On the Saturday August 31, 2024 edition of The Richard Crouse Show we’ll meet Amanda Marshall.
You know the name, but could be forgiven if you wondered what happened to her. After hits like her 1996 single, “Birmingham”, which reached number 3 in Canada and charted on the US, and diamond and certified 3× platinum albums, she disappeared from the charts and the music scene for more than 20 years.
She says the legal battle with her former manager that kept her away from the spotlight for two decades “turned out to be the very best thing that ever happened to me.” We’ll find out why in this interview.
Then, we’ll meet three-time Academy Award nominee for Best Actor Viggo Mortensen. From his film debut in 1985’s “Witness” to the “Lord of the Rings” movies that made him a superstar to his more recent work, like the Oscar winning “Green Book,” he has been a constant, welcome presence on screens for 40 years. Joins me today as the writer, director, star, and composer of “The Dead Don’t Hurt,” a great new Western now available on all major platforms for Digital Purchase and Digital Rental.
Then, we meet Salah Bachir, author of a new memoir, “First to the Leave the Party: My Life with Ordinary People Who Happen to Be Famous,” available now wherever fine books are sold.
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!
All iHeartRadio Canada stations are available across Canada via live stream on iHeartRadio.caand the iHeartRadio Canada app. iHeartRadio Canada stations are also connected through Alexa, Siri, and Google Home smart speakers.
On the Saturday July 27, 2024 edition of The Richard Crouse Show we meet Natalie Shaw who stars as Cady Heron in the touring, musical production of the show that touches down in Toronto at The Royal Alexandra Theatre from July 30 – August 25, 2024.
You remember the story… Cady Heron may have grown up on an African savanna, but nothing prepared her for the vicious ways of her strange new home: suburban Illinois. Soon, this naïve newbie falls prey to a trio of lionized frenemies led by the charming but ruthless Regina George. But when Cady devises a plan to end Regina’s reign, she learns the hard way that you can’t cross a Queen Bee without getting stung.
Then, we’ll meet three-time Academy Award nominee for Best Actor Viggo Mortensen. From his film debut in 1985’s “Witness” to the “Lord of the Rings” movies that made him a superstar to his more recent work, like the Oscar winning “Green Book,” he has been a constant, welcome presence on screens for 40 years. Joins me today as the writer, director, star, and composer of “The Dead Don’t Hurt,” a great new Western now available on all major platforms for Digital Purchase and Digital Rental.
Then, we’ll meet Willie Poll. She is the director of education for the Moose Hide Campaign, an organization focused on ending violence against women and children. But today we’re here to talk about her new book for children, “My Little Ogichidaa: An Indigenous Lullaby.”
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!
All iHeartRadio Canada stations are available across Canada via live stream on iHeartRadio.caand the iHeartRadio Canada app. iHeartRadio Canada stations are also connected through Alexa, Siri, and Google Home smart speakers.
SYNOPSIS: Set on the western U.S. frontier in the 1860s, this story of star-crossed lovers sees the fiercely independent French-Canadian florist Vivienne Le Coudy (Vicky Krieps) begins a relationship with Danish immigrant and ex-soldier Holger Olsen (Viggo Mortensen). When their lives are up-ended by the Civil War, Vivienne must fend for herself in a rough-n-tumble Nevada town run by the corrupt Mayor Rudolph Schiller (Danny Huston) and his ruthless business partner Alfred Jeffries (Garret Dillahunt).
CAST: Viggo Mortensen, Vicky Krieps, Solly McLeod, Garret Dillahunt, Colin Morgan, Ray McKinnon, Luke Reilly, Atlas Green, Danny Huston. Written, directed, and produced by Viggo Mortensen.
REVIEW: “The Dead Don’t Hurt” is an old-fashioned Western with a modern twist. Told on a broken timeline, this story of frontier life looks very much like a classic horse opera, but places its focus on the immigrant experience and Vivienne’s rebellious streak, rather than on the cliches of the genre. There are shootouts, a saloon that could have been left over from the set of “Bonanza” and a “pig sticker” plays a climatic role, but Mortensen’s second feature as director has a different perspective on a traditional genre.
Mortensen is in fine form, but yields the bulk of camera time to Krieps’s luminescent performance. With Vivienne she up-ends the typical portrayal of women in Westerns. She shares a loving, playful relationship with Olsen, but her independent streak is the what drives the movie. The romance is at the heart of the film, but it is the unconventional portrayal of a woman in the wild west that makes the movie unique.
As a director Mortensen creates vivid, compelling moments that would not be out of place in a more tradition Western, but there are enough flourishes—medieval knight fantasy sequences, for example—and a somewhat ungainly time shifting structure of storytelling, that set the film apart from the John Ford standard.
“The Dead Don’t Hurt” is a reinvention, a reimagination, that is both nostalgic and innovative.
Richard joins CTV NewsChannel and anchor Merella Fernandez to have a look at new movies coming to VOD, streaming services and theatres including director Kenneth Branagh’s poignant coming-of-age drama “Belfast,” the Dwayne Johnson, Ryan Reynolds and Gal Gadot action comedy “Red Notice” and the literary adaptation “Passing” starring Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga.
“Belfast,” Kenneth Branagh’s look back at his early life in Ireland, now playing in theatres, is a story very much of its time, but it resonates with contemporary themes.
The movie opens with tourist bureau beauty shots of modern Belfast before jumping back in time to the film’s black-and-white vision of the city in 1969. The Troubles have come to 9-year-old boy Buddy’s (Jude Hill) street. There’s the Unionists, the Ulster Protestants, who want Northern Ireland to remain within the United Kingdom. They are in in violent dispute with Irish nationalists, mostly Irish Catholics, who want Northern Ireland to exit the United Kingdom to join a united Ireland. Buddy is inquisitive but he doesn’t understand what’s going on when an explosion sets his neighborhood, a mix of Catholic and Protestant households, on edge. He’s too busy being smitten with Catherine (Olive Tennant), the pretty girl who sits in front of him at school.
Buddy’s father (Jamie Dornan), a construction worker whose job takes him to England for weeks at a time, is very much aware of the situation. Local hardmen advise him to join the Unionist cause… or else.
For the rest of the tightly-knit family, Ma (Caitriona Balfe), older brother Will (Lewis McAskie) and grandparents (Ciarán Hinds and Judi Dench), life goes on, but the city’s increasing violence forces them to make a choice; Will they stay in the only home they’ve ever known, or relocate to safety in a strange city?
Seen through Buddy’s eyes, “Belfast” tackles big subjects like religious intolerance, senseless neighbor against neighbor violence and ethno-nationalism, but focusses on the effect of those elements, not the elements themselves. That perspective allows Branagh to set the scene with the dramatic opening, a series of period television news broadcasts and the concerned looks on the faces of the adults. But set against a time of upheaval, this is a family drama, but not a political one.
Branagh calls “Belfast” his most personal film, and it feels like it. Every frame radiates with the warmth of the connection Buddy shares with his family, and his family’s relationship to their home and country. Hill’s coming-of-age performance is the anchor that keeps the movie from drifting off course. His joy and infectious laugh when his grandfather cracks a joke is delightful, and you can really see the gears turning as he struggles to figure out why his once peaceful neighborhood isn’t the Eden it once was.
The performances are uniformly interesting, but Balfe, as Ma, shines as a steely, protective presence.
Hinds and Dench, as Buddy’s grandparents, are frisky, lovable and bring an intimacy to their portrayals of people who have been married forever, that is the very definition of heartfelt.
“Belfast” is a lovely, earnest movie that paints a vivid picture of a time, a place and, most importantly, its people. The scenes of Buddy and family at the movies, or crowded around the television also reenforce something many of us have realized during the pandemic, and that is the importance of art—in this case, the movies and television—as an escape from the stark realities of the world.
Based on English writer Vera Brittain’s 1933 memoir about her experiences during World War I, “Testament of Youth” is a handsomely presented, if sometimes a bit restrained story of one woman’s voyage into pacifism.
Alicia “Ex Machina” Vikander stars as Brittain, a tenacious young woman who battles against her father’s (Dominic West) wishes and the conventions of the day to take the Oxford University entrance exam. Her schooling is interrupted when WWI breaks out and brother Edward (Taron “Kingsman: The Secret Service” Egerton), her fiancé Roland Leighton (Kit “Game of Thrones “ Harington) and friends Victor (Colin Morgan) and Geoffrey (Jonathan Bailey) are sent to fight at the front lines. With her friends at risk Vera opts to join them, leaving school to enrol as a nurse in the Voluntary Aid Detachment. Tending to both German and English soldiers in London, Malta and France she learns first hand about personal loss, human suffering and the futility of war.
“Testament of Youth” offers up a different, parallel view to combat, than the usual war film. Told from the point of view of a battle nurse, it is different but no less effecting as a story of female strength. Vikander is the movie’s soul and strength, handing in a performance that is both strong willed and remarkably nimble. When Vera pretends to be the German girlfriend of a dying soldier, the performance transcends the “Downton Abbey” vibe of the production. Moments like these are almost an antidote to the melodrama that masquerades as actual emotion in other scenes. Almost but not quite.
The supporting performances work well enough, although other than Vera the emotional connection necessary for the anti-war message to be truly effective is missing. Large scale shots of dead and dying men in battle and hospitals visualize the sentiment but a real, personal connection with the characters would have been more fitting for a story about a woman so absolutely changed by the war and her experiences.
“Testament of Youth” is based on a true and well-documented story but a dose or three of melodrama—does she really have to get such bad news on her wedding day?—blunts the power of the story.
On the Saturday August 31, 2024 edition of The Richard Crouse Show we’ll meet Amanda Marshall.
