I wrote about the cars from “The Munsters” for the Toronto Star.
“When it comes to the classic TV show “The Munsters,” to paraphrase an old saying, it is the car that makes the monster…” Read the whole thing HERE!
I’ll be hosting a Q&A with “Drinkwater” star Eric McCormack at the Scotiabank Theatre in Toronto at 7:20 pm, on Friday October 28.
Some info on the film: Awkward Canadian teen Mike Drinkwater has trouble fitting in, but his father, Hank, is dealing with his own difficulties. When a girl from the United States comes to town, her courage inspires them to overcome their challenges.
Fifteen years ago, director Martin McDonagh brought actors Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson together as inept hitmen in hiding in the Belgium-set film “In Bruges.”
Sparks flew.
The terrific trio reunite in “The Banshees of Inisherin,” a new movie, now playing in theatres, that locates the setting to a tiny Irish island, but maintains the chemistry that made “In Bruges” an audience and critical favorite.
Set in 1923 on a windswept island off the west coast of Ireland, the story begins as the Irish Civil War rages on the mainland. With the sounds of gunfire and exploding bombs in the distance, village nice-guy Pádraic (Farrell) goes about his daily routine, stopping by his life-long friend Colm’s (Gleeson) house to collect him on the way to the pub. When his knock at the door goes unanswered, Pádraic peers through the window to see his old friend, sitting and smoking, ignoring the rapping at the door.
Later at the pub, the gormless Pádraic learns why he was snubbed by Colm. “I just don’t like you no more.”
Hurt and confused, Pádraic attempts to patch things up, but Colm is steadfast. He wants to spend his remaining time, no matter many years he has left, doing something meaningful; not making small talk over a pint. Pádraic is dull, Colm says, his conversation a waste of time.
Despite the threat of dire consequences, Pádraic cannot accept that the friendship is over, and what began as a cold shoulder escalates into violence born of humiliation and anger.
The darkly hilarious “The Banshees of Inisherin” uses Colm’s brushoff of his former friend as the engine to drive a universal story of loneliness, what happens when civility fades and the importance of support systems.
McDonagh creates a vivid backdrop for the action. Life on the small island is presented as simultaneously idyllic and stultifying. The rolling hills, greenery and winding country roads are straight out of a tourist brochure. But it’s the soft underbelly, the stuff that lies beneath the quaint façade, that is of interest. Gossip is currency, every house has a secret and the local cop (Gary Lydon) misuses his power on the streets and at home. The movie takes its time in the shift from charming to sinister, from the lighthearted tone of the first hour to the darkness of the last forty minutes.
It is a pleasure to see Farrell and Gleeson together again. There’s an undefinable chemistry between them, one that suggests they have a deep bond, which makes the break in their on-screen friendship so effective.
Gleeson, as a man thinking of his legacy, fighting off the despair of realizing, late in life, that he hasn’t actually felt anything authentic in years, is a towering presence. He has woken up from his isolated, mundane existence and takes extremes to change his life, leaving Pádraic in the dust.
As rock solid as Gleeson is, it is Farrell’s shift in tone from heartbroken to desperate to steely that steals the show. As someone who prided himself in being a “nice” person, watching the darkness grow in him is fascinating. It’s subtle, delivered with sly changes of expression, but compelling as he goes through the stages of grief for his lost friendship.
“The Banshees of Inisherin” would be worth the price of admission only for the inventive use of colloquial Irish swearing. Come for the cussing, but stay for the performances and the palpable sense of devastation that comes when a friendship ends, and there is no one to share a pint with at the local pub.
“The Good Nurse,” a new Netflix psychological thriller starring Jessica Chastain and Eddie Redmayne, is both a condemnation of the American health care system and a pulpy warning that looks can be deceiving.
At home Amy (Chastain) is an attentive single mother of two. At work she is a kind and compassionate New Jersey night shift nurse, the kind of health worker who goes above and beyond for her patients. New to the job, she is still on probation, working toward full time status and, most importantly, health insurance. Amy suffers from Cardiomyopathy, a cardiovascular disease characterized by blood blisters on her heart. She should take time off from work, but can’t because she has no insurance. “We need to keep your heart going long enough to get you on the transplant list,” says her doctor.
Enter new night nurse Charlie Cullen (Redmayne). As a co-worker, he is compassionate and knowledgeable. As a friend he steps up to help her through the health crisis and look after her two daughters. He’s almost too good to be tue.
“I can help you,” he says to her as he feeds her pills pilfered from the hospital’s store room. “You’re going to be OK.”
But when people start mysteriously dying at the ICU, was it all just a deadly coincidence or could he be responsible? Is this friendly, helpful nurse an angel of compassion or an angel of death? Police officers Danny Baldwin (Nnamdi Asomugha) and Tim Braun (Noah Emmerich) lean to the latter and want Amy to help prove their case. “He’s been at nine hospitals and no one will talk to us,” says Baldwin of Charlie’s checkered professional past.
The based-on-a-true-story of one of the most prolific serial killers ever, “The Good Nurse” is a thriller without many thrills. It’s no surprise who the killer is.
What is surprising, and effectively portrayed, is the other stuff, the way the hospital attempts to control the investigation, the stonewalling and outright cover-up. As on the recent “Doctor Death” series, it reveals the extraordinary lengths hospitals will go to limit their liability in wrongful death cases. That’s where the shocks are; that’s the stuff that leaves a mark.
The rest of the story is carried by the leads, Chastain and Redmayne, who both hand in minor chord, restrained performances that ooze compassion, until they don’t. The change in Redmayne is chilling as he lets his true colors show.
“The Good Nurse” isn’t edge of your seat stuff, but it does something most true crime dramas don.t. It emphasized the characters and the procedural over the sensational details of the Cullen’s crime spree.
Cate Blanchett gives a bravura performance in “Tár,” a new 158-minute cancel culture melodrama, disguised as art house fare.
Blanchett is Lydia Tár, the superstar maestro of the Berlin Symphony Orchestra. As she prepares for a landmark recording of Mahler’s Fifth, she is exacting and demanding, on-stage and off. In other words, she is a bully, used to folks kowtowing to her genius.
She quietly belittles her assistant Francesca (Noémie Merlant), and unleashes a withering takedown of a Julliard student (Zethphan D. Smith-Gneist) whose crime was suggesting that Johann Sebastian Bach’s ribald personal life makes the composer unworthy of study.
In Berlin, when she isn’t putting the orchestra through their paces, she lives with partner Sharon (Nina Hoss), who happens to play violin in the orchestra, and stepdaughter Petra (Mila Bogojevic). At work she plays favorites with Olga (Sophie Kauer), a virtuoso cellist who rises through the ranks a little too quickly for the comfort of some of the other musicians.
Just as she is on the verge of major career milestones, a new memoir and the completion of her Mahler cycle of recordings, a crudely edited video of her Julliard lecture surfaces, alongside accusations of professional improprieties with a former colleague.
“Tár” places the emphasis on the wrong end of the story.
We can all imagine the high-flying part of Tár’s life. Images of limousines and private jets, of harried personal assistants and the hushed kind of respect that greeted her in the hallways of power, are all evidence of that.
What is far more compelling, but not as familiar, is the fall from grace. What happens when all you have worked for is taken away, gradually, then suddenly? That’s the real story and it’s the tale “Tár” doesn’t tell. Unfortunately, it spends two-plus hours on the other stuff, and gives a short shrift to the comeuppance in a way that is very unsatisfying.
Despite the imbalance in the story, “Tár” contains some breathtaking scenes, like the aforementioned Julliard sequence. Shot in one take, the scene is a show stopper for both Blanchett and cinematographer Florian Hoffmeister. That the beautiful one-shot take is later snipped into shards and reassembled, like pieces of a video puzzle, is a clever in-joke, and very effective.
The best part of “Tár” is an Oscar-bound Blanchett. In her hands Tár is an intimidator, whether it’s in her job, or at the playground as she browbeats her stepdaughter’s bully. She uses her power like a weapon to get what she wants and in Blanchett’s hands she is a character study of monster, a person cut loose from polite society. She says artists must “sublimate and obliterate” themselves for the art, and yet she is too much of a narcissist to take her own advice.
“Tár” has rewards for viewers patient enough to navigate the film’s poorly paced first hour. The revelation that power can breed monstrous behaviour isn’t new, but it is brilliantly brought to life by Blanchett.
“Down with intelligence! Long live death!” — a fascist general in Viva La Muerte
Filmmaker Fernando Arrabal’s troubled childhood haunts his first and most famous surrealist film, Viva La Muerte. The framework of the story of Fando (Mahdi Chaouch) whose father has been arrested for treason in Franco era Spain was based, in part, on true events.
Born on the cusp of the Spanish Civil War, Arrabal was just a child when his father, an officer in the Spanish Army, was sentenced to death for trying to assassinate the head of the Popular Front government. His punishment was later commuted to life-in-prison. When Fernando was nine, however, the elder Arrabal broke out of jail and was never heard from again.
The loss of his father informs much of Arrabal’s work, but none so much as Viva La Muerte, a movie called one of three “perfect surrealist films” along with Un Chien Andalou and El Topo by digitalbits.com.
The movie begins with some very strange yet striking opening credits. Superimposed over a childlike theme song sung by French schoolchildren Arrabal has layered Hieronymus Boschian etchings (by Fantastic Planet’s Roland Topor) of torture and sexual deviancy. It’s a grabber of an opening but the strange ride has just begun.
Episodic in nature, it’s a nightmarish coming of age story for Fando, who, despite his father’s execution for “political crimes” and his mother’s strange assertion that the father wasn’t executed, but actually committed suicide, clings to the belief that his father is alive and well. Fando soon realizes that his life is part of a web of lies when he learns that his mother was the one who turned his father into the authorities. In reaction to the mounting pressure from everyone in his life to renounce his Communist father, Fando conjures up a series of increasingly twisted Oedipal fantasies.
What follows is not for the weak of heart. These multi-colored scenes, seen decades after the film’s release, still have the power to cause shock and awe. Arrabal not only pushes the envelope, he tears it in half, showing disturbing and scatological scenes of Fando’s father being beheaded by his mother; his mother making love to his captors and later, the mother wearing a freshly slaughtered ox like a coat. I would say most certainly that Arrabal can’t guarantee that no animals were harmed during the production of this picture, and while he would never be able to get away with the butchery of the ox (or the beetle that is sliced in half or the decapitated lizard, for that matter) on film today, it is a vivid image.
Viva La Muerte’s jumble of surrealism and autobiography is a potent mix, made more effective by Arrabal’s unwavering use of disquieting imagery. Good taste is certainly not on the menu, but the dream sequences are unforgettable. In one scene Fando urinates over the side of a building while imagining that the entire town below is drowning in a sea of his urine. In another he imagines Arabesque men playing Polo with his father’s disembodied head. These are strange and unsettling images that take us further into the psyche of young Fando. He has been lied to, mistreated by those closest to him and in the end his only refuge is in the dark recesses of tortured mind.
Viva La Muerte is the very definition of “not for everyone.” It is risky and upsetting viewing, but in the avant-garde descriptions is a beautifully crafted — although completely gonzo — portrait of a young person in mental anguish.
A movie about a group of college kids who go to a remote cabin—a jock, a scholarship jock, a stoner and some hot girls, one a brainiac, one a party girl—complete with a dangerous hillbilly type, mysterious incantations and lines like “No matter what, we have to stay together,” sounds very familiar. Like a thousand teen chillers we’ve seen before, but add in a secret government agency, ancient evil life forms and other surprises (you’ll get no spoilers here) and you have the best mash-up of horror and humor since “Scream.”
All I will tell you about the plot is this: five college friends go to a cabin in the woods. Then all hell breaks loose. All the conventions of the teen horror genre are here, but turned upside down.
The pleasure of “Cabin in the Woods” is in the not knowing, so excuse the brief synopsis. Go in fresh and be surprised.
I can tell you there has never been a slasher flick quite like “Cabin.” The subversive mix of horror movie lore—“The virgin’s death is optional.”—post modern self awareness and gruesome gags isn’t new but rarely has it been this smartly presented.
Like romantic comedy, horror is a genre that frequently takes the easy way out. By the time we got to “Saw 3478: A Stab in the Dark” the movies were more about how many gallons of stereoscopic blood could be squirted toward the audience than creating a new, intriguing story.
Conversely “Cabin in the Woods” screenwriters Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard (who also directed) have crafted a film that is exhilarating in the way it adopts and then challenges the conventions of the form. They even have fun with J-horror with hilarious results.
Expect Whedon’s trademark crackling dialogue. Expect gallons of blood. Expect to be challenged. Expect the unexpected.
I write about Evel Knievel, a daredevil who blurred the line between stunt performer and entertainer for the Toronto Star!
“A larger-than-life character, his ramp-to-ramp motorcycle jumps made him a superstar. Known for his fearlessness and flamboyance he was like P.T. Barnum on a motorcycle…” Read the whole thing HERE!
Black Adam, the titular character of the new Dwayne Johnson movie, walks like a superhero, but doesn’t talk like one. He has super speed, incredible physical strength, extraordinary stamina, unflinching courage and a skin-tight suit like goody-two-shoes Superman, but he’s also got an attitude. “My powers are not a gift,” the DC Comics character says, “but a curse. Born out of rage.”
The character’s origin story dates back thousands of years to ancient Kahndaq, a tyrannical kingdom where a power-hungry, despotic king has enslaved his people to mine a rare substance called Eternium that will help him attain God-like powers.
(POSSIBLE SPOILERS AHEAD)
When one young worker fights back, his bravery is rewarded by the Council of Wizards, and before you can say the word “Shazam,” the child is imbued with mystical powers. When the youngster’s family is targeted for death, he makes the ultimate sacrifice and transfers his powers to his father Teth-Adam (Johnson). Stripped of his mystical energy, the boy is now human again, and is soon killed.
Filled with rage, Teth-Adam uses his powers to unleash demons, a crime that sees him imprisoned for 5000 years of dreamless sleep. “The world needed a hero,” he says. “Instead, it got me.”
(END OF SPOILER ZONE)
Awoken in modern day by university professor and resistance fighter Adrianna Tomaz (Sarah Shahi), he emerges as a vengeful entity with a twisted sense of integrity. “I was a slave until I died,” he says. “Then I was reborn a god. My son sacrificed his life to save me. Now, I kneel before no one.”
His old home of Kahndaq is now under military occupation by an organization called Intergang who set their sights on finding the ancient Eternium Crown of Sabbac at any cost. But with Teth-Adam back on the scene, that cost come with a huge, bloody price tag.
A larger-than-life justice machine, his violent curbing of Intergang soldiers brings him on a collision course with the Justice Society of America, Cyclone (Quintessa Swindell), Doctor Fate (Pierce Brosnan), Atom Smasher (Noah Centineo) and the winged Hawkman (Aldis Hodge), a group of superheroes who enforce global stability.
“Heroes don’t kill people,” says Hawkman. “Well,” says Teth-Adam, now renamed Black Adam, “I do.”
It’s about time Dwayne Johnson played a superhero, or mystical anti-hero, or whatever the heck Black Adam is supposed to be, right? A real-life, larger-than-life character, he physically fits the bill—no padding required in his tight spandex suit—and his heroic bona fides are well defined. He’s a natural, but here he’s saddled with a reluctant hero’s journey. His morose character works against the very traits that have made The Rock beloved. He’s all pumped up, that is for sure, but the charisma that usually flows so effortlessly out of him has narrowed to a trickle. Even though he is omni-powerful, Black Adam, the character, is about as interesting as a glass of tepid water. It’ll quench your thirst, but isn’t all that fun.
It doesn’t help that Johnson is surrounded by Dollar Store versions of more established superheroes. The Justice Society of America are generic brand world-savers, but do add a bit of zip to the proceedings, even if they put you in the mind of Dr. Strange, Storm, Ant-Man and Falcon while doing so.
“Black Adam” is one big kaboom. The plentiful action scenes are CGI orgies, large-scale land and air battles meant to distract from the clunky, exposition heavy story. As an origin story there are lots of moving parts as we get to know Teth-Adam and Justice Society members. Layer in historical perspective and a theme of freedom over tyranny and you have a movie that feels, simultaneously, over-stuffed and yet, because nothing is explored in any depth, undercooked.
I’m sure “Black Adam” will be the beginning of a new franchise for Johnson, and it should fill the hole felt by DC fans aching for more Zach Snyder-esque slo-mo (even though the film was directed by Jaume Collet-Serra) but I found the cluttered, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” story more forgettable than fun.
