Richard sits in with CTV NewsChannel anchor Jennifer Burke to have a look at the weekend’s big releases including “Miss Bala,” a look at a woman who takes the law into her own hands, “Wonders of the Sea 3D,” the latest ocean adventure from the Cousteau family and “Into Invisible Light,” Jennifer Dale’s film about artistic rebirth.
Watch the whole thing HERE!
A weekly feature from from ctvnews.ca! The Crouse Review is a quick, hot take on the weekend’s biggest movies! This week Richard looks at “Jane the Virgin’s” Gina Rodriguez as a kidnap victim who gets even in “Miss Bala,” the exploration of the ocean in “Wonders of the Sea 3D” and Jennifer Dale’s drama for adults “Into Invisible Light.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
At the beginning of the “Wonders of the Sea 3D,” a new documentary featuring underwater adventurers Jean Michel Cousteau and his children Celine and Fabien, narrator Arnold Schwarzenegger says the reason he signed on was because this “is an important film with an important message.” The message is actually twofold. First he cites the aesthetic, calling the doc a “declaration of love for the beauty of the ocean.” Later the movie’s secondary, but more serious message of how the future of humanity is inextricably connected to the health of the ocean.
From Fiji to the Bahamas, with a pit stop in California “Wonders of the Sea 3D” takes us to the final frontier. More people have walked on the moon than on the bottom of the deep ocean, and indeed many of the creatures we are introduced to look ripped from the pages of a sci fi comic book. From the familiar—like the octopus; “We may never get closer to alien intelligence than this,” says Jean Michel.—to more exotic undersea life like the bizarre Christmas Tree Worm and a flatworm that looks like it could be a multi-coloured scarf in a Fashion Week runway show, the images are striking and surreal. There’s even a fish who looks like Steve Buscemi.
The photography is beautiful, the 3D effective but as eye-catching as these images are they rarely provide a sense of scale. Life on the documented reefs reveals “nature’s masterful design” but it’s hard to tell if these creatures are ten feet tall or microscopic.
“Wonders of the Sea 3D” is aimed at kids whose imaginations may be sparked by the unusual watery beasts on display. The narration, courtesy of the Cousteau family and Schwarzenegger, is simple and direct, often with the feel of an educational classroom film. The narration may not be nearly as compelling as the images but the messages are memorable. “The ocean survives without us. We don’t survive without the ocean.”
Richard sits in on the CJAD Montreal morning show with host Andrew Carter to talk about “Miss Bala,” an updated, feminist take on a Spanish-language film from Mexico of the same-name, the undersea adventure of “Wonders of the Sea 3D” and the grown up Jennifer Dale drama “Into Invisible Light.”
Listen to the whole thing HERE!
Richard’s “Canada AM” reviews for “Terminator: Genisys,” “Magic Mike XXL,” “Madame Bovary” and “Infinitely Polar Bear.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
Richard’s “Canada AM” reviews for “Terminator: Genisys,” “Magic Mike XXL,” “Madame Bovary” and “Infinitely Polar Bear.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
Where would Arnold Schwarzenegger’s career be without these three simple words: “I’ll be back”? Taken from The Terminator it’s as simple a phrase as was ever uttered in the movies, but became a pop culture catchphrase, and came to define Arnold’s career on screen and off.
He’s used the line—or a slight variation on it—in three other Terminator movies and eight other films. In 1993’s Last Action Hero he says it three times! He utters it one more time as he jumps from one helicopter to another in this weekend’s Terminator Genisys.
Few actors have done so much with so little. But the perfectly crafted saying almost didn’t happen.
“In the treatment it was ‘I’ll come back,’” The Terminator director and co-writer James Cameron told me. “In the script it was ‘I’ll be back.’ I don’t remember why I changed it. It just sounded better.”
The line certainly played no small part in establishing Schwarzenegger larger-than-life action hero image even though Arnold had problems with it when they were shooting the film.
In his autobiography, Total Recall, Schwarzenegger recalls, “Our biggest disagreement was about ‘I’ll be back’. I was arguing for ‘I will be back’. I felt that the line would sound more machine-like and menacing without the contraction.
“[But] we shot it as written in the script. The truth was that, even after all these years of speaking English, I still didn’t understand contractions.”
“There is something about the way the line plays,” says Cameron, “not just Arnold’s delivery, but the fact that you’ve seen enough of him in action up to that point to know that when he says ‘I’ll be back’ something really bad is going to happen. There is a counterpoint between the innocence of the words and the threat that is a wink to the audience. And the audience likes to be in the position of knowing what is going to happen next. They may not know the details but they know something bad is going to happen and then it pays off. He just comes flying through the window in a car and takes out the whole place. So there is something kind of delicious about the anticipation that it produces.”
The line’s popularity wasn’t planned. Cameron, who has three quips on AFI’s 100 Years… 100 Movie Quotes list—“I’ll be back,” “Hasta la vista, baby” from T2 and Titanic’s “I’m king of the world!—says it is a bad idea to try and write catchphrases.
“I think it is a very hard thing to try and do that,” he says. “I think I was somewhat self conscious about it when I did Terminator 2 and he says ‘Hasta le vista baby.’ That I knew I was doing a line, an Arnold line. I think it is a very dangerous area because it can so easily blow up on you and I tend not to do that.”
Schwarzenegger has been associated with dozens of one-liners. So many, in fact that a youtube video titled 160 Greatest Arnold Schwarzenegger Quotes has over twenty million hits, but as widely imitated as “Hasta la vista, baby” was—even Chilean president Michelle Bachelet aped Arnold’s famous delivery of the line—“I’ll be back” remains his most iconic line.
After 31 years, four movies, two classics, one almost ran and one Rotten Tomatoes reject, it was only a matter of time until Hollywood had pushed the “Terminator” franchise too far and had to cannibalize itself and reinvent the story.
In “Terminator: Genisys” after time travel has landed Sarah Connor (Emilia Clarke) and Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney) to her future but his past (Huh?) Detective O’Brien (J.K. Simmons) tries to wrap his head around the situation.
“I know whatever’s going on here must be really, really complicated,” he says.
“We’re here to stop the end of the world,” says Sarah.
“I can work with that.”
Hopefully so can the audience. The fourth “Terminator” movie warns us time and time again not to pay too much attention to the plot, which is a confounding mess of time travel that completely rewrites the Connor mythology.
“Everything has changed,” says Sarah, “the 1984 John sent you to no longer exists,” which is essentially sci fi screenwriter lingo for, We’ve changed most everything you thought you knew about the “Terminator” folklore. Reese put it in simpler terms, “Time travel makes my head hurt.”
The action begins in 2029, years after Judgement Day when artificial intelligence system Skynet became sentient and tried to destroy humanity. Resistance hero John Connor (Jason Clarke) sends his right hand man (and son) Reese back in time to protect Sarah Connor, make sure she survives and in turn will live to give birth to John who will save humanity. It’s a bit of a Möbius strip, but at least it is a familiar one.
Once Reese transports back in time there’s a glitch and the past has changed. Lethal T-1000 Terminators are waiting for him and Sarah is already a warrior aided by her man-machine companion, the T-800 model Terminator (Arnold “I’m old but not obsolete” Schwarzenegger). “There’s a new mission,” says Sarah, “if the past can change so can the future.” The plan is to destroy Genisys, a computer operating system that will link everything—phones to tablets, tablets to cars… it will run the whole shebang—and will enable Skynet. And you thought having to change your Apple passwords all the time was a pain. Throwing a wrench into the job is (ALMOST A SPOILER BUT NOT REALLY) an unwelcome and unexpected family reunion.
There’s enough time travel here for three regular movies, but “Terminator: Genisys” is no regular movie. It’s a summer blockbuster meant to breathe life back into the silvery skeletoned franchise. It bigger, louder and dumber than ever before with a big action sequence every ten minutes and an ending that guarantees a sequel. The heretical meddling with the story aside, “Terminator” fans will likely enjoy watching the relentless T-1000 (Byung-hun Lee) scenes, old Arnold going mano a mano with a younger version of himself or the relationship between Sarah and the T-800 (although she calls him “Pops” too many times for my taste) but endless exposition—this is a story that needs some explaining—drags the middle part of the movie down.
“Terminator Genisys” is robotic in its presentation of the story. In an effort to make something new out of the pieces of the past, the movie relies on twists and time travel theatrics to push the plot instead of an actual coherent story. Reese’s past may be O’Brien’s present and Connor’s future, but the time spent watching this movie is two hours of our time spent in almost total confusion.
Richard’s CP24 reviews for “Hot Pursuit,” “Maggie” and “Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief” with anchor Rena Heer.
Watch the whole thing HERE!
