Anthony Gonzalez, the star of the new Pixar film Coco, has spent one-third of his life working on the project.
“It was a very long process,” said the 13-year old actor. “I auditioned when I was nine years old. I actually got to go to Pixar headquarters in Oakland when I was 10.
“I started doing the scratch voice, where they put my voice under the character to see what it looks like when I was 10. Eleven is when I got cast so I started going in more often to Pixar and doing the voice. At 12 I was still doing some voices. At the end of 12 I felt my voice was changing!”
In Coco he plays Miguel, a 12-year-old aspiring musician in a family with a generations-old ban on anything musical. During his village’s Day of the Dead celebrations he breaks into the ornate crypt of Ernesto de la Cruz, the world’s greatest musician, to steal the late singer’s guitar.
Then something strange happens. Guitar in hand, he finds himself transported to the colourful world of the Land of the Dead. If he can get de la Cruz‘s blessing he can go back to the world of the living and be a musician, but first he will learn the real story behind his unusual family history.
Gonzalez worked on the project for years without knowing if he would appear in the final film. “Every time they would tell me I was going to Pixar I would get so excited because it is a paradise there,” he said. “The food there is amazing, the Pixar store is just awesome and they have a big soccer field and I love to play. Every time I went to Pixar I would also be happy because I would miss school.
“When I was 11, it was around Christmas, and I went to do scratch voices. The director, Lee Unkrich, told me they had a present for me. I was so excited and I opened it and it was this big, wonderful piece of artwork that said, ‘You got the part.’”
Gonzalez has been performing in front of people since he was four years old. “I wasn’t shy,” he said. “It’s fun singing and acting. I can be free. I can express feelings when I am singing and when I act I can be stuff I never thought I could be.”
Coco has afforded Gonzalez the chance to follow his dream. He gets to travel to promote the movie — “Today I had poutine for lunch,” he enthused in his Toronto hotel room.
“It was the best thing I ever had. Who knew that French fries, bacon and gravy and cheese was a perfect mix?” — and more importantly, he gets to do what he loves. He hopes the movie will encourage other kids to follow their dreams.
“Miguel could be a role model for kids,” Gonzalez said. “Miguel in the movie really fights for what he wants. He wants to be a musician and no obstacles will stop him. He doesn’t let anyone or anything stop him from what he wants to do. I feel many kids will look up to him; kids who want to share their talent with the world.”
The Mexican tradition of honouring their deceased loved ones on Day of the Dead forms the backbone, both visually and emotionally, of the new Pixar film “Coco.”
Miguel Rivera (Anthony Gonzalez) is a 12-year-old aspiring musician and devoted fan of the “world’s greatest musician,” the late, great Ernesto de la Cruz (Benjamin Bratt). Trouble is, his family doesn’t approve. In fact they have a generations–old ban on anything musical stemming from Miguel’s great-great grandfather, a guitar player who chose music over his young family. They are, we’re told, “the only family in Mexico who hates music.” Still, Miguel can’t let his dream of making music go. He studies de la Cruz’s films and records, learning them note-for-note.
In his village Day of the Dead celebrations are being prepared. Photos of loved ones are placed on altars in hopes that relatives who have passed into the spirit world will come back to visit and enjoy the festivities.
In the village square a talent show draws a huge crowd. Miguel is desperate to perform, but needs a new guitar. Keeping the words of his hero in mind—Don’t let anything stand in your way!—he breaks into de la Cruz’s ornate crypt to steal the late singer’s guitar when something strange happens. Guitar in hand, he finds himself transported to the colourful Day of the Dead spirit world just in time to attend de la Cruz’s spectacular show. If he can get de la Cruz‘s blessing he can go back to the world of the living and be a musician but first he must learn the real story behind his unusual family history.
“Coco” is packed with music but it isn’t a musical. Characters don’t suddenly burst into song. Instead, the songs—and there are a few of them—are set pieces, deftly woven into the fabric of the story. The stand-out tune, “Remember Me,” written by the “Frozen” team of Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez, is heard throughout and used particularly effectively in the film’s tear-jerking finale.
Miguel’s love of music is the film’s McGuffin, the thing that drives the story, but “Coco” is more about the importance of family. Pixar has found a way to embroider a familiar kid’s movie motif with deeper messages about remembrance and the passing of time.
“Finding Nemo” and “Bambi” aside, mortality is not a big topic in children’s movies. “Coco,” however, embraces it; weaving an interesting story that toggles back-and-forth between the land of the living and dead. It celebrates the vibrancy of the Día de los Muertos celebrations, complete with skeletons in dazzlingly costumes and sugar-skulled characters aplenty that are kid friendly in a “Nightmare Before Christmas” kind of way. “The Walking Dead” this ain’t.
Visually “Coco” is spectacular. Whether it is the intricately realized skeleton characters or the perfect sheen on the water Miguel dives into, once again Pixar proves to be ahead of the pack in terms of bringing pixels and terabytes of information to imaginative life.
“Coco” is a heartfelt tribute to Mexican culture but more than that it is a universal story about the importance of family that is heartfelt but never saccharine.
In an unconscious way Rachel McAdams has been preparing to play Dr. Christine Palmer in Doctor Strange her whole life.
“My mother is a nurse,” says the London, Ontario born actress. “She is a very compassionate kind of nurse and Christine is sort of that way as a doctor. She has excellent bedside manner as opposed to Doctor Strange. I took a page from my mom.
“I’ve been talking to her about it for my whole life. She brought her job home sometimes. I picked it up over the years.”
Doctor Strange, the fourteenth film in the Marvel Universe aims to introduce you to the neurosurgeon, played by Benedict Cumberbatch, who goes from saving lives to saving planets. Trauma surgeon Dr. Palmer is his ex-girlfriend but still a constant in his life, and later, when things get mystical, his anchor to the real world.
“It’s a much less typical love trajectory,” she says of their connection. “I think because we had so few scenes to establish our relationship it was a better jumping off point. We had a lot more subterranean life and a much richer history for the characters.”
In the comic books Christine Palmer is a very different person than the one McAdams brings to life on the screen.
“She is an amalgamation of a couple of characters,” she says. “It gave us a lot of creative freedom. We were inventing something. I kind of looked at the comic books more for the flavour of the world and Doctor Strange himself and less so for my character.”
McAdams’s nurse mother may have helped the actress access the emotional side of playing a doctor, but what about the practical stuff, like tying a suture?
“This great neurosurgeon we had on set with us taught us how to sew up a raw turkey breast,” she laughs. “I guess it’s the closest thing to a real live human being, Poor turkey. Then I used oranges, which were easier to carry in my purse. Better smell too. I also had a fake head to practice on. It was kind of like knitting. I would take the suture stuff around, put it on a light stand while we were shooting and practice. I still have sutures on my doorknobs. Haven’t gotten around to cutting them off yet.
“I was really nervous about it because I thought it was going to take forever but it is just one of those thing that one you get the hang of it it’s kind of fun to do.”
The result of all her work is a movie she calls “an ambitious film on the page that I think ticks a lot of those boxes for people are hoping for when they go see a big, blow-out Marvel film. There’s also a quiet deep emotion that runs through it that may catch people off guard.
“I find it hard to get swept away by a film I am in,” she adds, “because I look at it differently, but I actually jumped at one point in my own scene. My friends were laughing. ‘You knew that was coming!’ I know, but I was wrapped up in it.”
As everybody knows The Avengers exist to save the planet from physical threats like rogue sentient robots and red skulled Nazis. But who protects us from metaphysical danger? Apparently a guy in a crazy cape who looks a lot like Sherlock Holmes.
If you’re not familiar with Stephen Strange, “Doctor Strange,” the fourteenth film in the Marvel Universe introduces you to the neurosurgeon who goes from saving lives to saving planets.
When we first meet Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) he’s a gifted surgeon, a good-looking mix of ambition, charm and arrogance. When a car accident leaves him with severe nerve damage in his hands, he feels he has lost his best asset. The fingers that one’s free-handed complicated nerve surgery cannot now even hold a pen.
His search for a cure leads him to Jonathan Pangborn (Benjamin Bratt), a paraplegic who regained use of his hands and legs. “You came back from a place there is no coming back from,” says Strange. “I’m trying to find my way back.” Pangborn tells the desperate man of a place in Kathmandu, Nepal where he can experience a spiritual journey of healing.
In Nepul he meets the Ancient One (Tilda Swinton) an immortal Celt and Sorceress Supreme who teaches Strange some weird new tricks. With her guidance and his photographic memory, he quickly learns how to re-orient the spirit to heal the body. He also discovers who to teleport himself form one place to another and control the very fabric of time. Nifty stuff.
His lessons come in handy when Kaecilius (Mads Mikkelsen), a former student, returns to steal a single page of an ancient text. The spell contained on the page would give him a power over time that would make Dr. Who envious. His endgame is to join our world with the Dark Dimension, a place beyond time, thus ensuring life eternal. With the very essence of time at stake can Doctor Strange take a licking, but keep on ticking?
Despite a plot that deals with horology and the metaphysical make-up of the universe, “Doctor Strange” doesn’t take itself too seriously. It’s an origin story, pure and simple, that breaks up the interdimensional gobbledegook with bits of levity. Add to that a running gag with Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies” and some very trippy visuals and you have a movie that feels fresh despite being yet another origin tale.
Cumberbatch’s take on Strange echoes Marvel’s Tony Stark character. He’s arrogant and quick with a line, but where Stark had an air of unpredictability about him, Strange has none. He’s driven by ego and a need to get his life back, not the darker, and more interesting urges that propelled Stark’s world-saving.
Instead the movie focuses on bringing his experience to vivid life. As Strange begins his mystical journey director Scott Derrickson fills the screen with kaleidoscopic images. The trippy pictures entertain the eye and lend an authentic comic book feel to the movie that is sometimes missed in these big screen adaptations. Who knows how many pixels were harmed to create the hallucinogenic M.C. Escher-esque folding landscapes. Imagine the shifting terrains of “Inception,” but on steroids and you get the idea.
It takes some doing to stand out amid the film’s psychedelic visuals but Tilda Swinton as the Ancient One and Chiwetel Ejiofor as mentor Karl Mordo stand head and shoulders above the fray. Swinton sidesteps early criticism of character whitewashing—in the comic books the Ancient One is generally portrayed as a Tibetan man—by handing in an androgynous character who identifies as Celtic.
“Doctor Strange” is a lively mix of mysticism and mirth that breathes some new life into the Marvel Universe.
Richard hosted a Facebook Live session with “Doctor Strange” star Rachel McAdams! Find out how the actress prepared for the suturing scenes, what she has to say about working with Benedict Cumberbatch and who her favourite Marvel superhero is! See the video on Marvel Facebook Page!
Imagine if “Donnie Brasco” and “Narcos” had a baby. Now imagine that the baby grew up to be the dull kid who thought he was smarter than everyone else. That baby is “The Infiltrator,” a new drug movie starring Bryan Cranston.
Set in 1985 South Florida, the War on Drugs is in full swing. Colombian drug kingpin Pablo Escobar is flooding the streets with $400 million of cocaine per week while remaining out of reach to law enforcement. Enter Robert Mazur (Cranston), an accountant-turned-federal-undercover-drug-agent. He’s wounded and eligible for retirement with a full pension, but takes in one last job that turns out to be the biggest and most dangerous of his career. Working with fellow narcs Kathy Ertz (Diane Kruger) and Emir Abreu (John Leguizamo), he goes deep as Bob Musella, money launderer to the cartels. Dodging bullets and unwanted sexual advances, Musella gains the trust of the Medellín Cartel but must balance his friendship with drug lord Roberto Alcaino (Benjamin Bratt) with the responsibilities of his job.
Part of all of us wants Bryan Cranston back in the drug trade. Years of “Breaking Bad” primed us for his brand of Heisenbergian ruthlessness and in the wake of the show’s conclusion, left us wanting more. Too bad that his return to the underworld is such a milquetoast affair. What could have been an engaging look into the inner workings of a business so huge they had to spend a thousand bucks a week on rubber bands to hold stacks of bills together, is instead a mishmash of clichés, tough-talk and 80s-style excess. Not content to let the story do the talking director Brad Furman errs on the side of the obvious throughout. For instance, instead of letting the implied threat of Cartel violence stand on its own, characters remind us that if things go wrong there will be grave consequences for everyone involved.
Better is the portrayal of Mazur’s complicated relationship with Alcaino and his wife. The agent and Escobar’s suave-but-deadly US representative become friends of a sort and when the sting goes down there are poignant moments that add some real drama to a film that desperately needs them.
“The Infiltrator” is held together by Cranston whose fine work is the most compelling thing in the movie. Leguizamo has the more interesting character in the street wise Abreu but isn’t given enough to do. Ditto Amy Smart as Mazur’s commanding officer. She does what she can but the character still seems to have walked straight of Central Casting Handbook and on to the screen.
Here’s the best way to gauge your potential enjoyment of “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2.” Imagine a scene in a boat. Then imagine a panicked voice saying, “There’s a leak in the boat!”
Cut to… a leek, with eyes and a mouth, screaming, “No-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o!”
If that kind of grocery gag makes you giggle then this animated follow-up to the fanciful 2009 Anna Faris, Bill Hader hit may be for you.
Me, I laughed both times they used that joke in the movie.
The new film picks up where the last one left off. The Flint Lockwood Diatonic Super Mutating Dynamic Food Replicator—FLDSMDFR for short—has left the planet covered in food. When scientific superstar and Thinkquanaut Chester V (Will Forte)—a bizarre mix of the Steves, Jobs and Hawking—offers to clean up the mess Flint Lockwood’s (Hader) machine made and give the inventor a job at the LIVE Corp—the “coolest and hippest company in the world”—it appears everything may work out for the best.
Before you can say, “Clean up in aisle nine,” however, things take a strange turn when Flint and friends—meteorologist Sam Sparks (Faris), policeman Earl (Terry Crews), Steve (Neil Patrick Harris) and Manny (Benjamin Bratt)—visit their former island home to find it overrun with food creatures. Foodimals like watermelophants, shrimpanzees, double bacon cheespiders, the Tacodile Supreme and Barry, the world’s cutest strawberry, have created their own ecosystem. Think of it as a delicious Island of Doctor Moreau, or a foodie’s “Jurassic Park.”
Flint’s job is to find the FLDSMDFR and destroy it before the cuisine creatures can leave the island and invade the rest of the planet. He and his friends are in for the food fight of their lives.
“Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2” is a surreal story with familiar themes about friendship and believing in yourself, but instead of conveying those messages through a talking giraffe or a sardonic dinosaur, it features a bizarre array of talking groceries.
The movie’s imagination, inventiveness and humor are its selling points. The creatures are fantastic, the food puns are delicious and the story moves along faster than a sous chef chopping parsley. There’s sight gags galore and there’s even jokes for foodie parents.
Barb (Kristen Schaal), an orangutan with a genius IQ explains that Chester V “put a human brain in my monkey brain—like a turducken.”
And like a turducken “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2” offers up layers of fun for every member of the family.
The overriding theme of Love in the Time of Cholera, the new film from 4 Weddings and a Funeral director Mike Newell, is that true love never dies. Nice sentiment to be sure, but unfortunately for viewers of this sprawling adaptation of the wildly popular novel by Nobel Prize Winner , my love for the film died about an hour before the movie ended.
To keep the running time of the film to 139 minutes Newell and team cut and slashed away at the book’s 50-year timeline, altering storylines somewhat—for example, Dr. Juvenal Urbino (Benjamin Bratt) dies from a fall rather than natural causes—eliminating characters and generally condensing the novel’s 368 pages into a more cinematic form. Happily the power of love theme hasn’t been lost; unhappily they have chosen to highlight the story’s melodramatic elements, adopting a style more appropriate to a daytime soap than a high minded literary adaptation.
Set in 1878 in the Columbian town of Cartagena during a cholera epidemic, the film is the saga of young Fiorentino’s (Unax Ugalde) love for Fermina (Giovanna Mezzogiorno). They fall deeply in love, but when her domineering father (John Leguziamo) discovers their affair he spirits her away to a small mountain town far from the admiring hands of her young suitor. There she meets and marries the handsome Dr. Urbino (Benjamin Bratt) who provides well for her but occasionally strays outside the boundaries of their marriage.
Over the next few decades the heartbroken Fiorentino (Javier Bardem as the adult character) finds success in business but none in his personal life. He remains a bachelor, but an endless (and well catalogued) string of one-night stands and brief affairs only accentuates the aching love he still feels for Fermina.
When Dr. Urbino unexpectedly dies Fiorentino seizes the chance to rekindle his long dormant love affair with Fermina.
Love in the Time of Cholera has none of the charm of the novel. Although lushly photographed mostly on location in Columbia, the film lurches along from one scene to the next with little regard to pacing or coherent storytelling. At 139 minutes it feels twice as long because of the disjointed way Newell unrolls the story. The film leaps from year to year like a gazelle chasing its prey, the characters age rapidly (with unusually obvious makeup) and several scenes simply don’t belong. A love scene between Bardem and beauty queen Laura Harring as the buxom Sara Noriega seems to only have been included to give Newell the opportunity to show the former Miss USA winner topless.
Bardem, so effective as the psycho killer in No Country for Old Men commits himself fully to the role of the heartsick Fiorentino but is undone by a weak script and an almost total lack of chemistry between him and his paramour co-star Giovanna Mezzogiorno. No sparks fly between the two and it is hard to believe that anyone would spend a lifetime pursuing such a flaccid relationship and since that pairing is at the core of the film, its failure brings the whole enterprise down.
Love in the Time of Cholera is a missed opportunity to turn a literary masterpiece into a masterful—although in this case I’d even settle for good or even bearable—movie.
