A weekly feature from ctvnews.ca! The Crouse Review is a quick, hot take on the weekend’s biggest and most interesting movies! This week Richard looks at “Ford v Ferrari,” “The Good Liar,” and the documentary “Margaret Atwood: A Word After A Word After A Word Is Power.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
Richard has a look at the new movies coming to theatres, including the hairpin twists and turns of “Ford v Farrari,” the secrets and lies of “The Good Liar” and the life of one of Canada’s best known authors in the documentary “Margaret Atwood: A Word After A Word After A Word Is Power” with CFRA morning show host Bill Carroll.
Listen to the whole thing HERE!
Richard sits in on the CJAD Montreal morning show with host Andrew Carter to talk the new movies coming to theatres including the pedal to the metal “Ford v Ferrari,” the b-movie with an a-list cast “The Good Liar,” and the documentary “Margaret Atwood: A Word After A Word After A Word Is Power.”
Listen to the whole thing HERE!
The cars of the early 1960s were sexy beasts. Sleek and metallic on the outside, perfumed with the sweet smell of fine Corinthian leather on the inside, they tore along the highways and byways like, to paraphrase Bruce Springsteen, like big old dinosaurs. The action in “Ford v Ferrari,” however, begins in 1963 with the least sexy things ever, a failed corporate takeover.
Suffering a slump in sales the Ford Motor Company tries unsuccessfully to take over the infinitely more seductive Ferrari. The Italian car company, on a winning streak with at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, replies in no uncertain terms. “Ford makes ugly little cars in ugly factories,” says Enzo Ferrari (Remo Girone).
That’s a no.
Insulted, Henry Ford II (Tracy Letts) flip-flops an old maxim. If he can’t join ‘em, he can beat ‘em. “This isn’t the first time Ford Motors’ gone to war,” he says. “We know how to do more than push papers. When early attempts to create a race car to take the wind out of Ferrari’s sails fails Ford marketing executive Lee Iacocca (Jon Bernthal) brings in car designer Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon) to make a Ford that will rule at La Mans. “My name is Carroll Shelby and performance is my business.” A former racer—he won the Le Mans in 1959 with partner Roy Salvadori—heart problems forced him off the track.
Shelby asks hot-headed British racer Ken Miles (Christian Bale) to help. “How long did you tell them that you needed?” he asks. “Two, three hundred years?” Together they work to make a sports car that will appeal to young consumers and “go like hell.”
Some basic knowledge of how cars work may enhance your enjoyment of “Ford v Ferrari” but the resonate part of the story has nothing to do with horsepower or Gurney flaps. At its fuel Injected heart the James Mangold-directed movie is a Davey and Goliath story about friendship and burning rubber.
The bromance angle comes in the bond between Shelby and Miles. The two men are like brothers who fight and love in almost equal measure. Damon and Bale share an easy camaraderie, fuelled by their character’s love of the art of racing and the desire to stick it to the big guys, the Ford Motor Company. Shelby is the diplomat, Miles the one more likely to punch a Ford executive, but both are underdogs who take pleasure in making the suits squirm.
“Ford v Ferrari” is formulaic in laying out the story. It’s a longshot tale with revving engines and many predictable twists and turns but Mangold injects some real excitement in the extended racing scenes.
Richard sits in with CTV NewsChannel’s Merella Fernandez to chat about the morning’s Emmy nominations, who was snubbed and who will win!
Watch the whole thing HERE!
Richard and CP24 anchor George Lagogianes do a refresher on “Captain America: Civil War” and then talk about the weekend’s big releases,the George Clooney – Julia Roberts thriller “Money Monster” and the lusty and lurid “A Bigger Splash.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
By Richard Crouse – Metro In Focus
George Clooney is a rare breed, a one-name film star. Mention “George” and everyone knows who you’re talking about.
He’s headlined a handful of films dating all the way back to when there was a Clinton in the White House that raked in north of $100 million. Since leaving the television show ER in 1999, he’s released two movies a year on average, including this weekend’s Money Monster, a thriller about the host of a financial advice show held hostage on live TV by an investor who lost everything.
Some of his films have been successful, others not, but it’s clear Clooney doesn’t aspire to be a blockbuster star. Perhaps it’s because George is, as Time called him, “the last movie star,” that he appears determined to smash what that kind of stardom means. By lending his name to offbeat movies he deconstructs the mechanism of superstardom.
George steers his career toward character driven pieces, often at the expense of giant box office numbers. And while the fabric of his fame may fray around the edges from time to time — he’s as susceptible to box office vagaries as anyone — he stays busy, winning Oscars, producing movies like August: Osage County and acting as pitchman for everyone from Fiat to Martini vermouth.
“I’m very aware of the fact that if not for a Thursday night time slot on ER, I wouldn’t have this career,” he once said, “so I’m going to push the limits as much as I can.”
From kid flicks to period dramas and political satire Clooney has done just that.
Loosely based on a Roald Dahl story, the stop-motion animated Fantastic Mr. Fox sees Clooney as a smooth-talking fox that returns to a life of crime after buying a tree house he can’t afford. Clooney brings charm, wit and warmth to an unpredictable character, smooth one minute, a wild animal the next.
Clooney also starred in The Good German, a tribute to 1940s cinema shot with technology from the golden age of Hollywood — the same lenses, the same atmospheric lighting, the same rat-a-tat-tat style of dialogue, the same everything. It’s a retro-looking film made with twenty-first century creative freedom. Clooney, as an American military journalist covering the Potsdam Conference in post-war Berlin, and co-star Cate Blanchett look like golden age movie stars but behave more like Brat Packers.
Strangest of all is The Men Who Stare at Goats, the best movie with the worst name on Clooney’s resume. He plays a psychic soldier in this screwball satire about the state of modern warfare. Its an absurdist film, filled with memorable images — Clooney staring down a goat, enlisted men doing the Watusi and a montage of Jeff Bridges embarking on a journey of enlightenment — where no joke is too broad or too barbed.
George is so artistically eclectic he even disowns one of his biggest hits. “I always apologize for Batman!” he says of the ludicrous Batman & Robin.
Richard and “Canada AM” host Beverly Thomson kick around the weekend’s big releases, the George Clooney – Julia Roberts thriller “Money Monster,” the lusty and lurid “A Bigger Splash” and the Scottish drama “Sunset Song.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
George Clooney looks like the kind of guy you could trust. Older, experienced, he seems trustworthy, brimming with advice you could take to the bank. I mean, if you’d buy Nespresso coffee because he told you to, why wouldn’t you take financial guidance as well? A new movie, “Money Monster,” uses that quality, Clooney’s charisma, as the cornerstone of a thriller about misplaced trust, mislaid money and attempted murder.
Clooney is Lee Gates, a loudmouth financial advisor who bellows about investing in stocks and saving for retirement on a live television show called “Money Monster.” Think “Mad Money with Jim Cramer” with just enough details changed to avoid lawsuits and you get the idea. Gates is a self-styled Wiz of Wall Street, a financial shock jock who starts each of his shows with a wild dance number.
Just as his Friday night broadcast is getting underway Kyle Budwell (Jack O’Connell), a jilted investor invades the studio and takes Gates, his crew, and producer Patty (Julia Roberts) hostage live on air. “Turn those cameras back on I’m going to shoot him in his head!” He trusted the TV oracle only to lose everything when a high-frequency trading company Gates endorsed called Ibis Clear Capital lost $800 million overnight, tanking the stock market. Kyle is convinced that Wall Street banks are stealing our money and our country and Gates is the emblem of the theft. “I may be the one with the gun,” he says, “but I’m not the criminal here.”
In real time over the next hour Gates learns the human cost of his actions as Kyle as the cameras broadcast every minute to a worldwide audience of millions.
Like the volatile stock market Gates chronicles on his fictional show, “Money Monster’s” story takes many unexpected twist and turns. Unexpected and, as the story unfolds, preposterous. Unable to decide whether it is an exposé of Wall Street’s dirty dealings—much of it breathes the same air as “The Big Short” minus the bubble baths and Anthony Bourdain—a humanist thriller or a comment on the remove we feel watching tragedy through a screen—“If Lee survives we got to get him on the show,” chirps one chat show host watching the action on a monitor—it blends all its ideas into a mushy concoction that is neither one thing or the other. Director Jodie Foster relies on clichés to move the story forward rather than trusting the ideas and rich vein of social commentary that could have been mined from the material. You can’t help but wonder what Sidney Lumet might have done with the same story.
Clooney does the best he can with a script that forces him to behave like a caricature. He’s believable as the cocky on-air host, less so when he has to transform that character into a vulnerable, real human being.
Roberts is trapped in a control room, barking orders through a headset for most of the film, bringing whatever charm there is to be had from a part that is essentially a conduit for information and she tries to unravel the film’s core “where did the money go?” mystery.
The third part of the triumvirate, O’Connell, plays confused/mad quite well, but again is saddled with a role that is dragged down with repetition.
Some of the supporting actors fare a little better, particularly Caitriona Balfe as the CCO who wants to do the right thing, if only she knew what the right thing was and Christopher Denham as a producer who will do anything to please Gates.
“This isn’t good Lee,” Patti says about the action unfolding in the studio. She could have been talking about “Money Monster,” a movie that feels like a missed opportunity to mix intimate life and death drama with an indictment of the wheelers and dealers who play hardball with our money.
