine spit out a script based on all the data. Beat for beat it telegraphs what is coming next as though any deviation from the form will result in a case of ringworm.
On the plus side, the dogs in “Dog Days” do not speak. If they could, they might say things like, “Call my agent! What am I doing in a movie as bad as this?”
You will not be bow-wowed by “Dog Days.” Instead you may wonder, not who, but why let the dogs out?
“BlacKkKlansman” is based on the strange but true story of Ron Stallworth. The true part sees the Colorado Springs, Colorado police officer join the KKK and even act as a bodyguard for Grand Wizard David Duke. The strange part is that Ron Stallworth is African American. Maybe that’s why director Spike Jones chose to open the film with the title credit, “DIS JOINT IS BASED UPON SOME FO’ REAL, FO’ REAL S***.”
When we first meet Stallworth (John David Washington) it’s the mid-1970s and he is an ambitious rookie cop who wants out of the records room and into the action. The overwhelmingly white Colorado Springs police department doesn’t quite know what to do with him until Civil Rights organizer Stokely Carmichael (Corey Hawkins) is booked to speak in town. “We don’t want this Carmichael getting into the minds of the young people of Colorado Springs,” he’s told. Sent undercover to the meeting wearing a wire, he meets local college activist Patrice (Laura Harrier). She calls the police “pigs” but awakens Ron’s dormant activism with her passion.
Back at his desk a recruitment ad for the Ku Klux Klan. On an impulse he dials the number, changes his voice and gets a meeting with a local, high-level Klansman. Now what to do? Stallworth continues wooing the Klan on the phone, spouting racist gobbledegook, while his colleague Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver) plays the part in person.
“BlacKkKlansman” is set forty plus years ago and comes complete with flared pants, jive talk and other indicators of the time but feels timely and alive. This is not a period piece. It’s a slice of Stallworth’s life that bristles with Lee’s anger, social commentary and humour. Parallels to today’s news are woven throughout, sometimes subtly, sometimes with the delicacy of a slap to the face. For instance, midway through Duke says he’s working, “to get America back on track, to give America its greatness again.” It’s a barbed satire with its feet firmly rooted in the realities of American life.
The use of clips from D.W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation” and news footage from Charlottesville compares and contracts a hundred years of filmed racist behaviour, displaying how little has changed in that time.
Terrific performances and fearless storytelling make “BlacKkKlansman” a searing document that defies the viewer not to react.
“The Crescent” is a creepy slow-burner of a story that, like it’s main character, doesn’t know how to say goodbye.
Set in Nova Scotia, “The Crescent” focuses on Beth (Danika Vandersteen) and her two-year-old son Lowen (Woodrow Graves). A recent widow, Beth is having a hard time adapting to life without her husband. Seeking solace they retreat to the family’s remote beach house. Beth tries to return to a normal life, playing on the beach, creating art projects, making food and reading stories to her son, but true normalcy remains just out of reach. Depressed and uneasy, she often leaves Lowen alone to fend for himself.
As an anxiety-inducing soundtrack hums along in the background neighbours appear, like Joseph (Terrance Murray), an unsettling character whose condolences—“It must be so devastating to lose a loved one. You can be with him again.”—sound like whispered threats. Then there’s the little girl on the beach who warns about the “dead folk who don’t want to stay dead.” “They’ve been watching your son,” she says. It’s all in service of a clever climax that suggests that the ones left behind in a situation like this aren’t the only ones who suffer.
“The Crescent” begins as a traditional narrative but ends—and ends and ends—as an experimental, and occasionally patience trying, art house horror film. Director Seth A. Smith successfully uses music, shifting aspect ratios and the stark location to create an atmosphere of dread that builds as Beth’s grip of reality crumbles. Less interesting is his decision to not end the story when it needs to end. Elongating the narrative takes some of the power away from what has gone before, no matter how eerily effective it was.
That director Alison McAlpine used to be a poet is obvious after viewing her latest documentary “Cielo.” The word means ‘heaven” in Spanish, and here McAlpine uses the visuals in much the same way a poet uses words to express aesthetic qualities of her subject.
The film is a celebration of the sky high above Northern Chile’s Atacama Desert, just west of the Andes Mountains. Time lapse cameras capture the ethereal beauty of the wild blue yonder, day and night. To comment she brings in a variety of people to comment on their relationship with the sky, the sun and moon from scientific, cultural and spiritual standpoints. We meet everyone from astronomers and cowboys, to miners and algae collectors. Elderly indigenous storyteller Roberto Garcia says he flies around the stars while professional stargazer Mercedes Lopez reflects on the data she and her colleagues collect. From the personal to the professional, “Cielo” presents a profound collection of perspectives on life’s ceiling.
McAlpine herself chimes in, saying, “the sky is more urgent than the land,” and she does a wonderful job of capturing the beauty and the mystery of the sky. By the time the end credits roll we’re left with some engaging stories and observations but it is the visuals that make a lasting impression.
Virginia Woolf famously said, ‘One cannot think well, love well and sleep well if one has not dined well.’ Our guests today would surely agree. Jeremiah Tower was the first celebrity chef and Gail Simmons is a cook book author and Top Chef Judge.
“Don’t go getting all grown up on us.“ That’s the sentiment that hangs over “Christopher Robin,” a new film about regaining an intangible starring Ewan McGregor and Winnie the Pooh (voice of Jim Cummings), like a shroud.
The movie begins with 10-year-old Christopher Robin‘s going away party, just before he leaves for boarding school. His playmates, Piglet (voice of Nick Mohammed), Eeyore (Brad Garrett), Tigger (Cummings again), Owl (Toby Jones), Rabbit (Peter Capaldi), Kanga (Sophie Okonedo) and the honey loving bear have gathered to see him off from 100 Acre Woods, their home and Christopher’s escape from real life.
“I will never forget you Pooh,“ Christopher says, “even if I live to be 100 years old.“
But of course he does.
Like the quickly flipped pages of a story park the film rockets through Christopher’s boarding school, marriage, efforts in WWII and his difficulties after the war. Now a husband to Evelyn (Hayley Atwell) and a father to Madeline (Bronte Carmichael), he has a job he doesn’t like and responsibilities that keep him away from his family.
Christopher Robin got all grown up.
When his boss instructs him to cut 20% of his operating budget Christopher is pushed against the wall. The frivolities of youth are pushed even further to the background until Pooh, looking for his friends and in search of honey, shows up in London with the grumbling tummy and some sage words of advice. “I’ve cracked,” says Christopher when his childhood friend shows up. “I’ve totally cracked. “I don’t see any cracks,” replies Pooh sweetly, “some wrinkles maybe.”
A mix of live action and CGI characters, “Christopher Robin” doesn’t allow the special effects to get in the way of the film’s message of staying young at heart. The stuffed animals—Winnie and friends—don’t feel like and excuse to sell toys. Instead they are given distinct and engaging personalities that move the story and the message forward. Cummings, who has voiced Winnie since 1988, brings real personality to the character, imbuing his elliptical speaking patterns with equal parts humour and melancholy. Pooh also causes some Paddington-style chaos in the Robin household, adding to the slapstick factor in a movie that toggles between heartfelt and farce.
There is an undeniable sense of loss and longing in “Christopher Robin.” Loss, in the form of a childhood innocence gone missing—“I’m lost,” says Pooh, “but I found you.”—longing in the efforts made to regain the connection to childlike wonder and, in Robin’s case, his own daughter Madeline. Children might not get it, although I’m sure they will enjoy the stuffed characters, but adults will understand the curious tale about the importance of old friends and embracing the inner child.
“The Spy Who Dumped Me” is the most multi-hyphenated movie to hit screens this year. It’s a spy-thriller-rom-com-buddy-flick-dark-comedy, that’s a lot of hyphens and genres. Too many, in fact.
Kate McKinnon plays Morgan Freeman (you read that right), BFF to Audrey (Mila Kunis), a cashier still stinging from being dumped by her boyfriend Drew (Justin Theroux). They both thought he worked for NPR as a jazz and political podcaster. Turns out, he’s a secret agent for the CIA. Despite dumping her on her birthday, and by text no less, he reaches out to ask her to deliver a flash drive containing the “back door to the entire internet” to Vienna.
With some coaxing from Morgan—“Do you want to die never having been to Europe or do you want to die on a European trip?”—Audrey agrees and the best friends head for Europe. On their tails are squabbling MI6 spies Sebastian (Sam Heughan) and Duffer (Hasan Minhaj) the “bad people” who have been tracking Drew. “Some bad people are after me and now they are after you,” says Drew.
It seems Audrey‘s video game playing experience has trained her for life in the field. On the mission the two newbie spies Jason Bourne their way through Europe, stamping their stolen passports in Prague, Paris, Berlin while fending off ice cold Eastern European assassin Nadedja (Ivanna Sakhno). Several car chases, one death by fondue and hundreds of bullets later they uncover the truth of their assignment.
“The Spy Who Dumped Me” gets lost amid all its duelling genres. It’s not dark enough to be a dark comedy, not funny enough to be a full on comedy, not romantic enough to be a rom com and certainly not thrilling enough to give 007 a run for this money. Instead it’s a Frankensteined version of all the genres sewn together sitcom style.
McKinnon gives it her all as the well-intentioned BFF who starts as much trouble as she stops, spicing up all her scenes with the deadpan Kunis. McKinnon‘s characters are comedic things a beauty, human but other worldly, strange but relatable, but here it feels as if the big screen amplifies her already larger-than-life character. It’s as if she is acting in a different movie than Kunis and the others. She’s the movie’s MVP but her take on Morgan distracts rather than adds. As Drew tells her when they first meet, “Morgan, has anyone ever told you told you you’re a bit much?”
Despite McKinnon’s best efforts “The Spy Who Dumped Me,” at almost two hours, is overlong and overstuffed.
“It’s hard to believe, unless you were there, how much fun that gas station was,” says Scotty Bowers, the subject of a new documentary “Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood.” The gas station in question, Richfield at 5777 Hollywood Boulevard, was the unassuming hub of closeted gay celebrity culture in in 1940s and 50s Los Angeles.
Bowers, now aged 95, settled in Los Angeles after serving as a Marine in WWII. To make ends meet he pumped gas at Richfield. His life changed the day Oscar nominee Walter Pidgeon came in for fuel and went home with Scotty. Scotty left Pidgeon’s house with a pocket full of cash and a new career as an escort, and later, a facilitator who ran a stable of studs who charged twenty dollars a date. Bowers wrote a book about this era called “Full Service,” but it is the subtitle, “My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars,” that sum up his wild years.
He names names, everyone from J. Edgar Hoover and Cole Porter, to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, get a mention but the film isn’t simply a tell all, or gossipy document of the sexual appetite of Hollywood stars. Although there is some of that—comedian and game show staple Paul Lynde is described as “the drunk,” while “The Philadelphia Story” director George Cukor is called “the salivator”—it focuses on the why not the how. It’s the story of a man who helped famous gay people, who could go to jail or lose their careers because of their sexuality, “to have lives that were honest and authentic.” Bowers provided a very real service to people who otherwise were restricted by the studio’s moral code and backwards laws.
He’s a compelling character. In his nineties, he still bartends for his rich friends, tends to several homes—which now act mostly as repositories for his hoarded collections of memorabilia—and stays active.
Director Matt Tyrnauer places Bowers’s story against the backdrop of repressed sexuality, painting a vivid picture of the social morays of the day. Take for example, the case of two of the era’s biggest stars, Spencer Tracey and Katharine Hepburn. Tracey was married but it was public knowledge his frequent co-star Hepburn lived in a guesthouse on his property. Fans assumed they were an item but Bowers claims otherwise. Friends yes, but according to the Hollywood escort—don’t call him a pimp, he says, he never took money for the “dates” he arranged for others—they were both gay. Bowers says he spent many nights with Tracey and arranged 150 liaisons with women for Hepburn. The larger point Tyrnauer makes is that it was more acceptable to the general public that Tracey and Hepburn could appear to be in an adulterous relationship than it was to be gay or lesbian.
The movie doesn’t dive as deep into Bowers himself. He’s a renegade, an iconoclast but not a particularly introspective one. A great storyteller, yes, but not an inward looking one.
A brief exchange about his wartime experience suggests deeper wounds than he is willing or able to admit. Later the story of continuing on to a date after the news of his daughter’s death isn’t chalked up to subversion of grief but to his work ethic. Even childhood sexual abuse is written off as having no influence on his later life as a hustler. “The only way they ruin your life is if they run you over with a bus on the street,” he says. “Even as a little bitty kid I never saw anything wrong with anything. I went along with everything and never told anyone.” In the film he comes off as compelling but not complex, particularly by comparison to the larger issues that surround his story.
Despite Bowers’s lack of self-examination “Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood” is an engaging and likeable film, much like the man himself and as he says in the film, “There’s nothing wrong with that baby.”
Designer Lee Alexander McQueen killed himself at the height of his fame and on the eve of his mother’s funeral. An iconoclast, his art transcended commercial concerns but was embraced by the fashion elite. His clothes were, as one talking head says, “about sabotage and tradition.” The documentary “McQueen,” from directors Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui, attempts to explain the contradictions that made the man, his short life and clothes, a legend.
McQueen, or Lee as friends called him, makes for a compelling central character. The son of a London cabbie and an encouraging mother, his was a talent so exciting that when he started out people paid to work with him. The film is jam packed with tidbits like that; testaments to his adrenaline fuelled bursts of creativity and fond memories from friends—“He laughed all the time and was funny and disrespectful.”—but the filmmakers instinctively know the best approach to their subject is through the clothes. “I would go to the far reaches of my dark side and pull these horrors out of myself and put them on the catwalk,” he says.
His dark side included childhood abuse and later, alcohol and drug problems. Excessive workload—he designed fourteen collections a year—and grief at the loss of his mother and mentor Isabella Blow exacerbated his depression. “I’m angry at the world,” he says.
The film’s final chapter details his last, successful but unhappy years. “I think there is more to life than fashion,” he says, “and I don’t want to be stuck in that bubble of ‘This is what I do.’ You see everyone else in the office and they can go home. I can’t. I’m still Alexander McQueen. I can’t shut the door.”
Ultimately “McQueen” makes it clear he was unable to ever close that door, to find a place where life and work could co-exist. The film is a portrait of genius and while the biographical details are interesting, it’s the singular vision of his clothes that lingers. “If you want to know me,” he says, “look at the work.”
