I appear on “CTV News at 11:30” with anchor Natalie Johnson to talk about the weekend’s best shows and movies 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.”
Watch the whole thing HERE! (Starts at 15:53)
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 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!
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.
