Chuck Wepner goes by many names. To some he is The Champ, a heavyweight boxer who once went fifteen rounds with Muhammad Ali. To others he is the Bayonne Bleeder, a fighter sometimes sidelined by his tendency to bleed out all over the ring. Still others call him the Real Rocky in reference to the rumour that his career inspired the Sylvester Stallone movie. He’s an American brawler played by Liev Schreiber in a new movie simply called “Chuck.”
Wepner became a local hero when he was tapped to take on boxing legend George Foreman. There was just one catch. Foreman had to beat Muhammad Ali first. The odds were in his favour but, in an upset, Foreman lost. That defeat should have put Wepner out of the running but the Ali fight was being positioned as a battle of the races and since he was the only white boxer on a long list of fighters qualified to take on the champ, he got the gig. The odds against him were 40-to-1 but the lure of a $100,000 payday was too great to resist. As expected he lost but the fact he shared the ring with Ali burnished his reputation, if not his bank account.
And thus the template of Wepner’s career was set. He’s an also ran, a man who can see the brass ring but never quite grab hold of it.
In the wake of the Ali fight Wepner’s life was turned topsy-turvy. He coulda been a contender but instead moonlighted as a liquor salesman. He was a star at night, hanging around clubs, cheating on his wife Phyllis (Elisabeth Moss) and developing a cocaine problem. His notoriety increased with the release of “Rocky,” the Stallone movie reportedly semi-based on Wepner’s life. A failed audition for “Rocky 2” forces the fighter further down the rabbit hole into a “Requiem for a Heavyweight-esque” life outside the ring.
“Chuck’s” story is little known but feels familiar. The “Rocky” twist and Ali fight add some nice colour to the tale, but this is, essentially, another retelling of an arrogant also ran boxer whose life outside the ring spiralled out of control. In Schreiber’s hands it’s easy to see why people were drawn to Wepner. He’s charismatic and despite his myriad flaws, likeable.
Good supporting work also comes from Moss (in an underwritten role), Ron Perlman and Jim Gaffigan as Wepner’s manager and best friend respectively but the movie, directed by Philippe Falardeau, like it’s main character, feels workmanlike. It covers large sections of the man’s life when it feels like a concentrated version may have been more compelling.
Richard and “Canada AM” host Marci Ien talk about the weekend’s three big releases, the shady charm of “The Nice Guys” with Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling, the kid’s cartoon “The Angry Birds Movie,” and the Seth Rogen sequel “Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising” and the debauched “High-Rise” with Tom Hiddleston.
How to describe High-Rise, the darkly funny film from director Ben Wheatley?
Here goes; imagine the love child of Lord of the Flies and The Towering Inferno. An adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s novel about class segregation in a luxury condo, High-Rise is chaotic and completely bonkers.
“There’s material in here that is difficult and there’s structure in here that’s difficult but there’s also fun,” says Wheatley.
“There’s anarchy and sex and dancing and music. I always like to think about it like those 40s and 50s Hollywood movies and what they used to look like. There’d be no contradiction in a cowboy movie stopping for someone to sing a song.
“You don’t think about the pacing being really odd. The idea behind it was that those films were broken up into chunks. There’s a variety to them that make them really enjoyable. That’s what I was hoping for with this.”
Wheatley says the story of social warfare in the closed environment of an apartment building is just as relevant now as it was when Ballard wrote it in 1975.
“Ballard used to describe it that he was standing by the side of the road waving that there is danger ahead. But when I reread it when I was 40, it’s like, Crap, it’s not a warning anymore. It’s like it was taken from the newspaper. This is actually happening, which is kind of shocking but also kind of interesting.”
Known for his uncompromising films like Kill List and Sightseers, movies that critic Sheila O’Malley described as “black comedy thrillers involving crime, murder” and notable for their “absence of a moral compass,” the 44-year-old director is the cinematic spawn of mavericks like Nicolas Roeg, Ken Russell and John Boorman, British filmmakers who broke taboos in big budget movies like Don’t Look Now, The Devils and Deliverance.
“That was the mainstream,” he says. “When you dig into the BFI archive and look at the Jack Bond stuff and see the other end of the avant guard cinema that was being made at the same time, it was absolutely crazy. It’s a real shame that has been lost. What also makes me chuckle is you see reviews saying that High-Rise is insane or incredibly experimental and you think, ‘This film wouldn’t have stood out as all that strange in the ’70s.’ It would have been a more conservative film of that period.”
Today it’s a little tougher to raise money to get challenging films like High-Rise made. He says Hollywood-y or famous actors help, and to that end he signed Tom Hiddleston, Jeremy Irons and Mad Men’s Elisabeth Moss to tell his outlandish tale.
“I like what (producer) Jeremy Thomas says about it. His whole career has been about smuggling weird into the mainstream and I think that’s about right. It’s a deal between you and the audience.”
Part of that audience is Ballard’s considerable fan base.
“The Ballardian website have interviewed us a few times and they seem to be convinced that we haven’t totally pissed up the leg of the memory of J.G. Ballard. There was never any intention to rile those people. They are partly the reason we are able to do the film, they are the fan base. Why would you go out of your way to irritate people like that?”
Words strain to describe the unrepentant grotesqueness on display in “High-Rise,” the darkly funny Tom Hiddleston film. Imagine if Ken Russell had directed “The Towering Inferno.” Or picture “Lord of the Flies” with an adult cast who don’t mind taking their clothes off.
“High-Rise” begins with some tasty real estate porn. Dr. Robert Laing (Hiddleston, who brings a Michael Fassbender vibe to the film) moves into an elegant apartment on the twenty-fifth floor of a luxurious high-rise building. He quickly begins to hobnob with his neighbours, the building’s elite like single mother Charlotte (Sienna Miller) and the regal Mr. Royal (Jeremy Irons), the penthouse occupant and architect who calls himself the building’s midwife. The building is a social hierarchy, a segregated culture where the rich live on the top floors in opulence while the poor folks and families on the ground floor have to who beg for water and electricity. Royal calls it colonizing the sky, which, as one rich guy says, “is understandable when you look at what’s happening at street level.” When the anarchy of the lower floors spreads to the top, class warfare erupts and everyone, rich and poor, goes into extreme survival mode. How’s the high life? “Prone to fits of mania, narcissism and power failure,” says Laing.
An adaptation of JG Ballard’s 1975 novel about class segregation “High-Rise” is chaotic and completely bonkers. As the social structure disintegrates calm and reason go out the window—or more likely, are hurled off the balcony—for both the characters and director Ben Wheatley. Unafraid to allow anarchy to be the story’s engine, he blurs the line between behaviours civilized and savage, presenting a kaleidoscopic look at social rot. I mean, how many movies feature a roasted dog dinner and a Marie Antoinette dress-up party?
“High-Rise” will not be for everybody. It’s not meant to be for everybody. Uncompromising and disjointed, it’s unapologetically weird; a film that seems likely to earn instant cult status.
Richard’s alter ego Zomald Trump reviews the teenage Halloween freak-out “Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse,” and some more adult fare in the ghostly form of “Our Brand is Crisis,” “Truth” and “Suffragette.”
Richard’s alter ego Zomald Trump reviews the teenage Halloween freak-out “Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse,” and some more adult fare in the ghostly form of “Our Brand is Crisis,” “Truth” and “Suffragette.”
Who do you get to play an icon? If you are James Vanderbilt, director of Truth, you hire another icon.
The story of 60 Minutes producer Mary Mapes and legendary news anchor Dan Rather’s journalistic examination into President George W. Bush’s military service features Robert Redford as one of the most famous reporters of the twentieth century.
“The movie’s big buy is, ‘Are you going to see Redford all the way through or are you going to see Rather?’” says Vanderbilt. “Redford is a phenomenal actor but what he brings into a scene by just being present (is a) gravitational pull. The room turns toward him. Getting to know Dan, that’s what Dan Rather is like. When Dan Rather walks into a room, the same thing happens.
“Everybody turns into, in a good way, a teenager, because those are both voices who have been in your living room for 30 to 40 years. It’s a voice of God thing they both have and that’s why I really wanted Bob to do it.”
Vanderbilt says the legendary actor is “very easy going, the nicest guy you’ll ever meet,” but nonetheless made people on the set nervous.
“We had heads of departments who had been working in film for 30 years who couldn’t call him Bob. He would say, ‘Call me Bob,’ and they would say, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t do that Mr. Redford. I’m very sorry that is not going to happen.’”
Vanderbilt is best known as a screenwriter, penning the scripts for The Amazing Spider-Man, Zodiac, White House Down and the upcoming Independence Day 2. His screenplay for Truth is based on Mapes’ memoir Truth and Duty and reveals a time before journalism was driven by ad sales and click-throughs.
“It was pre iPhone,” he says. “It was a year before the iPhone came out and that is such a big thing in terms of how we connect to one another now. How we relate to each other. Journalists and everybody. It felt like a fulcrum point, kind of where we had been, journalistically, and where we are now.”
His research into the story gave the director a new respect for journalists.
“I think it is a very noble profession but maybe I’m a very pie in the sky guy,” he says. “I think the more young people who grow up and go, ‘This is what I want to be. I want to ask questions of power,’ the better. I think we, as a society, are better that way.”
Made at a time when big stores are broken on Twitter truth set at a time when journalist did work the old-fashioned way, following paper trails and working the phones, “Truth” tells of murky investigation into an even murkier story.
Based on the nonfiction book “Truth and Duty: The Press, the President, and the Privilege of Power” by Mary Mapes, the film begins with Mapes (Cate Blanchett) having just broken the story of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. Her hard-hitting approach made her a journalism superstar at CBS and “60 Minutes,” the show that ran the story. Gearing up for the next season meant finding an even bigger story. Mapes put together a crack team of investigators—the jaded but idealistic Mike Smith (Topher Grace), army insider Colonel Roger Charles (Dennis Quaid) and journalism professor Lucy Scott (Elisabeth Moss)—to examine President George W. Bush’s military service. The theory, supported by the so-called Killian documents, was that Bush had received preferential treatment to avoid fighting in the Vietnam War.
The seemingly airtight story falls apart the day after airing on “60 Minutes,” calling into question the reputation of CBS News, Mapes and her team and costing anchor and news legend Dan Rather (Robert Redford) his job.
For a movie that is all about bias, or the lack thereof, “Truth” is certainly in the corner of its journalists. The much ballyhooed fair and balanced approach is largely absent as the movie paints Mapes and Company as warrior journalists on a search for the truth while everyone else is painted with a big bad Republican brush.
As Mapes Blanchett plays a scapegoat, a mix of steely nerves and vulnerability, who will do what she thinks is right no matter what the consequences. In real life Mapes was fired and hasn’t worked in television news since even though her Abu Ghraib story won a Peabody Award.
Redford brings gravitas to the role of Rather, reeking of old school trust. Rather was a link to the past, to a time when journalism wasn’t driven by ad sales or click throughs. “Why did you get into journalism?” he’s asked. “Curiosity,” he says, “that’s everything.” He viewed asking the right questions and passing along the results, pro or con, to his audience as a trust. Times changed around him and Redford captures Rather’s resignation to the new world of news with equal measures of sadness and outrage.
“Trust” is a compelling story told with a heavy hand. A slow-motion shot of Mapes’s hand, holding a remote, and turning off the TV after Rather’s retirement announcement is a bit much and some clumsy foreshadowing— just before the troublesome “60 Minutes” story airs a commercial for “Survivor” screams, “Somebody’s going to get burned!”—adds unnecessary melodrama to what should have been an even-handed look at the inner workings of the fourth estate.
