Richard joins CTV NewsChannel and anchor Akshay Tandon to have a look at new movies coming to VOD, streaming services and theatres including Steven Spielberg’s remake of West Side Story, the star-studded “Don’t Look Up” and the story of one very bad week in the lives of Lucy and Desi in “Being the Ricardos.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
Richard sits in on the CFRA Ottawa morning show with host Bill Carroll to talk the new movies coming to theatres, VOD and streaming services including Steven Spielberg’s remake of West Side Story, the star-studded “Don’t Look Up” and the story of one very bad week in the lives of Lucy and Desi in “Being the Ricardos.”
Listen to the whole thing HERE!
Movies about giant things hurdling through space toward Earth are almost as plentiful as the stars in the sky. “Armageddon,” “Deep Impact” and “Judgment Day” all pose end-of-the-world scenarios but none have the satirical edge of “Don’t Look Up.” The darkly comedic movie, now in theatres but coming soon to Netflix, paints a grim, on-the-nose picture of how the world responds to a crisis.
Jennifer Lawrence is PhD candidate Dr. Kate Dibiasky, a student astronomer who discovers a comet the size of Mount Everest aimed directly at our planet. Her professor, Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio), comes to the alarming conclusion that the comet will collide with Earth in six months and fourteen days in what he calls an “extinction level event.”
They take their concerns to NASA and the White House, but are met with President Janie Orlean’s (Meryl Streep) concerns about optics, costs and the up-coming mid-term elections. “The timing is just disastrous,” she says. “Let’s sit tight and assess.”
With the clock ticking to total destruction Dibiasky and Mindy go public, but their dire warnings on the perky news show “The Rip”—“We keep the bad news light!”—go unheeded. Social media focusses on Dibiasky’s panic, creating memes of her face, while dubbing Mindy the Bedroom Eyed Doomsday Prophet.
As the comet hurdles toward Earth the world becomes divided between those willing to Look Up and do something about the incoming disaster and the deniers who think that scientists “want you to look up because they are looking down their noses at you.”
Chaos breaks out, and the division widens as the comet closes in on its target.
It is not difficult to find parallels between the events in “Don’t Look Up” and recent world occurrences. Director and co-writer Adam McKay explores the reaction to world affairs through a lens of Fake News, clickbait journalism, skepticism of science, political spin and social media gone amok. In fact, the topics McKay hits on don’t really play like satire at all. The social media outrage, bizarro-land decisions made by people in high offices and the influence of tech companies all sound very real world, ripped out of today’s newspapers.
It’s timely, but perhaps too timely. Social satire is important, and popular—“Saturday Night Live” has done it successfully for decades—but “Don’t Look Up,” while brimming with good ideas, often feels like an overkill of familiarity. The comet is fiction, at least I hope it is, but the reaction to it and the on-coming catastrophe feels like something I might see on Twitter just before the lights go down in the theatre.
It feels a little too real to be pure satire. There are laughs throughout, but it’s the serious questions that resonate. When Mindy, on TV having his “Network” moment, rages, “What the hell happened to us? What have we done to ourselves and how do we fix it?” the movie becomes a beacon. The satire is comes easily—let’s face it, the world is full of easy targets—but it’s the asking of hard questions and in the frustration of a world gone mad, when McKay’s point that we’re broken and don’t appreciate the world around us, shines through.
Despite big glitzy Hollywood names above the title and many laugh lines, “Don’t Look Up” isn’t escapism. It’s a serious movie that aims to entertain but really wants to make you think.
Richard joins CP24 to have a look at the weekend’s new movies including the “kids say the darndest things” flick “Good Boys,” the mystery-comedy “Where’d You Go, Bernadette” and the crowd-pleasing ode to Bruce Springsteen “Blinded by the Light.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
Richard sits in on the CTV NewsChannel with news anchor Marcia MacMillan to have a look at the weekend’s big releases including the raunchy coming-of-age flick “Good Boys,” the mystery-comedy “Where’d You Go, Bernadette,” the crowd-pleasing ode to Bruce Springsteen “Blinded by the Light” and the claustrophobic mining disaster movie “Mine 9.”
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 and most interesting movies! This week Richard looks at the “kids say the darndest things” flick “Good Boys,” the mystery-comedy “Where’d You Go, Bernadette” and the crowd-pleasing ode to Bruce Springsteen “Blinded by the Light.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
Richard has a look at the new movies coming to theatres, including the raunchy coming-of-age flick “Good Boys,” the mystery-comedy “Where’d You Go, Bernadette,” the crowd-pleasing ode to Bruce Springsteen “Blinded by the Light” and the claustrophobic mining disaster movie “Mine 9” with CFRA morning show guest host Matt Harris.
Listen to the whole thing HERE!
Based on Maria Semple’s 2012 bestseller “Where’d You Go, Bernadette,” is a mystery-comedy that explores motherhood and mental illness.
Cate Blanchett plays the title character, an agoraphobic architect, once heralded as a genius, now a hermit who hasn’t designed a building in decades. Described as one of architecture’s “true enigmas,” she hates travelling, complains that people are rude and yammer too much, can’t sleep—“Anxiety causes insomnia,” she claims, “and insomnia causes anxiety.”—rarely leaves the house and has poured all her prescription drugs into one jar. “The colours and shapes are amazing together,” she says.
The other moms in the area, next door neighbor Audrey (Kristen Wiig) and “all her flying monkeys,” don’t like her and Bernadette makes no effort to build bridges with them. “I’m not good when exposed to people.”
The only bright spots in her life are husband Elgin (Billy Crudup), 15-year-old daughter Bee (Emma Nelson) and her virtual, on-line assistant. A series of unrelated but catastrophic events, including a mini-mud slide, an identity theft ring and an intervention, prompt Bernadette to disappear without a trace, leaving Bee and Elgin to figure out where she went.
“Where’d You Go, Bernadette” is more story driven than director Richard Linklater’s recent, more slice-of-life films. In movies like “Everybody Wants Some!!” he excelled in crafting interesting situations for his characters to inhabit. Here the details aren’t so much focussed on the location or building atmosphere, but in creating a layered and compelling central character.
Blanchett applies a light touch here, playing up the funny moments, but still digging in when it comes time to deal with the “formality of life.” It’s a lovely performance in a film that rambles somewhat, but ultimately finds touching moments in the story of a woman who had to get lost to find herself.
Richard joins CP24 anchor Kelly Linehan to have a look at the weekend’s new movies including “How to Train Your Dragon: the Hidden World” and the charming “Fighting With My Family” and German Oscar contender “Never Look Away.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
