Anna Sewell’s timeless classic “Black Beauty,” now streaming on Disney+, is given an update in a gentle, family-friendly take on a girl and a horse who “share the same Mustang spirit.”
The titular character is a wild horse, born to roam free until she is rounded up, taken from her family and sent to Birtwick Stables where she is to be trained and sold off to the highest bidder. Meanwhile, Jo Green (Mackenzie Foy of “Twilight” and “The Conjuring”) has lost her immediate family and is sent to live with her horse trainer Uncle John (Iain Glen). Feeling lost, she’s unhappy and unfamiliar with life at the stables. Soon though, a bond forms between her and the Mustang named Black Beauty. Somehow, they see themselves reflected in one another. “You’ve gotten closer to that filly in days than I have in weeks,” says Uncle John. “They say a horse picks you.”
Later, when it’s time for Black Beauty to move along top a new owner, Jo protests. “If I fought for every horse I ever loved,” Uncle John says, “I’d have a hundred of them.”
“I don’t want a hundred horses,” Foy responds. “I just want one.”
And so it goes, the connection between a girl and her horse remains unbroken, despite the ups and downs in both their lives.
This version of “Black Beauty” features a first, two female leads, Foy and Kate Winslet. The Oscar winning Winslet supplies the voice of Black Beauty in narration, in calm, measured tones that suggest she’s reading the inside of a schmaltzy Hallmark greeting card. “A true mustang never gives up on hope and love,” she whinnies.
It has also dialed back much of the rough stuff—there’s no enforced labor pulling London cabs for instance—that younger viewers may have found distressing in the original story but there are still some emotional scenes that will pull at the heartstrings of young and old.
“Black Beauty” errs on the side of sentimentality, favoring uplift over real edge, but while the smoothed down version has changed some of the details of Sewell’s story but the underlying messages of loyalty and kindness to animals remain the same.
“Fatman,” a new film starring Mel Gibson as Chris Cringle and Walton Goggins as a hitman hired to kill him now playing on VOD, is another entry into the great Winter pastime of arguing whether or not certain films can be classified as Christmas movies.
Does a December 24th setting, holiday music, a Grinchy villain in the form of Hans Gruber and hero who says, “Now I have a machine gun, ho, ho, ho,” after killing a man make “Die Hard” a Christmas movie? It depends on your definition and I’m guessing that same metric will apply to “Fatman.”
Gibson is Cringle a.k.a. Santa Claus, a disillusioned holiday icon upset with the commercialization of Christmas. “Maybe it’s time I retired the coat,” he says to Mrs. Claus (Marianne Jean-Baptiste). “I’ve lost my influence. I’m a silly fat man in a red suit. Christmas is a farce and I am a joke. There hasn’t been any Christmas spirit for years.” After a string of bad Christmases, he’s broke and forced to take on a military contract making control panel for bomber jets to keep the elves employed and pay his electric bill. “I should have charged a royalty for my image,” he grumbles.
Meanwhile a wealthy preteen Patrick Bateman type, upset that he received a lump of coal in his stocking, hires an unhinged hitman known as the Skinny Man (Walton Goggins) to assassinate (Not So) Jolly Old St. Nick. “Do you think you’re the first?” Santa asks him. “Do you think I got this job because I’m fat and jolly?”
‘Tis the season for carnage and bloodshed.
There is a message in “Fatman,” but it isn’t about goodwill to all men. It’s an essay on humanity’s failings, a lack of morals or fear of consequences. How the stuff that makes Christmas special—family, generosity, happiness and joy—have somehow been erased in today’s world. We know this because Gibson mumbles and grumbles about it nonstop before the shootout at Santa’s Workshop eats up most of the film’s last half hour.
So, is “Fatman” a Christmas movie? Not really. In fact, it can’t seem to make up its mind what it wants to be. It’s by turns bleak, cartoonishly violent and brutal, all blanketed in a shroud of dark humour. It’s all over the place, a concept in search of a tone. It’s not completely ho-ho-ho-horrible, but if this Santa Claus comes to your town, you better watch out.
There is music in “Stardust,” the new David Bowie biopic starring Johnny Flynn, in theaters and digital and on-demand platforms. Unfortunately, none of it is David Bowie’s music.
The year is 1971, a year before David Bowie (Flynn) achieved superstardom with “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.” He’s a one hit wonder with little support from his record label and a new record languishing on the charts. “I need you to give me a song I can sell,” says manager Tony Defries (Julian Richings). “If you can’t do that, I need you to give me a person I can sell.”
Sent on a low-budget promo tour of the United State, the singer arrives with a suitcase filled with stage wear—“That’s a man’s dress actually,” he tells a nosy customs official—but no work visa. “With the paperwork you have all you can do is talk,” he’s told by his American contact, Mercury Records publicist Ron Oberman (Marc Maron) as they hop into Oberman’s wood panel station wagon and head off to try and create a buzz for an obscure artist who thinks of himself as filling “the gap between Elvis and Dylan.”
Oberman skirts the rules and finds the odd (emphasis on odd) gig for his client. In one of the film’s desperate attempts to avoid playing Bowie’s music, Oberman arranges a show at a vacuum cleaner sales conference. In front of a disinterested crowd the singer strums “Good Ol’ Jane,” a Velvet Underground sound-a-like song written for the film.
The odd couple stay the course, crisscrossing the country. Between shows, arguments and the occasional press interview Bowie formulates his breakthrough image, the androgynous glam rock star Ziggy Stardust.
“Stardust” isn’t a terrible movie but it also isn’t, as advertised, a David Bowie biopic. The first words we see on screen are “What follows is mostly fiction,” and while I realize that biographies must take liberties, I thought the movie lacked the thing that was at the core of Bowie’s life and work, and that’s originality. “Stardust” is a startlingly conventional movie about a man who was anything but. The film is a generic artist coming-of-age story with dialogue that feels borrowed from other show biz flicks—”I think you’re going to be the biggest star in America,” Oberman gushes at one point.—and music that in no way hints at the revolutionary sounds percolating in Bowie’s head. You wonder why director Gabriel Range, who co-wrote the script with Christopher Bell didn’t fictionalize the story à la “Velvet Goldmine,” and create a whole new world to explore.
With no access to Bowie’s music—the musician’s estate denied Range the rights to the tunes—“Stardust” attempts to recreate the era with covers the real Bowie performed around this time, like “I Wish You Would” by the Yardbirds and Jacques Brel’s “My Death.” This approach has worked before in films like “Backbeat,” the story of the early days of The Beatles and the Jimi Hendrix biopic “Jimi: All Is by My Side,” but here the absence of Bowie songs is deafening.
John Belushi was only famous for five years before his untimely death at age 33 but in that short time his unique comedic quality left an indelible impression that resonates almost forty years later. A new documentary, now streaming on Crave, looks at his meteoric rise and tragic fall.
Director R.J. Cutler uses the usual devices to tell the story. He mixes and matches archival material, animation, ephemera from Belushi’s life—handwritten letters, home movies etc—and news footage but his ace in the hole, the thing that gives “Belushi” its emotional wallop, are the audio interviews that tell the story.
In 2012 author Tanner Colby released a book called “Belushi: A Biography,” an oral history of the life and times of the “SNL” star. Colby did dozens of interviews with the people who knew Belushi best, Lorne Michaels, Dan Ackroyd, Harold Ramis, and friends and family, including John’s wife Judith. Those interviews form the backbone of the film, bringing with them a conversational, intimate and wistful feel.
The story beats are familiar. An uber talented rebel with a sensitive side finds enormous fame—at one point he had the number one comedy show on TV, movie in theatres and album on the charts—but is undone by personal demons. That’s the story in broad strokes. Filling in the small details is the expertly edited oral history who provide first hand details and impressions on Belushi’s life.
Most devastating of all are the handwritten letters from John to Judith that Cutler brings to life. From the playful tone of the early letters sent while they were courting to the final notes, written in desperation as drugs and depression debilitated the actor, these notes, written in a messy scrawl and often containing funny self-help lists, provide more insight into the Belushi’s mind frame that no talking head interview could ever hope.
“Belushi” has gaps. The warts and all depiction of Belushi’s drug habits is front and center but the misogyny of the early “SNL” days, for instance, is brushed over in a quick passage.
Having said that, the doc packs an emotional punch in its final moments as Belushi’s nearest and dearest express regret for allowing their friend to lapse back into heavy drug use. It is heartbreaking stuff on a personal level for them. For the rest of us, as Belushi fans, the cutting short of his potential feels like a cautionary tale of excess and a tragedy of a talent taken way too soon.
In the early moments of “Zappa,” a new documentary now in select theatres and on VOD, iconoclast and rock icon Frank Zappa tells an audience, “It won’t be perfect, it’ll be music.”
It’s a sentiment that could also be applied to the Alex Winter (yes, it’s Bill of Bill & Ted fame) directed doc. It isn’t perfect, there are glaring biographical omissions, but the eye-catching collection of home movies, concert footage, animation, news reels and interviews is an intriguing look at a perfectionist whose gaze was always pointed at the future.
Although this is a mostly chronological look at Zappa’s life, we first see the musician in a preface. The year is 1991 and Zappa is playing at Sports Hall in Prague, Czechoslovakia in a celebration of the withdrawal of Russian troops from the country. During what would be his last recorded guitar performance, he tells the cheering crowd, “Please try and keep your country unique. Don’t change into something else. Keep it unique.”
The movie then spends the next two hours showing why and how Zappa kept his career unique in an industry that would have preferred him to conform.
From his early years in Baltimore, where he made Super 8 films and soaked up the music of contemporary classical composers such as Edgard Varèse to early experiments working as a composer and an arrest for making a stag tape, the film paints a portrait of a man in search of artistic freedom. Later, his exacting musicianship blazes new trails with his aptly named band The Mothers of Invention. “A lot of what we do is designed to annoy people,” he says.
Mixing rhythm and blues, rock ‘n roll and doo-wop with avant-garde sound collages and orchestral arrangements their debut album “Freak Out!” is said to be one of the inspirations for “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”
The experimentation that defined his career is illustrated by rare film clips from the Zappa archives and interviews with collaborators, including assorted Mothers and Bruce Bickford, the stop motion animator who created the trippy visuals for the film “Baby Snakes.” Guitarist Steve Vai describes Zappa as “a slave to his inner ear,” always trying to recreate the complicated sounds he heard in his head.
Those increasingly complex resonances manifested themselves in orchestra pieces like “London Symphony Orchestra, Vol. I,” a self-financed project Zappa says he sunk money into simply to hear his music played properly.
Aside from never-before-seen musical performances “Zappa” details Frank’s war of words against the Parents Music Resource Council (PMRC), his stint as a trade ambassador for Czechoslovakia and his side gig as one of the first name musicians to create their own indie label Barking Pumpkin Records.
As the film winds down, recounting Zappa’s battle with prostate cancer, we see an artist running out of time to create everything he had inside. Dead at age 52, he left behind a massive catalogue of work, a testament to his restless artistic spirit.
“Zappa” does a thorough and entertaining job of examining Frank as a creative force. What remains a cypher is the man himself. Aloof, exacting and a walking contradiction—a straight edge who casually talks about cheating on his wife with groupies—like his music, he defies pigeonholes. The film doesn’t attempt to categorize him, but neither does it dig too deeply into the man behind the famous moustache. By the time the end credits roll it’s clear that “Zappa” is more a tribute to his talent than character study.
On the November 22 episode of the Richard Crouse Show Podcast we answer the age old question, “What are you watching on television?” Christian Blauvelt, culture journalist and co-author of “What to Watch Next,” now in bookstores, helps you navigate pandemic viewing.
Then, award winning historian and author of “The Company,” Stephen R. Bown, drops by to discuss one of the worst villains in Canadian history.
Each week on the nationally syndicated 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 hear in-depth interviews with actors and directors, to find out what’s going on behind the scenes of your favourite shows and movies and get a new take on current trends. Recent guests include Ethan Hawke, director Brad Bird, comedian Gilbert Gottfried, Eric Roberts, Brian Henson, Jonathan Goldsmith a.k.a. “The most interesting man in the world,” and best selling author Linwood Barclay.
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Richard speaks to “CTV News at 11:30” anchor Pauline Chan about movies on VOD and in theatres to watch this weekend including “Industry,” a look at the world of high finance on Crave, the World War II drama “The Liberators” on Netflix, the true crime docu-series “Murder on Middle Beach” and Disney+’s “LEGO Star Wars Holiday Special.”
Richard speaks to “CTV News at Six” anchor Pauline Chan about television and movies to watch this weekend including “Industry,” a look at the world of high finance on Crave, the World War II drama “The Liberators” on Netflix and Disney+’s “LEGO Star Wars Holiday Special.”
Richard and CP24 anchor Stephanie Smythe have a look at david Fincher’s Hollywood biopic “Mank,” now in theatres, the Disney+ Christmas movie “The LEGO Star Wars Holiday Special,” “Sound of Metal,” the new film from “Rogue One’s” Riz Ahmed and the family drama “Rustic Oracle,” now on VOD.
Anna Sewell’s timeless classic “Black Beauty,” now streaming on Disney+, is given an update in a gentle, family-friendly take on a girl and a horse who “share the same Mustang spirit.”
