I sit with Deb Hutton on NewsTalk 1010 to go over some of the week’s biggest entertainment stories and movies playing in theatres. We talk about Britney Spears selling her musical catelogue, the Backstreet Boys and pizza, a strange collection of things and the movies “Nirvanna: The Band The Shgow The Movie” and “Wuthering Heights.”
Listen to the whole thing HERE!
Fast reviews for busy lovers! Watch as I review three Valentine’s Day movies in less time than it takes to kiss your partner! Have a look as I race against Cupid to tell you about the obsessive “Wuthering Heights,” the supernatural love story “Eternity” and the scary romance of “Together.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
I join the CTV NewsChanel to talk about the reimagined “Wuthering Heights,” the time travelling farce “Nirvanna: The Band The Show The Movie” and the nostalgic b-movie “Cold Storage.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
SYNOPSIS: “Moor, moor, moor. How do you like it?” “Wuthering Heights,” a reimagined take on Emily Brontë’s grand gothic tale of bodice-ripping and obsessive love, stars Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi as lovers with an unbreakable bond. “Love twisted by time. Desire that won’t die.”
CAST: Margot Robbie, Jacob Elordi, Hong Chau, Shazad Latif, Alison Oliver, Martin Clunes, Ewan Mitchell. Directed by Emerald Fennell.
REVIEW: More (or should that be “moor”) explicit than previous iterations of the Brontë classic, Emerald Fennell’s take on the story is a study in how obsessive love can lead to ruin.
Set in the late 1700s, Charlotte Mellington plays Catherine Earnshaw, the young, free-spirited daughter of Mr. Earnshaw (Martin Clunes), a booze-hound who brings home an illiterate, orphaned boy (“Adolescence” star Owen Cooper) from the city to the family’s decaying Yorkshire estate. She names him Heathcliff, after her dead brother, and they form a fast bond.
Cut to years later. Catherine and Heathcliff, now played by Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, are head over heels but Cathy desires the kind of social standing Heathcliff cannot provide.
Despite Heathcliff’s promise to “follow you like a dog to the end of the world,” she marries the refined gentleman Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif), a handsome rich man but without the intensity that defined her relationship with Heathcliff.
Rejected and devastated, Heathcliff leaves the only home and real love he has ever known, only to return five years later, wealthy and with revenge on this mind. “Why did you leave me?” she asks. “Why did you betray your own heart?” he replies.
Simply put, Emerald Fennell, the director of “Promising Young Woman” and “Saltburn,” has turned “Wuthering Heights” into something best described as a light “Fifty Shades of Bridgerton.”
Despite a reputation for pushing the envelope, Fennell seems restrained here, save for a brief scene of bizarre doggie-style degradation and the worst consent scene ever committed to film. Those moments are memorable for the kind of provocation and boundary-pushing we expect from the director. For much of the film’s runtime, however, she’s on a low simmer, stuck somewhere between the Brontë’s melancholic passion and the director’s usual decadent discomfort.
As the young Catherine and Heathcliffe, Charlotte Mellington and Owen Cooper provide a proper setup for the soul-deep connection to come. When the characters grow up Robbie and Elordi bring intensity but the heartfelt spark that lit the flame of passion years before is replaced by a romantic appetite that manifests itself in cruelty and muddled motivations.
At its most basic, Catherine and Heathcliffe straddle the thin line between love and hate, not an uncommon romantic position, but Fennell confusingly blurs the line into a gaping incoherent hole.
Robbie and Elordi look the part of impossibly beautiful star-crossed lovers, and they share chemistry, but their thirst for one another feels skin deep, even as it grows obsessive and destructive.
Like its stars, “Wuthering Heights” looks lovely—opulent interiors, moody moors—but the reimagination of Brontë’s novel feels lackluster, unable to truly grasp the passion or the tragedy inherent to the original story.
“Saltburn,” a dark comedy of manners starring “Priscilla’s” Jacob Elordi and Academy Award nominee Barry Keoghan and now playing in theatres, is a titillating “Talented Mr. Ripley” style tale of class, position and desire that is not afraid to get weird.
Keoghan is Oliver Quick, a shy “scholarship kid” at Oxford University who doesn’t quite fit in with his classmates. His jackets aren’t from Saville Row, he lacks their social graces and most notably, doesn’t come from oodles of cash.
When the handsome, gregarious and monied Felix Catton’s (Elordi) bicycle get s flat tire on the way to a tutorial, Oliver comes to the rescue and the odd couple become fast friends. Ollie isn’t exactly embraced by Felix’s well-heeled inner circle, who find him coarse, but they become tight, hanging out at the pub when they aren’t studying.
At the end of the term Felix asks if Oliver will go home for the summer.
“Honestly, home doesn’t mean the same thing for me as it does for you Felix,” Oliver says. “I don’t think I’ll ever go home again.“
His tale of woe, of growing up as the only child to a drunken father, moves Felix who invites him to spend the summer at Saltburn, his family’s palatial estate.
“Just be yourself,” Felix says. “They’ll love you. It’s relaxed. I promise.”
Except it’s not. It’s the kind of English country home that makes Downton Abbey look like a shack. Priceless art lines the walls, there are butlers and footmen, mandatory jackets at dinner and an oddball collection of aristocratic family members including Felix’s eccentric, self-absorbed father Sir James (Richard E. Grant), casually cruel mother Elspeth (Rosamund Pike) and troubled sister Venetia (Alison Oliver), who tells the newcomer, “You’re just another one of his toys.”
He may be a novelty, out of his depth, but Oliver is drawn to shiny things, the lives of the rich and famous, and will do anything to stay in that privileged world.
“Saltburn” isn’t just a study of the haves and the have nots, it’s a tale of the haves and unchained aspiration. Obsessed with the good life, Oliver will do bad things to get a taste of it.
Keoghan takes risks as the chameleonic Oliver. Whether he is vulnerable, hapless, or a menacing manipulator, the “The Banshees of Inisherin” actor chooses interesting ways to manifest Oliver’s state of mind. There may not be much beneath the surface, other than danger and avarice, but Keoghan, whether he is dancing naked through the grand home or lapping up bath water, keeps the performance and the audience off kilter.
Elordi allows just enough of Felix’s heart of gold to shine through his charming veneer to make the filthy rich character feel a little less dirty and Grant is perfection as the repressed upper-class twit at the head of the family, but it is Pike who steals every scene she’s in. Blessed with the film’s best lines, Elspeth has an off-hand, casual way with a barb that cuts like a knife. When she hears about a friend who has taken her own life, she snorts, “She’d do anything for attention.” These lines are often asides, not central to the action, but Pike makes them memorable.
Unfortunately, director Emerald Fennell, who also wrote the script, doesn’t mine the class satire for answers. She’s content with the black comedy, Oliver’s coldhearted desire and little else. The result is an entertaining film, but a mixed bag. It’s diverting, filled with over-the-top moments and plot twists, but at the end it feels less than the sum of its parts.
It would be easy to suggest that “Promising Young Woman,” a new drama starring Carey Mulligan, is simply a “Falling Down” for the #MeToo era but it is much more than that. It has elements of that but it is also an audacious look at rape culture and male privilege that weaves dark humour and revenge into the ragged fabric of its story.
It’s difficult to talk about “Promising Young Woman” without being spoilerific but here goes: Mulligan is Cassandra, a thirty-year-old drop out from medical school. She lives at home with her parents (Clancy Brown and Jennifer Coolidge), works at a coffee shop with her best, and only friend, Gail (Laverene Cox). “If I wanted a house, a career, a yoga class and a boyfriend my mom could brag about I’d do it,” she says. “In ten minutes. But I don’t want it.”
At night she hits the clubs, pretending to be intoxicated, waiting for men to approach her. Just when they think she is at her most vulnerable, she “comes to.” “What is this?” says one of the “nice guys” who tries to take advantage of her. “Are you some kind of psycho? I thought you were…” “Drunk?” she says, finishing his sentence.
At home she has a notebook, filled a list of the men she has encountered and the several names in store for a “day of reckoning.”
There’s more but one of the pleasures of “Promising Young Woman” is in its ability to surprise and shock with the story’s twists and turns. There is a lot in play here. The action here is fueled by Cassie’s trauma but writer-director Emerald Fennell keeps the action off kilter with the introduction of dark satire, revenge, an exploration of toxic masculinity and even some rom com-esque scenes. The culmination of all these disparate components is a film with a strange tone but a clear-cut point of view. It’s social commentary as art and it works.
Mulligan appears in virtually every frame, navigating the story’s left turns and holding its centre no matter what is thrown at her. The sense of loss that drives her is always present—she even wears a broken heart pendent—even when she is in control, steely-eyed and ready to rumble.
“Promising Young Woman” is occasionally rough around the edges structurally but despite its flaws is compelling and surprising.
