“Wildwood” is in theatres this weekend! “A visually ambitious movie, the stop motion animated Wildwood is a hand-crafted movie of uncommon beauty.” I spoke with Laika stop-motion animation supervisor Brad Schiff and Jacob Tremblay who voices the character Curtis in the film.
Watch the whole thing HERE!
I join CTV NewsChannel anchor Renée Rodgers to talk about the origin story “Clayface,” the stop-motion animated “Wildwood,” the documentary “Once Upon a Time in Harlem” and the adult fairy tale “Wicker.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
I sit in with CKTB morning show host Steph Vivier to have a look at movies in theatres including the origin story “Clayface,” the stop-motion animated “Wildwood,” the documenary “Once Upon a Time in Harlem” and the adult fairy tale “Wicker.”
Listen to the whole thing HERE!
Fast reviews for busy people! Watch as I review three movies in less time than it takes to wind your watch. Have a look as I race against the clock to tell you about the origin story “Clayface,” the stop-motion animated “Wildwood” and the documentary “Once Upon a Time in Harlem.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
SYNOPSIS: In “Wildwood,” a new animated dark fairy tale now playing in theatres, a sister goes on a dangerous journey through an “impassable forest” to rescue her brother after he is kidnapped by a mysterious woman named Alexandra. “I’m not a hero,” she says, “I’m just a girl who lost her brother to a murder of crows.”
CAST: Peyton Elizabeth Lee, Jacob Tremblay, Carey Mulligan, Mahershala Ali, Awkwafina, Angela Bassett, Jake Johnson, Charlie Day, Amandla Stenberg, Jemaine Clement, Len Cariou, Maya Erskine, Tantoo Cardinal, Tom Waits, Richard E. Grant. Directed by Travis Knight.
REVIEW: A visually ambitious movie, “Wildwood” is an epic fairy tale for adults told on a grand scale.
Set in current day Portland, Oregon the story begins when Prue McKeel’s (Peyton Elizabeth Lee) parents ask her to babysit her little brother Mac. They can do whatever they want, as long as she doesn’t take him out of the house.
Of course she does, and, along with eager-to-please schoolmate Curtis (Jacob Tremblay), take the infant for an adventure packed, fun day in town. Well, fun until a murder of crows swoops down and carries the infant skyward.
Frantically following the flock, Prue and Curtis end up in the “impassable wilderness,” a magical place on the outskirts of town with a strict no outsiders policy. There they encounter an army of coyotes, talking owls, castles and mystics who talk to trees and a grief-stricken Dowager Governess (Carey Mulligan) still stinging from the loss of her son. “I don’t want any part of your fairytale,” says Prue. ”I just want my brother.”
To rescue young Mac, Prue and Curtis will have to figure out who to trust in a world filled with magic and distractions.
As far as animation studios go LAIKA, the Oregon based creators behind films like “Coraline” and “Kubo and the Two Strings,” may not have the same name recognition as Pixar, but their brand equals their better-known counterpart in quality and fearless embrace of challenging and thought-provoking themes.
In “Wildwood,” their first PG-13 film (this may be too intense for the little ones, especially in the final battle scene), LAIKA delivers their most accomplished film to date. With a blend of stop motion animation and digital tools director Travis Knight has created the company’s magnum opus, a hand-crafted movie of uncommon beauty.
Epic in scope but personal in nature, Prue’s search for her brother takes her to a wonderfully realized world.
Ripe with magic and danger in equal measure, it’s a spectacularly rendered realm, filled with an eye-popping sense of scale. From Prue’s ride on the back of a giant eagle—“Scared of flying?” she says as they soar through the air. “I’m not usually on the outside of the plane.”—and the Hitchcockian murder of crows abduction sequence to a twelve-minute climatic battle scene and the living ivy that comes alive near the end, the attention to detail will make your eyeballs dance across the screen.
There is also an unusual degree of performance, with smooth stop motion and nuanced facial expressions courtesy of 140,000 3-D printed replacement faces. The use of digital effects, however, doesn’t overwhelm the stop motion, which still feels soulful and artisanal.
Although “Wildwood’s” story sometimes feels like it has been cobbled together from a variety of other fairy tales but nonetheless sets a high bar for stop motion that will be very difficult to top.
Adam Sandler’s career arc is wide and weird. Rotten Tomatoes lists dozens of films, ranging from the wacky “The Ridiculous 6,” which earned a 0% approval rating, to the dramedy “Hustle” that clocks in at a healthy 93%. In between is a wildly diverse collection of movies that vacillate from beloved comedy classics like the goofy “Happy Gilmore” to the Oscar nominated “Uncut Gems.”
His latest, “Spaceman,” now streaming on Netflix, is something new, an outer space marital drama featuring the comedian as a Czech astronaut on a mission to Jupiter, who receives personal advice from an extraterrestrial six-eyed hairy spider, voiced by Paul Dano.
In space, nobody can hear you scream… but a giant spider can read your mind.
Based on Jaroslav Kalfař’s novel “Spaceman Of Bohemia,” the story revolves around Commander Jakub Procházka (Sandler), a withdrawn astronaut on a solo six-month mission to the fifth planet from the Sun. During a live press conference from space, organized by Commissioner Tuma (Isabella Rossellini), a child asks him, “Are you the loneliest man in the world?”
He may well be.
He hasn’t had a message from his pregnant wife Lenka (Carey Mulligan) in a long time. Unbeknownst to him, she has tired of being alone and sent him a Dear John transmission, which was suppressed by Tuma. “He’s not doing well,” Tuma says, fearing for Jakub’s mental health. “He misses his wife.”
Left adrift in space, alone and cut off from Lenka, Jakub receives relationship guidance from a large, chatty spider who says, “Your loneliness intrigued me. I wish to assist you in your emotional distress.” Whether the celestial spider is real, or a figment of Jakub’s fevered imagination, their conversations are therapeutic, forcing him to reassess his life and relationships.
“Spaceman” doesn’t play any of this for laughs. It is a low-key but high-minded film about a psychoanalytic spider, longing, loss and love. Set against the backdrop of a space mission, it examines the personal reasons why Jakub would leave behind the love of his life for the isolation of space.
“Billy Madison” this ain’t.
In a quiet, heartfelt performance, Sandler plays Jakub as a flawed man, deadened by emotional distress. It is sombre work, with whispered dialogue, longing looks and loads of introspection. He pulls it off, playing off of the goodwill earned from many years of making us laugh, to create a character we have instant empathy for. It’s another notch on his serious actor belt, even if it veers toward dreary for much of the film’s runtime.
Dano brings a whispery HAL 9000 vibe to the wise alien tarantula. He’s an eight-legged psychiatrist; a strange looking companion who knows how to ask the right questions to fire Jakub’s memories. Although the spider looks like something that may have escaped the set of “H.R. Pufnstuf,” Dano gives him real empathy.
As the earthbound Lenka, Mulligan isn’t given that much to do, but effectively displays her character’s deeply rooted, but conflicted, sadness.
As outer-space dramas go, “Spaceman” has more in common with “Solaris” than it does “Star Wars.” It is a slow-moving movie, with very little action—although a broken, on-board toilet threatens to pierce through the movie’s lugubrious tone—that is more concerned with the human condition; Jakub’s childhood trauma, his fear at impending fatherhood, his deep emotional scars.
Director Johan “Chernobyl” Renck does provide moments of great beauty and compassion, but the film’s listless pacing blunts the effectiveness of Jakub’s emotional journey.
Depending on what generation you belong to, Leonard Bernstein is either a name from the distant past, a prodigiously talented musician who wrote the music for “West Side Story,” or the subject of a well-loved name drop in the 1987 R.E.M. song “It’s The End of The World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine).” “Maestro,” a new film written, directed, produced and starring Bradley Cooper, aims to remind audiences of the complicated man who said, “music, it keeps me glued to life.”
The story of gender roles and genius begins in 1943 with Bernstein’s (Cooper) career making debut as a conductor at Carnegie Hall, filling in for an ailing colleague with only an hour’s notice and no rehearsal. The day before he was a talented but struggling musician, living in a cramped apartment with boyfriend David Oppenheim (Matt Bomer). The next day a star is born. He is the toast of New York, lauded on the front page of the New York Times.
At a party he meets Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan), a Chilean actress with dreams of starring on Broadway. It’s love at first sight and Cooper stages their first night together as a romantic fantasy, a ballet in a theatre that is both beautiful and surreal as it morphs from stage bound to involving Lenny and Felicia.
The couple marry, and have three children, Jamie (Maya Hawke), Alexander (Sam Nivola) and Nina (Alexa Swinton), as Felicia turns a blind eye to her husband’s extramarital relationships with men. “One can be as free as one likes without guilt or confession,” she says to him. “Please, I know exactly who you are.”
She is his muse, a catalyst for his best work, who pushes him to perform with passion but his lack of discretion eventually takes its toll. The couple split, but when she is diagnosed with cancer, he returns to care for her in her final days.
“Maestro” is a tenderhearted tragedy, a movie about a complicated marriage and the push and pull between Leonard Bernstein public and private lives. It is not a cradle to grave portrait of the title character. Instead, it’s an ambitious film that disregards most of the usual biopic conventions to delve into Bernstein’s sexuality, creative genius and his marriage to Felicia, brilliantly played by Mulligan.
Bernstein may be the focus, but the contradictions of his life are best viewed through the lens of his relationship with his wife. With a sexual appetite that rivalled his passion for music, Bernstein is a compelling character, and wonderfully played in a career best performance by Cooper.
Any trace of his “Hangover” persona disappears behind an inch of make-up but this isn’t a performance made from cosmetic prosthetics. Cooper digs deep to get into the nooks and crannies of Bernstein’s life, from his playfulness—“I’ve slept with both your parents,” he jokes when he bumps into Oppenheim, wife and baby in Central Park—to his musical passions, to his warmth and self-absorption.
The performance’s pinnacle comes with a vigorous recreation of Bernstein conducting Mahler’s Second Symphony in London at the Ely Cathedral in 1976. The nearly six-minute sequence is a powerhouse of performance—Cooper reportedly spent six years learning Bernstein’s moves and conducts a live orchestra on screen—that captures the passion that fuels the character. It is the kind of work that wins awards.
As dynamic as Cooper is, it is Mulligan’s delicate work as Felicia that steals the show. She is a pillar of resilience and gracefulness, as composed as Bernstein is mercurial. Her final moments in the film (NO SPOILERS HERE) are quiet and reserved but devastating. It’s a radiant performance in an already impressive body of work.
When Cooper and Mulligan share the screen their effortless chemistry and the way they look at one another tells us as much about their lives and how they moved through the world as the script. Their dynamics and wonderful performances are invigorating in their portrayal of a creative life, marred and fuelled in equal measure by self-destructive behaviour and fervidness.
“Maestro” avoids most, but not all, of the usual biopic cliches.
It occasionally goes too heavy on expository dialogue to move the story along, is linear in its construction and a scene in which Felicia plunges into a pool, sitting on the bottom to escape trouble at home, is a film staple, but Mulligan, to her credit, makes it work. And while the film doesn’t shy away from Bernstein’s same sex liaisons, it is fairly chaste in the depiction of that aspect of his life.
Still, this is a stylish, passionate movie with just enough depth to both warm and break the heart.
“She Said,” a new film about the New York Times reporters Megan Twohey (Carey Mulligan) and Jodi Kantor (Zoe Kazan) and their Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation of the sexual misconduct perpetrated by Harvey Weinstein, breathes the same air as other newsroom procedurals like “The Post” and “Spotlight.”
Based on the 2019 book by Twohey and Kantor, the movie begins with Twohey’s investigations into sexual assault allegations against presidential candidate Donald Trump and FOX TV commentator Bill O’Reilly. The success of those stories, which cost O’Reilly his lucrative television gig, led to a further investigation of abuse and institutional misogyny in the film business, specifically involving film producer Weinstein.
Working in tandem with Kantor, Twohey begins sorting through sexual abuse claims from Hollywood actresses like Rose McGowan (voice of Kelly McQuail) and Ashley Judd (as herself).
“If that can happen to Hollywood actresses,” Twohey says, “who else is it happening to?”
“She Said” follows their month’s long investigation, from the unwillingness of victims to go on the record for fear of repercussions and legal maneuvering to death threats and harassment.
“You have to imagine that every call you make is being recorded and you’re being followed,” warns New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet (Andre Braugher).
The story behind the story that rocked Hollywood is a boots-on-the-ground journalism movie. Director Maria Schrader and screenwriter Rebecca Lenkiewicz walk us through the uncovering of information, the dead-ends, the back-and-forth with reluctant sources in a slow-and-steady fashion. It’s a detailed portrait of the daily grind journalists go through to ensure accuracy and fairness.
Unfortunately, because this #MeToo story lived at the very center of popular discourse at the time and beyond, “She Said’s” efforts to document the making of the story contain very few surprises.
On an emotional level, however, the recollections of Weinstein’s victims, former assistant Zelda Perkins (Samantha Morton) and Rowena Chiu (Angela Yeoh), are as devastating as former Weinstein Co. Board Member Lance Maerov’s (Sean Cullen) comment—”Are you sure that this isn’t just young women who want to sleep with a movie producer to get ahead?” is maddening.
Schrader never sensationalizes “She Said,” but her retelling of the victimization of the powerless and Weinstein’s criminal behaviour is buoyed by some interesting choices, including using real audio of model Ambra Battilana Gutierrez and Weinstein as he tries to coerce her into joining him in his hotel suite. As the camera floats down a fancy hotel hallway, Schrader allows the tape to play to skin crawling effect. It is that level of detail and raw storytelling that captures the true horror of the case against Weinstein.
Like the archeological excavation that lies at the center of “The Dig,” a new drama starring Carey Mulligan and Ralph Fiennes and now streaming on Netflix, the movie is slow and steady but reveals much if you’re patient.
Based on the 1939 unearthing of a ship burial site containing a bounty of Anglo-Saxon artefacts in Sutton Hoo, near Suffolk, England, “The Dig” stars Mulligan as Edith Pretty, a wealthy widow who hires amateur archeologist Basil Brown (Fiennes) to excavate ancient burial mounds on her property. Auto-didact Brown’s discovery of a treasure trove of priceless artefacts attracts the attention of the toffs at the British Museum, who insist on taking control of the dig. As World War II looms and Pretty’s health worsens, the job takes on a personal and professional urgency.
Unsurprisingly, “The Dig” spends a great deal of time at the excavation but, as the riches of the job reveal themselves, the interpersonal dynamics of the characters take center stage.
As the salt-of-the-earth Mr. Brown, Fiennes is a stoic figure who provides much of the film’s heart and soul. Early on, in an effective but clumsy metaphor, he is revealed to be the film’s real treasure after he is accidentally buried, swallowed up by the dig, and unearthed by his frantic co-workers. His presence is the film’s catalyst for a study of class and of respect born of hard work and study. He even becomes a father figure for Pretty’s son Robert (Archie Barnes). Fiennes plays him with an appealing mix of decency and stubbornness.
Mulligan’s chaste, but deeply felt relationship with Mr. Brown, is nicely played but as the ensemble cast grows to include the British Museum folks, the snobby Charles Phillips (Ken Stott), John Brailsford (Eamon Farren), Stuart Piggott (Ben Chaplin) and his young wife Peggy (Lily James) and Pretty’s cousin Rory Lomax (Johnny Flynn), she takes a backseat as an illicit romance blossoms. She is, predictably, very good, but as her health declines so does her dominance of the story.
“The Dig” confronts big issues but maintains an intimate feel. It’s not a story of archeology, although James is shown lovingly dusting dirt encrusted artefacts. The portrayal of class and impending war never overshadow the more relatable topics of legacy and teamwork. It’s a quiet movie, one filled with longing looks where much is left unsaid, but nothing is ambiguous.
