“500 Days in the Wild,” a new documentary from director Dianne Whelan now playing in theatres, isn’t exactly “Planes, Trains and Automobiles.” It more like “Hiking, Biking, Paddling, Snowshoeing and Skiing.”
In 2015 British Columbia filmmaker-photographer Whelan was disillusioned, feeling the effects of a recent break-up and worried about the state of the world.
As a way to reconnect with the planet and herself, she undertook the most grueling film shoot of her career, documenting her journey across the 24,000 kilometres, over land and water, of the 487 different trails and multiple waterways that make up the Trans Canada Trail. The longest trail in the world, it connects the Atlantic, Arctic, and Pacific Oceans.
Without a firm schedule—she ripped up her written plan ten days into the journey—Whelan spent much of the next six years completing the trail.
Culled from 800 hours of footage, the new movie showcases the visual poetry of the country—starry nights captured by her camera, the communing with nature, open spaces untouched by modern life—and danger in the form of bears, hypothermia and, at the beginning of the trip, of strangers, like two hunters she encounters on a rainy night.
The film highlights the gorgeous landscapes of the trail, and the challenges of navigating it, but it’s the inner journey that fascinates.
Whelan finds personal serenity through isolation, introspection and intimate moments. What began with disillusionment, ends with a newfound appreciation of the kindness of people, Indigenous beliefs and nature. She emerges changed, but most importantly, without a trace of the cynicism that characterized her mindset at the beginning.
“500 Days in the Wild” captures the expansiveness of the journey with beautiful, often eye-popping photography and contains moments of high drama alongside some lighter sections, but it’s Whelan’s vulnerability and personal journey that illuminates.
“Another Body,” a true crime investigative documentary that looks at a very twenty-first century criminal act, the deepfaking of pornography. “No woman in the world is safe from this technology.”
Wikipedia defines “deepfake” as a “portmanteau of ‘deep learning’ and ‘fake’” and explains they “are synthetic media that have been digitally manipulated to replace one person’s likeness convincingly with that of another.” In other words, taking the real-life image of someone from the web and digitally cutting-and-pasting their face on pornographic footage.
“Another Body,” from directors Sophie Compton and Reuben Hamlyn, dives into the story of Taylor Klein, a 22-year-old engineering grad who began receiving strange, provocative messages from strangers on her social media. Turns out she’s being doxed by someone who has also deepfaked her face onto an on-line pornographic film.
Humiliated and concerned, she contacts law enforcement, who say they are unable to help her because no laws have been broken in that state. The deepfakes, she says, “[make me] ”feel like I’m not in control in that one area of my life, [and] it’s causing me to feel out of control in other areas of my life.”
When she hears of Julia, an old classmate whose life is being turned upside down by similar deepfaked images, the two become advocates for themselves as they compare stories and come up with a suspect, someone they both knew who would be capable of this most personal fraud. “I don’t really think there is anything that could make up for what has happened,” Klein says.
To reinforce the power of this deepfake technology Compton and Hamlyn, in an effort to maintain Klein’s privacy, do the standard stuff, changed her name and the name of her school. What is different is the way they very realistically deepfaked an actor’s face over her real face. It protects her identity, but if you need any more convincing of the effectiveness of the technology to create realistic looking facial replacement, look no further. Once revealed, the effectiveness of it is chilling.
“Another Body,” despite its high-tech trick, is a fairly straightforward sleuthing documentary. Linear in its investigation of the crime, it uses modern tech, like Zoom and loads of screen grabs, etc, to tell the story of the grassroots, on-line connections that brought together a number of deepfake victims who form a community in the face of a lack of help from law enforcement. True justice may not be served—in most states deepfakes are not yet illegal—but Klein and the people she uncovers prove that something can be done.
“The Pigeon Tunnel” (coming to Apple TV+ in October) is a look at the extraordinary life of author John le Carré. It examines the very essence of truth, and how memory and manipulation play a part in shaping our worlds. I sat with director Errol Morris to talk about truth.
“The Pigeon Tunnel,” a new documentary from Academy Award-winning filmmaker Errol Morris, now streaming on Apple TV+, is a look at the extraordinary life of David Cornwell a.k.a. prolific author John le Carré. Through a retelling of his life, Cornwell examines the very essence of truth, and how memory and manipulation play a part in how we shape our world and our perceptions.
The set-up is simple, the story is not. Morris, who does not appear on camera, allows Cornwell/ le Carré, a leisurely ninety minutes to tell the story of his astonishing life. Dressed in an elegant blue businessman’s suit, he looks every inch the erudite MI6 intelligence officer he actually was from 1960 until 1964 when his career was cut short by the betrayal of double agent Kim Philby.
In measured tones, he eloquently describes a childhood that initially seems at odds with the sophisticated man seen in front of the camera. The son of Ronnie Cornwell, a career criminal and con man, says, “reality did not exist in my childhood. Performance did.”
And what follows is a performance of a sort. One that does not rely on truth as a cornerstone.
Early on, Ronnie schooled his son in the ways of duplicity, training that came in handy in his future careers as a raconteur, spy and a novelist. Cornwell/ le Carré, who died in 2020 shortly after the interviews for this film were completed, was a master fabulist, a storyteller who created a persona for himself in addition to the characters he created for his novels. He admits that much of what he says in the film isn’t true, that his recollections have been manipulated by the vagaries of memory and the trauma of youth.
A “long family background of betrayal,” from his father’s transgressions, his mother’s abandonment and later life changing disloyalty from his friend Philby, shaped him, and that is at the heart of what Morris wants the film to illuminate.
On the surface, it’s a look at an extraordinary life. But beyond the well-told stories, the real insight comes with how he sees the world. It doesn’t matter if the biographical details are true or not, what matters is his perception. It is how David Cornwell sees himself that is important and revealing. “I see my own life as a series of embraces and escapes,” he says.
“The Pigeon Tunnel” is as compelling as any le Carré novel. Cornwell/ le Carré knows how to tell a tale, and like any good spy, he knows what details to include, and which to hide away. Morris doesn’t attempt to chip away at the façade and get at the underlying truth, because he knows, in the hands of master storyteller, a good story is a good story, whether it is true or not.
On the Saturday October 14, 2023 edition of The Richard Crouse Show get to know Academy Award-winning filmmaker Errol Morris. His film “The Thin Blue Line” placed fifth on a Sight & Sound poll of the greatest documentaries ever made, and he has, in his films, documented everything from the career of Robert S. McNamara, the Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War and physicist Stephen Hawking to a topiary gardener, a robot scientist and a naked mole rat specialist.
“The Pigeon Tunnel,” his latest film, now streaming on Apple TV+, is a look at the extraordinary life of David Cornwell a.k.a. prolific author John le Carré. Through a retelling of his life, Cornwell examines the very essence of truth, and how memory and manipulation play a part in how we shape our world and our perceptions.
“The Pigeon Tunnel” is as compelling as any le Carré novel. Cornwell/ le Carré knows how to tell a tale, and like any good spy, he knows what details to include, and which to hide away. Morris doesn’t attempt to chip away at the façade and get at the underlying truth, because he knows, in the hands of master storyteller, a good story is a good story, whether it is true or not.
We’ll also meet Robert McCallum, director of the Amazon Prime documentary “Mr. Dressup: The Magic of Make-Believe,” an award-winning look at the life and legacy of legendary children’s entertainer Ernie Coombs.
Finally, we’ll chat with Tatiana Maslany. You know her as the Emmy winning star of thew science-fiction thriller “Orphan Black,” and as part of the Marvel Universe as the star of “She-Hulk: Attorney at Law.” Today she joins me to talk about playing Jennifer, a Monarch butterfly who suffers from acrophobia, a fear of heights, in the new animated film “Butterfly Tale.” We talk Butterflies, Broadway and much more.
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!
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“Mr. Dressup: The Magic of Make-Believe,” a look at the life and legacy of legendary children’s entertainer Ernie Coombs, now streaming on Amazon Prime, has the same brand of low-key kindness and empathy that made his show, “Mr. Dressup,” appointment viewing for several generations of Canadians.
The beauty of “Mr. Dressup,” which aired 4000 episodes chock full of songs, skits and crafts between 1967 and 1996, is that it was a simple, heartfelt program. So, it’s appropriate that director Robert McCallum leans into those qualities in this retelling of the life and legacy of the man and the show.
From his start in children’s entertainment as an assistant puppeteer to Fred Rogers in Pittsburgh and the move to Canada to the creation of his legendary CBC show and his decades long partnership with treehouse legends Casey and Finnegan, the film paints a vivid picture of the era through rarely seen archival footage and talking heads.
A generation or two of Canadians who grew up watching “Mr. Dressup,” including notable names like Eric McCormack, Paul Sun-Hyung Lee, Bif Naked, Michael J. Fox, Graham Greene, Peter Mansbridge and Andrew Phung chime in on the impact Coombs had on their lives.
More interesting is Judith Lawrence, Coombs’s puppeteer partner for much of the show’s run, who provides valuable insight to the inner workings of the show.
Along the way we learn about the foundations of the CBC that gave birth to “Mr. Dressup” and, much later, the budget cuts that threatened its existence.
But don’t come to “Mr. Dressup: The Magic of Make-Believe,” looking for dirt. There isn’t any. There are no bodies buried in the Tickle Trunk. It’s Mr. Dressup for goodness sake.
There are, however, heartfelt and tragic moments. The passing of wife Marlene is heartbreaking, not only because of the circumstances surrounding her death, but by the loss felt by a man who had given so many, so much.
“Mr. Dressup: The Magic of Make-Believe” is a feel-good blast of nostalgia, reminiscent of a kinder and gentler time.
This week on the Richard Crouse Show we meet director Brett Morgen and producer Debra Eisenstadt of the film “Moonage Daydream,” an impressionistic look at the life and work of iconic artist David Bowie, now playing in theatres.
Bowie led one of the most eclectic show business careers of the last sixty years. He was a seeker, an artist whose work flirted with everything from mime and music to acting and art. He was never less than a free thinker who valued artistic joy over fame.
Morgen’s film emphasizes the restless spirit that defined David Bowie, but don’t buy a ticket expecting a cradle-to-grave “Behind the Music” style expose. This is an experience, a collage of sound and vision, that over the two-and-a-quarter-hour running time creates a portrait that doesn’t attempt to define the artist as much as it does to illuminate his ever-changing philosophical mindset. To achieve this Morgen mixes never-before-seen footage and performances, forty remastered songs spanning the singer’s entire career and, as narration, excerpts from fifty years of Bowie interviews.
There are no talking heads or re-enactments, and neither is this one long music video. It’s an ephemeral collection of ideas and images with a solid intellectual underpinning, a philosophical edge and an emotional component for diehard Bowie fans. It also has a good beat and you can dance to it… most of it anyway.
We also get to know Ke Huy Quan, the star of the most aptly titled movie of the year, “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” You can say a lot of things about “Everything Everywhere All At Once” but you can’t say you’ve ever seen anything quite like it before. An eye-popping reflection on the power of kindness and love to heal the world’s problems, it is exhilarating that mixes and matches everything from family drama and tax problems to martial-arts and metaphysics into a whimsical story that moves at the speed of light. The result is a singular film that milks intentionality out of its madness.
What does all that mean? Stick around as I chat with one of the film’s stars Ke Huy Quan. You know him as Short Round, the plucky kid companion to Indiana Jones in The Temple Of Doom and from a role in cult classic comedy-adventure The Goonies. We’ll talk about why he chose to return to acting in “Everything Everywhere All at Once” after a twenty-year break from Hollywood.
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!
Listen to the show live here:
C-FAX 1070 in Victoria
SAT 5:00 PM to 6:00 PM
SUN 10:00 AM to 11:00 AM
CJAD in Montreal
SAT 8 PM to 9:00 PM
CFRA in Ottawa
SAT 8 PM to 9:00 PM
NEWSTALK 610 CKTB in St. Catharines
Sat 8:00 PM to 9:00 PM
NEWSTALK 1010 in Toronto
SAT 8 PM to 9:00 PM
NEWSTALK 1290 CJBK
SAT 8 PM to 9:00 PM
AM 1150 in Kelowna
SAT 11 PM to Midnight
BNN BLOOMBERG RADIO 1410
SAT 8 PM to 9:00 PM
Click HERE to catch up on shows you might have missed!
Early on in “Moonage Daydream,” an impressionistic look at the life and work of iconic artist David Bowie now playing in theatres, director Brett Morgen showcases a performance of “Wild Eyed Boy from Freecloud,” the B-side to Bowie’s breakthrough single “Space Oddity.”
“You’ll lose me,” he sings, “though I’m always really free.”
It’s a deceptively simple line, written early on in Bowie’s career, that sums up everything that was to come. Bowie led one of the most eclectic show business careers of the last sixty years. He was a seeker, an artist whose work flirted with everything from mime and music to acting and art. He occasionally lost track of commercial concerns, but, like the lyrics suggests, he was never less than a free thinker who valued artistic joy over fame.
Morgen’s film emphasizes the restless spirit that defined David Bowie, but don’t buy a ticket expecting a cradle-to-grave “Behind the Music” style expose. There is no mention of Angela, his first wife, manager Tony Defries or the mountain of cocaine that decorated his nostrils in the 1970s.
Instead, Morgen has created an experience, a collage of sound and vision, that over the two-and-a-quarter-hour running time creates a portrait that doesn’t attempt to define the artist as much as it does to illuminate his ever-changing philosophical mindset. To achieve this Morgen mixes never-before-seen footage and performances, forty remastered songs spanning the singer’s entire career and, as narration, excerpts from fifty years of Bowie interviews.
There are no talking heads or re-enactments, and neither is this one long music video. It’s an ephemeral collection of ideas and images about an enigmatic artist who once said, “I’ve never been sure of my personality. I’m a collector. I collect personalities and ideas.”
Fragmented and almost overwhelming in its sensory effect, “Moonage Daydream” is a compelling portrait with a solid intellectual underpinning, a philosophical edge and an emotional component for diehard Bowie fans. It also has a good beat and you can dance to it… most of it anyway.
For twenty years French geologists Katia and Maurice Krafft indulged in their great love, exploring active volcanoes, cameras in tow. “Katia and Maurice had spent their lives documenting how the earth’s heart beat,” says narrator Miranda July, “how its blood flowed.”
The Kraffts were the Jacques Cousteaus of volcanology. Their groundbreaking footage and photographs of Mount St. Helens, Mauna Loa, Mount Nyiragongo and others, are as epic as they are educational, charting otherwise unfamiliar territory.
Filmmaker Sara Dosa uses that material as the basis for “Fire of Love,” a stunning new documentary that captures not only the Krafft’s (ultimately tragic) love of volcanoes, but their love for one another.
Near the beginning of the film July says, “This is Katia and this is Maurice. It’s 1991, June 2nd. Tomorrow will be their last day,” telegraphing the story’s tragic end at Mount Unzen in Japan. But before we get there, director Dosa uses 200 hours of 16-millimeter film and archival photos and interviews, to tell two stories, one of scientific passion, the other of simple and pure passion for one another.
Visually the film makes an indelible impression. The otherworldly images of volcanoes are breathtaking, like watching pictures sent back from another planet. Dosa enhances the silent footage with interesting foley to awe inspiring effect. These shots, including boating on a lake of sulfuric acid, and protective clothing bursting into flame, coupled with thousands of gallons of flowing lava, betray the risks the couple faced every day on the job.
Those scenes are memorable, but it is the relationship between Katia and Maurice that gives the movie real depth. Their bond is evident in their joy, the sheer exuberance ion display. The scenes of them talking are limited to talk show appearances and the odd bit of in situ dialogue, but their bond as soul mates, living and loving the life they’ve chosen, is undeniable. They are not stuffy scientists, but passionate, funny seekers with a philosophical bent to their understanding of the natural world.
“I have a hard time understanding humans,” Maurice says. “I mean, I am one. I’m not constantly running away from them. But I believe that by living on volcanoes, away from humans, I’ll end up loving humans.”
“Fire of Love” is not just a nature documentary, it’s something more. It’s a character driven film with stirring images best seen on the big screen of a movie theatre, about the nature of passion.
