With the release of “A Madea Family Funeral” Tyler Perry is putting to rest his most famous character. The actor-director has been playing the elderly, sharp-tongued Mabel “Madea” Simmons on screen since 2005’s “Diary of a Mad Black Woman” but now says, “I just don’t want to be her age, playing her.”
Is the titular funeral for Madea? There will be no spoilers here but I can tell you Perry gives “Krump’s” era Eddie Murphy a run for this money, not just playing four characters in “A Madea Family Funeral,” but also writing, directing and producing. For all we know he also did the catering and best boy duties.
The set up for the action revolves around a family reunion in rural Georgia. The family, including Madea, Joe, Brian (all played by Perry) and Madea’s brother, a Vietnam war vet Heathrow (Perry again). When tragedy strikes the family must arrange a funeral (NO SPOILERS HERE!) “If I’m not in the will I tell you that funeral will be messed up,” says Joe. There’s more at stake than the money in the will, however. Personal secrets threaten to tear the once tight knit family apart.
If you are not already a fan of Madea’s rough-and-tumble humour “A Madea Family Funeral” is unlikely to convert you. Perry’s trademarked mix of slapstick, social commentary, soap opera melodrama and sentimentality is sloppily applied with scenes that recklessly veer from smiles to schmaltz at the speed of light.
The film’s funniest scene is also it’s most disturbing. On the way to the reunion Brian and family are pulled over by an over-enthusiastic cop whose escalating behaviour seems bound for a violent outcome uses humour to portray an all too familiar powder keg situation. It’s the movie’s only concession to current events. The rest feels as though Madea’s sitcom and a soap opera had a baby and named it “A Madea Family Funeral.”
Like the title suggests, Hungarian animator Milorad Krstić’s first feature film “Ruben Brandt, Collector” springs from a collection of inspirations. From Dalí to art deco and Eisenstein to The Pink Panther, the director draws on various forms of visual art to create a beguiling heist film.
Psychotherapist Ruben Brandt (voice of Iván Kamarás) is troubled by bad dreams of famous artworks come life. Warhol’s Double Elvis takes pot shots at him and Botticelli’s Venus becomes a Lovecraftian horror. “My nightmares are getting stronger and stronger,” he says.
Meanwhile a daring cat burglar named Mimi (Gabriella Hámori) is on the run after a daring robbery. Crossing paths with Brandt, she learns of the doctor’s troubles by listening in on his Dictaphone. To help ease his troubled mind Mimi relies on the advice the doctor has often given to others, “Possess your problems to conquer them.” To this end she recruits four of his shadiest patients, all thieves, to steal the thirteen paintings that plague is thoughts. Cue the capers as they raid the Louvre, Tate, Uffizi, Hermitage and Museum of Modern Art. Trouble is, the police put a $100 million price on “the collector’s” head.
“Ruben Brandt, Collector” is so rich with visual imagery it feels like flipping through a thick copy of “Fine Art Connoisseur Magazine.” Even the name Ruben Brandt is a sly reference, culled from the names Rubens and Rembrandt but this isn’t just style over substance, it’s style as substance. It’s a loving pop culture pastiche that is a reverential as it is action packed. There are car chases and heist scenes that owe as much to cubism as they do to William Friedkin.
You’ll want to watch “Ruben Brandt, Collector” more than once just to catch all the references. The imagery will seem familiar—who hasn’t at least glimpsed Picasso’s cubist paintings?—but like “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” this movie takes familiar images and tropes and forms them into something fresh and exciting.
Winnipeg born Terry Sawchuk is one of the legends of the NHL, an Original Six era player and leader in wins by goaltenders. A new film, “Goalie,” starring Mark O’Brien, gives a blow-by-blow account of his rise to fame, literally. It begins with an autopsy detailing each and every war wound and how he earned them.
It’s a striking way to kick off the story of a man who was scarred physically and mentally from his many years in the net. We first meet him as a shy child with a beloved brother and abusive father. His brother’s death at seventeen carved a hole in his heart that was never filled, despite being married to Pat (Georgina Reilly) and fathering seven children. Booze (“I’m not drunk. I just forgot to eat,” he slurs.), hockey and the reflected glow of being in the NHL kept him going but the lifestyle—he earned 400 stitches on his face alone—took a toll and depression and erratic behaviour became his norm.
Sawchuk saw his share of triumph and trouble but “Goalie” is not a hagiography of one of the legends of the game. Instead it is more an elegy for a man who spent much of his career earning $25 a game, occasionally playing with broken bones for fear of being traded.
O’Brien does a nice job of portraying Sawchuk’s duality. From a young man full of hope and promise to the battle-scarred veteran of the ice who let the pressure of performance weigh him down, O’Brien subtly portrays his descent.
Not so subtle is Kevin Pollak as Detroit general manager Jack Adams. He’s a sports manager straight out of Central Casting, given to saying things like, “We both know the game is played between those blood red poles!”
His flowery language aside, director Adriana Maggs manages to insert some real poetry into the film. Interspersed into the action are snippets of “Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems” by the director’s father Randall Maggs. His words add to the elegiac feel of the film and are a nice antidote when the film falls into the occasional “ice is thicker than blood” cliché.
Like all good sports movies “Goalie” isn’t about scores or stats, it’s about what drives the players to push themselves, to be warriors or be worthless.
You’ve seen the moon landing before but you have never seen it like this. To create the eye-popping new documentary “Apollo 11” director Todd Douglas Miller, along with a team of folks from NASA and the National Archives, catalogued and restored 11,000 hours of film that had been languishing in dusty archives since 1969. Just in time fore the mission’s fiftieth anniversary comes a new look at an old subject.
Walter Cronkite, Richard Nixon and a handful of others provide context via archival footage but director Miller doesn’t clutter things with experts or historians. Instead he lets the pictures do the talking. From blast-off to the welcome home parade and astronaut quarantine “Apollo 11” brings the history alive in a way we’ve never seen before. The restored film allows for new angles on old events and a crisp look that is truly out of this world. The footage, much of it shot by camera people who must have had a sense they were capturing images for the ages, is truly cinematic.
It is a technical feat for sure but the restored footage also reveals much of the mission’s humanity. The cleaned-up audio both inside Mission Control and the capsule gives insight to the fellowship and tension that fuelled the ambitious operation. “You’ve got a bunch of guys about to turn blue,” says a NASA staffer to the crew upon re-entry. “We’re breathing again.” It’s an often-overlooked aspect of the Apollo 11 mission and one crucial to the understanding of how a mission this complicated came off without a hitch five decades ago.
“Apollo 11” ignores the Cold War politics of beating the Russians to the moon. Instead it celebrates the achievement, leaving the viewer with a sense of awe at the precise work that created one of the most dramatic events in (out of this) world history.
Film critic and pop culture historian Richard Crouse shares a toast with celebrity guests and entertainment pundits every week on CTV News Channel’s 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 rock superstar Sting, musician Josh Groban, comedian Ken Jeong, writer Fran Lebowitz, superstar jazz musician Diana Krall, legendary rock star Meatloaf, stand-up comedian and CNN host W. Kamau Bell, actor Jay Baruchel, celebrity chefs Bobby Flay and Nigella Lawson, and many more.
On the season four opener of “Pop Life” Richard spoke with rock superstar Sting about his new musical “The Last Ship” and the importance of remembering the community he came from. “It was a gift in that I am a songwriter a storyteller and there was a story that hadn’t been told,” Sting says of The Last Ship, “that needed to be told by someone of community, but not in the community so there was some objectivity. I had a responsibility to honour the community that I came from, a community in crisis.”
Film critic and pop culture historian Richard Crouse shares a toast with celebrity guests and entertainment pundits every week on CTV News Channel’s 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 rock superstar Sting, musician Josh Groban, comedian Ken Jeong, writer Fran Lebowitz, superstar jazz musician Diana Krall, legendary rock star Meatloaf, stand-up comedian and CNN host W. Kamau Bell, actor Jay Baruchel, celebrity chefs Bobby Flay and Nigella Lawson, and many more.
In this business you meet a lot of different people. Mostly good, the occasional bad and even some people that you’ve looked up to an admired for quite some time…at least until they aren’t just someone on print or TV, it’s somebody you see weekly, knows you by your first name and you can call him a colleague (which still sounds weird to me).
That one person is Richard Crouse; Canada’s film critic and resident voice on CP24, CTV News Channel and on his syndicated radio show; The Richard Crouse Show. He is the preeminent voice for all things cinematic and a little bit of pop culture mixed in and I think that’s what makes his show, Pop Life something special… Read the whole thing HERE!
From ctvnews.ca: Film critic Richard Crouse is excited for the newest batch of interviews that will air when CTV’s “Pop Life” returns for its fourth season this Saturday. Since his show aired three years ago, Crouse said he’s set out to create a platform where people could share stories they hadn’t before. “Everybody has got a fascinating story … and we give them time to tell it,” he told CTVNews.ca over the phone… Read the whole thing HERE!
IMDb lists dozens of titles containing the phrase “dragon slayer.” The Hobbit author J.R.R. Tolkien described dragon Smaug as “a most specially greedy, strong and wicked worm.” The Flight of the Conchords have a song called “Albi the Racist Dragon,” and on Dragon Day at Cornell University, an effigy of one of the giant beasts is burned while students shout and dance.
From “Game of Thrones” to “DragonHeart” the winged creatures are portrayed as fiery, fearsome creatures. Only one movie franchise shows the flip side, cinematic dragons who are more misunderstood than actually evil. “How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World” is the final instalment of the wildly successful trilogy of tales about a dragon whisperer and his flying pet.
Hero Hiccup (voice of Jay Baruchel), now the chief of the dragon-friendly Viking Isle of Berk, and his fire-breathing friend Toothless are growing up. Romance is in the air. Hiccup may or may not propose to Astrid (America Ferrera) while Toothless falls for a Light Fury, a smaller dragon whose colouration allows her to hide in clouds.
All is well until Grimmel (F. Murray Abraham), a dragon hunter whose goal is to exterminate all dragons, disrupts Berk’s romantic idylls. As Grimmel’s dark threat hangs over Berk, Hiccup searches for a safe haven for both dragons and Vikings, the fabled Hidden World. “I don’t see a way of staying here any longer,” he says. “If we want to live in peace with our dragons we need to disappear off the map.”
The “How to Train Your Dragon” movies have always been cinematic. Director Dean DeBlois’s camera is in constant motion capturing the choreography of flocks of dragons as they soar through the air or Hiccup’s more outlandish adventures. “The Hidden World” is no different. Beautifully animated, it makes the most of its visuals, presenting gorgeous landscapes of Berk and the beautiful phosphorescent caves of the Hidden World that feel like they sprang from the pages of one of Cressida Cowell source novels.
The dragons come in all shapes, sizes and colours. From fierce to funny they each have distinct personalities. The mating dance between Toothless and the Light Fury is goofy, sweet fun, like something out of a NatGeo documentary on dragon rituals. DeBlois’s animators have found new and subtle ways to add expression to their scaly faces that helps bring them to vivid life.
There is less story in “The Hidden World” than the previous franchise entries. There are good messages about selflessness, the importance of love—the old chestnut about loving something enough to set it free is emphasized—topped off by more timely ideas about finding ways to co-exist.
The goofy humour that gave the other films much of their charm is intact but the emphasis is placed on large-scale action sequences and set pieces. The characters have grown up and so has the action. Dragons spew green acid and the swashbuckling is frenetic which may be too much for younger viewers.
“How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World” feels like a film that has grown along with its core audience. Determined to supply a satisfying ending to the franchise DeBlois delivers a movie that pushes the boundaries of the series while still maintaining the soul that earned the fans in the first place.
