I join CP24 to talk about the road trip flick “Holy Days,” the time travel crime drama “Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice,” the epidemic drama “Alpha” and the animated biopic “A Magnificent Life.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
I join “CTV News Toronto at Five” with anchor Zuraidah Alman to talk about new movies in theatres including the road trip flick “Holy Days,” the time travel crime drama “Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice” and the epidemic drama “Alpha.”
Watch the whole thing HERE! (Starts at 16:01)
I join CTV Atlantic’s Todd Battis to talk about the road trip flick “Holy Days,” the time travel crime drama “Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice,” the epidemic drama “Alpha” and the animated biopic “A Magnificent Life.”
Watch 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 road trip flick “Holy Days,” the time travel crime drama “Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice,” the epidemic drama “Alpha” and the animated biopic “A Magnificent Life.”
Listen to the whole thing HERE!
Fast reviews for busy people! Watch as I review three movies in less time than it takes to tune a violin. Have a look as I race against the clock to tell you about the road trip flick “Holy Days,” the time travel crime drama “Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice” and the epidemic drama “Alpha.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
I join the Bell Media Radio Network national night time show “Shane Hewitt and the Night Shift” to talk about “undertone,” the little movie that could, Celine Dion’s return to the stage, then I review the action-comedy “Mike&Nick&Nick&Mary” and tell you about some of star Vince Vaughn’s favorite drinks.
Listen to the whole thing HERE!
SYNOPSIS: A story of hitmen, romantic betrayal, a cannibal assassin and time travel, “Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice,” now streaming on Disney+, is not your average underworld story.
CAST: Vince Vaughn, James Marsden, Eiza González, Keith David, Jimmy Tatro. Written and directed by BenDavid Grabinski.
REVIEW: A buddy comedy with a time travel twist, “Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice” delivers solid laughs and is a welcome return of Vince Vaughn’s vaunted comic timing.
The action begins with crime lord Sosa (Keith David) vowing to get revenge on the snitch who ratted out his son Jimmy Boy (Jimmy Tatro), throwing him in prison for eight years. The wet work has been assigned to hitman Nick (Vince Vaughn), who has set up Quick Draw Mike (James Marsden), a rival in crime and for the attention of Alice (Eiza González), as the fall guy.
Into this deadly love triangle comes another assassin called The Baron who kills and eats his victims, betrayals, secrets and a chatty inventor named Symon (Ben Schwartz) whose time machine complicates an already complicated situation.
“Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice” is a welcome return to the swaggerlicious, slick talking characters that made Vaughn an R-rated comedy fan favorite. He’s made comedies in the last few years, but his work in shows and films like “Bad Monkey,” “Nonnas” and “Easy’s Waltz” feel lowkey compared to the snappy delivery on display here.
Writer/director BenDavid Grabinski stages enough big shoot-‘em-up sequences for this to qualify as an action comedy, but he knows the secret sauce is in the chemistry between the cast.
In a dual role the above-mentioned Vaughn is fun, playing Present Nick as ruthless, ruled by anger and loyalty to Sosa while he softens Future Nick, presenting hm as a reflective guy with regret for the life he’s led. To paraphrase iconic slogan for Doublemint gum, Vaughn doubles his performance and doubles the fun.
Marsden brings a way with a punch and a punchline, while never losing the likability that characterizes his best work, like his arc as Liz Lemon’s boyfriend Criss Cross on “30 Rock” and “Enchanted’s” Prince Edward.
In her first big comedic role González isn’t given as much to do as Marsden and Vaughn but brings great comic timing and a dose of humanity to the absurd story.
Propelled by the cast’s chemistry, “Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice” is a time travel flick about living in the moment that doesn’t forget to have fun along the way.
SYNOPSIS: In “Alpha,” a new French-language body horror/pandemic film now playing in theatres, a teenager’s tattoo may have exposed her to a deadly disease.
CAST: Tahar Rahim, Golshifteh Farahani, Mélissa Boros, Emma Mackey, Finnegan Oldfield, Louai El Amrousy. Written and directed by Julia Ducournau.
REVIEW: “Titane” director Julia Ducournau plumbs the depths of tedium to tell an opaque story that doesn’t have the narrative urgency to overcome its emotional inertness.
Set in both the past and present in coastal France as a contagious blood-borne disease turns people into something resembling marble statues, the story centers on the fourteen-year-old Alpha (Mélissa Boros), her physician mother (Golshifteh Farahani) and Amin (Tahar Rahim), Alpha’s junkie uncle.
When Alpha arrives home with an infected “A” tattooed on her arm, her mother thinks she may have contracted the mysterious disease. At school the bleeding “A” gets Alpha bullied, while at home she is now forced to share a room with Amin whose intravenous heroin use may have infected him with the strange illness.
Locked in the room while Alpha’s mother is at work, the rebellious teenager and her uncle sneak out on an adventure that may change both their lives.
An unfocussed allegorical take on an AIDS-like epidemic, “Alpha’s” story is told with a broken narrative structure that jumps through time, a confusing device that becomes distracting and disorienting as the film’s runtime goes on.
The filmmaking is demanding, if uneven, the performances committed, but the unconventional storytelling muddies the waters, allowing the themes of family trauma, disease and caregiving to drown in a sea of style and ever-shifting timelines.
“Alpha” is a frustrating movie. An ambitious, timely story of the effects of a society torn apart by an epidemic is done in by an indulgent, heavy hand that prioritizes polarization and provocation over coherent storytelling.
SYNOPSIS: In “A Magnificent Life,” a new animated film now playing in theatres, looks at acclaimed playwright, novelist and filmmaker Marcel Pagnol.
CAST: Laurent Lafitte, Géraldine Pailhas, Matt Berry. Directed by Sylvain Chomet.
REVIEW: “A Magnificent Life” is something you don’t see often. An animated biopic, it’s the story of playwright, novelist and filmmaker Marcel Pagnol, one of the giants of 20th century French culture.
“The Triplets of Belleville” writer/director Sylvain Chomet assembles a loving portrait of Pagnol, beginning the story at a low moment in the subject’s life. Pagnol is 6o years old, struggling with his own relevance and his latest work, writing a collection of stories from his “magnificent life” for Elle magazine.
Feeling defeated by his faulty memory, his memoir begins to take shape when he is visited by an unusual muse, his 10-year-old self who magically appears to guide him through the vagaries of his memory. Playfully, Marcel pokes and prods the older man to write about success and failure, and his hard-scrabble life growing up in Marseilles.
Chomet’s beautiful hand-drawn animation (with minor digital tinkering) is the star of “A Magnificent Life.” Detailed, Chomet takes a painterly approach to the work, which stands in slight contrast to the more whimsical look and character movement of the jazz age “The Triplets of Belleville.”
He’s opted for a more realistic look but doesn’t forget the mischievousness that make his films memorable. Any movie with a magical manifestation of the main character’s youth is bound to have a sense of fun, but that spark is also demonstrated by a silent-film sequence, complete with intertitles and the story’s interchangeable use of theatrical, cinematic and literary devices to tell the tale. It’s engaging, even if the story itself is a bit Wikipedia in its approach.
“A Magnificent Life” has one perplexing element. Much is made of Pagnol’s insistence on using the Marseilles accent in his work, despite producer’s concerns that general audiences wouldn’t be able to understand the dialect. Thing is, the accents here are all pretty much the same, with no discernable difference for Pagnol’s lilting “accent du Midi.”
What “A Magnificent Life” lacks in adventurous storytelling it makes up in warmth and visual invention as it blends magic realism with reality.
