I joined CTV NewsChannel anchor Roger Peterson to have a look at new movies coming to theatres, including the live action déjà vu of “How to Train Your Dragon,” the non rom com “Materialists” and the life-affirming “The Life of Chuck.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
Fast reviews for busy people! Watch as I review three movies in less time than it takes to make the bed! Have a look as I race against the clock to tell you about the live action déjà vu of “How to Train Your Dragon,” the non rom com “Materialists” and the life-affirming “The Life of Chuck.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
I join the Bell Media Radio Network national night time show “Shane Hewitt and the Night Shift” for “Booze & Reviews!” This week I review the matchmaker rom com “Materialists,” and give you a history of the pick-up bar!
Click HERE to hear Shane and I talking about the new “Smartless” mobile phone venture, a Manny the Mayo style wedding and the upcoming Snoop Dogg biography.
Click HERE to hear my Booze & Reviews take on “Materialists” and the history of New York City pick-up bars.
SYOPSIS: in “How to Train Your Dragon,” a new live-action remake of the 2010 animated film of the same name, a young Viking boy named Hiccup goes against his village’s traditional belief that dragons are “the unholy offspring of lightning and death itself,” when he befriends a Night Fury dragon named Toothless. “Dad, I can’t kill dragons,” Hiccup admits to his father, Stoick the Vast.
CAST: Mason Thames, Nico Parker, Nick Frost, Julian Dennison, Gabriel Howell, Bronwyn James, Harry Trevaldwyn, Ruth Codd, Peter Serafinowicz, Murray McArthur, Gerard Butler. Written and directed by Dean DeBlois.
REVIEW: At the movies, it seems that everything old is new again.
Even if it’s not that old.
It was just 15 years ago that the animated “How to Train Your Dragon,” based on the 2003 novel by Cressida Cowell, earned two Oscar nominations and launched a franchise that includes sequels, short films, a television series, a video game and an arena show adaptation featuring 24 animatronic dragons.
This weekend it gets a live-action treatment that includes all the familiar characters, situations plus 27 brand new minutes of story.
It’s new, but it isn’t necessarily improved.
On the plus side Canadian director and writer Dean DeBlois, who has been involved with the franchise as a director since the first film, brings a darker tone to the story. It’s still family friendly (although the finale with the Queen Dragon may haunt younger viewers) but the live action brings with it more exciting aerial action scenes, even if the CGI is sometimes murky in the big sequences.
It also adds complexity to the characters, particularly in the relationship between Hiccup (a terrific Mason Thames) and his father (Gerard Butler, who returns from the animated films).
Also welcome is the return of the emotional core of the original. The animated film’s allegory to 9/11 feels even more poignant today as a message of tolerance. As Hiccup cuts through his father’s Viking jingoism with kindness and compassion, the movie reverberates with the franchise’s humanistic themes.
The heart of the film, the relationship between the boy and his dragon, beats loudly. Thames is up against it, reinterpreting Jay Baruchel’s classic voice work, but he brings an earnestness to the character that works.
Toothless the friendly dragon is lovingly rendered in photorealistic CGI, and even with no dialogue, expresses himself as easily as any of the real-life actors.
On the downside, it feels been-there-done-that. Several scenes are shot-for-shot from the original, which, depending on your level of fandom, will either be an homage or a display of a lack of originality.
“How to Train Your Dragon” will likely entertain original fans, and may win over some new ones, but I missed the snappier pacing of the original. The extra 27 minutes brings with it some impressive look-at-me moments—particularly in the final battle scene—but I found it less charming than it animated counterpart.
SYNOPSIS: Based on Stephen King’s 2020 novella of the same name, “The Life of Chuck,” a new science fiction drama starring Tom Hiddleston now playing in theatres, begins as an apocalyptic drama but, by the film’s end, reveals itself to be a life-affirming look at the way we embrace the fleeting experience of life.
CAST: Tom Hiddleston, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Karen Gillan, Jacob Tremblay, Matthew Lillard and Mark Hamill. Written and directed by Mike Flanagan.
REVIEW: Many people die in “The Life of Chuck,” the winner of the People’s Choice Award at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival. Young people, middle-aged people, old people. In fact, by the end of the film’s opening half hour, it’s suggested that everyone is a goner. And still, the film, adapted from a Stephen King novella of the same name, manages to be tearily life affirming in its compact hour and 45-minute run time.
Structurally “The Life of Chuck” is challenging, divided into three stand-alone, but related pieces.
It begins at the end with Act 3. Chiwetel Ejiofor is Marty, high school teacher and ex-husband of Felicia (Karen Gillan). As the world crumbles around them—California falls into the sea, the internet is gone, earthquakes and wildfires are ravaging most of the planet and entire species of birds and fish disappear overnight—they struggle to understand the billboards and TV ads that thank Charles “Chuck” Krantz for “39 Great Years” that suddenly appear everywhere. “It’s all Krantz all the time,” Marty says. “Anyone know who he is?”
Act 2 focuses on Chuck’s (Tom Hiddleston) adult life, including an afternoon spent dancing with a stranger in public.
Act 1 ties the segments together with a look at Chuck as a youngster and his introduction to the vagaries of life. “You contain multitudes,” says his teacher, placing her hands on either side of his head. “Isn’t that wonderful?”
“The Life of Chuck” is an eclectic film with an odd upside-down presentation, but its themes are anything but strange. A chronical of a life’s journey, it reveals, like Amanda Marshall sang, that everybody, even an “ordinary” accountant like Chuck, has “a story that’ll break your heart.”
A mix of memories, dance and family bonds paint an empathetic portrait of an everyman who, as Walt Whitman said, “contains multitudes.” Chuck is a surrogate for all of us, a microcosm of the inner universe of experience, emotions, and connection that give color to all our lives. And while the movie grapples with mortality, it’s not a downer. Instead, it’s a vibrant testament to the small moments that make up a life, and how small gestures can imprint on those around you.
Once you get acclimatized to the wonky backwards structure, director Mike Flanagan’s abstract commentary on life and legacy gels and the appreciation of life, even in the face of death, becomes clear. It’s sentimental, but never syrupy. It’s heartfelt but not overbearing. It is just like the character of Chuck: likable, multi-layered and nuanced.
SYNOPSIS: Set against the backdrop of New York City, the Rom Com Capitol of the World®, “Materialists” sees Dakota Johnson play Lucy, a matchmaker for the rich and famous. “I promise you’re going to marry the love of your life,” she says to her clients. She has arranged nine marriages but personally, keeps romance at arm’s length after a messy break-up. Things change for the “eternal bachelorette” when she meets wealthy charm-bomb Harry Castillo (Pedro Pascal). “You are what we call a unicorn,” she tells him, “an impossible fantasy.” As romance blossoms, Lucy’s life is upended by the return of her broke ex-boyfriend, John (Chris Evans), forcing her to choose between a perfect match and her imperfect ex.
CAST: Dakota Johnson, Chris Evans, and Pedro Pascal. Written and directed by Celine Song.
REVIEW: A rom com that emphasizes the rom over the com, “Materialists” takes several big leaps, story wise, to arrive at the fairly simple idea that the heart wants with the heart wants. There’s no fifty-shades of nuance here.
As a matchmaker, Lucy (Dakota Johnson) treats her clients like commodities, not humans. She talks about the “math” of relationships, the calculation of compatibility plus physical appearance plus bank account, but admits, “We promise them love, but the math doesn’t add up.”
In other words, sometimes perfect on paper, isn’t perfect.
With “Materialists” writer-director Celine Song takes a deep dive into the need for real human connection, the kind of bond that is messy, unpredictable, sometimes illogical and can’t be summed up by a simple equation.
It’s the stuff of rom coms, boiled down to its essence.
There are a handful of mild laughs, but don’t come to “Materialists” looking for slapstick. Song subverts the genre, poking fun at the often unreasonable demands prospective daters want regarding class and age. “39 isn’t in the 30s,” says an older guy who wants to date thirty-year-olds, by which he means a woman in her mid-to-late twenties.
The “interview” segments between Lucy and her clients are often funny and more often ridiculous but they don’t set the tone for the entire film. Song isn’t as interested in the ins-and-outs of modern dating as she is in the bond people form when the math is taken out of the equation. It aims to be a realistic rom com of a sort—although you could argue that Lucy’s $80,000 salary is an unrealistic figure given her high end wardrobe and NYC apartment—about how there is no formula for love that avoids most of the formulas of the genre.
Fast reviews for busy people! Watch as I review three movies in less time than it takes to make the bed! Have a look as I race against the clock to tell you about the bullet ballet of “Ballerina,” fishy thriller “Dangerous Animals” and the horror comedy “I Don’t Understand You.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
I join CTV Atlantic anchor Stephanie Tsicos to talk about the the bullet ballet of “Ballerina,” fishy thriller “Dangerous Animals” and the exorcism flick “The Ritual.”
Watch the whole thing HERE! (Starts at 28:18)
SYNOPSIS: In “Predator: Killer of Killers,” a new animated-science-fiction-action-horror-anthology film for adults, now streaming on Disney+, pits the relentless alien killing machine against three fierce human warriors—a Viking our for revenge, a ninja from feudal Japan and a WWII pilot. “There’s only one way to kill it. We must fight together.”
CAST: Lindsay LaVanchy, Louis Ozawa Changchien, Rick Gonzalez, Michael Biehn. Directed by Dan Trachtenberg.
REVIEW: If the animated “Predator: Killer of Killers” is any indication, fans are in for a bloody good time this November when “Predator: Badlands” hits theatres. Think of this animated anthology film is an amuse bouche, dipped in gore, to whet your appetite for the main event.
The premise is simple, like a riff on the schoolyard game of Who Would Win? Remember that? Who would win in a fight, Dracula or Frankenstein? Yeti or Bigfoot?
In this case “Predator: Killer of Killers” jumps through history to coral a trio of warriors willing to do battle with the ultimate killing machine.
The first third sees a Viking raider guiding her young son on a bloody quest for revenge against the alien. Part two is set against the backdrop of feudal Japan and a battle for succession, while part three sees a WWII pilot attempt to save the Allied cause from the existential, extraterrestrial threat.
Individually, they are no match for the otherworldly menace, but together they might have a chance. Perhaps this should have been called “Predator: There Is No ‘I’ in Team.”
It should be noted that just because something is on Disney+, that doesn’t mean it’s for the whole family. This is a grisly, high-octane movie that doesn’t spare the plasma; one that combines 2D and 3D animation techniques filtered through a “Mortal Combat” lens. The result is a thing of terrible beauty that blends realism with cartoon animation to brutal effect.
Directed by Dan Trachtenberg, whose “Prey” revitalized the franchise, and whose upcoming “Predator: Badlands” is hotly anticipated, “Predator: Killer of Killers” isn’t a sequel or a prequel, at least not in any way I could decipher, it’s simply a fearsome adventure set within the Predator Universe.
