According to horror maestro Stephen King, there are three levels of horror movies: The Gross-Out, Horror, and Terror. For busy people at Halloween, in thirty-ish seconds, Richard Crouse suggests three movies in each category.
Watch the whole thing HERE!
I join NewsTalk 1010’s “Moore in the Morning” host John Moore to have a look at the life and legacy of the late Matthew Perry.
Listen to the whole thing HERE!
On the Saturday October 28, 2023 edition of The Richard Crouse Show we meet David and Jerry Zucker, and Jim Abrahams, the writers and co-directors of Airplane, the the story of a washed-up pilot summoned to greatness on a potentially doomed aircraft. It spoofed the genre of airline disaster movies, made a fortune at the box office in 1980 and inspired a generation or two of filmmakers like Peter Farrelly, one of the filmmakers behind s Dumb and Dumber; There’s Something About Mary and the comedy-drama Green Book, who said, “Seeing Airplane for the first time was like going to a great rock concert, like seeing Led Zeppelin or the Talking Heads.”
The movie’s secret weapon was the casting of serious actors, like Leslie Nielsen, Robert Stack, Lloyd Bridges and Peter Graves, who played the comedy straight. The result was a great spoof and a comedy unlike anything else.
Now you can learn the story behind the making of the film in “Surely You Can’t Be Serious: The True Story of Airplane!,” the new book by David and Jerry Zucker, and Jim Abrahams, which is available now wherever you buy fine books.
We’ll get to know New York City-based stand-up comedian Tina Friml. She has performed at the Just for Laughs Festival in Montreal, is a regular at the Comedy Cellar in New York City and has a large following on line for her unique take on her own physical disability, and fearless honesty about the social assumptions that come with living with cerebral palsy.
Finally, author Ainslie Hogarth stops by. She is the author of four novels, including “Motherthing,” a darkly comedic novel about a woman who must take drastic measures to save her husband and herself from the vengeful ghost of her mother-in-law that was chosen as one of New York Times picks for best book of the year in 2022. Today we’re here to talk about her new novel, “Normal Women,” a darkly comic story about how we value female labor—and how we don’t. In the story a new mother becomes embroiled in a dangerous mystery when her friend, a controversial entrepreneur, goes missing.
Listen to the whole thing HERE!
Here’s some info on The Richard Crouse Show!
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 Chris Pratt, Elvis Costello, Baz Luhrmann, Martin Freeman, David Cronenberg, Mayim Bialik, The Kids in the Hall and many more!
Listen to the show live here:
C-FAX 1070 in Victoria
SAT 5:00 PM to 6:00 PM
SUN 10:00 AM to 11:00 AM
CJAD in Montreal
SAT 8 PM to 9:00 PM
CFRA in Ottawa
SAT 8 PM to 9:00 PM
NEWSTALK 610 CKTB in St. Catharines
Sat 8:00 PM to 9:00 PM
NEWSTALK 1010 in Toronto
SAT 8 PM to 9:00 PM
NEWSTALK 1290 CJBK
SAT 8 PM to 9:00 PM
AM 1150 in Kelowna
SAT 11 PM to Midnight
BNN BLOOMBERG RADIO 1410
SAT 8 PM to 9:00 PM
Click HERE to catch up on shows you might have missed!
In “Freelance,” a new action comedy now playing in theatres, John Cena plays a man fighting back against a life of quiet desperation, a feeling audiences will be familiar with by the time the end credits roll.
Cena is Mason Pettits, a do gooder trying to find his place in the world. After few miserable years of practicing law left him wanting more—”I thought it would make me feel normal,” he says, “but it made me hate myself.”—he joins the Special Forces. Fulfilled, he says the job allows him to find a much-needed purpose to his life.
That is, until a mission to assassinate dictator Juan Arturo Venegas (Juan Pablo Raba) goes south. Wounded and disillusioned, he leaves behind the life of adventure, and settles down, returning to law and marriage and a safe suburban life.
Bored and unhappy, he accepts a job from Sebastian (Christian Slater), a former Special Forces colleague now running Contractual Defense Industries, a one stop shop-and-shoot mercenary business. “We sell security,” he says.
The job is sounds simple but there is a catch. He will accompany journalist Claire Wellington (Alison Brie) to South America and keep her safe as she interviews Juan Arturo Venegas, the very dictator at the heart of the mission that ended Pettits’s Special Forces career.
“Freelance” is the kind of movie that once gathered dust in direct-to-DVD bins at Blockbuster.
Not even the considerable charm of the leads, Cena and Brie, can overcome the generic action, the weird shifts in tone from bloody gun battles to light comedy, a forgettable villain (played by the usually reliable Marton Csokas) and a goofy dictator who, on one hand speaks about the exploitation of poor countries by corrupt international corporations, while on the other delivering silly lines like, “I believe when one encounters danger, one must sing to it.”
With very few exceptions, “Freelance” feels very been-there-done-that, as if director Pierre Morel tried to pay tribute to the direct-to-DVD genre, but forgot to bring the fun.
“Five Nights at Freddy’s,” is a new horror film starring Josh Hutcherson now playing in theatres, but it may feel familiar to some movie goers.
Referred to as “FNaF” by fans, it began life in 2014 as a popular video game that has since spawned a number of sequels, including “Five Nights at Freddy’s: Sister Location” and “Five Nights at Freddy’s: Help Wanted.”
With the game’s creator Scott Cawthon signed on as co-writer and producer, the new film version offers up recognizable visual and audio call-backs to the video game series.
Then, there is the strange case of “Willy’s Wonderland,” a 2021 Nic Cage cult film that fills its lungs with much of the same fetid air as “FNaF.” It’s like “Freddy’s” brother from another mother.
So, with so much history, is the new movie fresh enough to get a fresh rating?
On the big screen Hutcherson plays Mike Schmidt, a down-on-his luck guy desperate to make some cash and look after his withdrawn sister Abby (Piper Rubio). How desperate is he? Desperate enough to take a nighttime gig as a security guard at a family entertainment center called Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza. “I’ll take anything,” he tells job counselor Steve (Matthew Lillard).
The run-down and shut-down facility was a once-popular hot spot but now sits empty save for four animatronic mascots, Freddy Fazbear, Bonnie, Chica, and Foxy.
Turns out, these mascots are anything but good luck charms. They used to entertain the kids who once flocked to the restaurant, but these days they’re possessed by the spirits of the children who disappeared during Fazbear’s glory days.
“The police searched Freddy’s top to bottom,” says enigmatic local police officer Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail). “They never found them. That’s why the place shut down.”
What Vanessa doesn’t know, but Mike is about to find out, at night the mascots come alive, and have set their eyes on a new victim, little, innocent Abby.
Fans of the video game may get an extra charge out of the film’s Easter eggs. Director Emma Tammi provides fan service while the screenplay by Cawthon, Seth Cuddeback and Emma Tammi go hard on the psychological drama.
Determined to figure out who abducted his kid brother Garrett years before, Mike uses his dreams to relive the experience and find new clues. It his attempt to fix the sins of the past, but the drawn-out sequences drag the movie down. Ditto a subplot involving Mike and Abby’s nasty Aunt Jane (Mary Stuart Masterson). Both take valuable screen time away from the main attraction, and that is Abby—Rubio is especially effective as the open-hearted youngster—and her relationship with the creepy mascots. Abby has a connection with them, and also, perhaps, a connection to the abduction of Garrett. That’s where the action is, not in the dreary flashback dream sequences.
“Five Nights at Freddy’s” is being billed as a horror film, but other than a few jump scares, there isn’t much here to make the hair on the back of your neck stand up. Instead, it’s generically atmospheric with little-to-no actual fear factor.
“The Killer,” a new thriller starring Michael Fassbender, now playing in theatres before moving to Netflix on November 10, is a welcome return to genre filmmaking for David Fincher, director of “Se7en,” “Gone Girl” and “Zodiac.”
In the film’s first chapter the unnamed title character is holed up in a rented Parisian We Work office across the street from a ritzy hotel. There to kill a prominent man who should be checking in any day now, the Killer is a coiled snake, ready to jump into action.
When he does leave “the office,” he dresses in beige, like a “German tourist,” with no distinguishing features, (save for his Fassbender movie star good looks). He’s Mr. Nobody, unrecognized and unrecognizable.
He is there for one reason; to kill. He calls it an “Annie Oakley” job, a shot from a rifle at long distance. It’s not as exciting as some of his other gigs, like slipping poison into a person’s coffee or making the deaths look like accidents, but it pays the bills.
He lives by a considered set of rules, an existential credo for the business of death. “Forbid empathy,” he says. “Empathy is weakness.” “Anticipate, don’t improvise.” “Fight only the battle you’re paid to fight.”
He is careful, not prone to mistakes until the Paris assassination goes wrong and his bullet blows away his target’s companion, leaving the intended victim covered in gore, but very much alive.
An expert in the art of self-preservation, the Killer, through a circuitous route, under fake passports all carrying the name of old time sit com characters, beginning with Felix Unger, the meticulous half of “The Odd Couple,” eludes police. When he finally arrives at his home in the Dominican Republic, he finds his girlfriend has been assaulted, left near death in retaliation for his failed hit in Paris.
Asking himself, “WWJWBD”—”What Would John Wilkes Boothe Do?”—he jumps into action, vowing to get revenge on the people who attacked his girlfriend.
The moody, coldblooded “The Killer” is a showcase for Fassbender, who hasn’t appeared on screen in four years. From Magneto in the X-Men films to the lead in Justin Kurzel’s 2015 version of “Macbeth” and “Alien: Covenant’s” android David 8 and the corrupt MI6 agent Paul in “Haywire,” he’s played villains before, but has rarely been this nonchalantly captivating. He sucks out much of the character’s humanity, leaving behind a deadly automaton, directed by the logistics of his job rather than any sort of moral compass. Life and death, for him, is transactional and part of the film’s pleasure is waiting to see when and if he will break and allow his humanity to shine through.
But despite the movie’s hardheartedness, director Fincher, working from a script by Andrew Kevin Walker builds-in a sense of fun. Fassbender’s deliberately robotic delivery is perfect as he deadpans lines like, “The Sunshine State. Where else can you find so many likeminded individuals… outside a penitentiary?”
“The Killer” is a slickly made, stylish thriller, with an anxiety inducing score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, that uses the central character’s aloofness as a hook to pull you to the edge of your seat.
“Pain Hustlers,” a new true crime dramedy based on the non-fiction book “The Hard Sell” by Evan Hughes, starring Emily Blunt and Chris Evans, and now streaming on Netflix, joins the ever-growing list of movies and television shows that detail big pharma’s culpability in the opioid crisis.
Blunt plays Liza Drake, a broke single-mom to daughter Phoebe (Chloe Coleman). Kicked out of her sister’s garage, where they’d been sleeping for more than a month, Liza is desperate for a job and cash.
During a chance meeting with oily pharmaceutical sales rep Pete Brenner (Chris Evans), she impresses him with her tenacity. Sensing she’d do anything for a buck, he offers her a job, despite her complete lack of qualifications, selling a new, inhalable fentanyl-based pain killer directly to doctors.
“It’s a long-odds lottery buried under a thousand rejections,” he tells her.
To keep the job, all she has to do is get the ball rolling by convincing one doctor to prescribe the drug. Just under the deadline, she lands a whale, the morally compromised Dr. Lydell (Brian d’Arcy James) who hands out the drug to his patients like candy to kids at Halloween.
Liza’s piece of the action is more money than she ever could have imagined. “You’re not going to make a hundred K this year,” Brenner tells her. “It’s going to be more like six-hundred.”
Drunk on success—and frequent drinking binges—she bends laws and bribes doctors as she chants her mantra, “Own your territory,” to a growing legion of sales reps. But while her bank account swells, so do her doubts, as her conscience becomes her moral compass.
“Pain Hustlers” breathes much of the same air as “Dopesick,” “Painkiller” and the documentary “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed.” Some. But not all. Those stories focused on patients and the personal toll of the opioid epidemic. Conversely, “Pain Hustlers” turns the camera on the sales reps, the pharmaceutical pushers who made fortunes on the misfortune of others.
Liza’s shift from desperation to greed isn’t a particularly fresh take on the rags-to-riches tale, but Blunt works overtime to make her character compelling. Her desire to succeed, to improve her life isn’t simply about the Benjamins, it’s about creating a new start for her daughter. Blunt grounds the movie with ample humanity, anchoring the film’s often over-the-top antics with her earthbound presence.
To its detriment, “Pain Hustlers” has a lighter tone than other recent opioid dramas. It’s not exactly a laugh a minute, but the jocular tone seems at odds with the serious subject matter, particularly in the performances of Evans and Andy Garcia, whose character loses his mind and the audience’s attention midway through.
“Pain Hustlers” attempts a new take on a hot button topic, but, the formulaic execution and uneven tone feels wonky given subject matter.
On the Saturday October 21, 2023 edition of The Richard Crouse Show we welcome a household name. In the NHL Ken Dryden backstopped the Montreal Canadiens to six Stanley Cup championships in eight seasons. He is an Officer of the Order of Canada and a member of the Hockey Hall of Fame. He was a Liberal Member of Parliament from 2004 to 2011 and Minister of Social Development from 2004 to 2006. In 2017, the league counted him in history’s 100 Greatest NHL Players. He received the Order of Hockey in Canada in 2020.
He’s also an author. His books include the bestselling “The Game” and “Face Off at the Summit.” His new book is “The Class: A Memoir of a Place, a Time, and Us,” a look back to class 9G at Etobicoke Collegiate Institute.
Then, we’ll meet Irish-Canadian playwright, novelist, and screenwriter. Her 2010 novel “Room” was a finalist for the Booker Prize and an international best-seller. She was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for “Room,” and since then she has released a number of best-selling novels, including “The Wionder,” and her latest, “Learned by Heart,” which was shortlisted for the 2023 Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize.
The new novel is based on the true story of two girls who fall secretly, deeply and dangerously in love at boarding school in nineteenth century York.
Listen to the whole thing HERE!
Here’s some info on The Richard Crouse Show!
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 Chris Pratt, Elvis Costello, Baz Luhrmann, Martin Freeman, David Cronenberg, Mayim Bialik, The Kids in the Hall and many more!
Listen to the show live here:
C-FAX 1070 in Victoria
SAT 5:00 PM to 6:00 PM
SUN 10:00 AM to 11:00 AM
CJAD in Montreal
SAT 8 PM to 9:00 PM
CFRA in Ottawa
SAT 8 PM to 9:00 PM
NEWSTALK 610 CKTB in St. Catharines
Sat 8:00 PM to 9:00 PM
NEWSTALK 1010 in Toronto
SAT 8 PM to 9:00 PM
NEWSTALK 1290 CJBK
SAT 8 PM to 9:00 PM
AM 1150 in Kelowna
SAT 11 PM to Midnight
BNN BLOOMBERG RADIO 1410
SAT 8 PM to 9:00 PM
Click HERE to catch up on shows you might have missed!
“The Pigeon Tunnel” (coming to Apple TV+ in October) is a look at the extraordinary life of author John le Carré. It examines the very essence of truth, and how memory and manipulation play a part in shaping our worlds. I sat with director Errol Morris to talk about truth.
Watch the whole thing HERE!
