Posts Tagged ‘Alan Arkin’

MINIONS: THE RISE OF GRU: 3 ½ STARS. “no deep thoughts, just sublime silliness.”

Not since the Three Stooges has nonsense been this much fun. Over five movies, the frantic, Tic Tac-shaped Minions, the silly sidekicks to former supervillain Gru (voiced by Steve Carell), have brought the most kid friendly anarchy to the screen since Curly said, “Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk,” for the first time.

Their new movie, “Minions: The Rise of Gru,” now playing in theatres, sets a new standard for silliness.

Set in 1976 San Francisco, the story begins with awkward twelve-year-old Gru and his dream.

“There are a lot of villains in the world,” he says, “but I am going to be a supervillain.”

To make his evil wish come true, he interviews to become a member of the world’s top outlaw team, the Vicious 6. But, he is not taken seriously. At all.

“I am pretty despicable,” Gru says proudly. “You don’t want to cross me.”

“Evil is for adults who steal powerful ancient stones and wreak havoc,” says Belle Bottom (Taraji P. Henson), the newly-appointed head of The Vicious 6, who took over from the former, recently deposed Wild Knuckles (Alan Arkin). “Not for tubby little punks, who should be at school learning, taking a recess and sucking his thumb! Come back when you’ve done something evil to impress me!”

To prove he’s got what it takes to be a supervillain, Gru steals something near and dear to the peach-pit sized hearts of the Vicious 6, their prized Zodiac Stone. Instead of impressing Belle Bottom, the theft turns her against Gru and his loyal Minions. With the mad, bad and dangerous to know Vicious 6 on their tail, Gru is kidnapped by Wild Knuckles. “My favorite villain is also my kidnapper,” marvels Gru. “This is going to be a great opportunity if you don’t kill me.”

Cue the Minion mayhem.

“The Minions: The Rise of Gru” provides fans of the franchise exactly what they want, no deep thoughts, just sublime silliness.

If you want to get all film critic-y about this, I suppose you could say the leitmotif is that of sweetly-inspired mayhem that follows the Minions wherever they go. But this isn’t a movie with layers of subtext or loads of diegetic elements. There is a denouement, a resolution to the story, but why overthink this? It’s short, fast and stupid, with an easily digested message of, as Armistead Maupin always says, finding your logical, not biological family. Or, as Gru says, “find your tribe and never let them go.” More zesty than arty, it’s made for kids, who I’m sure will gobble it up, while parents sit patiently through the 85 minute runtime with visions of the Three Stooges dancing in their heads.

POP LIFE: FULL EPISODE FROM SATURDAY MARCH 30, 2019 WITH DANNY DEVITO.

On this week’s edition of “Pop Life” comedy legend Danny DeVito reflects on the different characters he’s played, working with Tim Burton on “Dumbo” and his audition for the TV show “Taxi.” Then, the “Pop Life” panel, comedian Micheal McCreary, tech expert Takara Small and author and broadcaster Dan Riskin, discuss the term ‘outsider’ and the benefits of being unique.

Watch the whole thing HERE!

Film critic and pop culture historian Richard Crouse shares a toast with celebrity guests and entertainment pundits every week on CTV News Channel’s talk show POP LIFE.

Featuring in-depth discussion and debate on pop culture and modern life, POP LIFE features sit-down interviews with celebrities from across the entertainment world, including rock legends Sting and Meat Loaf, musicians Josh Groban and Sarah Brightman, comedian Ken Jeong, writer Fran Lebowitz, superstar jazz musician Diana Krall, stand-up comedian and CNN host W. Kamau Bell, actors Danny DeVito and Jay Baruchel, celebrity chefs Bobby Flay and Nigella Lawson, and many more.

POP LIFE: Danny DeVito on his career and feeling like an outsider.

This week on “Pop Life” comedy legend Danny DeVito reflects on the different characters he’s played, working with Tim Burton on “Dumbo” and his audition for the TV show “Taxi.”

“I read this thing was that you should go into a room and take it over, psychologically. So, in other words you want change the room in your own way. I can’t remember if it was Stanislavsky or acting coach or teacher, or who it was.

I used to go in and do things just to make an impression. I don’t even know if I had to but I did. With ‘Taxi’ there’s my famous story where I go in and they’re all in there and I’m going to go sit in the hot seat and read it. And it’s the first audition for that I had for the show and I said to them, “There’s one thing I want to know before I start. Who wrote this shit?” and I threw it on the table. It was like Louie walked into their lives. That was bold, but it worked. ‘Taxi’ was like a gift.”

Watch the whole thing HERE!

Film critic and pop culture historian Richard Crouse shares a toast with celebrity guests and entertainment pundits every week on CTV News Channel’s talk show POP LIFE.

Featuring in-depth discussion and debate on pop culture and modern life, POP LIFE features sit-down interviews with celebrities from across the entertainment world, including rock legends Sting and Meat Loaf, musicians Josh Groban and Sarah Brightman, comedian Ken Jeong, writer Fran Lebowitz, superstar jazz musician Diana Krall, stand-up comedian and CNN host W. Kamau Bell, actors Danny DeVito and Jay Baruchel, celebrity chefs Bobby Flay and Nigella Lawson, and many more.

DUMBO: 3 ½ STARS. “a Tim Burton movie rather than a remake of the 1941 film.”

Much of Tim Burton’s live action remake of the Disney classic “Dumbo” concerns itself with putting on a great show. Set in a travelling circus whose ringmaster Max Medici (Danny DeVito) is always looking for new ways to entertain people, the movie made me ask, “Is it possible to put on too much show?”

The Medici Brothers Circus has seen better days. Crowds are sparse and to keep the travelling circus afloat Max has sold off their show horses. When former circus star Holt Farrier (Colin Farrell) returns, injured from the war, his dream of starring in the big top are dashed. The only job available is tending to newly acquired elephant Jumbo. Medici purchased the pregnant pachyderm with the hope of having a baby elephant on display will sell tickets.

When the baby is born Max is convinced that Little Jumbo’s gigantic, floppy ears will turn him into a laughing stock and actually turn audiences off. It’s not until Farrier’s kids, Milly (Nico Parker) and Joe (Finley Hobbins), discover Little Jumbo—now dubbed Dumbo after a catastrophic big top debut—can flap his ears like wings and fly that Max sees a way to earn back his investment. Enter amusement park entrepreneur V. A. Vandevere (Michael Keaton) with an offer that could save the circus or endanger everyone, most of all Dumbo.

“Dumbo” treads familiar ground for director Tim Burton. His best films tell stories of outsiders like Pee-Wee Herman, Edward Scissorhands or Ed Wood, lovable characters who weren’t quite made for this world. He’s drawn to outcasts but finds a narrative route for them to find a connection and a sense of community through their abilities and art. “Dumbo” breathes the same air, focussing on old-fashioned caricatures of circus folk like strongmen and mermaids, and, of course, the underdog elephant whose unique ability makes him a hero.

As such “Dumbo” feels like a Tim Burton movie rather than a remake of the 1941 film. His trademark whimsy is fully on display in the form of highly stylized design, fanciful casting and costuming and, “What’s a Tim Burton movie without Danny DeVito?” It looks and feel like a Burton film for better and for worse.

The better is his unique and heartfelt love of the unloved. He coddles his characters, imbuing Dumbo with soulful eyes to compliment his outsize ears. It’s almost impossible to understand how anyone couldn’t see the beauty in this unusual creature. Dumbo is a waif, an innocent whose inner beauty and strength is well beyond his years. Burton gets the character and keeps Dumbo mostly front and centre as the action swirls around him.

Here’s the issue. There’s too much action. The original film was a brief 63 minutes, a tight telling of the tale. Burton almost doubles that length, adding in anti-corporate subplots, action sequences and new characters. Near the film’s end, however, the extra elements feel superfluous, unnecessary. Sometimes more is less. The heart of the story is found in Dumbo’s character not the layers of CGI action that surround him.

Having said that, “Dumbo” is a treat for the peepers. Every detail from the costumes to Medici’s grinning faced-train are pure Burton eye-candy. Fun performances from DeVito and Keaton keep things lively and the pro-animal message is heartfelt adding up to a movie that doesn’t seem to trust its star, a flying elephant, to be enough of a draw.

GOING IN STYLE: 3 STARS. “’The Italian Job’ with electric wheelchairs.”

“Going in Style” is a blistering social commentary disguised as an old coot caper comedy. Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman and Alan Arkin play factory workers who did all the right things only to have the system give them the middle finger in old age.

A remake from the 1979 George Burns, Art Carney, and Lee Strasberg adventure “Going in Style,” the movie begins with Joe (Caine) confronting his condescending bank manager (John Pais). The older man’s mortgage has tripled and he will soon be evicted from his home. As they argue, outside the manager’s office armed masked men invade the bank, scooping handfuls of cash from the tellers. Joe is unharmed in the heist—one of the thieves tells him, “It is a culture’s duty to take care of the elderly.”—and later excitedly tells his family and friends Willie (Freeman) and Al (Arkin) about the robbery.

The afternoon’s excitement aside, Joe’s financial situation is still dire. His old company, now in the midst of a takeover, has frozen all pension cheques. He needs to come up with a way to get his hands on some cash. Ditto for Willie, who needs a new kidney and Al who can barely afford to feed himself.

When their favourite waitress gives them a free piece of pie with the truism, “Everybody deserves pie,” it dawns on Joe that she’s right. “We should be having our pie and eating it too,” he says, hatching a plan to steal back their pensions. “These banks practically destroyed this country and nothing ever happened to them,” he says. “If we get caught we get a bed, three meals a day and free healthcare.”

“Going in Style” then drops the social commentary and becomes a heist flick. Think “The Italian Job” with electric wheelchairs and you’ll get the idea.

Much of the charm of “Going in Style” comes from watching Caine, Freeman and Arkin glide—OK, it’s more like shuffle—through this material. There’s nothing particularly new here, we’ve seen loads of elderly men take back their lives on film in recent years, but subtext and actor goodwill elevate this slight story.

Caine, Freeman and Arkin are formidable actors but expertly portray the invisibility that can come with old age. As eighty-somethings they are unseen—banks take advantage of them, the police ignore them—until they take their future into their own hands. The story is implausible but by the time the heist happens you want the best for these grandpas, no matter how silly the story gets.

“Going in Style” is part knockabout comedy, part rage against the machine. Director Zach Braff adds in just enough sentimentality and slapstick to frame the film’s message of “having a pie of pie whenever the hell I want to!”

LOVE THE COOPERS: 2 STARS. “cue the yuletide family dysfunction.”

The Christmas season doesn’t start when The Bay puts up wreaths and ornaments for sale in mid-October or when Starbucks introduces the red cup. Nope. Paradoxically, on the big screen, Christmas begins in November with American Thanksgiving. This year along with the turkey and the yam-topped sweet potatoes comes sage Christmas advice from Grandpa Bucky (Alan Arkin): “Everyone thinks you can schedule happiness, but you can’t.” Listen and learn. It’s Christmastime at the movies so cue the yuletide family dysfunction.

Four generations of Coopers are headed to Mon (Diane Keaton) and Dad’s (John Goodman) place for Christmas dinner. What the kids and grandchildren and assorted others don’t know is that the rents are splitting after 40 years of marriage but want to give the kids “one last perfect Christmas” before announcing the divorce.

Among the guests descending for holiday vittles are an unemployed sad sack son (Ed Helms) and his children. Olivia Wilde as Eleanor, the philosophically inclined but reckless daughter accompanied by Bailey (Jake Lacy), an Iraq-bound soldier she meets at the airport and convinces to be her dinner date and a kleptomaniac sister (Marisa Tomei) who apparently can look to people souls. There’s more, like the excellently named Aunt Fishy (June Squibb) and Ruby (Amanda Seyfried), an angelic waitress at Bucky’s favourite diner, but there’s so many characters the movie starts to lose track of them and so does the audience. “Love the Coopers” is so jam pacekd with people it takes 20 minutes of narration to introduce them all. Imagine a Christmas tale written by Leo Tolstoy, with a dozen or more characters weaving in and out of the narrative—plus a dog flatulence joke!—and you get the idea.

Sting songs decorate the soundtrack as life times of regret and resentment boil over. Before you can say, “Pass the stuffing,” a litany of hardships—unemployment, divorce, empty nest syndrome, longing and underwear soiling to name a few—have been touched on and while there are moments of actual raw emotion they’re buttressed by enough schmaltz to fill eight CDs worth of Celine Dion Christmas ballads. For instance Eleanor’s meet cute with Bailey is the stuff of a solid rom com. Her out-of-control run through a hospital—knocking over patients and grieving visitors—is not.

There are too many stories happening at once—but don’t worry there’s “helpful” narration to explain the details—for you to become invested in the characters. Characters come and go and by the time they’re all in the same place story threads are left hanging like twisted tinsel on a wilted Christmas tree. Director Jessie “I Am Sam” Nelson tidies everything up in the final moments, putting a pretty bow on the package, while throwing story credibility out the window.

Much of “Love the Coopers” is as appealing as last year’s fruitcake, but in the odd moment where it leaves the emotional manipulation in the background and focuses on the story’s sense of melancholy and messages about the power of family, it casts a warm glow.

GET SMART: 2 ½ STARS

Turning a beloved television show into a film isn’t as easy as simply writing a longer, feature length script. For every Sex and the City or X Files that successfully makes the leap from small to big screens, there’s a Bewitched, Mod Squad or The Honeymooners, all ideas that should have worked but failed to find audiences. Or, in the parlance of Maxwell Smart, “They missed it by that much…”

The new big screen adaptation of Agent Smart’s exploits, Get Smart, is loosely based on the 1960s television series and while it tries to be all things to all people—there’s slapstick, action, romance, The Rock!—what it doesn’t try to be, for better and for worse, is a photocopy of the original series.

In the new film evil doers KAOS infiltrate the super-secret offices of CONTROL and learn the identity of each of their working agents. The only two uncompromised operatives left are Agent 99, an expert spy who was recently rendered unrecognizable after massive reconstructive plastic surgery—unless of course you saw Brokeback Mountain or The Devil Wears Prada and you’ll note she looks just like Anne Hathaway—and Maxwell Smart (Steve Carell), a desk-bound analyst who recently passed his field agent exam. The future of CONTROL and the free world rests in their hands as they do battle with KAOS head honcho Siegfried (Terence Stamp).

Fans of the television show will be pleased that many of the touchstones from the series are firmly in place. Max uses a shoe phone; there’s a new, but not entirely improved cone-of-silence and, of course, the catchphrases—“Sorry about that Chief,” “Missed it by that much,” and “Would you believe…”—are all intact.

What has changed is the tone. Get Smart has the silly jokes and the pratfalls of the series, but it can’t seem to decide whether it is a full-on comedy or an action film, or both. Either way it is an uneasy mix topped off with an unconvincing romance that only muddies the waters even more. Just when the movie works up a head of comedy steam it is often sidelined by a full-on action sequence and vice-a-versa.

Carell puts his own spin on the character which actually has little to do with the original Agent 86, Maxwell Smart. As played by Don Adams in the series and a couple of reunion movies—The Nude Bomb and the TV movie Get Smart, Again—Smart was an ironically named klutz who prevailed against evil not because he was clever or talented but because he was a self-confident fool who usually got lucky. Carell’s take on the character is different and it changes everything.

His Maxwell Smart is smart; a dedicated worker bee who tries harder than everybody else and prevails because of perseverance. It’s a small change but it inverts the character from someone an audience enjoys laughing at to someone who tries to make the audience laugh with him. That one change sucks much of the anarchic spirit of the series out of the big screen treatment, leaving us with a rather generic spy spoof.

That being said there are some good things about Get Smart. Carell makes good use of his innate comic timing and brings a straight-faced charm to the role, but I wish they hadn’t called him Maxwell Smart. By any other name I would likely have thought this was an interesting comic creation but, frankly, he pales by comparison to Adams who imprinted his take on the character on an entire generation’s consciousness. For those unfamiliar with the original show, however, and there are likely many younger audience members who have never had the pleasure, Carell’s Maxwell Smart will become the new standard should this movie spin off into a sequel or two.

There is much to enjoy in Get Smart; there are some good gags, a nice nod or two to the television series, some good action and even an improbable but fun explanation regarding the gap in age between Agent 99 and 86, but for old timers like me who grew up on the television series it doesn’t feel like the real deal.