The summer movie season began amid doom and gloom. I don’t mean George Miller’s filling screens with his dystopian vision of the future in Mad Max: Fury Road or the career ending fallout from the Sony hack. No, I mean the sky-is-falling predictions that circulated about the movie business.
Box office is down! No one goes to the movies anymore! And best of all: Movies are dead!
To paraphrase Mark Twain, I’m happy to say the reports of the death of cinema have been greatly exaggerated. The summer box office of 2015 will go down in the record books as the second-biggest in history with almost seven billion dollars generated by Minions, Ant-Man, Mad Max, dinosaurs and a sad little girl named Riley.
Superheroes helped put bums in seats, but 2015 won’t be remembered as the Year of Ultron. Now that the summer silly season is over, a definite trend toward female-driven movies like Trainwreck, Pitch Perfect 2 and Spy showed that, as Amy Schumer told me, Hollywood has finally realized “our money works, too. Our banks also accept the female dollar.”
But it wasn’t just women going to the movies. With Jurassic World pulling in 1.6 billion samolians worldwide, it seems everyone put down the remote and went to the cinema.
We didn’t rush out to everything — cash grabs like Ted 2 and Terminator: Genisys flopped — but the naysayers, the folks who, in January, were declaring movies to be a thing of the past, an old outmoded form of entertainment in the digital age, missed the point.
People flocked to the movies in huge numbers this summer, filling seats and studio bank accounts, not simply to sit in air conditioning for a few hours as relief from the summer heat or to dine out on popcorn and Twizzlers, but to engage in an age-old ritual.
Of course, you can watch movies at home or on your phone. New technology has made it easier than ever to enjoy a film from the comfort of your coach on a 60-inch screen with surround sound and healthy, homemade snacks, but no matter what set-up you may have in your living room, the thing missing is the ancient practice of sharing entertainment with a large group of strangers. It’s a primal thing, hard-wired into our DNA, that dates back to when tribes of cave dwellers would sit around fires and tell stories through to the Globe Theatre, vaudeville, the talkies and right up to today’s IMAX and AUX screenings.
People have gathered to be entertained since there were tales to be told because there is no better way to enjoy the storytelling experience than surrounded by strangers who are laughing, crying, gasping— whatever — in response to a shared event.
No matter how large your TV or comfortable your sofa, home viewing misses the magical element of community. In the theatre you’re getting the sound and the picture the director intended, but more than that the experience brings people together, inspires conversation, respect and triggers actual physical interaction with others. Try that as you stream a movie on your iPhone.
Of course, as in any other community there are a few troublemakers — texters, seat kickers — but I spend more time in theatres than most and find the pros far outweigh any negatives.
In the era of home entertainment the idea of going to the movies may sound old fashioned or quaint but I like the way English novelist Angela Carter described watching a film in a theatre. She called it “dreaming the same dream in unison” and that, for me will never go out of style.
“I love Canada,” says Mountain Men star Chace Crawford. “I’m from Texas so I get along with Canadians really well. There is some weird kindred spirit there.”
Crawford is best known as the star of Gossip Girl — he played Upper East Side heartthrob Nate Archibald on over 100 episodes of the hit show — but he got his big break working in Canada.
“I worked in Montreal on my first film ever back in 2005,” he says. “It was a Screen Gems movie called The Covenant, which was like The Craft meets the Backstreet Boys. I had the best time of my life on that. I love Montreal but I know Montreal is a lot different than Toronto or Vancouver and definitely Revelstoke.”
Revelstoke is, indeed, a long hike from Montreal. The beautiful southeastern British Columbia community has provided a backdrop for films dating back to the 1930s — a 1937 Lilli Palmer about the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway was partially shot there — and gave Mountain Men its picturesque setting.
The film is the story of estranged brothers Cooper (Crawford) and Toph (Tyler Labine, real life brother of the film’s writer and director Cameron Labine). When Cooper returns home to attend their mother’s wedding, Toph tricks him into taking a trip into the Rocky Mountains. When everything goes wrong they must bond or die.
The scenery is suitably rustic, but Crawford says the location wasn’t as rough as it looks in the film.
“We really pulled it off,” he says. “To be honest we got there in April and had this house up in the middle of nowhere. There was a couple feet of snow everywhere but by the end it was gorgeous springtime. The snow just slowly melted. We had to keep going higher and higher up the mountain to make it look more treacherous. It was nice out almost. It was more wet than anything.”
When he wasn’t shooting on the mountain he was getting to know his co-star.
“Tyler and me shared a big house,” he says. “He has a family and a wife and kids and he’s a great dad, but he got to be away from that for a moment and kind of lock in. We’d go out and have a few drinks and get to know one another. There was nothing negative about it. We didn’t get tired of one another or angry. It was more a bonding experience and by the end of it we were brothers from another mother.”
In Cop Car, a b-movie thriller about two kids who steal a police vehicle for a joyride, Kevin Bacon plays Sherriff Kretzer, a bad cop short on dialogue but long on menace. It’s an intense role but one that once upon a time the Footloose star would have turned down.
“When I first started becoming an actor I would judge a role by how many lines I had,” he says. “Then, later on, by, ‘Where’s my big scene?’ As time has gone on I’ve really loved the idea of trying to use everything cinema has to offer in terms of helping you unfold the mystery of who somebody is. Sherriff Kretzer is one of those guys who, somehow, even though there is very little being said, I had an image for who he would be. Sometimes it just comes to me.”
Now into an almost four decade long career—his first professional acting gig came in 1978 on the soap opera Search for Tomorrow—he’s come to understand why less is often more on screen.
“Look at something like Diner,” he says. “I didn’t want that part because the guy didn’t say much. I didn’t know or trust that who he was would come through [in the scene where] I was just sitting there watching the college bowl. People talk about that as being the moment where they totally got the guy, but on the page I didn’t get that. I was too naïve to understand that. In the course of my career I have started to realize that the camera sees so much more than we see in real life. It’s not that it just shoots real life, it’s that it goes deeper. You shoot somebody’s eyes, do a close up on somebody’s eyes, and you see things that the human eye can’t see. It actually reaches down into that person’s soul so you’re exposed to something that is deeper and more beautiful.”
Bacon says he and director Jon Watts give audiences everything they need to “metaphorically jump in the car and come along” without over explaining the characters.
The result is a violent film that transcends its b-movie roots to become a story about loss of childhood innocence. “I think it is a surprisingly moving and emotional film,” he says. “I know my wife [actress Kyra Sedgwick] feels that way.”
Ben Kingsley is an Academy Award winner and one of the most recognizable faces in movies. He is an actor, and a very good one but he prefers to be called something else.
“I’m sure I am a storyteller,” he says. “I’m sure that is the right place for my DNA to be.”
Whether he is playing Darwan in this weekend’s Learning to Drive or Mohandas Gandhi, Itzhak Stern in Schindler’s List or Sexy Beasts’ Don Logan, he strives to tell stories that get under the audience’s skin.
“Something happened to me and it stayed with me forever,” he says. “I had the privilege of playing Hamlet for the Royal Shakespeare Company and I was walking and it was always in my head. It is a very all-consuming role.
“I was in Snitterfield, an open field just outside Stratford Upon Avon. A lovely young woman was on the opposite side of the field and seemed to be walking towards me, so I decided to tack to my right to avoid her feeling that I was intruding on her space. She tacked to her left. In other words, she mirrored me. Then I went the other way and she mirrored me. She was determined to meet me in the middle of this field. Then face-to-face, she said, ‘I saw Hamlet last night. How did you know about me?’
Something (I did) must have gone right in there (he points to his heart), straight through the sternum and said, ‘I know.’ That’s the connection.”
In his new film Kingsley makes a connection with co-star Patricia Clarkson. She plays Wendy, a divorcee who hires Darwan to teach her how to drive so she can travel to upstate New York to visit her daughter. As she learns to navigate Manhattan’s mean streets, they form a bond, teaching one another about life and love.
“I think in a really beautifully fashioned play or screenplay you have a feeling that the gods look down and say, ‘I’m going to bring you two together.’ I love that idea in mythology that the gods look down and send somebody to somebody. It is only through very unfortunate, heartbreaking circumstances that she finds herself in a taxi.
Heartbroken. I am driving a heartbroken woman. And I loved in the way, as in all great stories, the little coincidences are the gods guiding and bringing people together for some purpose. Here it is not for a great romance, it is to heal.”
Zac Efron became a teen heartthrob with the success of the High School Musical movies and then did everything possible to decimate and alienate the core audience that made him a star.
He rightly realized that the shelf life of a young Disney star was limited and turned his attention to making serious but little seen films like Parkland, At Any Price and The Paperboy, an art house film better known for a scene utilizing an age-old cure for a jellyfish sting you don’t normally see administered by an Oscar winner like Nicole Kidman.
His latest movie, We Are Your Friends, the first major-studio film set in the world of electronic dance music, is a mix of music and romance that sees Efron play an aspiring DJ who falls in love with his mentor’s girlfriend.
It’s a role that should appeal to his original fanbase, the kids who have aged out of High School Musical and now listen to EDM, where his other screen choices seem to have left them behind. Occasionally he’s thrown them a bone, with popcorn movies like New Year’s Eve, or Neighbors, where he plays the prerequisite 20-something good-looking Hollywood hunk.
Take That Awkward Moment for instance. He played an avowed hook-up artist, a young guy who would rather hang out with his best friends Daniel (Miles Teller) and Mikey (Michael B. Jordan) than have a meaningful relationship with a girl. In time-honoured rom-com fashion, it’s a movie that takes advantage of its leading man’s blue eyes and sculpted abs. Efron’s hair is practically a character in the film.
Perhaps while making The Lucky One, a Nicolas Sparks romance co-starring Taylor Schilling, it occurred to him that simply watching good-looking people fall in love does not a movie make.
I couldn’t help but think that Efron, when he says to Schilling’s character Beth, “I know you deserve better than this,” was actually speaking to the audience.
Luckily his other films are less about his looks and more about his ability. The Paperboy is an odd film. It’s an art house thriller — meaning that there aren’t many thrills — in which each of its stars do some fairly intense envelope pushing in a story about a reporter returning to his native Florida to investigate a murder.
Paired with risk-taking actors like Nicole Kidman, David Oyelowo, John Cusack and Matthew McConaughey, Efron works hard to shake off the early teen idol gloss that made him famous. He mostly succeeds, although director Lee Daniels’s camera still caresses the actor, taking full advantage of his effortless appeal.
In Me and Orson Welles, Efron is overshadowed by an actor playing a man who died many years before the core audience of this movie was even born. Christian McKay plays Orson Welles with such panache that Efron becomes a supporting player in his own movie but still makes a strong impression as a teenager with dreams of being on stage in this handsomely mounted period piece.
Other films like At Any Price, a 2012 powerful tale of fathers and sons and the pressure to succeed, have shown not only his depth but his willingness to stretch as an actor.
So why does Efron, who could have a movie franchise career in a heartbeat, look past the obvious career path?
Efron told the Hollywood Reporter that his often eclectic acting choices are always artistic in nature and never about money.
“I’m constantly searching for characters that are about betterment of self and betterment of others,” he says. “And I’m searching for those parts because those are the ones that make me happy. They’re the ones that fulfil me personally.”
Jane Levy has a diverse resume that includes the cable hit Shameless (where she dies in a most fiery way), the sitcom Suburgatory and the 2013 remake of Evil Dead. But her new film, Bang Bang Baby takes her back to where she began: singing and dancing.
“I did musical theatre, mostly because it was the only theatre available, not to say anything negative about that, but I wanted to be an actor. I loved drama and that was the way to do it so I was in all the plays. I was in Annie. I was in Oklahoma. I was in Annie Get Your Gun and The Wizard of Oz,” When she was seven years old the California native recalls about her seven -year-old self.
She warbled her way through Broadway-style shows until she was about thirteen when she traded the stage for the soccer field. It took a few years but eventually she felt a familiar draw.
“I was eighteen and I just finished my first year of college and I hated school,” she says. “I was miserable the whole year and I couldn’t quite figure out why.
“I was in Europe with my friend and I said, ‘You know what? I’m not going to do it anymore. I’m not going to school. Why not pursue the thing that I know has always been, deep down, my dream?’”
She’s back to basics in Bang Bang Baby, a strange new big screen sci-fi musical that gives her the chance to strut her stuff. In it, she plays Stepphy, a 1960s teenager whose dreams of rock ’n’ roll stardom are dashed when a chemical leak in her town causes mass mutations and “threatens to turn her dream into a nightmare.”
When she first saw the script she says, “I thought, how cool and how strange. I thought it would be a challenge to explore singing and dancing which is something I had done as a kid but not since. And I also thought how unusual, how peculiar, how fun.”
Levy has a whole slate of films on the way, including the much-anticipated animated movie Monster Trucks, but the best part of it all, she says, is that she is able to act in a variety of projects.
“For me, I feel like this is the thing I have to do. This is the thing I enjoy the most and this is the thing I’m best at.”
“Real horror has always thrived in the mainstream and elsewhere. Always will.”
When was the last time you were freaked out by a Hollywood movie?
I can admit that It Follows and Unfriended raised a few goosebumps and I recall a Saturday matinee screening of Paranormal Activity that was the first and only time I have ever heard anyone actually scream in a theatre. I don’t mean a quiet whimper followed by an embarrassed laugh or a frightened little squeal. I mean a full-on, open-throated howl of terror.
But these days it seems to me those moments are becoming fewer and further between. Zombies have gone mainstream, vampires now sparkle in the sun and werewolves have hipster hairdos.
I find the news more upsetting than most mainstream monster movies.
A recent re-watch of In Cold Blood gave me a jolt unlike any recent traditional gore fest.
It’s not a horror film in the conventional sense, but because it’s a true story of a senseless murder, it sent shivers down my spine.
A new film this weekend, the haunted home-movie tale Sinister 2, can only be called a horror movie because it is so poorly made. It is terrifyingly badly made but there is nothing that will actually give you nightmares, and isn’t that the whole point?
George Mihalka, director of My Bloody Valentine — a movie Quentin Tarantino calls his all-time favourite slasher film — agrees that conventional horror is in a rut.
“As long as mainstream horror focuses on glossy monsters and the perfectly backlit villain and stylish gore shots that could pass for TV commercial beauty shots where blood and victims are interchangeable with beer and models, there is nothing left to fear,” he says.
“An honest well-developed character is the reflective mirror that conveys the reality of the monster, villain, serial killer, ghost, zombie or vampire. If there is no truth or reality in the performance we cannot truly believe in the menace. We are left as numb, detached voyeurs of slick boogeymen or at best rooting for them to kill off the annoying bad acting of interchangeable pretty plastic people.”
Horror hero and Rue Morgue editor-in-chief Dave Alexander agrees that much Hollywood horror errs on the safe side, but says there are still thrills to be had at the movies.
“Foreign and indie horror movies — those titles that play genre festivals — are the most exciting and innovative because they’re not as bound by the Hollywood business model that favours remakes, sequels and chasing trends. That said, there are still chills to be had at the multiplex when a breakout title with an original concept comes along — one of the best recent examples being It Follows.”
Chris Alexander, editor-in-chief of legendary N.Y.C.-based horror and dark fantasy film culture magazine Fangoria says “real horror has always thrived in the mainstream and elsewhere. Always will.”
“Throughout horror history, there have always been ‘lite’ versions of more palpable big-screen terrors. From the various monster comedies of the 1940s (how many times did Bela run afoul of Bowery Boys and Brooklyn Gorillas?) to Abbott and Costello romps to The Munsters. And Dark Shadows was a vampire soap opera that romanticized vampires for lonely housewives.
“Horror in the mainstream has long been a gateway drug for young people and, if they are affected and obsessed by the films they see with their pals on a Friday night, they’ll likely begin the endless quest to ‘chase the dragon’ and find darker terrors, which are in large supply, internationally. If it wasn’t… I’d be out of a job!”
Claridge’s Hotel in London is the kind of place you might expect a secret agent to call home. An unassuming entranceway leads into an opulent lobby with lots of quiet corners perfect for clandestine meetings. It’s the kind of place where Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin could do highly classified business over a martini, shaken or stirred. So, it’s appropriate I’m meeting Henry Cavill and Army Hammer here. They’re the stars of the Man from U.N.C.L.E. reboot and the latest actors, after Robert Vaughn and David McCallum, to play super spies Solo and Kuriatkin.
The TV show, which was equal parts camp and classic action, ran from 1964 to 68, made stars of its leads and established high-flying spy cool for a generation of television watchers. Cavill, who plays the suave Solo, however, says he has never seen the show.
“I prefer to operate as a blank canvas,” says Cavill, who will next be seen as the Man of Steel in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. “If you’re trying to make something your own you’re concentrating on the wrong thing. You should be concentrating on the story and evolving the story with your fellow actors and or director. That’s what we did.”
His co-star Hammer referred to the show to partially to craft his portrayal of the hothead KGB spy Kuryakin and partially “out of motivation of fear.”
“If I do this movie and someone asked me about the show I wanted to have an answer to give them,” he says. “I basically spent the weekend binge watching the whole show.”
He says the new movie incorporates elements of the original show, “so people who grew up with that will love and appreciate it but it is also a completely fresh take on it. That’s what we were going for, to make everybody happy.”
Like many spies (and actors who have played spies) before them, both utilized accents and costumes to disguise themselves and disappear into their roles.
Cavill, notes that the bespoke Saville Road suits he wore were the “final pieces of the puzzle” in creating the character. “The accent informs the way you physically interact with everybody and the suit the contains that.”
Hammer learned his accent listening to “old recordings of native Russian speakers trying to speak English, or barely speaking English and picking up little bits of both. At a certain point with the accent, I’d say after a week or two, it feels natural. You’re not spending your time making sure your words sound laboured. It starts to flow out as an accent.”
Blaine Thurier’s parents are OK with his day job as synthesizer player with the indie supergroup The New Pornographers but they probably won’t go be seeing his new movie.
“I had an evangelical upbringing,” he says, “so anything sexual you weren’t allowed to talk about and you certainly weren’t allowed to do anything about it. It can be very frustrating for a kid. The trauma of that has inextricably linked sex and religion in my brain. Everything I write these days seems to be about that.”
His new film, Teen Lust, is an homage to the teen comedies of the 1980s. The main character Neil (Jesse Carere) is determined to lose his virginity on the eve of his eighteenth birthday. The surprise is that he’s desperate to have sex, not just because of any natural desires, but because his parents are part of a Satanist cult led by John (Cary Elwes) and his wife Mary (True Blood’s Kristin Bauer van Straten) who plan on sacrificing Neil to prevent 1000 years of peace on earth. Imagine Porky’s with a dollop of Rosemary’s Baby.
“I won’t even tell them what it is about,” he says, adding, “It’s weird, but it is me trying to be normal.”
“I wanted to make a teen sex comedy but there are so many of them out there I felt it needed higher stakes and a little twist. I also wanted it to be a funny adventure, like Ferris Bueller, Back to the Future or Risky Business. They were touchstones. Stylistically it doesn’t look like any of those films but story wise, I wanted to have a big night of comedic adventure.”
The Manitoba-shot movie debuted at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival in the Contemporary World Cinema program. It was Thurier’s fourth visit to the fest and he was pleased with the response he received.
“If they laugh,” he says, “I’m happy. You wait for that first laugh. Once you get the first laugh it’s like, ‘OK, I can relax now,’ because if they found that funny they’ll probably find something else funny too.”
As for his parents, while Teen Lust would be too shocking for them, they seem at ease with the name of his band The New Pornographers.
“They think it is kind of edgy and out there,” he says. “I feel bad because my mom can brag to her friends at church that her son was on David Letterman but then they ask, ‘What’s the name of his band?’”
