SYNOPSIS: Based on Peter Brown’s award-winning, #1 New York Times bestseller of the same name, “The Wild Robot,” a new animated film starring the voices of Lupita Nyong’o and Pedro Pascal, and now playing in theatres, features a shipwrecked robot named ROZZUM unit 7134— “Roz” for short—who develops a parental bond with an orphaned gosling. “A ROZZUM always completes its task,” she says.
CAST: The Wild Robot Lupita Nyong’o, Pedro Pascal, Kit Connor, Bill Nighy, Stephanie Hsu, Mark Hamill, Catherine O’Hara, Matt Berry, Ving Rhames. Directed by Chris Sanders.
REVIEW: The animated “The Wild Robot” will put you in the mind of “The Iron Giant,” “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” and “WALL-E,” but carves out its own, unique, rewarding space. Brimming with compassion, humor and kindness, it’s an exciting adventure story with a big, beating heart.
It’s a deceptively simple film. Roz’s sleek character design and the unpretentious premise of finding your logical, not necessarily biological family, are brought to life by the power of a great voice cast, inventive animation and director Chris Sanders’s vivid imagination.
Roz (voiced by Lupita Nyong’o) is a bigger BB-8 style robot, mechanical and, when we first meet her, mission driven with no visible signs of compassion behind her crystal blue electronic eyes. At first the matriarchal relationship with the gosling named Brightbill (voice of Kit Connor) is a job, nothing more. “A ROZZUM always completes its task,” she says.
But as time passes a warmth appears in her eyes and voice as Nyong’o reveals the bot’s hidden humanity. She’s less Siri and more a mother. “Sometimes to survive,” she says, “we must become more than we were programmed to be.”
Nyong’o does the heavy lifting, shifting Roz from automaton to sentient being, but she is supported by a terrific cast.
Catherine O’Hara brings comedic relief as frazzled possum mother Pinktail. As Fink, a fox who undergoes a transformation from predator to patriarchal figure, fan favorite Pedro Pascal brings sly humor and, as robot Vontra, Oscar nominees Stephanie Hsu is the icy-but-wacky voice of authoritarianism.
“The Wild Robot” is a wonderful film for the whole family. It has humor, adventure and uplift, but mostly, it has heart and the makings of a classic. “Was this task completed to your satisfaction?” Roz asks several times in the film. The answer is an emphatic yes.
Betelgeuse, the bio-exorcist made famous by Michael Keaton in the 1988 film of (almost) the same name, thinks of himself as “nightmare material,” but for fans of the much-loved original movie, his reunion with director Tim Burton is a dream.
The new film, “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” returns to Winter River, and three generations of the Deetz family, wacky artist Delia (Catherine O’Hara), mother of goth TV personality Lydia (Winona Ryder)—”The Living. The Dead. Can they coexist? That’s what we’re here to find out,” she says— and grandmother of the rebellious Astrid (Jenna Ortega), who thinks her mother’s clairvoyance is a sham.
Brought together by the passing of Deetz family patriarch Charles, (originally played by Jeffrey Jones), the trio becomes a quartet when Astrid opens a portal to the Afterlife, releasing the ghostly presence of Betelgeuse (Keaton). “The juice is loose!”
Lydia, now engaged to greasy television producer Rory (Justin Theroux), must reckon with her past betrothal to Betelgeuse—“When I was a teenager, a trickster demon terrorized our entire family and tried to force me to marry him,” she says—while the rambunctious spirit has marital troubles of his own. His ex-wife, the soul-sucking Delores (Monica Belucci) has pulled herself together—when we first see her, she’s reassembling her dismembered body—and looking for revenge.
Flip flopping between past and present, our world and the otherworld, “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” explores Astrid’s crush on emo local boy Jeremy (Arthur Conti), the adventures of b-movie-action-star-turned-ghost-detective Wolf Jackson (Willem Dafoe) and the power of the “Handbook for the Recently Deceased.”
A sequel to a movie released when Ronald Reagan was the President of the United States, “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” is in some ways a back-to-basics Tim Burton movie.
A return to the pop pastiche style that made his name, it’s an eye-popping collection of influences. From the German Expressionism of “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” and classic 50s kitsch to exaggerated dreamscapes and the gothic “Gashlycrumb Tinies,” his energized visuals will make your eyeballs dance. It’s a welcome return to the marvellously macabre window dressing that defined the original and made it so much fun.
But sequel culture, being what it is, means that the follow-up to a beloved hit must be bigger than what came before. So, “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” is longer, louder and unrulier than the original. In its attempt to recreate the magic of the first film, it tries too hard, stuffing the story with side-stories, new characters and callbacks to 1988. It’s a new “Day-O” for Betelgeuse, and the effort is evident, but the extra stuff doesn’t do much in terms of freshening up Mr. Juice’s mouldy corpse.
Still, although bigger is not better, it brims with humor and heart, courtesy of a handpicked cast of Burton regulars. Keaton has an expanded role—he only appears for 17.5 minutes in the original—and goes for it. The character isn’t exactly subtle, but both Burton and Keaton use restraint, so the wild-and-wacky “ghost with the most” doesn’t overstay his welcome.
The Deetz family dynamic, the film’s beating heart, is well represented in the relationship between Ryder, O’Hara and Ortega. National treasure O’Hara is reliably hilarious, stealing every scene she’s in, while Ryder and Ortega do the dramatic heavy lifting.
You may not have the time of your afterlife at “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” but it’s far from a dead end for Burton and Company. It doesn’t have the charm of the first film, but does deliver enough laughs, fan service and new ideas to cast its spell.
English director Matthew Vaughn is best known for making high concept, high octane action movies like “Kick-Ass” and the “Kingsman” series. His new PG-13 rated spy spoof, “Argylle,” now playing in theatres, features his trademarked busy, stylistic action but feels like a toned-down—i.e. less violent, and less provocative—version of his previous work.
The chaotic story begins with Bryce Dallas Howard as bestselling but reclusive author Elly Conway. Her life is as sedate as the spy novels she writes are exciting. By day, she sends her main character, globe-trotting super-spy Argylle (Henry Cavill) and sidekicks Wyatt (John Cena) and Kiera (Ariana DeBose), off on adventures to do battle with femme fatale LaGrange (Dua Lipa) in hopes of taking down a global spy syndicate called the Directorate. After work, she spends quiet time at home with a “hot date,” her beloved cat Alfie (best spy movie cat since Blofeld’s Solomon) by her side.
That quiet life is upended when she meets a real-deal Argylle type, Aidan (Sam Rockwell), an actual spy sent to keep her safe.
“What you write in your new book actually happened,” he says, “and you kicked a hornet’s nest you didn’t even know existed.”
Turns out there is a real Agent Argylle, some very bad people who are after her and Ritter (Bryan Cranston), an unhinged spy master who thinks her books are too close to reality for comfort.
Drawn into real-world espionage, she, Aiden and the cat are thrust into a world wilder, and certainly more dangerous, than anything in any of her books.
“If you want your life back,” says Aidan, “I can give it to you. I’m the good guy here.”
A mix-and-match of “Mission Impossible,” the James Bond franchise and buddy comedies, “Argylle” is a jumbled, confusing bit of semi-fun. Cartoonish and convoluted, the movie is stuffed with over-the-top spy action, a stacked a-listy cast and a wise-cracking, scene-stealing performance from Rockwell, but never quite comes together. Loose ends strangle the story’s forward motion, Vaughn occasionally falls into the movie’s deep plot holes, and there are so many twists, not even Chubby Checker could keep up.
It isn’t until the films last half hour, of an over-long 139-minute running time, that Vaughn stages two eye-popping action sequences. A “deadly” dance number and an untraditional figure skating routine are fun, and have the kind of over-the-top energy you expect from Vaughn. Both sequences entertain the eye, but also highlight what the rest of the movie so desperately lacks.
Rockwell’s live-wire performance provides most of the film’s laughs, but they are few and far between. As for the rest of the cast, most are underused. And you have to wonder why some of them—including Samuel L. Jackson and Richard E. Grant—even bothered to show up.
“Argylle” is errs on the side of PG-13. It is an outrageous, twisty-turny idea trapped in a movie that is afraid to really cut loose.
“Pain Hustlers,” a new true crime dramedy based on the non-fiction book “The Hard Sell” by Evan Hughes, starring Emily Blunt and Chris Evans, and now streaming on Netflix, joins the ever-growing list of movies and television shows that detail big pharma’s culpability in the opioid crisis.
Blunt plays Liza Drake, a broke single-mom to daughter Phoebe (Chloe Coleman). Kicked out of her sister’s garage, where they’d been sleeping for more than a month, Liza is desperate for a job and cash.
During a chance meeting with oily pharmaceutical sales rep Pete Brenner (Chris Evans), she impresses him with her tenacity. Sensing she’d do anything for a buck, he offers her a job, despite her complete lack of qualifications, selling a new, inhalable fentanyl-based pain killer directly to doctors.
“It’s a long-odds lottery buried under a thousand rejections,” he tells her.
To keep the job, all she has to do is get the ball rolling by convincing one doctor to prescribe the drug. Just under the deadline, she lands a whale, the morally compromised Dr. Lydell (Brian d’Arcy James) who hands out the drug to his patients like candy to kids at Halloween.
Liza’s piece of the action is more money than she ever could have imagined. “You’re not going to make a hundred K this year,” Brenner tells her. “It’s going to be more like six-hundred.”
Drunk on success—and frequent drinking binges—she bends laws and bribes doctors as she chants her mantra, “Own your territory,” to a growing legion of sales reps. But while her bank account swells, so do her doubts, as her conscience becomes her moral compass.
“Pain Hustlers” breathes much of the same air as “Dopesick,” “Painkiller” and the documentary “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed.” Some. But not all. Those stories focused on patients and the personal toll of the opioid epidemic. Conversely, “Pain Hustlers” turns the camera on the sales reps, the pharmaceutical pushers who made fortunes on the misfortune of others.
Liza’s shift from desperation to greed isn’t a particularly fresh take on the rags-to-riches tale, but Blunt works overtime to make her character compelling. Her desire to succeed, to improve her life isn’t simply about the Benjamins, it’s about creating a new start for her daughter. Blunt grounds the movie with ample humanity, anchoring the film’s often over-the-top antics with her earthbound presence.
To its detriment, “Pain Hustlers” has a lighter tone than other recent opioid dramas. It’s not exactly a laugh a minute, but the jocular tone seems at odds with the serious subject matter, particularly in the performances of Evans and Andy Garcia, whose character loses his mind and the audience’s attention midway through.
“Pain Hustlers” attempts a new take on a hot button topic, but, the formulaic execution and uneven tone feels wonky given subject matter.
“Elemental,” the new Pixar picture now playing in theatres, takes an old-fashioned love story and gives it a high-concept spin.
The setting is Element City, a metropolis divided into four distinct districts, one for every kind of the city’s anthropomorphized element residents. The fire people live in the Fire Land, there’s the Splash District for water people, the Terra District for land people, and the Breeze District for air people.
“Elemental” focusses on the Lumen family and their fiery daughter Ember (voice of Leah Lewis) who immigrated to Element City looking for a better life. The young flame is poised to take over the family’s Fire Land shop, a small convenience store with the slogan “We Flame to Please!”
“This shop is the dream of our family,” says patriarch Bernie Lumen (voice of Ronnie Del Carmen). “Someday it’ll all be yours!” Eager to please her parents, Ember feigns excitement at the prospect of running the shop, the family’s pride and joy.
“I’ve been trying to fill my father’s shoes,” she says, “but I was never asked what I want to do.”
As her hidden resentment grows, Ember becomes sullen and begins lashing out until she meets
Water person Wade Ripple (voice of Mamoudou Athie), who, as a youngster, was once stuck inside a sponge. Despite that trauma, he grew up to be a kind, laid-back guy who cries at the drop of a hat.
Ember has always thought that “elements don’t mix,” but when Wade comes into her life she learns that sometimes opposites do attract and that she can make her own decisions. “Why does anyone get to tell you what you can do in your life?” asks Wade.
“Elemental” has a big heart, but not big enough to justify the film’s feature length. A new spin on the star-crossed lovers genre, à la “Romeo and Juliet,” it is a simple tale of the heart wanting what the heart wants despite differences. Then there’s the “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” vibe between Wade and Bernie, which is clever but never quite ignites.
The vivid artwork is often spectacular, and provides many beautiful images, but the watered-down story does not equal the film’s visual impact.
Director Peter Sohn, who also helmed “The Good Dinosaur,” builds a new world and introduces other story elements, including immigration metaphors, references to racism and intolerance, but these aspects often feel tentative, more well-intentioned than effective.
Better is the relationship between Ember and her father. Sohn used personal experience to shape the story of a father’s expectation and deference to tradition, and how the weight of that affects Ember. Their connection feels authentic and grounds the action of the rest of the film.
Opening the show in theatres is “Carl’s Date,” a sweet natured short film featuring Carl Fredricksen (voice of Ed Asner) and his adorable talking dog, Dug (voice of Bob Peterson) of the much-loved film “Up.” It’s a funny, tightly scripted look at companionship that made me think, by the time the main feature was over, that “Elemental,” given its slight narrative, might have had more punch, and seemed less stretched, as a short.
“Elemental” is wonderfully crafted, but the formulaic story prevents it from sitting on the shelf alongside other Pixar greats like “Up,” WALL-E” or “Toy Story.”
Thanks to the Canadian Screen Awards for having Richard in again last night to host the Press Room. He interviewed the winners as they left the stage and chatted with Mary Walsh, Billy Campbell, Karine Vanasse, Jennifer Baichwal, Stephan James, Deepa Mehta, Theodore Pellerin, the cast of Un Colonie, Catherine O’Hara and the gang from Schitt’s Creek, Jasmin Mozaffari, the Kids in the Freakin’ Hall, AmyBeth McNulty, Kim Coates and many others. Thanks to Anna-Lea Boeki, Alexandra Staseson and Mr. Will Wong for the pictures!
“When you lose someone you love they never really leave you.” These are the comforting words parents say to their kids when a beloved pet or grandparent dies. Leave it to the twisted mind of Tim Burton to take it one step further in “Frankenweenie,” his latest stop-motion animated film, about a boy and his dead dog.
The story takes place in the small town of New Holland, the kind of place with nosy neighbors and a line in the official town song about “modest homes at modest prices.” Look just beyond the perfectly manicured lawns, however, and you’ll find goth kids with creepy names like Victor Frankenstein, (voiced by Charlie Tahan), his parents (voiced by Catherine O’Hara & Martin Short) and dog Sparky. When Sparky is unexpectedly killed, Victor takes his mother’s platitude to heart—the “never leave you” part anyway—digs up his pet and brings him back to life using a method he learned in science class. He’s thrilled to have Sparky back, but will his parents and friends be as happy?
Reanimating corpses is not exactly the subject of kid’s films… unless you’re Tim Burton, who takes a horror premise and turns it into a touching and funny family story about a lonely boy and his best friend. The climax may be too intense for small kids, so judge your child’s tolerance for giant Sea Monkeys and some mild action before shelling out for tickets for the whole family.
Using gorgeous black-and-white and 3D Burton has crafted visuals that would make James Whale proud. No detail is too small or too strange for the director’s eye, from the beautiful set design to the homages to “Gamera” and “An American Werewolf in London.”
All the macabre elements of good old fashioned horror movies are represented—mobs with torches, lightening strikes bringing dead things back to life—but underneath it all is a great deal of heart, something that has been missing from Burton’s recent blockbuster work. “Frankenweenie” feels more personal, and because of the stop-motion animation, handmade. Kids may not get the “Bride of Frankenstein” gag, but they’ll love the look of the film.
Good voice work from Burton’s “Beetlejuice” cast members O’Hara and Wynona Ryder with “Ed Wood’s” Martin Landau chiming in and new comers like Short, Tahan and Atticus Shaffer bring the ghoulish puppets to life, animating them with personality.
Tim Burton has been trying to make “Frankenweenie” for a long time. It first saw life as a Disney short way back in 1984, and has definitely been worth the wait.
In 1949 Life Magazine described the four grades of laughs—there’s the titter, the yowl, the belly laugh and the boffo. For Your Consideration, the new comedy from the team of Christopher Guest and Eugene Levy, is a good movie with quite a few titters, a couple of yowls, at least one belly laugh, but stops just short of big boffo laughs.
Beginning in late October every year the big movie studios take out ‘For Your Consideration’ ads in Variety and the Hollywood Reporter. Basically these ads are a way to remind Academy voters about award-worthy achievements from the past year. Those three magic words can build a career, inflate a salary and move performers from not hot to hot in a flash. This new improvised comedy from the makers of Best in Show and Waiting for Guffman details what happens when members of the Home for Purim cast are plucked from obscurity and infected with Oscar fever.
Catherine O’Hara plays the aptly named Marilyn Hack, a veteran actress whose chances of stardom are behind her. When she gets wind of an internet rumor that her performance in this overwrought melodrama might attract the attention of the Academy he long dormant hopes of stardom are awakened. The resulting award hype spreads to everyone around her and soon her co-stars are being buzzed about by award season handicappers and everyone has Oscar mania.
Guest, with his usual collaborator Eugene Levy have come up with an occasionally touching, often revealing look at the outskirts of the dream factory and its citizens. The kind of actors who struggle and are best known for playing giant dancing hot dogs on television commercials. O’Hara’s Hack is a poignant example of an actor who never broke through but refuses to give up on her dreams, convinced that celebrity is just around the corner. Harry Shearer, best known as the voice of Ned Flanders (and many others) on The Simpsons and as Derek Smalls, bass player for Spinal Tap, is Victor Allan Miller, a journeyman actor who still has to audition for radio voice work. Together they represent the 98% of the Screen Actors Guild who spend most of their careers either unemployed or underused.
For Your Consideration isn’t as drop dead funny as some of Guest’s other efforts like Best in Show but does feature great work from the ensemble cast. Catherine O’Hara just might find herself with a For Your Consideration ad in real life, while Fred Willard happily and hilariously skewers television entertainment reporters. Dependable players Eugene Levy and Jennifer Coolidge hand in wonderfully odd comic performances, but if I have a complaint about the cast it is that it is too large. The ensemble has swelled to include Ricky Gervais and Sandra Oh both good performers, both kind of wasted in throw-away roles. Gervais is one of the funniest actors working today but you wouldn’t know it from his performance here.
For Your Consideration is a clever—I liked Harry Shearer’s line, “Oscar is the backbone of this industry, an industry not known for backbone.”—and fairly realistic look at life on the fringes of success, but it doesn’t deliver the boffo laughs of some of Guest’s other work.
This adaptation of the classic Maurice Sendak 1963 children’s book “Where the Wild Things Are” isn’t a movie for kids as much as it is a movie about being a kid. The story of Max, a lonely kid who goes to where the wild things are, is a work of profound vision from director Spike Jonze.
The story, based on a book of only nine sentences, couldn’t be simpler. A high-spirited but lonely boy named Max (Max Records) throws a tantrum when his mother (Catherine Keener), invites her boyfriend (Mark Ruffalo) over. When she tries to send him to his room he bites her, flees the house and sails to an imaginary island populated by Ira (voice of Forest Whitaker), Carol (James Gandolfini), KW (Lauren Ambrose), Judith (Catherine O’Hara), The Bull (Michael Berry Jr.), Douglas (Chris Cooper) and Alexander (Paul Dano), seven make-believe giants who crown him king of the Wild Things. For the most part life is easy on the island but soon Max becomes homesick and sets out for his real home.
The end.
This is the kind of movie the Hollywood studios don’t make anymore, a slow moving simple film about deep feelings. It’s not a slick, brightly coloured kid’s film with a connect-the-dots plot and an easily digested moral.
Not much happens. There are some very arresting images. Max and Carol rolling down a sand dune, a “wild rumpus” and a dirt fight, but it’s not about the action, it’s about primal feelings, things that are either not usually touched on or glossed over in most kid’s films—sorrow, loneliness and the difficulty of growing up.
Jonze has made a beautifully emotional and simple movie, both in message and style. The dialogue is basic, almost incidental to the story, as if it was written by a kid; or at least someone who understands how kid’s think and speak. It’s uncomplicated but the cast, both human and monster, brings depth to the plain spoken script.
Max Records, in his first major film role, is understated and instinctive, holding the film together with a compelling performance. The look of the beasts has been accurately adapted from the book. They essentially look like huge Muppets with very expressive eyes. Their furry faces combined with very naturalistic voice work from Gandolfini and company bring their search for acceptance and love to life in some very unexpected ways.
“Where the Wild Things Are” is a magical film that will please the arthouse crowd but likely will leave less adventurous viewers a little perplexed. The dark, melancholy tone isn’t typical of children’s entertainment, but since this isn’t really a kid’s film that shouldn’t matter.
