Greed and murder are not new themes in the work of Martin Scorsese, but the effects of those capital sins have never been more darkly devastating than they are in “Killers of the Flower Moon.”
A study in the banality of evil, the story, loosely based on David Grann’s 2017 nonfiction book of the same name, is set in 1920s Oklahoma, a time of an oil rush on land owned by the Osage Nation. The discovery of black gold made the Indigenous Nation the richest people per capita on Earth. With wealth came an influx of white interlopers, “like buzzards circling our people.”
Among them is William King Hale (Robert De Niro), a seemingly respectable Osage County power broker. He speaks the area’s Indigenous language and publicly supports the Osage community, but, as we find out, it is his insidious and deadly dealings with his Indigenous Osage neighbors that filled his bank account. “Call me King,” he says unironically.
When his nephew and World War I vet Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) arrives, looking to start a new life, Hale brings him into a years long con to defraud the Osage people through marriage scams and murder by setting up a connection between Mollie (Lily Gladstone), a wealthy Osage woman, and Ernest.
“He’s not that smart,” says Mollie, “but he’s handsome. He looks like a coyote. Those blue eyes.”
Mollie sees through the overture, noting, “Coyote wants money,” during their first dinner, but despite the economic angle, the pair marry, making Ernest an heir to her fortune if something should happen to her.
That economic element lays at the dark heart of Hale’s plan. He orchestrates matches between the monied Osage mothers, sisters and daughters with carefully chosen white men, who exploit them, murder them, and siphon off the oil money from their estates.
This reign of terror claims the lives of more than two dozen Osage women, attracting the attention of the newly formed Bureau of Investigation agent Tom White (Jesse Plemons) and his crew.
The murderous real-life scheme behind “Killers of the Flower Moon” is the most depraved crime and villain Scorsese has ever essayed on film.
The wholesale murder for money is driven not just by greed, but also by white supremacy, oppression of culture and a diabolical disregard for human life. It is pure evil, manipulated by Hale, played by De Niro as the smiling face of doom.
De Niro has played dastardly characters before, but he’s never been this vile. And this is an actor who played The Devil in “Angel Heart.”
The thing that makes Hale truly treacherous and morally irredeemable is the way he insinuates himself into the lives of the very people he was exploiting and having murdered. He is a master manipulator, who will shake his victim’s hand while using his other hand to stab them in the back, and De Niro’s embodiment of him is skin crawling. “This wealth should come to us,” he says, “Their time is over. It’s just going to be another tragedy.”
As Ernest, DiCaprio goes along with the plan, but, unlike his uncle, has a hint of a conscience even as he does horrible things. He’s a weak person, torn between love for his wife and his uncle’s plan to eliminate her and her family.
The center of the story is Mollie, played with quiet grace by Gladstone. Although she disappears from the screen for long periods of time, it is her presence that provides the film with much needed heart and soul. She is strong in the face of illness and betrayal, but her stoicism portrays a complexity of emotion as her family members are murdered and her own life is endangered. Mollie is as spiritual as Hale is immoral, and that balance is the film’s underpinning.
“Killers of the Flower Moon” earns its three-and-a-half hour runtime with a classically made, multiple perspective, slow burn of a crime story that sheds light on, and condemns, the brutal treatment of Indigenous people.
This week on the Richard Crouse Oscar Special we meet four Academy Award nominees!
First up, Ke Huy Quan, nominated for Best Supporting Actor for the most aptly titled movie of last year, “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” You can say a lot of things about “Everything Everywhere All At Once” but you can’t say you’ve ever seen anything quite like it before. An eye-popping reflection on the power of kindness and love to heal the world’s problems, it is exhilarating that mixes and matches everything from family drama and tax problems to martial-arts and metaphysics into a whimsical story that moves at the speed of light. The result is a singular film that milks intentionality out of its madness.
You know Ke Huy Quan as Short Round, the plucky kid companion to Indiana Jones in The Temple Of Doom and from a role in cult classic comedy-adventure The Goonies. We’ll talk about why he chose to return to acting in “Everything Everywhere All at Once” after a twenty-year break from Hollywood.
I caught up with Best Director nominee Baz Lurhmann and the stars of “Elvis,” Best Actor nominee Austin Butler, who hands in a terrific performance as Elvis and Olivia DeJonge who plays Elvis’ wife, Priscilla. We talked about what the story of Elvis’s life can tell us about America, Priscilla’s role in the singer’s life and much more.
Then, we meet Best Actor nominee Brendan Fraser, whose performance as a 600 pound man in “The Whale” earned him a six minute standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival, and the film’s screenwriter Sam Hunter, to talk about what Fraser learned from playing the character, how Hunter changed the script from the original stage play and more.
Listen to the whole thing HERE! (Link coming soon)
Here’s some info on The Richard Crouse Show!
Each week on the nationally syndicated Richard Crouse Show, Canada’s most recognized movie critic brings together some of the most interesting and opinionated people from the movies, television and music to put a fresh spin on news from the world of lifestyle and pop-culture. Tune into this show to hear in-depth interviews with actors and directors, to find out what’s going on behind the scenes of your favourite shows and movies and get a new take on current trends. Recent guests include Chris Pratt, Elvis Costello, Baz Luhrmann, Martin Freeman, David Cronenberg, Mayim Bialik, The Kids in the Hall and many more!
Listen to the show live here:
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Despite its dark subject matter, “The Whale,” Oscar nominated director Darren Aronofsky’s latest film, is coloured by a swirl of love, understanding and empathy.
Brendan Fraser, in his first leading role in nearly a decade, plays Charlie, a house-bound, 600-pound online English professor. Agoraphobic and unable to leave his apartment, the only outside contact Charlie has is his nurse and only friend Lis (Hong Chau) and the occasional visit from a pizza delivery guy (Sathya Sridharan). He is large to the point where even simple tasks, like standing up to retrieve a dropped remote from the floor, becomes a Herculean task.
“You will die by the weekend,” Lis says, clocking his blood pressure at 238/134. “Then I have to get to work,” he says optimistically. “I have papers to grade.”
Charlie suffers from a twice broken heart; once by congestive heart failure, the second by the death of his partner Alan. “Someone close to me passed away and it had an effect,” he says with great understatement. “I was always big,” admitting he binge-eats to make himself feel better. “I let it get out of control.”
Now, with just days left to live, he has one wish. He wants to repair the relationship with his estranged daughter Ellie (Sadie Sink), a 17-year-old he hasn’t seen since he left his family after falling in love with Alan, one of his students. “I need to know I did one thing right in my life,” he says.
Ellie, just eight-years-old when he deserted her, wants nothing to do with him—“I’m not spending time with you,” she says. “You’re disgusting. You’d still be disgusting even if you weren’t fat.”—but reluctantly relents when he offers to pay her and tutor her in exchange for spending time together.
As Charlie’s condition worsens, Ellie spends more time at the apartment, uncovering aspects of her father’s life with the help of a new friend, a naïve missionary named Thomas (Ty Simpkins).
Aronofsky brings us into Charlie’s world, a place where grief and forgiveness live side by side to create an intimate and compassionate portrait of a man who allowed his life to spiral out of control.
The specter of death hangs over every frame of “The Whale,” and yet Fraser manages to bring optimism to a character not long for this world. He’s looking to set things straight and make sure Ellie will have the tools to have a decent life after he goes. It is a tremendous performance that soars, transcending the stage-bound nature of the story.
On this edition of the Richard Crouse Show we get to know Teddy Wilson, co-host of “The Mightiest,” a six-episode docu-series, airing on Wednesdays on the Discovery Channel, that examines the science and ingenuity behind some of the biggest and most complex planes, trains, and ships that humankind has ever made and operated. From re-engineered Chinook helitankers fighting wildfires 24/7 in Southern California, to a train that helps sustain life and connect communities, the series gives viewers an all-access pass to every aspect of the vessels and the people around it as they embark on new and dangerous journeys.
Then, we meet Enuka Okuma. You know here as detective Traci Nash in the police drama series, Rookie Blue. She is also known for her work on the television series “Madison” and “Sue Thomas: F.B.Eye.” Today we talk about her work as one of the stars and writers of the hit CBC show “Workin’ Moms.”
We’ll meet meet Humble the Poet. He is a Canadian-born rapper, spoken-word artist, poet, internationally bestselling author, and former elementary school teacher with a wildly popular blog with over 100,000 monthly readers. After the international best-selling success of his book “Unlearn,” Humble The Poet is back with a new book, “How to be Love(D).” With short chapters filled with insight, advice, and personal anecdotes from his own journey, this book is a guide to self-love that helps clarify your path inward toward the inherent love and value that is within each of us… perfect reading for the start of a new year.
As we get closer to Awards Season, there is an embarrassment of riches of movies playing in theatres this month. IN this segment, we meet two of the stars of two of the season’s best movies.
First, we meet Brendan Fraser. In his first leading role in a decade, he is garnering Oscar buzz for playing a 600-pound man trying to reconnect with his daughter in “The Whale.” The specter of death hangs over every frame of “The Whale,” and yet Fraser manages to bring optimism to a character not long for this world. He’s looking to set things straight and make sure Ellie will have the tools to have a decent life after he goes. It is a tremendous performance that soars, transcending the stage-bound nature of the story.
Now let’s meet Janelle Monáe. The Grammy nominated singer, rapper and actor is one of the stars of of “Glass Onion,” the sequel to the 2019 hit “Knives Out.” In the movie tech billionaire Miles Bron, played by Ed Norton, invites his friends for a getaway on his private Greek island. When someone turns up dead, Detective Benoit Blanc, played by Daniel Craig, is put on the case.
Each week on the nationally syndicated Richard Crouse Show, Canada’s most recognized movie critic brings together some of the most interesting and opinionated people from the movies, television and music to put a fresh spin on news from the world of lifestyle and pop-culture. Tune into this show to hear in-depth interviews with actors and directors, to find out what’s going on behind the scenes of your favourite shows and movies and get a new take on current trends. Recent guests include Chris Pratt, Elvis Costello, Baz Luhrmann, Martin Freeman, David Cronenberg, Mayim Bialik, The Kids in the Hall and many more!
Listen to the show live here:
C-FAX 1070 in Victoria
SAT 5:00 PM to 6:00 PM
SUN 10:00 AM to 11:00 AM
CJAD in Montreal
SAT 8 PM to 9:00 PM
CFRA in Ottawa
SAT 8 PM to 9:00 PM
NEWSTALK 610 CKTB in St. Catharines
Sat 8:00 PM to 9:00 PM
NEWSTALK 1010 in Toronto
SAT 8 PM to 9:00 PM
NEWSTALK 1290 CJBK
SAT 8 PM to 9:00 PM
AM 1150 in Kelowna
SAT 11 PM to Midnight
BNN BLOOMBERG RADIO 1410
SAT 8 PM to 9:00 PM
Click HERE to catch up on shows you might have missed!
Richard joins Ryan Doyle and guest host Tamara Cherry of the NewsTalk 1010 afternoon show to talk about Squirt soda and the origin of the tequila-based cocktail the Paloma, and some movies to watch on the weekend, including “Black Widow” and “No Sudden Move.”
“No Sudden Move,” a new Steven Soderbergh film starring Don Cheadle and Benicio del Toro and now playing on Crave, is a film noir that gets lost in its knotty plot, but is kept on track by a top-notch cast.
Set in 1954 Detroit, the action begins with Jones, a shady character played by Brendan Fraser, recruiting three low level criminals, Curt (Cheadle), Ronald (del Toro) and Charley (Kieran Culkin), for a job that pays too much to be as easy as he says it will be. They all agree, just so long as someone named Frank (Ray Liotta) won’t be involved.
Their job is to invade General Motors accountant Matt Wertz’s (David Harbour) home, keep his family quiet for an hour while he retrieves a document from his boss’s safe.
Sounds simple, but this is Detroit in 1954. Industrial espionage between the Big Three car companies is a dangerous game, and, of course, Frank is involved. “Everybody has a problem with Frank these days.”
As things spin out of control, greed kicks in and the fast cash the small-time criminals hoped to make causes big time problems.
Soderbergh immerses his characters and the viewer in a world that where secrets propel the action. No one is who they seem and motives are even murkier. It makes for a twisty-turny story that is part crime story, part social history of the spark that ignited the slow decline of Detroit.
To add to the disorientation, Soderbergh shoots the action through a fish eye lens that blurs the edges of the screen, mimicking the script’s moral fog.
“No Sudden Move” almost bites off more than it can chew. It’s occasionally clunky, with too many double-crosses and characters vying for screen time, but the star-studded cast cuts through the script’s noise with ease. The result is a caper that flier by, buoyed by surprises (including a big-name uncredited cameo), snappy dialogue and a great debt to Elmore Leonard.
Jay Ward may not a household name, but many of the characters he created are.
As the Grand Poobah at Jay Ward Productions he produced the animated television shows that gave us Rocky & Bullwinkle, Dudley Do-Right, Peabody and Sherman and George of the Jungle among others.
His cartoons weren’t just for kids. The Los Angeles Times wrote, “The good ones, which Ward was a master at creating, worked at two levels: one direct and another wonderfully satiric.”
This weekend his characters take over the big screen in Mr. Peabody & Sherman, an animated film starring the voices of Modern Family’s Ty Burrell, Stephen Colbert and Leslie Mann.
Based on Peabody’s Improbable History segment from the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, the movie sees the duo use the WABAC machine to ping pong through time, interacting with everyone from Marie Antoinette to King Tut to Leonardo da Vinci and Albert Einstein.
Mr. Peabody & Sherman isn’t the first film based on Ward’s characters.
In a 199 television movie (originally shot in 1988 for theatrical release) SCTV alum Dave Thomas played Boris Badenov, “world’s greatest no-goodnik.” With his partner-in-crime Natasha Fatale (Sally Kellerman) he leaves Pottsylvania for the United States to retrieve a micro-chip. TV Guide said, “as a 90-minute feature film, it’s at least 80 minutes too long,” but it’s worth a gander to see one of the rare live action performances of June Foray, the original voice of Rocky.
Brendan Fraser brought two of Ward’s characters to life, George of the Jungle and Dudley Do-Right.
George of the Jungle is a riff on Tarzan. He’s boy raised in the jungle by an ape (John Cleese) but who never mastered the art of swinging from tree to tree. Rotten Tomatoes gives it a 56% Fresh Rating, but the film remains most memorable for the catchy “George, George / George of the Jungle / Strong as he can be / Watch out for that tree,” theme song by the Presidents of the United States of America.
Two years later Fraser was back in another Ward inspired movie about a bumbling Canadian Mountie called Dudley Do-Right who “always gets his man.”
Co-starring with Sarah Jessica Parker and Alfred Molina, the story saw Dudley track his nemesis, the depraved Snidely Whiplash. Bad reviews—USA Today’s called it a “Dead-carcass spinoff of Jay Ward’s animated TV favorite.”—doomed the movie, but the character lives on as part of an amusement park ride called Dudley Do-Right’s Ripsaw Falls at the Islands of Adventure theme park.
Finally, despite an big name cast—Jason Alexander, Rene Russo and John Goodman—The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle bombed at the box office despite Robert De Niro doing a take on his famous “You talkin’ to me?” speech from Taxi Driver.
We are gathered here today to mourn the death of the career of Brendan Fraser. In the early 1990s Mr. Fraser’s career appeared vibrant and healthy in films like “Gods and Monsters” and “Mrs. Winterbourne,” but following a career high with box office champs like “The Mummy” his career began a long, painful battle with bad material and began to look as green as the green screens it often performed in front of. With the release of “Furry Vengeance,” the battle is lost. A career, who once shared the screen with Oscar winners like Shirley MacLaine and legends like Ian McKellan, is now content work opposite angry raccoons. R.I.P. the career of Brendan Fraser.
In “Furry Vengeance” Fraser plays Dan Saunders a well meaning real estate developer who has moved his family from Chicago to the middle of nowhere to oversee the building of a subdivision. His contract is for one year, but his supposedly eco friendly, “green” boss has a different idea. He wants to clear cut the surrounding forest and build a new suburb. To prevent the destruction of their homeland the forest’s animals, led by a raccoon who fancies himself a fuzzy William Wallace, leads a campaign of psychological warfare on Saunders.
“Furry Vengeance” is as direct-to-DVD worthy a movie as will be released theatrically this year. Ten minutes in I was wishing the movie would take a sudden turn from flaccid family friendly fare into more “When Animals Attack” mode. Nothing would have pleased me more than to see the animals rise up against the filmmakers, hijack this movie and make it a true revenge film. Twenty minutes in I was wishing I had claws, like the little furry creatures in the film, so I could claw my own eyes out.
I know “Furry Vengeance” is meant for little kids, but kids deserve better than this. In a twelve month period that has given us “Fantastic Mr. Fox” and “Where the Wild Things Are,” movies that raised the bar for children’s entertainment, a return to this mush-headed-slapstick is taking a giant step backward. With the Laugh-O-Meter™ set somewhere between the hit-in-the-crotch gags of “America’s Funniest Home Videos” and a “Knock Knock” joke, it aims to amuse developing brains but it telegraphs every joke and by the time Fraser shows up in a pink track suit with the words Yum Yum on the bum, all hope is lost.
The cast is uniformly bad, but it is Fraser who makes the biggest impression. He’s acting at a level that, I’m sure, The Three Stooges would consider over-the-top. Watching this it’s hard to imagine that this is the same actor who once dazzled in “Gods and Monsters.” Perhaps my reports of his career death are, as Mark Twain once said, “greatly exaggerated,” but he has to try harder if he wants to keep his career off the critical list.
Go see (if you must) “Furry Vengeance” with low expectations, but be warned, it’s worse even than you think it is.
Once upon a time Brendan Fraser was a real actor. Years before he discovered the financial benefits of acting in front of a green screen—being chased by mummies or journeying to the center of the earth, in 3D no less, has been very kind to his bank account—he made smaller character driven films. That was then, this is now. Inkheart, the new special effects opus is the latest in a string of movies that sees him as the square jawed hero battling creatures from another realm. Not since Orson Welles voiced commercials for a frozen pea company has one actor squandered his talent so flagrantly.
Based on the 2003 German novel of the same name by Cornelia Funke Inkheart is the story of Mortimer “Mo” Folchart (Fraser) and his 12-year-old daughter, Meggie (Eliza Bennett). Both are bibliophiles but he is a book nut with a special gift… or curse depending on how you look at it. He is a “silver tongue,” someone who can bring books to life simply by reading them aloud. Of course over the years this has caused problems. When Meggie was just three years old Mo read aloud from a novel called Inkheart, a story filled with evil kings and a mysterious creature called The Shadow, made from the ashes of all his victims. As the words tripped off his tongue he mistakenly brought some of the characters from the book to the real world. Worse, his wife Resa (Sienna Guillory) vanished into the book’s mystical world. For nine years Mo has tried to track down another copy of the rare book with the hope of bring her back. When he finally finds a copy he must first deal with the book’s evil king who has decided he likes the real world and doesn’t want to be sent back to the pages of the novel.
Inkheart should have been romp through a whimsical world fun enough to give Harry Potter a run for his money. The idea is sound—fantastical creatures doing battle with Fraser and the other humans could be fun. Remember the first Mummy movie?—but director Iain Softley drops the ball. The pace is turgid, the action sequences have no bounce and even good actors like Paul Bettany as the enigmatic Dustfinger and Helen Mirren as feisty Great Aunt Elinor can’t elevate the proceedings to even a notch above dull.
The characters just aren’t very compelling. Fraser walks through the movie looking like he’s wondering when he’ll get paid; Paul Bettany’s Dustfinger, a character from the book who desperately wants to get sent back to his old life in the novel, is far too sullen and Andy Serkis’s supposedly evil Capricorn is a villain who seems grumpy rather than truly evil. And honestly, the sight of Dame Helen Mirren riding a unicorn, whooping like a blood crazed warrior from hell, is as ready a Razzie Awards moment as I have seen for some time.
Inkheart encapsulates everything that’s wrong with Brendan Fraser’s career. It’s another forgettable performance from him in a forgettable movie that allows the premise and the CGI to overshadow everything else. Let’s remember Fraser for the good ones—The Quiet American, Gods and Monsters and Crash—and hope that he gets over his green screen addiction sooner rather than later.
