Sofia Coppola and Bill Murray have only worked together twice, but “On the Rocks,” in select Theatres now and on Apple TV+ on October 23, makes you wish they would become exclusive. She gets him in all his scampish glory, allowing the septuagenarian to revel in playing a smooth talking, lovable old scamp who drinks Cutty over ice and teaches his young grandkids to bluff at poker. Murray is the Michelangelo of mischief, a clown prince with heart and soul and Coppola knows how to mine it.
Set in pre-pandemic New York City, the story centers on Laura (Rashida Jones), an author and mom who discovers that she’s not as happily married as she thought. Her high tech businessman husband Dean (Marlon Wayans) is aloof, never home and when she finds a strange make-up case in his luggage, he makes a lame excuse straight out of “Cheaters 101.”
Her father Felix (Bill Murray), a loquacious, jet setting art dealer knows about infidelity. He’s a scoundrel who knows, for instance, that The Plaza is the best place to have an affair because it has exits on three different streets for a fast extra-marital escape. He’s not shocked Dean might be having an affair, he’s just surprised he’s doing it at the Soho House, a building he considers déclassé.
Over a birthday dinner at the ritzy 21 Club, at the table where Bogart proposed to Bacall, Felix suggests they investigate on their own, using his knowledge if the cheating mind to catch Dean in the act. In a cherry red sports car they set out on their mission—“This is wartime,” he says.—but the relationship they expose isn’t the one they expected.
“On the Rocks” isn’t a rom com or a screwball comedy or an adventure film. It’s a Sofia Coppola film, a movie that teleports the viewer into a heightened world of privilege while still mining a deep emotional core. And it’s laugh out loud funny, for a time anyway.
It is light, plot wise, but exists to showcase the chemistry between Murray and Jones. Their relationship is the real love story in the film, as fractured and dysfunctional as it may be. They look at the world through very different eyes but are bound by blood.
During the caper portion they have an almost Nick and Nora vibe, exchanging sharp, smart and funny repartee. Later when the action turns introspective, they get real, exposing their feelings in a raw, real and regretful way.
Murray is loose, droll and deadpan. He’s a walking, talking anachronism who says things like, “Women. You can’t live with them. You can’t live without them. That doesn’t mean you have to live with them,” and yet there is a bittersweet quality to the work that adds unspoken layers. It is a very particular performance and one unique to his style.
Jones plays off Murray with a different kind of performance. She’s warm, vulnerable and naturalistic, even when they are mid-escapade. The trick here is to not let Murray steal the show, and she ably manages to share the spotlight.
“On the Rocks” also features nice supporting work from Wayans who dials down his comedy instincts to play it straight and Jenny Slate as an over-sharer Laura bumps into now and again. Both bring much to the proceedings but the main attraction here are the leads. Coppola knows that and while the ending may be a bit pat, the endearing characters are the draw, not the story.
Celebrate the 35th Anniversary of the 1984 timeless classic live with orchestra
Saturday, June 8, 2019
Sony Centre for the Performing Arts
(Toronto, ON – October 29, 2019) Experience Ivan Reitman’s 1984 comedy classic on the big screen while Elmer Bernstein’s score and Ray Parker Jr.’s chart-topping theme “Ghostbusters” are performed with orchestral accompaniment live and in-sync to the film.
Civic Theatres Toronto and Attila Glatz Concert Productions present Ghostbusters Live in Concert at the Sony Centre for the Performing Arts, Saturday, June 8, 2019. Buy tickets atsonycentre.ca, by phone, or visiting one of the Civic Theatres Toronto box offices.
Peter M. Bernstein, son of the Elmer Bernstein, the Academy Award-winning composer and orchestrator of the original “Ghostbusters” Grammy-nominated score, conducts the Motion Picture Symphony Orchestra.
On Saturday June 8, 2019 Richard Crouse will do a pre-show “Ghostbusters” talk from 6:30-7:00 pm – in the Lower Lobby with “Kim’s Convenience” stars and “Ghostbusters” super fans Paul Sun-Hyung Lee and Andrew Phung.
Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis star as eccentric parapsychologists who start a ghost-catching business in New York City after their careers in academia go awry. The film’s co-stars include Sigourney Weaver as the Ghostbusters’ first client turned Gatekeeper, Rick Moranis as an accountant turned Keymaster, and Ernie Hudson as the Ghostbusters’ first recruit.
The original 1984 film was a massive hit grossing nearly $300 million worldwide. A 1989 sequel and a 2016 reboot followed. The song “Ghostbusters” was at #1 for three weeks on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart. The song was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Song and Parker won a 1984 Grammy Award for Best Pop Instrumental Performance.
Celebrate the 35th Anniversary of the 1984 timeless classic live with orchestra
Saturday, June 8, 2019
Sony Centre for the Performing Arts
(Toronto, ON – October 29, 2019) Experience Ivan Reitman’s 1984 comedy classic on the big screen while Elmer Bernstein’s score and Ray Parker Jr.’s chart-topping theme “Ghostbusters” are performed with orchestral accompaniment live and in-sync to the film.
Civic Theatres Toronto and Attila Glatz Concert Productions present Ghostbusters Live in Concert at the Sony Centre for the Performing Arts, Saturday, June 8, 2019. Tickets go on sale to the public Wednesday, October 31, 10AM online at sonycentre.ca, by phone, or visiting one of the Civic Theatres Toronto box offices.
Peter M. Bernstein, son of the Elmer Bernstein, the Academy Award-winning composer and orchestrator of the original “Ghostbusters” Grammy-nominated score, conducts the Motion Picture Symphony Orchestra.
On Saturday June 8, 2019 Richard Crouse will do a pre-show “Ghostbusters” talk from 6:30-7:00 pm – in the Lower Lobby.
Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis star as eccentric parapsychologists who start a ghost-catching business in New York City after their careers in academia go awry. The film’s co-stars include Sigourney Weaver as the Ghostbusters’ first client turned Gatekeeper, Rick Moranis as an accountant turned Keymaster, and Ernie Hudson as the Ghostbusters’ first recruit.
The original 1984 film was a massive hit grossing nearly $300 million worldwide. A 1989 sequel and a 2016 reboot followed. The song “Ghostbusters” was at #1 for three weeks on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart. The song was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Song and Parker won a 1984 Grammy Award for Best Pop Instrumental Performance.
Imagine the painstaking process that goes into making stop-motion animated films like Isle of Dogs. Instead of using computer-generated imagery, animators meticulously manipulate little puppets a centimetre or two at a time, shoot a frame or two and repeat the process until the film is done. On average, working at a good clip, a stop-motion animator can complete one or two minutes of film per week.
According to whom you speak, the process is either a labour of love or pure torture.
“People think it’s monotonous and tedious, but I think stop motion creates a dream quality,” said legendary animator Ray Harryhausen. “I never found it tedious or monotonous.”
Others, like The Boxtrolls producer Travis Knight, say “It’s the worst way to make a movie. It makes no sense.”
However you feel about the method, the results are beautiful. At its best, stop motion has a timeless quality and otherworldly charm born from the old-fashioned process that brings it to the screen. It’s handmade with a level of craftsmanship and soul that not even the most skilled programmer working on an advanced computer can imitate.
“There’s a strange quality in stop-motion photography, like in King Kong,” says Harryhausen, “that adds to the fantasy. If you make things too real, sometimes you bring it down to the mundane. In Kong, you knew he wasn’t real, but he looked like a nightmare, you know? He acted real, and the dinosaurs looked real. But there was something about them that had a magic that you don’t quite get yet in CGI.”
Director Wes Anderson says Harryhausen’s work and the stop-motion animated holiday specials of Rankin/Bass Productions inspired Isle of Dogs.
“I really liked these TV Christmas specials in America,” he said. “I always liked the creatures in the Harryhausen-type films, but really these American Christmas specials were probably the thing that really made me want to do it.”
A film still from Isle of Dogs Behind the Scenes (in virtual reality) by Paul Raphael, Felix Lajeunesse and the Isle of Dogs Production Team.
Isle of Dogs, which became the first animated film to ever open the Berlin Film Festival in February, tells the story of the exile of the dogs of Megasaki City to a vast garbage dump, and a 12-year-old boy who sets off to find his lost pet.
The film’s handmade technique is already earning rave reviews. Slate said that Anderson’s stop-motion animations, including 2009’s Fantastic Mr. Fox, “are the warmest, the most emotionally accessible, the most real” of all of Anderson’s films.
That’s the magic of stop motion. From its earliest usage in 1897’s The Humpty Dumpty Circus, to the pioneering work of Harryhausen and Willis O’Brien, to the advanced visions of Aardman’s Wallace and Gromit movies, the exquisite Coraline from Henry Selick, and Czech filmmaker Jan Švankmajer, who mixes stop motion with live actors, all stop-motion films have one thing in common — a humanity that shines through the technology. It isn’t perfect, it’s primal.
Animation, as Pixar’s Brad Bird says, is about creating the illusion of life. Stop motion, with its reliance on the animator’s hands-on skills, presents an imperfect but organic image that can ignite imaginations.
Harryhausen told me it was the stop motion of the original 1933 King Kong that changed his life. “I saw it when I was 13,” he said, “and I haven’t been the same since.”
Ever wondered what would happen if stop motion master Ray Harryhausen and Japanese auteur Akira Kurosawa went to see “Benji” and then decided to make a movie? With the release of “Isle of Dogs” Wes Anderson, director of live action wonders like “Rushmore” and “Moonrise Kingdom” and the stop motion hit “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” offers up an idea of what that might have been like.
Once again working in stop motion, Anderson creates a fictional world, the Japanese city of Megasaki, twenty years from now. An epidemic of dog flu prompts the fear mongering Mayor Kobayashi (Kunichi Nomura) to forewarn that snout fever is about to spread to humans and order all dogs deported to a toxic wasteland called Trash Island.
Dog-zero is Spots (voiced by Liev Schreiber), the beloved pet of the mayor’s orphaned ward 12-year-old Atari (Koyu Rankin). When he is deported the boy makes the dangerous journey across the river in a prop plane to look for his dog. With the help of newfound mongrel pals, including the good-natured Rex (Edward Norton), former baseball mascot Boss (Bill Murray), King (Bob Balaban), the gossipy Duke (Jeff Goldblum), Chief (Bryan Cranston) and Nutmeg (Scarlett Johansson), Atari takes on the corrupt government.
“Isle of Dogs” is a fairy tale with a bite. Anderson, one of the most distinctive directors working today (or any day for that matter), brings a child-like wonder and unfettered imagination to bring this boy-and-his-dog story to vivid life. Gorgeous, soulful stop motion animation and Anderson’s trademarked banter combined with a timely story of deportation and exile makes for an unforgettable film.
The usual complaints about Anderson’s work, that it’s too detailed, too eccentric, will be levelled at this movie but I’d argue it is his obsessiveness that brings the creative magic. Subplots and flashbacks take the viewer on a wild journey but Anderson’s attention to every element, visual and narrative, guarantees the rambunctious story never loses itself in its own elaborate style.
There jokes throughout—even the title is a playful take on “I love dogs”—but just as important are the messages of tolerance. You will not see another film like “Isle of Dogs” this year. So effortlessly cinematic and inventive, it’s best in show.
Alfred Hitchcock made three of his greatest films with Grace Kelly and tried to lure her back to the big screen long after she retired. Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio have a seemingly unbreakable cinematic bond and the world of movies would be far less interesting if Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski had never met. John Ford and John Wayne inspired one another to do their best work and Tim Burton and Johnny Depp’s shared eccentricities gave us unforgettable nights at the multiplex.
Muses inspire their directors to aspire to new heights, to push the limits of their creativity.
Add another to the list: Melissa McCarthy.
Over the course of four films — including this weekend’s Ghostbusters — she has upped director Paul Feig’s game and in turn he gave her the roles that broke her out of the TV sidekick treadmill and turned her into a big screen star. “It’s not even like we go, ‘We’ve got to do the next movie together,’” Feig says.
“It’s just that suddenly the next movie will pop up and I’m like, ‘You know who would be great for this?’ So it’s funny that people think we have an agenda to keep doing this.”
Agenda or not, their creative chemistry is undeniable.
Feig describes McCarthy’s audition for the first film they made together, Bridesmaids, as a “religious moment.” She was less sure.
“The whole ride home from the audition,” she says, “I was thinking, ‘I got too weird. Should I turn the car around and do that cheesy actor thing of I can do it better! Give me another shot!’”
The director cast her in the scene-stealing role of Megan — imagine a feral, female Guy Fieri — and it was her flashpoint.
Her wonderfully weird performance, complete with sexual hijinks and an explosive bout of diarrhea —“It’s coming out of me like lava!” — stole the show out from under other, better-known stars like Kristen Wiig — and earned her an Oscar nomination.
Next up for the dynamic duo was The Heat, an odd couple, buddy cop movie set in Boston co-starring Sandra Bullock.
McCarthy plays a tough-talking street cop who forms an unlikely alliance with the uptight Sandra Bullock to bring down a murderous drug dealer.
The role riffed on McCarthy’s signature character, the aggressive but damaged comedic persona. “I’ve played a lot of characters who are very vocal, very aggressive,” she told me in 2014.
“For the women I’ve played there is a reason why they are so ballsy and it is nice when you see the crack in the veneer and you realize, ‘It’s part of their insecurity. They stay loud so nobody yells at them.’”
Feig knows when to let McCarthy off the leash — there are some wild slapstick scenes here — but he also knows when to pull her back and let the script do the work.
This week McCarthy headlines Feig’s all-female Ghostbusters reboot alongside Bridesmaids co-star Kristen Wiig.
Will that be their final collaboration? Don’t count on it.
Feig is reportedly writing a Spy sequel as we speak.
“She’s so good,” he says, “and we just really have the same sense of humour.”
Director Paul Fieg and Company are not the Ruiners of Your Childhood. Your youthful “Ghostbusters” memories are alive and well, in your head, in your DVD drawer or digital download file folder. Ghostbros, upset their 1984 favourite is being rebooted with an all female cast, flooded the internet with low-to-no star reviews. As it turns out, the time they spent trying to torpedo a movie they had not yet seen, might have been better spent making room on their basement shelves for the new “Ghostbusters” figurines. Feig hasn’t desecrated a classic, he has added a new chapter, creating a light and fluffy concoction that moves the franchise into the future while paying homage to the past.
When we first meet Erin Gilbert (Kristen Wiig) she’s a professor at Columbia trying to hide her past as a paranormal investigator. When a ghost-hunting book she co-wrote with Abby Yates (Melissa McCarthy) comes to light she is let go. Like Peter Venkman, Ray Stantz and Egon Spengler before her, she leaves academia and becomes a professional New York City ghostbuster alongside Abby, proton pack engineer Jillian Holtzmann (Kate McKinnon) and former subway worker Patty Tolan (Leslie Jones).
After making a name for themselves they uncover a major plot hatched by hotel janitor Rowan North (Neil Casey). Upset his genius has been ignored by the world, he plans on unleashing an army of undead to come back and “pester the world” in an event he calls the Fourth Cataclysm. He has created a vortex that will allow whatever it is on that plane to come crashing down on this plane and flood New York City with ghosts. By the climax the movie dissolves into regular summertime C.G.I. tomfoolery as the Ghostbusters battle spirits in Times Square.
There is a sense of déjà vu hanging heavy over “Ghostbusters.” The new film doesn’t continue the original story, it reboots it, taking us back to the origins of the group. In other words, it’s a lot like the 1984 movie. From class four semi-anchored entities and proton streams to cameos from Slimer, Dan Aykroyd, Bill Murray, Ernie Hudson, Sigourney Weaver, Annie “Ghostbusters, whaddaya want?” Potts plus a glimpse of a Harold Ramis statue, the movie feels familiar but has been freshened up.
The cast doesn’t try to imitate Murray, Aykroyd, Ramis and Hudson. The new characters are just that, new creations plunked down into an existing world.
McCarthy and Wiig, reteamed for the first time since “Bridesmaids,” are solid and Jones is a formidable presence but most interesting is McKinnon as engineering nerd Holtzmann. She is unapologetically weird, as strange as her unruly asymmetrical haircut and a glorious addition to the “Ghostbusters” family.
Also welcome is Chris Hemsworth as the dippy receptionist who doesn’t have glass in his eyeglasses and says things like, “An aquarium is a submarine for fish.” He’s a walking non sequitur and very funny.
Like the old Abbott and Costello horror comedies, “Ghostbusters” doesn’t have any real scares but it will make you laugh. The script, co-written by Feig and “Parks and Recreation” writer Katie Dippold, is funny, if not exactly in a slap the knee kind of way, then in a slow boil constant giggle respect. Is it an out-of-this-world hit like Feig’s “Bridesmaids” or “Spy”? No. It occasionally suffers from a weird rhythm where scenes end suddenly and at least one of the cameos feels wedged in, but the overall effect is one of a respectful resurrection of a beloved franchise.
Best of all, it is self-aware. Reading on-line comments Erin comes across one that reads, “Ain’t no bitches going to hunt no ghosts.” Later Abby says, “Don’t read what crazy people write in the middle of the night online.” Are you listening Ghostbros?
In 2009 I hosted an on-stage event with Disney legend Richard Sherman.
The co-writer (with his brother Robert) of classic songs like It’s a Small World (After All), Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious and the Oscar winning Chim Chim Cher-ee, was seated behind a piano and after regaling us with stories from his career, asked if anyone had any song requests.
I took advantage of my position as host and butted in, asking if he’d sing the hippest children’s song ever written, I Wan’na Be like You (The Monkey Song) from The Jungle Book.
As his fingers danced across the keyboard, he began, “Now, I’m the King of the Swinger’s Ball, a Jungle V.I.P…” and I was transported back to being a kid, wearing the grooves off the soundtrack record, playing it over and over. I was reminded of that memorable moment earlier this week as I watched the new, updated version of The Jungle Book. The song gets a remake, this time sung by Christopher Walken, but the magic is still there.
In the animated 1967 original, Louis Prima — playing the raucous orangutan King Louie — sang the upbeat tune but Richard Sherman says when they wrote the song they didn’t have Prima in mind.
Walt Disney hired them to help “Disnify” Rudyard Kipling’s original stories about a feral child raised in the jungle by wolves.
“Our assignment was to find crazy ways of having fun with it,” says Sherman.
For King Louie’s big moment the brothers went with a New Orleans inspired musical arrangement, complete with scat-singing.
They played the swingin’ song at a story conference and it was decided the singer should be the most swingin’ jazz act in the country. “When we first got an idea for I Wan’na Be Like You, we said an ape swings from a tree, and he’s the king of apes. We’ll make him ‘the king of the swingers.’ That’s the idea, we’ll make him a jazz man.”
The brothers presented the song to Prima who reportedly said, “You want to make a monkey out of me? You got me!”
It was a perfect marriage of performer to character, so much so that Disney animators filmed Prima live on a soundstage as a guide to animate his movements in the movie.
The I Wan’na Be like You (The Monkey Song) sequence is a standout in a film filled with great songs and has made a lasting impression on a generation or two of musicians.
Everyone from Phish and Voodoo Glow Skulls to Los Lobos and Fall Out Boy have covered the song. There’s a Hungarian version called Egy ilyen majom embernek való by Gyula Bodrogi & László Csákányi. And O Rei do Iê-Iê-Iê was a hit in Brazil for Márcio Simões & Mauro Ramos.
Of all the covers, Sherman says he likes the version by Smash Mouth featured in The Jungle Book 2. Almost 50 years after he originally co-wrote the song Richard Sherman revisited the tune. On the red carpet at The Jungle Book’s premier last week Sherman said he wrote new lyrics, “because it’s not the King Louie you saw in the first movie. This is a gigantopithecus, the greatest ape there ever was.”
Louis Prima’s version will always be the classic, at least for me, but Sherman says, “Chris Walken does a great job (on the song).”
