On the Saturday May 4 edition of the Richard Crouse Show we’ll meet novelist and writing coach Heidi Reimer. Her front-row seat to the theater world of her debut novel, “The Mother Act,” began two decades ago when she met and married an actor, and her immersion in motherhood began when she adopted a toddler and discovered she was pregnant on the same day.
Then, we’ll meet photographer-turned-film director, Caitlin Cronenberg. Her new movie “Humane” stars Jay Baruchel, Emily Hampshire and Enrico Colantoni is a wild story about a family dinner that erupts into chaos when a father’s plan to enlist in the government’s new euthanasia program goes sideways.
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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“Humane,” the debut film from director Caitlin Cronenberg, and now playing in theatres, places a violent family drama against the backdrop of a global ecological collapse.
Set in the near future, the movie takes place as a climate change has reached a critical point. Crops are failing around the world, and food is so scarce that world governments have ordered a voluntary 20% cull in the overall population to reduce the strain on the planet.
“We are engaged in a life and death struggle against our own extinction,” says Professor Jared York (Jay Baruchel).
Into this situation comes the rest of the wealthy York family, led by patriarch Charles (Peter Gallagher). A retired newscaster, Charles has had a good run and, to the surprise of his family, has signed up, along with wife Dawn (Uni Park) for the euthanasia program.
Despite his big talk on television news shows, Professor York doesn’t think the rules apply to his wealthy, well-known family, which includes piano playing adopted brother Noah (Sebastian Chacon), edgy sister Rachel (Emily Hampshire), Ashley (Alanna Bale) and the youngest, Mia (Sirena Gulamgaus).
The family’s resolve is put to the test when cheery government exterminator Bob (Enrico Colantoni) arrives to euthanatize and collect two bodies. Trouble is, Dawn has taken off.
“I can’t do it,” she says in a note. “I will always love you.”
One body short of his quota, Bob announces, “I need a second cadaver. We’re here to collect two bodies. We’ve got three hours before my next appointment.”
His offer to give the family time to decide which of them should sacrifice themselves for the betterment of the world, sends the siblings into a chaotic fight to stay alive.
“Think about your lives,” Bob says. “I’m sure one of you will realize it’s not all that great.”
Using dark humor to expose the selfishness and cruelty of human nature, “Humane’s” social farce cuts like a knife. As the action escalates, dirty secrets are revealed and the soft underbelly of the family exposed as each member makes a case for survival. It’s a dystopian “August: Osage County” with hints of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and “Step Brothers.” Cronenberg keeps the action contained to one day, mostly in one house, decisions that bring a sense of ticking-clock urgency and claustrophobia to the proceedings.
The tone vacillates between life-and-death and oddly chipper—thanks to Colantoni’s sprightly executioner Bob—but its far-fetched situation is taken as seriously as a heart attack, which amps up the dark, deadpan humor.
That none of the characters are particularly likable, save for Bob, turns the tables. Bob may be the bringer of doom, and an enthusiastic one, but the villains here are the family and Hampshire and Baruchel, who previously appeared together in “The Trotsky” and “Good Neighbors,” revel in their 1% smarminess.
“Humane” makes good use of Trooper’s fatalistic hit “We’re Here for a Good Time (Not a Long Time)” and wisely never allows the focus to wander away from the family satire.
A quote from French existentialist philosopher Simon de Beauvoir sets up the tone of writer/director Molly McGlynn’s semi-autobiographical sex comedy “Fitting In.” “The body is not a thing,” reads the title card, “but a situation.” It’s the perfect sentiment to set the stage for this raunchy, reproductive health coming-of-age film.
16-year-old Lindy (Maddie Ziegler) lives with her therapist mom Rita (Emily Hampshire) in Sudbury, Ontario. Abandoned by her father years ago, she and Rita has survived and thrived, and now Lindy finds herself in a new high school with supportive BFF Vivian (Djouliet Amara) and new boyfriend Adam (D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai).
In anticipation of being intimate with Adam, she makes an appointment with a gynecologist to get a prescription for birth control pills. She’s never had a period, so the doctor refers her to a male specialist who, after a routine examination, matter-of-factly drops a bomb. She has Mayer-Rokitansky-Kuster-Hauser syndrome, which means she was born without a uterus, and will never be able to give birth or “have sex without manual or surgical assistance.”
The news devastates her, leaving her shamed and anxious, unwilling to accept help from Rita or her friends. Overwhelmed by doctors who prescribe dilatators—”It’s like vagina bootcamp!”— her carefully crafted life begins to fall apart. There is tension at home, she quits the track team and, when she recoils from physical contact, her relationship with Adam becomes frayed.
“Pretty much my worst nightmare is people finding out,” she says.
The only person she feels comfortable confiding in is Jax (Ki Griffin), a nonbinary and intersex schoolmate whose relationship with their body goes a long way to ease Lindy along on her journey to defining her sexual identity. “I don’t feel like an object of medicine anymore,” Jax says. “I feel like being intersex gives me a superpower. To own who you are, however you define yourself, is up to you. No one should ever make you feel ashamed of that.”
Frank and funny, “Fitting In” is being described as a “traumedy,” a portmanteau of trauma and comedy. Director McGlynn certainly captures the struggle of Lindy’s situation but does so with relatable humour. Much of that comes courtesy of Ziegler, whose on-screen naturalness makes her an audience surrogate, guiding us through the ups-and-downs of Lindy’s life. From vulnerable and edgy to self-possessed and impulsive, Ziegler captures the chaotic inner workings of a teen coping with a life changing situation.
Much of “Fitting In” works well. McGlynn shows a deft hand with the scenes involving gynecological health care visits and details the alienating manner in which the male doctors advise their female patients. The teen scenes feel realistic, and the “big teen movie speech,” where Lindy finally finds a way to express herself, has a nice vindicating feel, but at 106 minutes the material overall feels stretched a bit too thin.
“The End of Sex,” now playing in theatres, stars Emily Hampshire and Jonas Chernick as a couple looking to spice up their stale sex life while the kids are off at sleepaway camp.
Emma (Hampshire) and Josh (Chernick) shared their first kiss as teens, and have been partners in life ever since. Two daughters later, they’re in a rut, but it’s a happy enough rut. They’re still in love, creating a happy, loving life for themselves and the kids. But one thing is missing. Their sex life.
“Our sex has become mechanical,” says Emma.
“So,” says Josh, “let’s surprise each other.”
With the kids away for the first time ever, they have the house to themselves. Without the prying eyes of the little ones watching their every move, they have a chance to reevaluate their “mutual apathy and shared disinterest in sex.”
As the pressure to have a “normal” sex life mounts—there’s a ménage à trois tinged with obsession, extasy popping and an embarrassing visit to a sex club—their sexual odyssey doesn’t quite go as they hoped.
Despite the provocative title, “The End of Sex” isn’t really about sex. Ultimately, it’s about trust and togetherness. And an awkward threesome. An exploration of long-term marriages, it places its characters in mild relationship jeopardy as a way to dig into what it really means to spend one’s life with another person.
We see examples of that long-term commitment in the shorthand between Emma and Josh. It’s in the easy way they communicate (most of the time) and the understanding of things that are left unsaid between them. We see the hurt that comes from complacency—”The past few days I’ve been thinking a lot about sex,” says Emma. “You’ve been thinking about sex with people who aren’t me,” replies Josh.—and the often ridiculous lengths couples will go through to spice things up.
It’s all a bit predictable and a bit heightened, but is buoyed by funny cameos from Melanie Scrofano, as the Emma’s obsessed friend, and Colin Mochrie in an unlikely situation.
As a date night movie “The End of Sex” offers up an earnest portrait of the intimacy and connection necessary for a couple to weather the storms of an on-going relationship. It’s no “A Married Couple”—Alan King’s legendary 1969 documentary about a marriage in uproar—but it does deliver some insights into what makes relationships tick.
“Never Saw it Coming,” based on the novel by Linwood Barclay, is a very dark comedy set against a backdrop of violence, murder and fraud.
Emily Hampshire is Keisha Ceylon, a con artist in an unhappy relationship who puts food on the table as a pseudo psychic. For a fee—always upfront—she preys on vulnerable families, offering phony information in outstanding missing person’s cases. An edgy character through and through, she even occasionally sets up a disappearance and later split the finder’s fee with a the supposedly disappeared person. When a consultation with Wendell Garfield (Eric Roberts), a wealthy man whose wife had vanished, takes a bad turn, Keisha discovers an even darker path in life.
Tightly constructed, “Never Saw it Coming” is a story about the lengths a person will go to survive, to provide for their family. Keisha’s morally dubious—to say the least—actions have unexpected results and that’s what keeps the story buoyant. In any other film Keisha would be the villain, or at the least, a very shady character not to be trusted. Here Hampshire infuses her with considerable charm, even when she is doing terrible things. She is one of the rare baddies you might just end up rooting for.
“Never Saw it Coming” isn’t a complicated tale. It’s an aptly named story that sees its main character thrown into a bad situation, ripe with violence and deceit, that provides enough twists to keep you guessing until the end credits roll.
A thriller about friendship, serial killers and lies set against the backdrop of the 1995 referendum on the separation of Quebec, Good Neighbors has a Twin Peaks feel. That is, if that show had been directed by Dario Argento. The lives of three neighbors in a Notre-Dame-de-Grace neighbourhood walk-up become entwined, leading to murder—dead cats and tenants—suspicion and double and triple crosses. The undeniable sweetness director Jacob Tierney brought to his last film The Trotsky is out the window, replaced by a delicious sense of mischief and mayhem. Also showing their dark sides are stars Jay Baruchel, Scottt Speedman and Emily Hampshire.
Last year Robert Pattinson, Paul Giamatti and homegrown stars Emily Hampshire, Sarah Gadon and Kevin Durand gathered in Toronto to shoot Cosmopolis, a dark drama for director David Cronenberg.
On Monday the cast reunited with their director for a press conference I hosted at a downtown Toronto hotel in advance of the movie opening in theatres on Friday.
The tone of the conference was light, and the camaraderie of the cast obvious. Here are some of the highlights:
“I don’t know what I was more excited about,” said Hampshire, “having David bend over me and show Robert how to get a prostate exam, or Rob bending over me and getting one.”
“You don’t have to choose,” quipped Cronenberg.
Cronenberg also offered up some tongue-in-cheek advice for filmmakers. “I use a little Apple program called iDirector. A little green light goes on if it is OK, or a red light if you need to do another take. It’s pretty straightforward. You can all use it.”
Later the director commented on why he wanted his actors to speak the lines of the script exactly as written. “I don’t want the actors to be screenwriters,” he said, “they’re not designed for that.”
“There were no rewrites,” Pattinson chimes in.
“Normally that is the first thing you think about as an actor. And you are so used to just changing it the whole time, on every single movie, that with this, once you suddenly got to the idea that you are not changing anything, the script is fine, it’s you that are the problem, at least you knew one thing.”
Pattinson has a tour-de-force scene at the end of the film, a 22-page two-hander opposite Oscar nominee Paul Giamatti. The Sideways star took a quick break from shooting Rock of Ages in Miami to appear in Cosmopolis.
“Fortunately the other movie wasn’t terribly demanding on me,” Giamatti joked. “It was a musical that I was doing and I didn’t have to sing or dance. I just had to show up and crack jokes.”
“I was panicked about it,” he says of his quick turnaround in Toronto.
“This thing was intimidating. The length and the language. So I bothered everyone on the other movie to read this thing with me. Fortunately Malin Ackerman made a great Rob Pattinson.
“She was fantastic. I was very disappointed when actually I got here and it was Rob.”
Take one part Twin Peaks, mix with one part Roman Polanski and you have Good Neighbours. It’s a dark comedy set in an apartment building in Montreal’s Notre-Dame-de-Grâce that features a murder, which star Jay Baruchel calls “if not the goriest, then the most uncomfortable death scene in any movie this year.”
The events leading up to the grisly, but darkly amusing incident involve three young Montrealers, the wheelchair bound Spencer (Scott Speedman), cat lover Louise (Emily Hampshire) and Victor, an earnest school teacher played by Baruchel. As their lives become entwined it becomes difficult for them — and the audience — to know who to trust.
“It will be polarizing,” says Baruchel, who was last seen starring opposite Nicolas Cage in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, “but I think this movie really gets under your skin.”
It’s also the kind of movie that probably wouldn’t easily find funding in Hollywood.
“The main reason this would never get made stateside is that it leaves too much up to the audience,” says Baruchel. “The studios don’t like that. They like to kind of give you a road map and let you know when you are supposed to be sad or happy and who you are meant to root for. Director Jacob Tierney says his favourite thing when talking to people after screenings is what they project on it. Some people will say that my character is so lovely and sympathetic and others think he’s really creepy. Your life will inform how you see our movie, I think.
“If I was to sum up the whole movie, and specifically my character it would be ‘Good depends on context.’ I really think this movie is nothing if not a grey area. It’s still going to be rewarding but there is this really uncomfortable sense of humour that permeates the whole thing. Jacob wants people to be on edge from beginning to end.”
One person, however, that Baruchel doesn’t want the movie to rattle is his mother. “There is a reason my mother is not coming to the movie (premier) tonight. I said ‘You can watch the movie just not beside me.’”
Canuck pride sidebar
“I’m very grateful for the career I’ve had in the states. It has afforded my mother, my sister and I lives we otherwise never would have had,” says Baruchel. “That being said … by and large the things I have been most proud of have all been here.”
On the Saturday May 4 edition of the Richard Crouse Show we’ll meet novelist and writing coach Heidi Reimer. Her front-row seat to the theater world of her debut novel, “The Mother Act,” began two decades ago when she met and married an actor, and her immersion in motherhood began when she adopted a toddler and discovered she was pregnant on the same day.
