First, the history. One of the great nautical mysteries dates back to 1872 when a British brig called Dei Gratia came across a ship adrift in choppy seas. They were 400 miles east of the Azores in rough water when they changed course to offer aide to the Mary Celeste, a Genoa, Italy bound ship, now in distress.
What the Dei Gratia boarding party found on board the ship Mary Celeste unnerved them. The cargo load was intact, as was a six-month supply of food and water. What was missing was the crew. Ten souls, lost without a trace.
The fate of the Celeste crew has confounded historians for years. A new thriller, “The Haunting of the Mary Celeste,” now on demand and on digital, offers up a supernatural solution for the crew’s disappearance.
Researcher Rachel (Emily Swallow) has an idea that borders the scientific and the supernatural. It is her hypothesis that there are places on this planet where every now and again there is a rift when the tectonic plates shift. There is a physical change during the event and, like the blowback on a gun that sucks matter into the barrel, the crew members of the Mary Celeste were drawn into the rift, never to be seen again.
Rachel has determined the date of the next rift and is determined to prove her theory. With a small crew on a rented ship owned and operated by Tulls (Richard “Shaft” Roundtree) she sets off, only to have her theory proved in increasingly scary and weird ways.
“The Haunting of the Mary Celeste” is the kind of straightforward thriller where people optimistically say things like, “Hey Rachel, something’s going to happen tonight. I can feel it,” before everything falls to pieces. With characters straight out of Central Casting, the gruff old sea captain, the hot headed assistant etc, it offers up a soggy sea-bound adventure with very few actual thrills.
“The Secrets We Keep,” a new revenge thriller starring Noomi Rapace and coming to digital and on-demand, is a riff on the claustrophobic revenge story of “Death and the Maiden.”
Set in 1960, Rapace plays Maja, a Romanian refugee and Holocaust survivor, now living in a small American town with her physician doctor Lewis (Chris Messina) and son Patrick (Jackson Vincent). One day at the park she hears a man whistle for his dog and a flood of memories come back. Following him home she gets a good look and her worst fears are confirmed. He is the SS officer who, near the end of the war, raped her and killed her sister as they fled a concentration camp.
Blinded by anger and horrific memories she kidnaps him, hitting him in the head with a hammer and shoving him in the trunk of her car. When Lewis gets home to find the man, who denies Maja’s charges and claims to be a Swiss citizen named Thomas (Joel Kinnaman, who, in real life went to high school with Rapace), tied up in the basement he is rightfully perplexed. Maja had never shared to the details of her ordeal with her husband but he trusts her and goes along with plan to get a confession, one way or another. “I’m not the man you think I am,” Thomas (or whatever his name is) says, begging to be let go. She is tortured by the memory of what happened and why her sister was shot and she wasn’t. “Help me remember,” she says to him. “It is your only way out of here.”
“The Secrets We Keep” raises questions of trust, survivor’s guilt and the corrosive nature of secrets. It’s a gritty, unsentimental movie that ratches up the tension with ideas, not action. How reliable is Maja’s memory? What amount of scepticism should Lewis bring to this situation? Is vengeance morally correct? Those questions and more hang heavy over the plot, confronting the viewer to assess their own feelings and biases. The story isn’t particularly tricky but it is carefully calibrated to make you wonder who is telling the truth, who is lying and even, who can trust their memories of long-ago events.
Rapace does her best work ever in an English film, bringing some nuance to a character who could have been played with a much harder, vengeful edge. Messina brings the sense of his character’s confusion to life—You said we were going to do things together,” he says supportively, “and you torture him while I’m not here?”—while Kinnaman remains a cypher, a person who may or may not be the man Maja thinks he is. Each performance fits in place, creating a mosaic of truths and lies that is as compelling as it is confounding.
“Totally Under Control,” the title of the new Alex Gibney now on VOD, is a bad joke. Kind of like nicknaming a tall guy Tiny it’s an ironic, sarcastic comment on President Donald Trump’s repeated denial of the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic. Made in secret over the five months leading up to the U.S. Presidential Election, it features damning interviews with scientists, medical professionals and government insiders.
The opening narration sets the stage, not that anyone alive needs reminding that we are living in very strange times. “2020. Since the 1980s, it’s been a magical year for science fiction writers, the year of predictions about the future, and the ruthless power of technology and humanity would be bound together by a world wide web. Artificial Intelligence would exponentially expand the powers of the human mind. And the world would be dominated and controlled by information based mega corporations without need for government intervention. But all that turned out to be a technocratic illusion when nature set loose a terrible disease that took advantage of the very connectivity we had manufactured.”
The narration goes on to say, “At a moment of crisis the world’s most powerful nation didn’t rise to the occasion it descended into division and chaos,” before asking the million dollar question, “Why did it fail to reckon for a danger for which it should have been so well prepared?”
To answer the question Oscar winner Gibney with co-directors Ophelia Harutyunyan and Suzanne Hillinger invented the “Corona Cam,” an easy and sanitary way to do interviews—this does not look like a Zoom meeting—to interview a variety of experts like whistleblower Dr. Rick Bright who says, “We, the scientists, knew what to do for the pandemic response. The plan was in front of us, but leadership would not do it.”
Add to that recent newsreel footage, investigative reporting and ominous narration and you have a portrait of catastrophic systemic bungling, beginning in January 20, 2020 when the U.S. and South Korea both discovered their first cases of COVID-19, that has left hundreds of thousands dead, many hundreds of thousands more ill with side effects that will linger for years and an economy in tatters.
It’s a haunting collection of facts that would be unbelievable if it wasn’t true. Gibney, Harutyunyan and Hillinger’s aim to expose “a system-wide collapse caused by a profound dereliction of Presidential leadership,” is methodical and urgent, digging behind the headlines to reveal a timeline that should be of concern to everyone reading this or watching the film. It is a difficult watch, not because it isn’t slickly made but because it an infuriating reminder of how we got into this situation.
The movie’s tagline says it all, “The truth will make you sick.”
Swedish filmmaker Nathan Grossman has been documenting teen activist Greta Thunberg since before she became a worldwide cause célèbre. From her early protests encouraging a “School Strike for the Climate” to her famous journey across the Atlantic Ocean en route to the UN Climate Action Summit in New York City, Grossman was there assembling the footage that became “I Am Greta,” a new documentary now playing in theatres.
Charting the course of the polarizing eco warrior’s life and career in two flashpoint years, 2018 and 2019, Grossman paints a glossy but ultimately superficial portrait. His unprecedented access to his subject allows for a lively look at Thunberg’s concerns about climate change, punctuated by her fiery addresses to world leaders.
The incendiary headline making speeches are all represented here—”You lied to us,” she admonishes London’s Parliament. “You gave us false hope.”—and her, “We haven’t taken to the streets for you to take selfies with us and tell us you admire what we do,” dismissal of bandwagon jumping celebs is as zingy a barb as we’re likely to hear from a public figure but as exciting as those public moments are Grossman never gets really up close and personal with his subject.
In part it’s understandable. Thunberg is a public figure who has been open about her activism and Asperger syndrome, which she describes as a superpower that allows her to cut through the information overload of her cause and focus on her mission, but she’s also a young woman thrust into the glare of a judgmental press and public. She isn’t obligated to reveal her personal life but the title “I Am Greta” promises insight that never appears.
Still, as a verité depiction of a time when the world was focused on Thunberg’s methods and important message, “I Am Greta” is sure to interest her supporters.
On today’s episode we talk with the one and only Richard Crouse…
Richard Crouse is the host of the CTV talk show Pop Life, the regular film critic for the 24 hour news source CTV’s News Channel and CP24. His syndicated Saturday afternoon radio show, The Richard Crouse Show, originates on News Talk 1010 in Toronto. He is also the author of nine books on pop culture history.
He was the host of Reel to Real, Canada’s longest running television show about movies, from 1998 to 2008 and is a frequent guest on many national Canadian radio and television shows.
Today we talked about the return of his show ‘Pop Life’ to the TV airwaves, how the entertainment business is pivoting in midst of the current health pandemic, what got him into this business of show, and what’s he’s a fan of…that you might not expect…
Listen to the podcast on Spotify HERE! On Apple HERE! On YouTube HERE!
“Percy,” a new based-on-real-life drama from director Clark Johnson now playing in select theatres, is a David and Goliath story with a universal message of standing up for what you believe in. Christopher Walken plays septuagenarian Percy Schmeiser, a small-town farmer from Bruno, Saskatchewan, who refuses to be bullied by a giant agrochemical corporation.
Schmeiser and his family have been canola farmers for generations. His cash crop is planted the old-fashioned way, with “the most virile seeds” saved from previous harvests. That’s why it is a shock to be accused by agrochemical Goliath Monsanto Canada of illegally growing their patented canola seed without a license.
“There’s got to be a mistake,” Schmeiser says. “I got my own seeds.”
Determined to prove his innocence, Schmeiser hires a lawyer he can’t afford, Jackson Weaver (Zach Braff), and vows to fight back. When Monsanto legally outguns Weaver, threatening to bury the lawyer under piles of motions, along comes agricultural activist Rebecca Salcau (Christina Ricci) with a way forward. “what you are doing is heroic,” she tells him. “You should be recognized.”
“Percy” is the story of not bowing down to corporate greed. A restrained Walken leaves behind his trademarked vocal tics to bring the principled Percy to life, and Johnson keeps the focus on him. There are courtroom scenes and some legalese but this isn’t “A Few Good Men on a Farm.” It’s about a man struggling to maintain his family farm in the face of an agricultural revolution, a very real and hot button topic across North America and the world. As Percy reluctantly becomes a spokesman for the cause screenwriters Garfield Lindsay Miller and Hilary Pryor find authentic and humanistic ways to illustrate the plight of farmers like the title character. “Farmers know the land. They know their plants,” Percy says. “Monsanto knows winning and losing and profits.”
It is a classic underdog story, one designed to make your blood boil at the disregard corporations have for the little guy.
“Percy” isn’t a flashy movie, although the landscape shots of Saskatchewan’s open skies and fields are often breathtaking. Instead it’s a low-key story of the fight to maintain the integrity of the food we put in our mouths.
Depending on which way you look at “The War with Grandpa,” a new family comedy starring Robert De Niro and now playing in theatres, it’s either about a child trying to assert some kind of control in his life or a gruesome exposé of elder abuse.
Based on the children’s book of the same name by Robert Kimmel Smith, “The War with Grandpa” is far more family-friendly than “Dirty Grandpa,” De Niro’s other ancestral comedy. The Oscar winning actor plays Ed, an old codger who gets arrested after causing a scene at the self check out at his local grocery store.
Widowed and out of step with the times—he can’t figure out how to swipe on an iPhone—his daughter Sally (Uma Thurman) decides it’s time he moved in with her family, husband Arthur (Rob Riggle) their two daughters and son Peter (Oakes Fegley). Trouble is, there’s no room. Grandpa can’t handle the stairs to the basement apartment. Ditto the attic loft so Peter is forced to give up his room and he’s not happy about it. The youngster declares war, pulling a series of escalating pranks on his grandfather designed to force him out of the room. Trouble is, grandpa fights back. “We’re in the middle of a turf war over a bedroom,” Ed says.
“The War with Grandpa” is part “Home Alone,” part “Jackass” but with an old guy. The warfare consists of slapstick gags mixed with the story’s easy sentimentality—Peter says, “I love you grandpa… but the war is still on.”—and adult diaper jokes. In other words, it is exactly what you imagine it will be.
De Niro does a riff on his tough guy persona, tempered with age and humour, that the film hopes will inevitably become endearing. That there are no surprises will be comforting to some happy to see old school stars like De Niro, Thurman, Cheech Marin, Christopher Walken (whose collective careers don’t exactly scream family entertainment unless you are the Addams Family) and Jane Seymour have some juvenile, if forgettable, good fun on screen. Just don’t expect anything you haven’t seen before, except, perhaps the tacked on anti-war message near the end.
“The War with Grandpa” is a harmless family film but the movie lover in me couldn’t help but cringe just a bit watching “The Deer Hunter” co-stars De Niro and Walken return to battle against a bunch of tweens.
Twenty minutes into “The Forty-Year Old Version,” now streaming on Netflix, a despondent Radha Blank (Blank, playing a fictionalized version of herself), having attacked a potential backer for her new play cries out in anguish, “I just want to be an artist! Mommy, please tell me what to do!” Making art, especially from an underrepresented perspective, is the theme of this very entertaining movie.
In the film’s world Blank is a single, playwright whose theatre career has stalled. She was once celebrated on a “30 under 30 list to watch” but is now almost 40-year-old and feeling invisible. “We watched,” says a TV reporter, “but where did she go?” Blank survives by teaching high school drama and hanging out with her best friend, talent agent and one-man support system Archie (Peter Kim).
She harbours high hopes for her most recent work, a stage play called “Harlem Ave.” Trouble is, she’s having trouble getting it produced. There’s either an African-American theatre company that doesn’t have the money to mount it properly or Josh Whitman (Reed Birney), a white, liberal producer who wants to meddle with the script, turning it into poverty porn. “I’m a playwright,” she says, “but I don’t really feel like one these days.”
Feeling cut loose from the theatre world she veers out of her lane to give rapping a try. Working with Bronx music producer, D (Oswin Benjamin) she finds a voice—and a new name, RadhaMUSprim—to express life frustrations about sciatica, and the AARP in rhyme but chokes in her first on-stage show. Dejected, she opts for commerce over art and agrees to compromise, adding in a white co-star at Whitman’s suggestions to get “Harlem Ave” produced.
“The play,” she says to Archie. “It’s not mine anymore.”
“The next one will be,” he replies.
Blank, whose resume includes off-Broadway stage plays and writing and producing the TV adaptation of “Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It,” is as engaging a screen presence as she is a writer/director. With humour and a sharp sense of social commentary she’s crafted a film that observes artistic insecurity, middle age and the difficulty of balancing one’s true voice against commercial concerns.
At the centre of it all is Blank, whose self-deprecating character finds strength and wisdom, but not in the traditional underdog narrative. The movie is leisurely, taking its time to get where it is going, allowing the viewer get to know Radha and root for her as she finds her path.
“The Forty-Year Old Version” is an account of an artist’s struggle but it isn’t strictly an artist’s story. It’s universal tale of being true to one’s self no matter the cost.
Country music, at its best, is a format for delivering songs that comment on the human condition. Storytelling and a heart laid bare are key components to any great country tune. And a bit of twang doesn’t hurt either. All those things, and more, are available in “Yellow Rose,” a new drama now playing in theatres.
Set pm the outskirts of Austin, Texas, “Yellow Rose” is the story of Rose Garcia (Eva Noblezada, a Filipina17-year-old who lives at the rundown motel where her mother Priscilla (Princess Punzalan) is an undocumented worker. Rose is obsessed with country music and when she isn’t being wooed by Elliot (Liam Booth), a sweet young guy who works at the music shop, she’s writing songs, even though she’s too shy to share them with anyone.
Her life is flipped upside down when she sneaks away to The Broken Spoke, an Austin honky-tonk, to see real-life Texas legend Dale Watson (playing himself) only to return to find her mother has been scooped by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and is now in custody.
Hoping to avoid arrest, Rose hides out with her aunt Gail (Lea Salonga) in a wealthy suburb across town as she mulls over the possibility of returning to Manilla with her mother or staying in Texas. Her aunt is welcoming, if cautious, but her uncle, a man she barely knows, wants her gone. Once again, Rose hits the road, this time finding refuge at the back room of The Broken Spoke and a mentor in the form of Watson.
“Yellow Rose,” the debut feature from director Diane Paragas, tackles big questions without offering up answers. Instead, as Roger Ebert once said of cinema in general, it acts as an empathy machine, allowing you to get to know, and feel for, a person whose future is unsure. It’s an urgent plea for inclusivity, for allowing people to find a place in the world and live without fear. Paragas does a good job of making sure the story never gets cloying. She is aided by Noblezeda whose performance is sweet but steely and Salonga, who returns to the screen for the first time in a quarter century, to play Rose’s estranged aunt.
My favorite performance comes from Watson, who in real life is a singer-songwriter and restaurateur in Texas. As Rose’s mentor, a man who drinks beer in the morning and sings his heart out on stage at night, he drips authenticity. He teaches Rose to trust herself in music and in life, and you get the sense he learned those same lessons the hard way.
As I said, “Yellow Rose” doesn’t offer up any answers to the big questions it raises, but it is infused with hope, and, like a good country song, tells a an affecting story with just three chords and the truth.
