I join CTV NewsChannel anchor Renée Rodgers to talk about the origin story “Clayface,” the stop-motion animated “Wildwood,” the documentary “Once Upon a Time in Harlem” and the adult fairy tale “Wicker.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
I sit in with CKTB morning show host Steph Vivier to have a look at movies in theatres including the origin story “Clayface,” the stop-motion animated “Wildwood,” the documenary “Once Upon a Time in Harlem” and the adult fairy tale “Wicker.”
Listen to the whole thing HERE!
Fast reviews for busy people! Watch as I review three movies in less time than it takes to wind your watch. Have a look as I race against the clock to tell you about the origin story “Clayface,” the stop-motion animated “Wildwood” and the documentary “Once Upon a Time in Harlem.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
SYNOPSIS: Third feature in James Gunn and Peter Safran’s DC Universe, “Clayface” is the origin story of one of Gotham City’s most notorious villains. “This is gonna be hard for you to believe. Matt Hagen can change his face.”
CAST: Tom Rhys Harries, Naomi Ackie, David Dencik, Max Minghella, Eddie Marsan. Directed by James Watkins.
REVIEW: An origin story that doesn’t spare the violence and gore, “Clayface” is a bloody good time that breathes the same fetid air as body horror flicks like “The Fly” and “The Substance.”
The DC standalone action of “Clayface” centers on rising movie star Matt Hagen (Tom Rhys Harries). From the rough-and-tumble streets of Gotham City to the big screen and an Oscar nomination, things are going great until he has an ill-advised dalliance with local crime boss Markos Szabo’s (David Dencik) girlfriend (Joana Ribeiro). In revenge Szabo takes a razor to Hagen’s face, rendering him disfigured and unrecognizable.
Scarred and with his career in tatters he looks into an experimental treatment to regain his old looks and identity offered by Dr. Caitlyn Corr (Naomi Ackie). “Even if it kills me,” he says, “I’ll be better off than I am now.”
The miracle nanocell serum yields results, and Hagen’s movie star good looks return, but, as Dr. Corr says, “The procedure is causing troubling… physical changes.”
As the grisly side effects manifest themselves, his body shapeshifts into living clay, making him able to absorb and change into his foes.
As his life and body transform, his vain quest is overtaken by a thirst for revenge. “You want to know how I feel?” he asks. “The people I trusted betrayed me. The justice system failed me. They stole my career, my money, my life…! I’m a monster.”
Dark, violent and grimly entertaining, “Clayface” isn’t the same old from DC. It’s a body horror film that goes surprisingly hard, capped with a charismatic performance from star Tom Rhys Harries.
It’s a multifaceted role for the Welsh actor as he metamorphoses from movie star to monster. As his identity and sanity slip away, his shift from charismatic actor to desperate victim to vengeful villain is seamless. Those transformations are made tragic (despite his dreadful behavior) by Harries’s deft work.
Adding to the overall vibe are practical effects that give the movie a gooey, visceral Cronenbergian feel that make for vivid, cringe-inducing visuals.
A twisted tale touched by human tragedy and revenge, “Clayface” is not your typical origin or comic book movie, but it is a welcome addition to the DC Universe.
LOGLINE: The Amy Winehouse (Marisa Abela) biopic “Back to Black,” now playing in theatres, details the chaotic relationship with husband Blake Fielder-Civil (Jack O’Connell) that inspired the internationally best-selling album “Back to Black.”
CAST: Marisa Abela, Jack O’Connell, Eddie Marsan, and Lesley Manville. Directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson and written by Matt Greenhalgh.
REVIEW: With all the depth and curiosity of a Wikipedia page, “Back to Black” attempts to tell the tale of a complicated artist who left a mark, but who left us too soon. Painted in the broadest of strokes, this sad story of sex, drugs and jazz is buoyed somewhat by Marisa Abela, who looks and sounds like the late singer, but instead of becoming a well-rounded character, Winehouse comes across as a walking, talking attitude with an impressive beehive hairdo and an alcohol problem.
An early scene detailing the writing of “What Is It About Men” hints at what is to come. Struck by a bolt of inspiration, she sings, “My destructive side has grown a mile wide.” It’s a shame, then, that “Back to Black” wallows in Winehouse’s self-destruction.
Director Sam Taylor-Johnson, working from a script by Matt Greenhalgh, tiptoes around many of the story’s landmines—the intrusive paparazzi, the exploitation she suffered by those close to her—to focus on the doomed romance with Fielder-Civil. “I need to live my songs,” she says, and her relationship certainly did inspire many of “Back to Black’s” songs, but the focus on her obsessive love, punctuated by the occasional musical performance, shifts the focus from the joy of making music to the story’s tawdry aspects.
Amy Winehouse was a singular artist, a fearless performer who made her own rules, and dug deep to create her art. So, it’s a shame her biopic is such a standard cautionary tale that skims the surface. Recommended instead is “Amy,” director Asif Kapadia’s 2015 documentary that carefully, and fulsomely, examines the life of a person who, as Tony Bennett says, didn’t live long enough to learn how to live.
A throwback to the erotic thrillers of the 1980s, “Fair Play,” a blistering exploration of workplace gender dynamics, now streaming on Netflix, is a smart, sexy and sharp story of sabotage.
When we first meet Emily and Luke, played by Phoebe Dynevor and Alden Ehrenreich, they are a young couple, very much in love. By night they are a lovey-dovey pair on the verge of getting married.
“I wish we could tell the world,” Luke says.
But they can’t, because by day they work at an aggressive Wall Street financial firm with a strict no fraternization policy. That means all business, no flirting, no batting of eyes, just head-down business analysis.
When a project manager gets fired and escorted out of the building, rumor has it that Luke will take over and get the corner office, and Emily is thrilled for him.
But when the unexpected happens, and Emily is offered the job—“You made half the big calls this quarter alone,” her boss says.—Luke congratulates her but his true feelings are betrayed by the hurt behind his eyes.
Relationship power dynamics shifted, Luke becomes sullen and unpredictable as Emily becomes more powerful and confident. As their relationship erodes, worn away by jealousy, a bruised ego and anger, Luke’s performance at work falters.
“Why is it so hard to accept that I deserve the job?” Emily asks.
“Because I never got the shot,” Luke snorts.
In its examination of the cutthroat world of finance, “Fair Play” treads similar ground as movies like “The Wolf of Wall Street” and “Boiler Room,” but does so from a different perspective. This movie is about the personal toll success can exact when ego, economics and gender dynamics collide.
In her big screen debut director Chloe Domont creates a tense two-hander, an edgy movie that transforms from sweet to sour as its provocative story nears the end credits. There are a handful of other characters, most notably Eddie Marsan as the reptilian big boss at the firm, but this is all about the intense performances from Dynevor and Ehrenreich.
“Bridgerton’s” Dynevor plays Emily, an Ivy Leaguer from humble Long Island beginnings, as a person who has fought her way to success. Her weapons against sexism and office politics are instinct, drive and a work ethic that places her a step ahead of the competition. In a breakout role Dynevor hands in the film’s most subtle performance, capturing the character’s inner reserve of strength necessary to keep her grounded as Luke’s behavior grows more erratic.
Ehrenreich, best known for play Han Solo in “Solo: A Star Wars Story,” has the showier part. He plays Luke as an entitled guy who hasn’t been told “no” enough in his life. As Emily’s star rises at work, his man-child masculinity is threatened, manifesting itself in impotency, anger and finally, violence as he hopscotches through the stages of grief over the shoddy state of his career. Ehrenreich is as outward in his performance as Dynevor is introspective, and is an interesting, if one note, villain.
“Fair Play” is an effective, if slightly overlong, acidic relationship drama, a kind of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” set among the world of high finance and insecure men.
Despite a final shot that is about as subtle as one of its title character’s trademarked baseball bat attacks, “Ray Donovan: The Movie,” now streaming on Crave, brings the moody television series to a satisfying conclusion.
The movie picks up where season seven of the TV show ended. Mickey (Jon Voight), family patriarch and all-round scumbag, and his quest for cash led to a violent showdown that resulted in the accidental shooting death of his granddaughter Bridget’s (Kerris Dorsey) husband.
With Mickey on the run, his son, Ray (Liev Schreiber), a “fixer” who solves pesky personal problems for wealthy clients, is looking inward, determined to fix his own issues, beginning with his trouble-making father.
As the main action plays out in present day, through flashbacks we learn more about the Donovan clan. How Ray ended up in Hollywood doing whatever it takes to keep bold-faced names out of the gossip pages or jail or both. The roots of his lifelong beef with Mickey and why bad luck and trouble has been this family’s only friends.
Anyone familiar with the tone of the last few seasons of “Ray Donovan” will not be surprised by the downbeat feel of the movie. Dour and sour, it’s a dark sins-of-the-father story that never met a shot of Schreiber’s scowling face it didn’t love. As it wraps up the series, the movie circles around its main ideology, that violence begets violence. It’s not exactly a revelation from the Donovan timeline, but it is the thread that sews up the loose story bits left by the abrupt cancellation of the series. It’s not always subtle (no spoilers here, but check out the last hammer-the-nail-on-the-head shot of Ray) but it does get to the heart of what makes the Donovans tick.
“Ray Donovan: The Movie” is a slow burn, but at a tight 100 minutes, should provide closure for fans of the show, a bit of action and even some emotional moments.
A remake of Nicolas Boukhrief’s 2004 French film “Le Convoyeur,” “Wrath of Man,” now playing in theatres and coming soon to VOD, is a revenge/heist flick that sees director Guy Ritchie reunited with his trademarked tricky storytelling style, Jason Statham and the ruthless violence that made his early movies such eye poppers.
Statham plays “’H’, like in bomb,” a man of few words with a mysterious past. Big surprise there. They should call him Gazpacho because he is the coolest of cool cucumbers. No matter what, this guy’s pulse rate never rises above 50 beats per minute.
When we first meet him, he takes a job as a security guard for Fortico, a Los Angeles armored car company. A recent robbery left three people dead and made the surviving guards edgy and uneasy. “Do you have any idea how dangerous this job can be?” a coworker named Boy Sweat Dave (Josh Hartnett) asks him. “We ain’t the predator, we’re the prey.”
When some very bad people attempt to rob one of the company’s cash trucks “H” reveals a special set of skills to the shock and awe of his co-workers. “It doesn’t feel right,” says security guard Bullet (Holt McCallany). “It’s like he wants the trucks to get hit.”
As the bodies pile up “H’s” lethal past is exposed and it becomes clear that he didn’t take the gig at the armored car company simply because he needed a week to week pay cheque. “I can do in two weeks,” “H” says to the shadowy Agent King (Andy Garcia), “what you wish you could do in twenty years.”
Told on a broken timeline and sectioned-off into chapters with names like “Bad, Animals, Bad” and “Scorched Earth,” the movie’s plot can be boiled down to one line. “I do bear a grudge,” “H” says, summing up the film’s raison d’etre as bullets fly and bodies pile up. A nihilistic story about revenge decorated with a tense heist subplot, it’s a riff on Statham’s earlier work in which he usually played either Character #1, a “loner with a past who must protect a loved one,” or Character #2, the “loner with a past who must protect a youthful innocent.”
Here he shakes things up by showing a disregard for the lives of some while avenging the loss of a loved one. Gone is the jokey Statham of “Spy” and his over-the-top “Fast and Furious” work. This is a back-to-basics performance that sees him settle on one facial expression, as though his chiseled face is encased in amber, to convey the character’s one deadly motive. The taciturn thing has worked for him before and it works well here. “H” is no laughing matter. Danger follows him around, and Statham’s coiled spring performance, no matter how basic, suggests that ultra-violence could erupt at any moment. It gives the movie much of its edge as Ritchie navigates the grim but stylish goings-on.
Are there plot holes? Yes. I can’t go into them without giving the story away but let’s just say “H’s” resilience is impressive.
Somewhere buried deep in the gunplay there is an elegance to “Wrath of Man.” Ritchie’s tough-talking film is tautly crafted, and, for those expecting “Snatch” style editing tricks, quite restrained.
The editing, not the violence.
Shot through a hail of bullets, the movie builds to a tense “Heat” style climax that doesn’t waste time or ammo. The jittery atmosphere is amped up by an angrily effective score from composer Chris Benstead.
On the downside, Ritchie’s taste for macho posturing doesn’t add much to the film’s early scenes. There are barely any female characters, save for Niamh Algar’s security guard Dana and assorted wife characters, and the hard-boiled dialogue between the often men borders on parody.
“Wrath of Man” is bleak and the characters are all, at best, anti-heroes, but for those with a taste for adrenaline pumping action set pieces, “Wrath of Man” delivers.
Anyone who thinks the Guy Ritchie of old has disappeared, crushed under the weight of the huge box office grosses of the family-friendly “Aladdin,” need look no further than the blood splattered pint mug of “The Gentlemen’s” opening scene for proof to the contrary.
Highly stylized crime comedies like “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels” and “Snatch” made Ritchie the king of fast-paced, politically-incorrect stories of life on the streets. The big budget movies, his Sherlock Holmes series and “Aladdin,” among others, made more money but lacked the visceral thrills of his early work. His new film, “The Gentlemen,” starring Matthew McConaughey, Henry Golding, Michelle Dockery, Colin Farrell and Hugh Grant, feels like a hybrid of the two phases of his career. A spiritual cousin to “Lock, Stock” and ”Snatch,” it brings Ritchie back to London’s underworld, a place populated by Saville Row suit-wearing tough guys, ruthless tabloid editors and henchmen who speak like down-on-their-heels Oxford drop outs.
Matthew McConaughey is Mickey Pearson, an American who built a weed empire in his adopted home country of England. Intelligent and ruthless—qualities matched only by his wife Rosalind (Dockery)—he’s now middle-aged and looking to cash out. His offers to sell the business to billionaire drug lord Matthew Berger (a very mannered Jeremy Strong) for $400 million attracts unwanted attention from Dry Eye (Golding), the ruthless youngest nephew of an aging crime lord.
There’s more, but this is a pretzel of a story, twisted and tied in knots.
“The Gentlemen” is not a sequel or a reboot but it feels like one. The hyper-masculine story telling style, inventive use of swear words and spider-web plotting, while audacious, will be very familiar to Ritchie-philes. It’s “Snatch 2.0” with the same kind of big name cast who seem to be having fun mouthing Ritchie’s profanity laden dialogue but no amount of fast cutting and fast talking can replace real energy. As rock ‘n rolling as the filmmaking is, the story acts as an anchor, bogging things down as it gets more and more convoluted.
It’s too bad because Ritchie takes pains to create the very specific world his characters inhabit, and it is a colourful place but it seems that he never met a plot twist he didn’t love. As the plot thickens, and it does thicken almost to the point of impenetrability, the movie begins to feel overstuffed. To help the audience along Ritchie binds everything together with a silly framing device involving Fletcher (Grant), a private eye/blackmailer who unfurls the complicated story to Pearson’s right-hand-man Raymond (Charlie Hunnam). It’s time consuming and adds little to the picture except for Hugh Grant’s exaggerated accent as he delivers flowery lines like, “Our antagonist explodes on the scene, like a millennial firework.”
“The Gentlemen” feels like an exercise in nostalgia, back to era of Ritchie’s frenetic jump cuts and outdated attitudes about race disguised as quippy dialogue.
