She’ll spend the next couple of days walking down red carpets and doing interviews, but not doing something she loves — going to the gym.
“If I had my choice I certainly would,” she says. “I walked past it and I sort of salivated, but it’s back to back to back. There’s no time. I sleep eight or nine hours a night and I don’t have time between the interviews and sleep.”
The Oscar-winning star of On Golden Pond, Klute and Coming Home is no stranger to the press circuit, but she says times have changed.
“Honey, back in the day, let me tell you what it was like,” she says.
“You would get on a plane alone — forget the hair and makeup and PR person — and fly to Des Moines and Kansas City and Denver and you’d cut ribbons inaugurating an orphanage, do the Police Gazette Parade, the Dick Clark Dance. You did radio. You had to go to them and had to do the weirdest things. It was hard. This seems easy. Those young ones are spoiled. They don’t know what it used to be like.”
When I ask if answering the same press junket questions over and over ever wears her down she says, “I’m an actor! It’s why I get the small bucks.”
In the film, she plays a best-selling author of self-help books and the mother of a dysfunctional family that gathers for the father’s funeral. She’s an outrageous character, the kind of person who wonders whether she should tip the coroner.
“I read the script, it was laugh-out-loud funny and this woman was fabulous,” she says. “I totally identify with her. I have no borders, porous boundaries. I share way too much.”
Like her character, she has had self-esteem issues, even though she is almost as well known as a workout guru as she is for her acting.
“I never have been (happy with my body image), so you teach what you need to learn. Working out helped me come to peace with my body. I grew up being told that I was fat, and I had to work very hard to overcome that. And if I said I was 100 per cent over that, I’d be lying.”
Richard hosted the ‘This is Where I Leave You” press conference: Shawn Levy, Director / Jason Bateman, Actor/ Tina Fey, Actor / Jane Fonda, Actor / Connie Britton, Actor / Corey Stoll, Actor / Abigail Spencer, Actor / Dax Shepard Actor / Kathryn Hahn, Actor / Rose Byrne, Actor / Jonathan Tropper, Screenwriter
Watch the whole thing HERE! Read about the press conference HERE!
Liam Neeson joins the mile high club in “Non-Stop.”
He plays Bill Marks, an aging U.S. federal air marshal safeguarding the 150 passengers (including Julianne Moore, Corey Stoll, Linus Roache and flight attendant Lupita Nyong’o) on an international flight from New York to London.
He’s also a burn-out, a lonely guy with a loaded gun and a propensity to get loaded on booze. The routine flight becomes fraught with danger when he receives text messages from a mysterious source threatening to kill a passenger every twenty minutes unless a ransom of $150 million is deposited into a bank account. When that account is discovered to be in Marks’s name he’s accused of being a hijacker.
“Non-Stop” has more red herrings than a fish and chips shop. Clues are dropped and discarded and the plot is so ludicrous that every now and again someone has to say, “I can explain this,” so the audience has a fighting chance of making some kind of sense of the intrigue. The story is simple but is muddied by outrageous twists. Once I decided to not try and play along—this isn’t “True Detective” where every word and scene counts—I enjoyed watching Neeson in action man mode. He’s better than the movie and he made this movie better simply by showing up.
There is a certain cheesy joy to be found in the image of Neeson floating in zero gravity, grabbing a gun out of the air and getting business done. Nothing can spice up a borderline action movie like the Flying Neeson Shot ™. He has carved a unique action niche for himself and seems to be having fun growling and gunning his way through trashy action movies.
Is “Non-Stop” great art? Nope, but did you really expect it to be? It’s the Neesonator after all.
Director Jaume Collet-Serra makes good use of the airplane’s small spaces, builds some nice scenes of claustrophobic tension and even makes a comment on how news organizations jump to conclusions, using conjecture instead of facts to fill the twenty-four hour wheel but story credibility is not his strong point.
Building tension, however, is. The movie is bookended by two terrific scenes. At the beginning Collet-Serra takes his time with the nicely shot boarding of the airplane sequence. Unease builds as the passengers, one of whom is a terrorist (not a spoiler, watch the trailer), take their seats.
The climax (SPOILER ALERT) is a typical ticking bomb sequence, but it’s an exciting one with cool visuals and the aforementioned Flying Neeson Shot ™.
The supporting cast is serviceable, in underwritten and generic roles. I hope Julianne Moore buys something nice with the pay cheque. She gets the job done, but that part could have been played by anyone. I feel worse for Lupita Nyong’o. She’s an Oscar nominee for “12 Years a Slave,” but here she’s reduced to a Grace Jones impersonator with just a few lines.
Despite a good pace and mounting tension, “Non-Stop is almost undone by superficial characters and a silly story. I say almost because it’s been Neesonized, the action movie equivalent of a sprinkle of fairy dust.
By Richard Crouse – Metro Canada 
