Richard has a look at the new movies coming to theatres, including the kid-friendly superhero flick “Shazam!,” the remake of “Pet Sematary” and the documentary “Carmine Street Guitars” with CFRA Morning Rush host Bill Carroll.
Listen to the whole thing HERE!
A weekly feature from ctvnews.ca! The Crouse Review is a quick, hot take on the weekend’s biggest movies! This week Richard looks at the family-friendly superhero flick “Shazam!,” the remake of “Pet Sematary” and the documentary “Carmine Street Guitars.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
As promised “Carmine Street Guitars,” the new documentary from Ron Mann, is about guitars. Beautiful stringed instruments hand made with love by artesian Rick Kelly. But it isn’t just about guitars. Sure, we hear music, solo performances by pickers and grinners like “Captain” Kirk Douglas, Lenny Kaye, Eleanor Friedberger, Charlie Sexton and Bill Frisell, but it’s about tradition and the personal connections between creators and their instruments.
For decades Kelly and his shop Carmine Street Guitars has been a Greenwich Village landmark. Untouched by modern conveniences like cell phones and computers, Kelly uses tools handed down from his grandfather, salvages old wood from New York landmarks like McSorley’s Old Ale House—the “bones of the city,” he calls them—to create one-of-a-kind instruments he says have a resonance that newer materials cannot duplicate. With him is apprentice, Cindy Hulej, a woodworker who burns beautiful designs into the faces of the guitars she creates.
It’s a slice of life doc, a week in the life of the shop as musicians come in, hang out and talk about guitars. Mann creates a rhythm that echoes the slow pace of life inside the store. Kelly is soft spoken, an old-school artist in a rapidly changing city, somehow dodging the homogenization that is putting people like him out of business. His icy demeanor toward a high rolling real estate agent tells you everything you need to know regarding his feelings toward the people who value glass and steel over heart and soul.
“Carmine Street Guitars” is an ode to tradition, to artistry, to slowing down. It’s an understated hang-out movie that has as much resonance as the old wood Kelly uses to make his guitars.
Richard sits in on the CJAD Montreal morning show with host Andrew Carter to talk the new movies coming to theatres including the kid-friendly superhero flick “Shazam!,” the remake of “Pet Sematary” and the documentary “Carmine Street Guitars.”
Listen to the whole thing HERE!
Richard and CP24 anchor Jamie Gutfreund have a look at the weekend’s new movies, “Transformers: the Last Night,” “The Hero’s” tale of redemption and the underwater terror of “47 Metres Down.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
Oscar-winning documentarian Errol Morris has travelled the world chronicling the famous and infamous. To find the subject for his latest film “The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman’s Portrait Photography” he looked closer to home. Next door in fact, to the home of his friend, portrait photographer Elsa Dorfman.
It’s a film as simple and unpretentious as its subject. In 76 quick minutes Morris lets Dorfman narrate the story in her thick Massachusetts accent. A friendship with Beat poet Allen Ginsberg opened the door for her to take photos of many literary and music stars, including W.H. Auden, Anais Nin, Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan. Local heroes like Jonathan Richman also found their way before her camera but it is the pictures of her family and friends that define her work. “What you’re wearing is OK,” she says. “Who you are is OK. You don’t have to be cosmetized.” It is, she says, an acceptance of “everydayness.”
Much of “The B-Side” takes place in Elsa’s cluttered archive. “A lot of these are mistakes but because they are 20×24 they are too expensive to throw away,” she says. “The ones they don’t take I call the B-side.”
In 1980 she found a format that came to define her work, the Polaroid Land 20×24 camera. Producing large-scale photos became her trademark, although by her own assessment her straightforward approach never brought her fame or media attention.
Perhaps its because the pictures aren’t slick and neither is Elsa. Her work is almost folk art, an outsiders look at the world. She captured her subjects as they are the moment they stood in front of her camera. No touch ups or after effects. The pictures are documents of moments in time, plain and simple. “I am really interested in the surfaces of people,” she says. “I am totally not interest in capturing your soul. I am only interested in how they seem.” Her method was effective. In one newspaper article the mother of a subject raves, “It looks more like Faye than Faye herself.”
“The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman’s Portrait Photography” is a quiet look at Dorfman and the art and life she created. “I was lucky in a way to find the cameras and to like it,” she says. “It’s a real way of being a quote artist and having an offbeat life. Inventing a way of living that is comfortable. It worked. I feel very grateful that it worked.”
Richard sits in on the weekly Behind the Headlines panel on the CTV News Channel with Beverly Thomson every Wednesday at 1:40 pm! This week paralympian Pam LeJean and Huffington Post Sr Editor Joshua Ostroff join us to talk about free beer for life, Bob Dylan and the Nobel Peace Prize and Invanka Trump’s $10,000 bracelet.
Watch the whole thing HERE!
By Richard Crouse – Metro In Focus
Asif Kapadia’s documentary Amy features never-before-seen footage and over 100 interviews with people from singer Amy Winehouse’s personal and professional life. It is a heartbreaking up-close-and-personal look at a woman who, as Tony Bennett says in the movie, didn’t live long enough to learn how to live.
Kapadia may be best known as the filmmaker behind the BAFTA winning documentary Senna but says, “It’s funny, but I am really a drama guy.”
His docs are structured like feature films. Amy, for instance, plays on a few levels, featuring several dramatic arcs. It’s a cautionary tale of the effects of international stardom. It’s a portrait of drug addiction, exploitation and a woman who looked to men for protection, and chose badly. It’s the story of Amy, a fiercely talented person who laid her heart bare in her art only to have the thing that should have been her saviour, her music, ultimately be her undoing.
When I asked Kapadia if he looked at other music docs before beginning work on Amy he said, “I don’t have references I look to. I just kind of make it up as I’m going along. For example, in the sequence with the paparazzi, I’m thinking of Raging Bull, with flashguns going off. I’m not thinking of a doc where you have someone’s life and then they pick up a guitar and sing.”
Here’s a list of other music bios—some docs, some features—that take a dramatic approach and give a complete look at the personal and creative lives of their subjects.
Anvil: The Story of Anvil: It would be easy to call Anvil a real-life Spinal Tap. The story of the heaviest heavy metal band you’ve never heard of bears a strong resemblance to the legendary fictional band, but it is so much more than that. It is a story of passion, of trying to beat the odds, of friendship, of hope against hope. It’s also quite funny and the music will peel the paint off your home theatre walls.
I’m Not There: It’s an elliptical and metaphoric retelling of Bob Dylan’s life, but none of the characters in it are called Bob Dylan. Most of them don’t look like Dylan, and the one who most looks like Dylan is a woman, played by Cate Blanchett. Yet I felt I knew more about what makes Bob Dylan tick when I left the theatre than I did about Johnny Cash following Walk the Line or Ray Charles after Ray.
Something from Nothing: The Art of Rap: A vibrant look at the art of hip hop, the first documentary from Ice-T profiles the passion of the grandmasters of rap: Afrika Bambaataa, Treach Criss, Doug E. Fresh, KRS-One, Dr. Dre and more. Worth it to hear Snoop Dogg’s (now Snoop Lion) songwriting methodology: “I need to smoke a lot of weed, and have a couple girls there because I like looking at them.”
Get on Up: James Brown was known as many things; The Godfather of Soul, Soul Brother No. 1, Mr. Dynamite and The Hardest Working Man in Show Business but he preferred to be called Mr. Brown. His rise from poverty to the top of the R&B charts is brought to life in a knock out performance from Chadwick Boseman, who plays Brown from age 16 to 60.
On January 25th at 7 pm Richard and Geoff Pevere will host a special screening of Don’t Look Back, 1967 documentary film by D. A. Pennebaker of Bob Dylan’s 1965 concert tour in the UK at the Revue Cinema (400 Roncesvalles Avenue,(416) 531-9950) in Toronto.
Geoff Pevere is one of Canada’s leading pop culture commentators and movie critics. Geoff was a former host of CBC Radio’s Prime Time program, a movie critic with the Toronto Star for ten years, a TV host and a lecturer on film and media and is currently a movie columnist with the Globe and Mail. He is the co-author of the national bestseller Mondo Canuck: A Canadian Pop Culture Odyssey, his books include Toronto on Film and Donald Shebib’s Goin’ Down the Road, his latest book is Gods of the Hammer – The Teenage Head Story. Geoff will be signing copies of Gods of the Hammer! If you don’t have your own copy you can pick one up at the Revue before and after the screening.
Richard Crouse is the regular film critic for CTV’s Canada AM, the 24 hour news source CTV’s News Channel and CP24. He is a frequent guest on many national Canadian radio and television shows. His syndicated Saturday afternoon radio show, The Richard Crouse Show, originates on News Talk 1010 in Toronto. He is the author of six books on pop culture and writes a weekly column for Metro newspaper.
Join us on January 25th at 7 pm when Geoff and Richard long-time friends and television co-hosts discuss music and film before screening Geoff’s all-time favourite music film Don’t Look Back.
More info HERE!
