I join the CTV NewsChanel to talk about the reimagined “Wuthering Heights,” the time travelling farce “Nirvanna: The Band The Show The Movie” and the nostalgic b-movie “Cold Storage.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
I sit in with CKTB morning show host Steph Vivier to have a look at movies in theatres including the reimagined “Wuthering Heights,” the time travelling farce “Nirvanna: The Band The Show The Movie,” the nostalgic b-movie “Cold Storrage” and the drama “Sirāt.”
Listen to the whole thing HERE!
I sit in on the CFRA Ottawa morning show with host Bill Carroll to talk about the new movies coming to theatres including the reimagined “Wuthering Heights,” the time travelling farce “Nirvanna: The Band The Show The Movie,” the nostalgic b-movie “Cold Storrage” and the drama “Sirāt.”
Listen to the whole thing HERE!
I join the Bell Media Radio Network national night time show “Shane Hewitt and the Night Shift” for a special Valentine’s Day edition. We talk about the unusual history of the day and I’ll suggest some movies for people who love Valentine’s Day, and those who don’t.
Listen to the whole thing HERE!
Fast reviews for busy people! Watch as I review three movies in less time than it takes to drink a latte! Have a look as I race against the clock to tell you about the time travelling farce “Nirvanna: The Band The Show The Movie,” the drama “Sirāt” and the coming-of-age story “Pillion.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
SYNOPSIS: “Moor, moor, moor. How do you like it?” “Wuthering Heights,” a reimagined take on Emily Brontë’s grand gothic tale of bodice-ripping and obsessive love, stars Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi as lovers with an unbreakable bond. “Love twisted by time. Desire that won’t die.”
CAST: Margot Robbie, Jacob Elordi, Hong Chau, Shazad Latif, Alison Oliver, Martin Clunes, Ewan Mitchell. Directed by Emerald Fennell.
REVIEW: More (or should that be “moor”) explicit than previous iterations of the Brontë classic, Emerald Fennell’s take on the story is a study in how obsessive love can lead to ruin.
Set in the late 1700s, Charlotte Mellington plays Catherine Earnshaw, the young, free-spirited daughter of Mr. Earnshaw (Martin Clunes), a booze-hound who brings home an illiterate, orphaned boy (“Adolescence” star Owen Cooper) from the city to the family’s decaying Yorkshire estate. She names him Heathcliff, after her dead brother, and they form a fast bond.
Cut to years later. Catherine and Heathcliff, now played by Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, are head over heels but Cathy desires the kind of social standing Heathcliff cannot provide.
Despite Heathcliff’s promise to “follow you like a dog to the end of the world,” she marries the refined gentleman Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif), a handsome rich man but without the intensity that defined her relationship with Heathcliff.
Rejected and devastated, Heathcliff leaves the only home and real love he has ever known, only to return five years later, wealthy and with revenge on this mind. “Why did you leave me?” she asks. “Why did you betray your own heart?” he replies.
Simply put, Emerald Fennell, the director of “Promising Young Woman” and “Saltburn,” has turned “Wuthering Heights” into something best described as a light “Fifty Shades of Bridgerton.”
Despite a reputation for pushing the envelope, Fennell seems restrained here, save for a brief scene of bizarre doggie-style degradation and the worst consent scene ever committed to film. Those moments are memorable for the kind of provocation and boundary-pushing we expect from the director. For much of the film’s runtime, however, she’s on a low simmer, stuck somewhere between the Brontë’s melancholic passion and the director’s usual decadent discomfort.
As the young Catherine and Heathcliffe, Charlotte Mellington and Owen Cooper provide a proper setup for the soul-deep connection to come. When the characters grow up Robbie and Elordi bring intensity but the heartfelt spark that lit the flame of passion years before is replaced by a romantic appetite that manifests itself in cruelty and muddled motivations.
At its most basic, Catherine and Heathcliffe straddle the thin line between love and hate, not an uncommon romantic position, but Fennell confusingly blurs the line into a gaping incoherent hole.
Robbie and Elordi look the part of impossibly beautiful star-crossed lovers, and they share chemistry, but their thirst for one another feels skin deep, even as it grows obsessive and destructive.
Like its stars, “Wuthering Heights” looks lovely—opulent interiors, moody moors—but the reimagination of Brontë’s novel feels lackluster, unable to truly grasp the passion or the tragedy inherent to the original story.
SYNOPSIS: In the wild ‘n woolly “Nirvanna: The Band The Show The Movie,” a new time travel mockumentary-adventure starring Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol, and now playing in theatres, “Nirvanna the Band’s” attempts to book a high-profile gig tests the limits of their friendship and the space time continuum.
CAST: Matt Johnson, Jay McCarrol, Jared Raab. Directed by Matt Johnson.
REVIEW: A punk rock riff on “Back to the Future,” “Nirvanna: The Band The Show The Movie” is a wild ride into the past brimming with creativity, anarchy and comedy and many other complimentary words ending in “y.”
The movie, which blends footage from the 2007–2009 web series of (mostly) the same name, begins with unemployed musicians Matt and Jay (Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol) hatching a plan to land a gig at the legendary Rivoli on Queen Street West in Toronto. Without contacting the club, writing any songs or practising, they decide to parachute off the CN Tower into the Skydome during a baseball game to announce the show in front of a stunned crowd.
What could go wrong? Well, lots.
No spoilers here, but when their skydiving stunt doesn’t get them the Rivoli gig, they (along with their camera guy Jared Raab) find themselves accidentally traveling back to the year 2008, and struggling to find a way back to the future.
There’s more. Lots more. “Nirvanna: The Band The Show The Movie” is never at rest.
Johnson (who directs as well as stars) is not afraid to add in layers of pure lunacy into the action but never loses the thing that makes the story so appealing, the strong friendship between the leads. Their relationship, cockeyed as it may be, brings heart to the escalating antics and gives the eccentric movie its earthbound charm, especially when they interact with their younger selves.
Johnson and McCarrol have chemistry and built-in comedic rhythm. Their affable back-and-forth has a lived-in feel, and each delivers a highly crafted persona. Like Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin or Laurel and Hardy, in many ways they are opposites. Johnson is the over-the-top dreamer, the kind of guy who dreams of parachuting into a sports arena, while McCarrol is more grounded and often exasperated by Matt’s unhinged plans. They are a classic odd couple, mismatched but still a fun comedic fit.
“Nirvanna: The Band The Show The Movie” is a crowd-pleasing story of absurdly ambitious people and ambitiously absurd characters that pulls out all the stops to tell a ludicrous story of best friends on a mission.
SYNOPSIS: A entry in the Academy Awards context for Best International Feature Film, the arthouse missing daughter drama “Sirāt” is an audacious and harrowing story of fate and the thin line between life and death.
CAST: Sergi López, Bruno Núñez Arjona, Richard Bellamy, Stefania Gadda, Joshua Liam Henderson, Tonin Janvier, Jade Oukid. Directed by Óliver Laxe.
REVIEW: A story of tension and torment, the road trip drama of “Sirāt” is a difficult, but hypnotising journey that will leave viewers willing to immerse themselves disoriented, while others may feel discontented by the film’s ending.
The story begins as father and son Luis (Sergi López) and Esteban (Bruno Núñez Arjona) arrive at a rave in the mountains of southern Morocco in search of their missing daughter/sister Mar. Amid the pounding music and flashing lights, they circulate her photo in hopes someone will recognize her.
Their search leads them to a group of ravers who think Mar might be at another rave, one located deeper in the Sahara. The journey of hope turns into a surreal trip as war breaks out around them, making their quest a literal geopolitical minefield of potential disaster.
An allegory for the Sirāt bridge, the Islamic concept of a bridge over Hell, a passage between salvation and damnation, that every person must cross on Judgment Day to reach Paradise, “Sirāt” is an unusual movie.
Director Óliver Laxe, who so-wrote with Santiago Fillol, sets up a seven levels of hell scenario for Luis, Esteban and the ravers to navigate, placing existential crisis at every turn. Death is ever present, whether it’s from misadventure, the above-mentioned landmines, their own desperate choices or through exposure to the unforgiving desert landscape.
It is harrowing, unforgiving material that occasionally veers into the absurd. A dog falls ill after eating LSD-laced feces and, in a rare bit of comic relief, a one-legged man performs a puppet musical using his prosthetic as a guitar. These moments don’t exactly break the tension, but they do provide a respite from the film’s intensity.
Rich in allegory, “Sirāt” keeps the story loose, opting for an episodic, sensory experience embellished with unexpected twists that tie the various elements—survival story, road trip tale, missing person story—together. It’s propulsive, if uneven, filmmaking that requires patience as it defies easy categorization.
”Sirāt” covers a lot of ground, physically and metaphysically, but at its heart is driven by personal grief and a sense of familial responsibility.
SYNOPSIS: In “Cold Storage,” a new sci fi comedy starring Joe Keery, and now playing in theatres, an infectious, constantly mutating fungus threatens to end the world unless two storage company nightshift workers and a bioterror expert can combine forces and come to the rescue.
CAST: Georgina Campbell, Joe Keery, Sosie Bacon, Vanessa Redgrave, Lesley Manville, Liam Neeson. Directed by Jonny Campbell.
REVIEW: A throwback to the gross ‘n gory sci-fi and horror popcorn films of 80s and 90s, “Cold Storage” features practical effects, plenty of humor and an exploding eyeball or two.
“Stranger Things” star Joe Keery and Georgina Campbell play Travis and Naomi, nightshift workers at a self-storage company that sits on the site of a decommissioned US military base. Decades before, a deadly, constantly mutating organism, capable of destroying all life on the planet in the grimmest and goriest of ways, was sealed in the facility’s sublevel.
As Travis and Naomi go about their mundane jobs, rising temperatures in the building’s basement allow the rapidly mutating microorganism to grow and escape its underground prison. What began as a sleepy overnight shift soon turns into an outbreak situation that could endanger the entire planet.
With the help of grizzled bioterror expert Robert Quinn (Liam Neeson) Travis and Naomi try and save all of humanity. “You two may have started the night as minimum wage guards,” says Quinn, “but you’re a green light team now.”
Adapted from David Koepp’s (the screenwriter of “Jurassic Park,” “The Lost World,” “War of the Worlds” and “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull”) 2019 sci-fi thriller of the same name, “Cold Storage” is a mix of comedy and gory exploding humans.
Practical special effects, done with very little CGI, bring a nice, nostalgic vibe to the film’s action. Exploding deer and fungus infected human effects are over-the-top and have a cool, retro handmade look that brings back memories of the visceral thrills of movies like “Re-Animator” and “Dead Alive.”
The script is laced with humor, but I wouldn’t call this a comedy. It’s more a sci fi horror with a few laughs, many of which some from Keery’s comic timing.
“Cold Storage” is a bit of b-movie fun that doesn’t take itself seriously, so neither should we.
