I join CTV NewsChannel anchor Roger Peterson to talk about the infamous Western “Rust,” the misplaced heroics of “Sharp Corner” and the character study of “The Luckiest Man in America.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
SYNOPSIS: In “Rust,” a new Western now playing in theatres, an outlaw grandfather breaks his grandson out of jail after he accidentally killed a man. On the run toward Mexico, the pair are pursued by a relentless sheriff and a dogged bounty hunter.
CAST: Alec Baldwin, Patrick Scott McDermott, Josh Hopkins, Frances Fisher, and Travis Fimmel. Directed by Joel Souza.
REVIEW: If not for the tragic circumstances surrounding the making of this film, it’s unlikely much ink would be spilled on “Rust.”
Over-long, miscast and cliché riddled, it’s destined to be remembered not as a compelling horse opera, but as the film that cost cinematographer Halyna Hutchins her life.
In October 2021 the forty-two-year-old was fatally shot when a prop gun, fired by actor Alex Baldwin, was accidentally loaded with a live round. The same bullet struck director Joel Souza in the shoulder. He was treated in hospital and released the next day.
As a result, it’s difficult to view the 1882-set “Rust,” a movie whose narrative is driven by an accidental shooting and features Baldwin suggesting to his young grandson to make sure his gun is loaded, “the next time you want to kill somebody,” through any other lens than real life.
Still, I’ll give it a go.
A traditional Western that explores well-worn themes of family, redemption and the morality of violence, “Rust” plants many of the same story seeds as “Unforgiven” and “The Searchers,” but, unfortunately, they never bear fruit. Mixing morality and survival with archetypal characters (Baldwin’s loner with a past, etc.) is fine, not everything has to blaze a new trail, but to be effective, the story needs interesting characters and worldbuilding.
That’s where “Rust” suffers.
A miscast Baldwin shares chemistry with his young co-star Patrick Scott McDermott, but fails to deliver a frontier vibe. His character is more grumpy grandfather than grizzled gunslinger. “I may be long in the tooth,” he says in one of the film’s many overwritten bits of dialogue, “but no one has sawn my horns off yet.”
His take on elderly outlaw Harland Rust feels like a faint shadow of those who came before. He’s a wannabe William “Will” Munny, but unable to hold the movie’s core.
Touched by tragedy, “Rust,” despite Halyna Hutchins’s beautiful, moody cinematography, is an uncomfortable watch and overstays its welcome at 140 minutes.
NOTE: The film is dedicated to Hutchins and a portion of the film’s profits are going to her family.
On today’s “What’s Entertaining” on NewsTalk 1010, host John Moore and I talk about the passing of David Crosby, the charges against Alec Baldwin over the on set shooting, and actor Austin Butler, who seems to be cursed with speaking like Elvis for the rest of his life.
Listen to the whole thing HERE!
They grow up so fast, don’t they? It was just four years ago that the Templetons welcomed a new child into the family. Ted was an odd baby who wore a suit onesie, carried a briefcase and spoke the language of the boardroom. “I may look like a baby but I was born all grown up,” he said in “The Boss Baby.”
Cut to “The Boss Baby: Family Business,” now playing in theatres. Older brother Tim (voiced by James Marsden) is now an adult and estranged from his “boss” baby brother Ted (Alec Baldwin). Their lives have taken different paths. Tim is now married to Carol (Eva Longoria) and a suburban dad to 7-year-old daughter Tabitha (Ariana Greenblatt) and infant Tina (Amy Sedaris). Ted, unsurprisingly, is a hedge fund manager and workaholic.
Tabitha seems to be following in her uncle’s footsteps, attending the Acorn Center for Advanced Childhood. She’s at the top of her class but what she doesn’t know is that Tina, the baby, is a spy for BabyCorp. “I’m in the family business,” she says. “And now you work for me Boomers!” Her mission? Find out exactly what’s up at Tabitha’s school and if its founder, Dr. Erwin Armstrong (Jeff Goldblum) is really planning a baby revolution. “We can make parents do whatever we want,” he yells.
The investigation brings the brothers, who drink a formula that turns them back into toddlers, together and reveals deep bonds. “Just because you grow up,” says Tina, “doesn’t mean you have to grow apart.”
Like all sequels “Boss Baby: Family Business” is bigger, louder and more frenetic than the original. In a blur of color and action, it uses kid-friendly humour and inventive animation to re-enforce a standard lesson about the importance of family.
The messaging may be generic, but the solid voice work from Marsden, Baldwin, Sedaris and Goldblum (who seems to be having a blast) inject vibrant life into it. This is essentially a one joke premise dragged kicking and screaming into feature length but director Tom McGrath expands the world of the first film (which he also directed) staging scenes with baby ninjas and inside Tim’s head. There are no big surprises really, but he does keep much of the mischievousness that made the first film so enjoyable.
“The Boss Baby: Family Business” moves at a rapid speed that may exhaust parents, but should keep young minds, who may have followed the adventures of the Boss Baby series on Netflix for the last four years, entertained.
Edward Norton spent twenty years trying to bring Jonathan Lethem’s bestselling novel “Motherless Brooklyn” to the big screen. Lethem set his detective story in the 1990s but Norton takes liberties, adding new characters and moving the action to the 1950s, lending a retro “Chinatown” vibe to the proceedings.
Norton, wrote, produced, directed and also stars as Lionel Essrog, a gumshoe with Tourette syndrome and an obsessive-compulsive eye for the little details that solve cases. “It’s like I got glass in my brain,” he says. When Frank Minna (Bruce Willis), his mentor and only friend, is killed while investigating a case no one is surprised. His colleagues, Tony (Bobby Cannavale), Gilbert (Ethan Suplee) and Danny (Dallas Roberts), accept that death is an almost inevitable part of the job but Lionel thinks there is more to the story. He is convinced Frank was about to blow the lid off a conspiracy involving Moses Randolph (Alec Baldwin), a ruthless politician who clears out African American communities to make way for redevelopment. “There’s something going down,” says Lionel, “and it’s big, and they were not happy about what he found.” His sleuthing leads him to Randolph’s hinky brother (Willem Dafoe), community activist Laura Rose (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), and a tale of corruption, lust and power where everyone is at risk.
Norton has created a detailed noir with “Motherless Brooklyn” that, while engaging, overstays its welcome in a long, drawn out conclusion. Terrific performances (there is some capitol A acting happening here), effective dialogue and anxiety-inducing music plus great 1950s era flourishes (even if Baldwin does smoke a recent vintage American Spirit cigarette in closeup) entertain the eyes and ears but as Lionel uncovers clues we are drawn further into a rabbit hole of murky motives, many of which are left dangling by the time the end credits roll. It’s an ambitious movie that feels meandering and overstuffed with plot.
It does, however, have its high notes. Norton is careful in his portrayal of a person with Tourettes and while he may have an extreme case of the syndrome it is never used as a gag or a gimmick. Instead it’s a sympathetic representation of a person with neurological tics making his way through life.
As for Baldwin, it’s hard to not see echoes of his Donald Trump impression in Moses Randolph. He’s an aggressive anything-to-win type who plays the power game to the disadvantage of anyone who gets in his way. It’s a big, blustery performance and one of the film’s pleasures.
Gugu Mbatha-Raw brings both vulnerability and steel to Laura, elevating her from a plot device to a living, breathing character.
“Motherless Brooklyn” is frustrating. It contains many interesting, thought provoking ideas on gentrification, some nicely rendered scenes and fine acting but errs on the side of self-indulgence to the point where the audience loses interest in its machinations.
“Framing John DeLorean,” the new hybrid documentary of the business life on the “Back to the Future” car creator, is a strange movie. Part traditional doc, complete with talking heads, archival photographs and even some FBI sting footage, it is also part docu-drama, featuring recreations with actor Alec Baldwin as DeLorean. Weirder still, Baldwin, all busy eyebrows and grey hair, offers up backstage observations on playing DeLorean. The carman was a bold character and portraying him on screen requires taking chances; most surprising of all is that it all works rather seamlessly.
It’s an interesting, ambiguously meta take on a man who was a bit of a hybrid himself. Part genius, part criminal, he was a person whose vision for reinvention extended from the futuristic car he designed to enhancing his own chin with plastic surgery to present the image he had of himself to the world, face first.
Directors and co-writers Don Argott and Sheena M. Joyce provide the necessary background; how, at General Motors he spearheaded the creation of the GTO, Firebird, and Grand Prix, how he was a devoted father and how, as CEO of the DeLorean Motor Company, he revolutionized the car industry with his stainless steel sports cars and gave a massive shot in the arm to Northern Ireland’s economy during the Troubles. They also detail the sordid side, the FBI videotaped sting and arrest for trafficking cocaine, Phil Donahue’s public excoriation of the man and his business practices, a divorce and marriage to a much younger woman and bankruptcy.
The resulting portrait is layered look at an unknowable man. Archival footage reveals a person with plenty of bluster and hubris, someone whose grandiose ideas required extraordinary measures to come to fruition. Baldwin, under an inch of exaggerated prosthetic make-up, tries to contextualize DeLorean’s thought processes by applying an actor’s process to his subject’s thinking, but it is conjecture, not fact. Interesting conjecture, but conjecture all the same and not exactly the stuff of true documentary. More compelling are DeLorean’s daughter Kathryn and son Zach who lend open and honest analysis of their father. Zach even colorfully describes his father’s life as a Hollywood movie. “It’s got cocaine,” he says. “It’s got ‘bleeping’ hot chicks. It’s got sports cars, ‘bleeping’ Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. The war on drugs. You got FBI agents and you got ‘bleeping’ hardcore drug dealers.”
“Framing John DeLorean” is a compellingly told story of a complex man, an Icarus, that asks but never answers the question at the core of DeLorean’s myth: Was he a cutthroat criminal or innovative genius or both? Instead it provides fodder for further exploration on the man and his methods.
Music documentaries often veer into hagiography, looking back with rose coloured glasses at their subject. There are heaps of high praise in “Gordon Lightfoot: If You Could Read My Mind,” a new career retrospective from co-directors Martha Kehoe and Joan Tosoni, but right from the outset it displays an honesty rare in authorized bios.
After a few bars of his chauvinistic ’60s hit “For Lovin’ Me” Lightfoot, watching vintage footage, demands it be shut off. “That’s a very offensive song for a guy to write who was married with a couple of kids,” he says before adding, “I guess I don’t like who I am.”
It’s a startling beginning to a movie that uses his music and a series of celebrity talking heads like Steve Earle, Sarah McLachlan, Geddy Lee, Anne Murray and Alec Baldwin, who helpfully adds, “This was a guy who sang poems,” to tell the story. Traditionally Lightfoot’s enigmatic approach to his biography has left many questions unanswered in the media. That doesn’t change much here, although he seems to have allowed open access to his home and is occasionally candid in the contemporary interviews. “I regret a lot of things,” he says near the end of the film. “I caused emotional trauma in people, particularly some women, the women I was closest to. I feel very, very badly about it.”
“If You Could Read My Mind” doesn’t skip over sensitive biographical points. His relationship with Cathy Evelyn Smith, a woman he loved who was later accused of killing John Belushi and the infidelities that marred his personal life are examined, although with a light touch that respects his privacy.
Supporting the storytelling are interestingly curated images. From rare clips of his early performances on the CBC and on the stages of Yonge Street taverns and Yorkville coffee houses and archival photos of the legendary, star-studded parties he threw at his Rosedale home, to old footage of his parents and behind-the-scenes images of his acting debut in Desperado—“You’ll never win an Oscar,” said co-star Bruce Dern, “but you’re fun to work with.”—the doc offers a comprehensive visual essay of Canadiana, Gordon Lightfoot style.
Ultimately the best documentary of Lightfoot’s storied life is his work, tunes like “Sundown” and “Rainy Day People” that suggest everything he has to say is in his songs. “Your personal experience and your emotional stress,” he says, “finds its way in by way of your unconscious mind over into the mind of reality and translates itself into your lyrics. And you don’t even know that is happening.”
Emilio Estevez became a Brat Pack star hanging around in a library in 1985’s “The Breakfast Club.” Years later he returns, this time as a grown up with grown up concerns. As writer-director-producer-star of “The Public” Estevez presents the socially aware story of what happens when people stand up for themselves and speak truth to power.
“The Public” sees Estevez play Stuart Goodson, head librarian and de facto social worker at the Cincinnati Public Library. Inside the library is an oasis of warmth for the city’s homeless community who use it as a drop in centre during the cold winter months. Outside, when the frigid weather claims one of the library regulars, the patrons, led by Jackson (Michael K. Williams), turn the building into an emergency homeless shelter. “There’s some situation at the central library,” says Detective Bill Ramstead (Alec Baldwin). “Probably somebody had a melt down over an overdue book.”
Behind the scenes the stand-off escalates as the sensationalist media, in the form of a TV news reporter played by Gabrielle Union, misrepresents the act of civil disobedience as a possible hostage situation or active shooter. A self-righteous mayoral candidate (Christian Slater) stokes the fire while library administrator Anderson (Jeffrey Wright) tries to keep the situation from boiling over. “Wat’s the downside to having them stay there for the evening,” he asks.
“The Public” takes a long hard look at pressing social concerns. Estevez based part of this story on a Chip Ward essay about public libraries as asylums for the homeless and drives home the point with all the subtlety of one of Cincinnati’s icy winters. Lack of shelter space for the homeless population coupled with governmental cutbacks to social programs are urgent needs brought to life here in a colorful if somewhat cliched way.
The idea that, as Anderson says, public libraries are the last bastion of democracy, truly a place for everyone and anyone, is an important one but delivered with a heavy hand. By the time Goodson reads a long excerpt from “The Grapes of Wrath” to a reporter the noble efforts of the screenplay give way to the stagier aspects of Estevez’s vision.
“The Public” features good performances from Slater, Baldwin, Estevez and Taylor Schilling as a flirtatious building manager but is weighted down by the burden of its good intentions.
Writing a review for “Mission Impossible – Fallout” gave my thesaurus a workout. The film, the sixth instalment in the Tom Cruise franchise, is jammed to the gills with next-level stunts that require an expanded vocabulary to describe. Words like ‘extreme’ or ‘exciting’ or even ‘epic’ (and those are only the ‘e’ words) don’t come close to describing the behemothic action sequences contained within.
Cruise returns as the seemingly invincible action man and IMF (Impossible Mission Force) agent Ethan Hunt. Hunt and his crew, tech wiz Benji (Simon Pegg) and agent Luther (Ving Rhames), are charged with finding and capturing anarchist Solomon Lane (Sean Harris), a baddie who was the leader of the Syndicate during the last film, “Rogue Nation.” “Whatever you heard about Lane,” explains Hunt, “if it makes your skin crawl it’s probably true.” Lane is working with the mysterious and murderous John Lark, a man with some extreme ideas about squashing the world order.
As Lark and Lane collect the necessary plutonium to fulfil their plan the CIA begins to have doubts about Hunt’s loyalty. Add to that the return of former MI6 agent Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), and some newbies, CIA assassin August Walker (Henry Cavill) and black market arms dealer and lady of mystery White Widow (Vanessa Kirby) and you have lots of characters to fill the space between the stunts. Complicating matters is the fallout from some of Hunt’s previous, well-intentioned missions.
There are a lot of very good-looking people in “Mission Impossible – Fallout.” Handsome fellas and femme fatale‘s, they are all woven into a stylish story of international intrigue and plutonium. Like the others “MI” movies it’s packed with exotic locations—only James Bond has more air travel points than Ethan Hunt—doublespeak and double crosses but the narrative doesn’t matter that much, it’s all in service of the Bunyanesque action.
Choreographed to an inch of Hunts life—Cruise really puts himself out there for this one—the realism of the stunts gives the movie a sense of danger and the Green Screen Department the day off. Monumental, vertigo inducing single sequences take place on land, wheels, water and air. Only the screeching of tires score one eye-peeling chase scene between a motorcycle and a car. Visually it is so visceral director Christopher McQuarrie wisely avoided cluttering the scene with frenetic music. It doesn’t need it.
Of course those looking for a finely crafted John le Carré style story of espionage in “Mission Impossible – Fallout” will be bitterly disappointed. While it does contain huggerymuggery it frequently falls just this side of making sense. That’s not to say it isn’t entertaining. Even when Hunt isn’t in action the movie is in perpetual motion, but Frederick Forsyth this ain’t. Instead it is an elephantine (although no actual elephants appear) action epic that breaks the blockbuster norm of cutting away to an action sequence every ten minutes or so. It’s made up of three Brobdingnagian set pieces stitched together by words that mostly make sense.
