What is Richard Crouse’s Movie Show (Fridays at 10:30 am on the Independent Film Channel)?
It’s kind of a mash-up of my old movie review show Reel to Real, a really cool DVD extra, Inside the Actor’s Studio and The Jack Paar Show (that’s where I got the glasses and the slicked back hair). With all due respect to Mr. Ebert and Mr. Siskel there are no thumbs, there’s no gossip, no yelling host and no celebrity sightings. Just movie chat and reviews, simple and straight up.
I’ll walk you through the most recent releases, add in a dash of historical perspective with a Did You Know segment that could cover anything from the early days of Warner Brothers to the classic Ray Harryhausen sci fi movies of the 1950s to Salvador Dali’s work with Alfred Hitchcock or why Rudolf Valentino’s picture is on the Sheik condom wrapper, and let you know what’s hot on DVD. I’m hoping for an eclectic mix that looks beyond what is available at first run theaters or the front rack of the video store. Blockbusters are great, and I’ll review them, but so are foreign movies and documentaries. Expect the unexpected.
We’ll also have guests sit in from time to time. Already we have shot interviews with Ed Harris, Viggo Mortensen, Mark Ruffalo, Jeremy Piven, Bill Maher, Larry Charles and even Seasame Street fairy-in-training Muppet Abby Cadabby. As I said earlier, expect the unexpected. I have plans for a variety of theme shows as well, including one on unusual music movies. Just know that it won’t include any movies with the words “High School” in title unless the next word is “Confidential”… and not “Musical.” This will be a HSM-free zone. Stay tuned.
Richard Crouse’s Movie Show won’t look or sound like any other movie show on television… I mean how many other movie shows have a twangin’ surf guitar theme song? Hear it once, hum it forever!
So check us out on IFC every Friday at 10:30 am—watch it live, set your PVRs, crank up your VCRs, whatever. If you’re a movie fan you won’t want to miss it.
For every serious mafia drama like Carlito’s Way, there is another film that doesn’t take the La Cosa Nostra as seriously.
Gangster comedies like The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight and Some Like It Hot are early examples of gangland gigglers.
This weekend Robert De Niro, who won an Oscar playing Vito Corleone in The Godfather: Part II, and Michelle Pfeiffer, who played a gangster’s moll in Scarface, team up for The Family, a darkly comedic mafia movie.
The film also features Sopranos’ star Dominic “Junior Soprano” Chianese and Vincent “Big Pussy” Pastore in a story about notorious crime family the Manzoni’s, who find themselves relocated to Normandy, France as part of the witness protection program. Trouble is, they have some difficulty blending in with the locals.
This isn’t the first time De Niro has played his tough guy image for laughs. In Analyze This and its sequel Analyze That, he’s Paul Vitti, a mob boss who suffers from panic attacks. To help him through he hires psychiatrist Dr. Ben Sobel (Billy Crystal). “What is my goal here?” asks the doctor. “To make you a happy, well-adjusted gangster?” The first movie was a big hit—both commercially and critically but the second one didn’t fare as well. Roger Ebert wrote, “what seemed like a clever idea the first time feels like a retread the second.”
In the Whole Nine Yards former hit man Jimmy the Tulip has trouble adapting to life on the right side of the law. As played by Bruce Willis he’s in hiding after ratting out members of Chicago’s deadly Gogolak gang. When his identity is discovered by his neighbor (Matthew Perry) Jimmy has to reluctantly revert to old habits to survive. “It’s not important how many people I’ve killed,” he says. “What’s important is how I get along with the people who are still alive.”
Years before Pride and Prejudice and Zombies became an unexpected literary hit, Hollywood co-opted the marquee value of Jane Austin’s name. Director Jim Abrahams of Naked Gun and Top Secret fame, looked to the underworld for the inspiration of Jane Austin’s Mafia. A spoof movie that draws heavily on Martin Scorsese’s Casino (and not so much on Austin’s oeuvre) it marked Lloyd Bridges’ last appearance on the big screen, playing a Mafia godfather. A quick watch, the film runs for a scant 84 minutes, six of which are taken up with credits.
“I’m annoyed by the story,” says Academy Award winning documentary filmmaker Errol Morris. “I just imagine that our public figures, the people we have given so much authority and power would more deeply reflect on what they’re doing and what they have done. Is that too much to ask?”
The subject of his ire is also the subject of his latest film The Unknown Known, Donald Rumsfeld, architect of the Iraq War.
The movie’s name is Rumsfeld doublespeak for “things you think you know that it turns out you did not,” which is appropriate for this riveting look at one of the most controversial characters of the twenty first century’s first decade.
At age 81 Rumsfeld gamely allows Morris to probe into his entire 50-year political career, as both the youngest—under President Gerald Ford—and the oldest person—under George W. Bush—to serve as Secretary of Defense.
“A friend of mine,” says Morris, “who is a political journalist, we argued a lot about the line in the movie where Rumsfeld says that the policies of Barack Obama have vindicated the policies of George W. Bush.
“I wouldn’t quite put it that way. But he is right in one regard. Many of these policies are still around. They still exist. There are still military tribunals. There are still detainees in Guantanamo. There is still the Patriot Act.
“My political journalist friend said, ‘Well maybe, even though we don’t like to think about it this way, are still living in a Rumsfeld world. The world he created.’
“I think that’s what is really important at the heart of this movie. It’s not like the Bush Administration disappeared when Barack Obama was elected and reelected. It didn’t. Those policies still linger on for whatever reason. Perhaps because we have a Republican congress, perhaps for other reasons but they changed everything, but they didn’t change everything for the better and we’re going to have to reckon with that for many, many years.”
I tell Morris I think he should consider using the tagline “It’s Rumsfeld’s World. We Just Live in It,” to promote the movie. “Think about it,” I said.
“I have thought about it!” he quickly replied shaking my hand. “I like it. As long as we don’t have to pay you it’s a deal.”
Director Alfonso Cuarón described the process of making Gravity as “painful and gruesome” for his star Sandra Bullock.
“Bodily fluids come to mind,” says Bullock. “There was blood. Blisters.”
The Oscar winner plays Dr. Ryan Stone, an astronaut untethered from her space shuttle following a debris storm. Cut adrift from her ride back to earth and her space partner (George Clooney) she floats through the inky darkness until she discovers the will and a way to survive.
Initially the filmmakers considered using the “vomit comet”—a plane that allows you to achieve weightlessness—to create the zero gravity of space. When that idea was rejected new technology was built to facilitate the film’s thrilling and chilling outer space scenes.
“There were contraptions that took twenty minutes to get into,” says Bullock. “that harnessed you and locked you into something that you had no control over once it started.”
She describes long takes in really uncomfortable positions strung up like a marionette on a twelve-wire system, an office chair on a hydraulic lift, cameras that flew toward her and the frustration of being “attached to something and not being able to use your body the way you’re used to.”
“It was something completely new,” she says. “It was more like being part of Cirque du Soleil than what we had been used to as actors.”
The technical issues of the job were physically challenging—“I love it,” she says, “but I didn’t love it while I was doing it.”— but she adds that the shoot, emotionally, was “the Wild West.”
“Most of it was frustration and trying not to take your anger out on Alfonso. I had no one else listening to me but him so he got the brunt of it. But it was my frustration with myself because I didn’t have all the tools I was used to to get me where I wanted to go.”
“I missed being in the sun. I missed being with my son. I missed being with people and having communication. It was lonely. Luckily I got to get out of it at the end of the day and appreciate the sunshine or my boy.”
In the end the arduous shoot was worth it. There’s Oscar buzz surrounding Bullock’s performance and she even got the thumbs up from real life spaceman Chris Hadfield
“Sandra Bullock was great,” he tweeted. “I’d fly with her.”
At a Toronto International Film Festival press conference on Saturday, Hugh Jackman said his new film Prisoners is “not just (a film) that grips you and keeps you on the edge of your seat, but one that actually makes you contemplate the themes for days after on many levels.”
He plays a father who takes to vigilante justice after his child has been abducted. The Denis Villeneuve movie raises the question of whether Jackman’s character goes beyond the pale to get his daughter back or, alternatively, if he does enough.
“I can’t make up the mind of audiences,” he said. “I’m thrilled that Denis and Aaron (Guzikowski) wrote a script that forces that moral ambiguity. I think the film’s power exists in that.
“I’ll tell you a little story about watching the film for the first time with my wife, who was holding my hand. I literally had nail markings in my hand as she gripped me and then there were certain parts where she removed her hand from mine and I thought, ‘Oh, maybe I’m not sleeping in the marital bed tonight.’”
Jackman delivers a powerful, primal performance of a man on the brink. It’s work that drew praise from his co-stars.
“If you’re asking me if Hugh Jackman deserves an Oscar,” said Jake Gyllenhaal, “the answer to that question is absolutely yes.”
Co-star Terence Howard called Jackman, “a sweet man,” but added watching the actor’s strength of courage come through in the violent scenes was like “witnessing a man channelling all of this frustration,” not acting. “He deserves an Oscar.”
Jackman’s performance anchors the movie, which is unrelenting in its approach to telling the story.
“(The movie) is uncomfortable,” says Jackman, “You think, ‘OK, we’re going down this path with this guy and yeah, let’s enact some rightful justice.’ Then all of a sudden you feel uncomfortable and what that forces you to do is question, if you went along with him, why you so easily went with that way of thinking. It questions what you would do in that situation and that’s where the film’s power lies.”
“There is a reason we don’t just go to comedies,” he says. “Somehow as humans we also need to touch on real elemental fears that we push down every day of our lives. And collectively delve into and discuss it and feel.”
It snowed in Anaheim, California Friday afternoon but it wasn’t a freak storm, just a blast of Disney magic at D23, the Mouse House’s equivalent of Comic Con.
As Broadway star Indina Menzel sang Let it Go from the upcoming animated film Frozen, artificial flakes fluttered down from the rafters, gently covering the 5000 faithful fans who gathered for the first of two star-studded early-look previews.
The convention featured over 200 presentations, panels and concerts, but these sneak peek events, which focussed on Disney’s reverence for their past and their commitment to the future, were among the most highly anticipated.
At Friday’s event, Disney chairman and chief executive Bob Eiger and chief creative officer John Lasseter were greeted with the kind of audience response usually reserved for rock stars and royal babies.
They unveiled the new short film Get a Horse, which mixes 85 year-old Walt Disney Mickey Mouse sketches and state-of-the art 3D computer animation. It also features a vocal performance from Walt himself, pieced together from old tapes. “Someone has to update his IMDB page,” joked director Lauren MacMullan.
Advance looks at The Good Dinosaur, which imagines a world if dinosaurs had survived, Inside Out, a movie Lasseter described as “one of the most unique films I have ever been associated with,” and Finding Dory, the sequel to one of Pixar’s most loved films, were met with cheers.
Saturday’s presentation unveiled teases from Disney’s live action slate. Paying tribute to Disney’s past Kenneth Branagh will direct a live action Cinderella, and another film revisits one of Disney’s great villains. Maleficent stars Angelina Jolie as the Sleeping Beauty villain, a role she’s coveted since youth. “Since I was a little girl Maleficent was always my favorite,” she told the crowd. “I wanted to know more about her.”
Tomorrowland, a sci fi film starring George Clooney, was inspired by a box found in the Disney archives. Labelled simply 1952, the “dusty old box” contained a mysterious mishmash of items, including a copy of Amazing Stories magazine and a short animated documentary, that inspired Lost screenwriter Damon Lindelof to pen the speculative story.
The most obvious tribute to Disney’s legacy is Saving Mr. Banks, which brings the late visionary to life on the big screen. Tom Hanks stars as Walt attempting to buy the rights to Mary Poppins from writer P.L. Travers, played by Emma Thompson. Shot on location at the Burbank Studios where Walt worked, the film is timed to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Mary Poppins.
The Sheridan College trained Dreamworks animator David Soren first hit on the concept of Turbo ten years ago.
“It started as a lark,” he says. “There was a competition and I turned in the idea the night before the deadline. The Fast and the Furious with snails. That was it. It happened that it won the competition and Dreamworks bought the idea. Then it went nowhere for a long time.”
While Soren worked on other projects like Chicken Run, Shrek, Shark Tale and directed a trio of TV specials based on the Madgascar film franchise the idea of an aspirational snail with dreams of speed stayed with him.
“My six year old boy, from birth, came with a love of cars and racing and all things fast,” he says. “I was not a car nut or a race fan growing up but it really got me thinking about the character in different terms and that freed me up to realize that a snail really is kind of a perfect underdog. Nobody expects anything of them, they’re lives are filled with obstacles; nobody really knows what they do, other than being gross and pesky.”
The next step was character design, no mean feat when your stars are ninety percent shell.
“In the beginning the fact that all those things that you usually rely on, like arms and legs and eyebrows [were missing meant that] we had to get more creative about how to do it. I did drawings early on of these snails with arms and it was creepy. It was just a matter of coming up with other viable ways for them to emote and move around.”
Taking his kids to animated movies also gave him a real sense of what he wanted and more importantly, didn’t want, in Turbo.
“I find myself growing impatient with animated movies that are just a bunch of gags,” he says. “I feel like I am just going to amuse or baby sit my kid. And yet by the same virtue I think it is pointless to make an animated movie that doesn’t have some appeal to children. It has made me want to see all sides of it a bit more and find the heart, find the human story in there. That universal thing that any audience member can connect with but not lose the kids either, because they’re important.”
“I knew it was a no-brainer of a subject,” says director Jamie Kastner about the “boogie oogie oogie” topic of his latest documentary, The Secret Disco Revolution.
“Great pictures, great music. Kitschy, funny fashions.”
As the words come out of his mouth he glances at the person sitting near him at the table; disco diva and co-star of the film, Thelma Houston.
“Thelma was never kitschy!” he corrects himself. “I didn’t mean Thelma. That is an adjective that could never be applied to the woman sitting here. And, I’ve seen many of her hairstyles over the years.”
Houston, the singer of the hit disco anthem Don’t Leave Me This Way, doesn’t think kitschy when she thinks about disco.
“I look back at it as a time when my record was at the height and a lot was going on, and everyone was having a good time,” says Houston.
The song that made her a star, almost didn’t happen, however.
“I was on the Motown label and everyone was trying to get that elusive R&B smash hit,” she says. “I was there almost everyday, in the studio trying to come up with something. Then someone, Suzanne de Passe who was the A&R person at the time, came up with the song Don’t Leave Me This Way and thought it would be a good dance song. We thought maybe this is the way to go.
“But then we had to take it to the chairman, Mr. (Berry)Gordy to have him listen to it and give us notes. Because I was friendly with Suzanne and her assistant they allowed me to go with them up to Berry’s house. We were so sure of it. I’d be there, and he would see it was going to be a hit. I was so excited.
“Early in the morning we went up there to the mansion up in Bel Air. They played a couple of things, saving mine to the end. They put the song on. He listened and I’m sitting there looking at him. When he finished hearing it, he said, ‘Hmmmm, no. I don’t get it. I don’t hear a hit.’ I was so disappointed coming down off that hill but Suzanne felt very strongly about it and she put it out anyway and it was a hit.
“For me it wasn’t just the disco era, it was like, ‘Wow, I finally had a hit.’”
Billy Crystal’s fourth and most recent grandchild was born on March 14. “Born on my, I hate to say it, 65th birthday,” he says. “No! I love to say it, because I’m here and it’s good.”
The “here” is a Toronto press junket for Monster’s University, a prequel to the Oscar winning Monster’s Inc.
In both he voices Mike Wazowski, a green eyeball creature whose goal in life is to scare kids. I ask if his grandchildren have seen either film. “The little guy’s seen everything,” he jokes, “I’m a night light.”
The three older kids were introduced to the movie in a scary way.
“The girls and I were walking in a mall and some of these paparazzi — I have to say it — creeps, jumped out and started taking pictures of us. Really freaked them out. ‘Why are they doing that!” So I had to explain to them what I did. That I was internationally famous…” (pauses for the laugh).
“So I showed them Monster’s Inc. I couldn’t show them the orgasm scene from When Harry Met Sally. ‘Why is she making that noise?’ Then I became Grandpa Mike. I had to be Mike Wazowski for about a year. They’d call the house, ‘Is Mike there?’ ‘OK, I’ll get him. Hold on.’ (Pauses.) ‘Hi!’ (he says in Wazowski’s distinctive high-pitched voice.) ‘Are you looking for me?’
“Now they see me around. There were billboards when I did the Oscars so now they are kind of used to it.
“It’s confusing to me! It was, ‘Who’s that guy?’ They watch the same things over and over and over and over again. And over again. And over again. We were watching Dora the Explorer exploring the same thing and then I was looking at the guide and I saw that City Slickers was on. I took the remote. ‘Let’s see what else is on. There I am!’ She actually just said, ‘How?’
“Now it’s like bragging rights at school, but we’re trying to play it down. We live in a town where a lot of the kid’s parents are performers. We read book at their school every two weeks, and there are a lot of famous parents.”
When I ask if they and their friends will ever realize how cool it is that the “internationally famous” Billy Crystal read to them he laughs, “I think OK, but Will Ferrell read the day before.”
What is Richard Crouse’s Movie Show (Fridays at 10:30 am on the Independent Film Channel)? 
