Fast reviews for busy people! Watch as I review three movies in less time than it takes to do a high five! Have a look as I race against the clock to tell you about the Christmas actioner “Red One,” the drama “Magpie” and the stop motion animated “Memoirs of a Snail.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
SYNOPSIS: The weird and wonderful stop-motion film “Memoir of a Snail” is the heartbreaking but somehow life-affirming story of Grace Pudel, voiced by “Succession’s” Sarah Snook. She’s a young girl in 1970s Melbourne, Australia who collects snails, to fill the void left by her inability to make connections with others. “If I saw something snail-y,” she says, “it had to be mine. I became a snail hoarder.”
CAST: Sarah Snook, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Eric Bana, Magda Szubanski, Dominique Pinon, Tony Armstrong, Paul Capsis, Nick Cave, and Jacki Weaver. Written, produced and directed by Adam Elliot.
REVIEW: An animated film for adults, “Memoir of a Sail” touches on alcoholism, loneliness, shame, grief and even “Prey the Gay Away.”
Grace, a clay figure with sad, watery eyes and a knit cap with snail antennae, is the kind of character who could have escaped from Edward Gorey’s “Gashlycrumb Tinies,” but as tragic as her life may be right from the start—her mother died giving birth to her and her twin brother Gilbert (voiced by Kody Smith-McPhee)—she perseveres, struggling as life lobs grenades at her. Sarah Snook’s lowkey, but empathetic voice work goes a long way to humanizing Grace and her journey.
Australian actor Jacki Weaver, as the elderly, former table dancer Grace befriends, also delivers knowck-out voice work. “For the first time in my life I feel older than I look, and I look like a testicle,” she says.
Grace’s lot in life is miserable, and yet despite all the grimy love, loss and heartache on display, writer-director Adam Elliot manages to mine humor, a sense of hope and courage from the mostly melancholy material.
The painstaking, frame-by-frame animation is gloomily beautiful with stunning details woven into the film’s fabric. That it is also 100% CGI free brings an organic, handmade feel that gives the images, and by extension the entire movie, a great deal of heart. “Life has bashed me around a bit,” Grace says near the end of the movie, “but the roses smell better, and I am finally becoming the person I always wanted.”
We’ve all seen boy and his dog movies about the deep relationship between humans and animals like “White Fang” and the simply named “Dog,” with Channing Tatum and a Belgian Malinois.
“Blueback,” a new Australian family picture starting Mia Wasikowska and now playing in theatres, mines similar territory, but this time it’s the story of a girl, her blue groper and the love of the ocean.
Wasikowska Is marine biologist Abby who grew up exploring the ocean around the coast of her Western Australian childhood home. “We were born in the water,” says her mother Dora (Elizabeth Alexander).
When Dora suffers a debilitating stroke that leaves her unable to speak, Abby returns home. Hoping a return to the sea will aid in Dora’s recovery, they travel to the coast.
From here, the story toggles between Abby’s childhood and the discovery of a rare blue groper—the Blueback of the title—that inspired the eco-activism that shaped her life, and the present day.
“Blueback” is a well-intentioned but heavy-handed film that mixes-and-matches mother and daughter dynamics with messages about the fragility of marine environments and the importance of conservationism. The movie’s main thrusts are intertwined and, unfortunately, over explained. Repetition and excessive exposition blunt the movie’s mission somewhat, despite fine performances from Wasikowska and Radha Mitchell, who plays Dora in the flashbacks.
The film’s storytelling deficiencies, however, are alleviated somewhat by beautiful underwater photography and the urgency of the conservation messaging.
A kid’s movie about Hollywood as a boulevard of broken dreams doesn’t exactly scream Disney, but “Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers,” a new live action, cartoon hybrid starring John Mulaney and Andy Samberg in the title roles, and now streaming on Dinsey+, is exactly that.
Except it’s WAY funnier than I just made it sound.
Set in Los Angeles, this is the tale of anthropomorphic chipmunks Chip (Mulaney) and Dale (Samberg). Once tight pals and big television stars, relative to their tiny size, they are now has-beens, relegated to the delete bin of popular culture. “We were living the dream,” says Dale. “Dancing the Roger Rabbit, with Roger Rabbit.”
Dale sticks it out in show biz and with some CGI surgery—i.e. plastic surgery in toon world—is now a photorealistic computer-animation version of himself chasing glory on the oldies convention circuit, while Chip gave up his Hollywood dream and makes ends meet by selling insurance.
Worst of all, they’re estranged and haven’t spoken in years. It takes a wild story from their old “Rescue Rangers” co-star Monterey Jack (Eric Bana) about missing animated characters, possibly kidnapped by Sweet Pete (Will Arnett), a middle-aged, paunchy version of Peter Pan, to bring them back together.
When Monterey disappears, Chip ‘n Dale use the sleuthing lessons they learned on “Rescue Rangers” and are drawn into the seedy underworld of Uncanny Valley where the baddies come in all styles—hand drawn, computer generated, claymation, puppets—Muppet fights are a daily occurrence and bootleggers threatens the toons’ lives and careers.
“Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers” is a multiverse of toontastic fun. In a wild mix n’ match, characters from movies like “The Little Mermaid” and “My Little Pony” to “South Park” and “The Jungle Book” clash and collide. There’s even Ugly Sonic, the original Sonic the Hedgehog design with human teeth.
The array of characters aside, there are loads of in-jokes for animaniacs to enjoy. A computer-generated Viking (Seth Rogen) is described as having, “those Polar Express eyes,” and director Akiva Schaffer crams the screen with various styles of animation that irreverently pays tribute to, and pokes fun at, these beloved characters who have fallen on hard times.
A riff on “The Happytime Murders,” which brought the Muppets into a crime-ridden, R-rated world, and the Toontown antics of “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?”, “Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers” is ripe with sight gags and deep laughs that will likely be appreciated more by parents than kids. Once again, my semi-annual reminder that simply because a movie is on Disney+, doesn’t mean it is for the entire family. There are good messages for kids about the importance of friendship but they are tempered by some adult humour and mild language.
‘King Arthur: Legend of the Sword’ is now in theatres. Richard sat down with Charlie Hunnam and Guy Ritchie to talk about the new film.
Watch the whole thing HERE!
Read about the interview here:
Guy Ritchie’s films have entertained me for years but I’m afraid he didn’t find me very interesting.
The incident happened during my press day with Ritchie and Charlie Hunnam, the director and star of King Arthur: Legend of the Sword. I first spoke with them for television. Hunnam answered my opening question about the film Excalibur, a precursor to their movie, enthusiastically. But I could feel Ritchie disengage. He sat back and went into autopilot, answering my questions by rote. The rest of the interview flew by in a flurry of quips and tossed off answers… READ THE WHOLE THING HERE!
By Richard Crouse – Metro In Focus
Guy Ritchie’s films have entertained me for years but I’m afraid he didn’t find me very interesting.
The incident happened during my press day with Ritchie and Charlie Hunnam, the director and star of King Arthur: Legend of the Sword. I first spoke with them for television. Hunnam answered my opening question about the film Excalibur, a precursor to their movie, enthusiastically. But I could feel Ritchie disengage. He sat back and went into autopilot, answering my questions by rote. The rest of the interview flew by in a flurry of quips and tossed off answers.
Half-an-hour later I sat with them again to do a longer interview for print.
“I’m glad we can make amends,” said Hunnam as I came in the room. “It seemed like you wanted to have a proper conversation and we were having a bit of a jolly up.”
The whole experience was an example of the yin and yang of movie promotion. The yin was Ritchie, an intense man who refers to the walking a red carpet as “a dog and pony show” before adding that’s not what he’s here for.
The yang is Hunnam, an engaging actor who said, “We don’t make these things to live on in obscurity, we make them with the hope that people will see them and this is one of the ways we can help manifest that.”
The duo have been all over the world talking to media people with perfectly coiffed hair and big smiles, answering the same questions on repeat. By the time I get them there’s nothing new to ask about their update of the Arthurian legend. But there is an unspoken contract between my interview subjects and me.
Whether it’s for television or for the paper you hold in your hands, the deal is the same. They say something interesting and I report it. They get publicity and I get a story that my audience will hopefully enjoy.
As Ritchie sat with his arms folded across his chest, I thought about our “contract” and the difference between the two men.
Despite his tabloid appeal — for a time the British press made a sport of reporting on him — Ritchie strikes me as a private person. He’s more interested in what he’ll be working on next than the film he spent years making and has now signed off on. Or perhaps it’s that, as a director, he’s used to being in control and in these situations he has to cede power to the interviewer.
“We both know why we’re doing it,” Ritchie says, “but the red carpet last night, I’ll tell you, I felt soulless after that. After ten minutes get me off there because it takes me hours to recover.”
Hunnam, the performer, is immediately warm and open. When Ritchie talks about losing patience on press days Hunnam jokes, “Guy Ritchie leaves the room and Johnny Nasty shows up.”
Luckily, Johnny Nasty never showed. By the end of our time together the ice broke, Ritchie’s arms unfolded and he smiled. I’m not sure what happened other than he seemed to warm up to me when we talked generally about film and not specifically about King Arthur.
We traded stories, discussed King Arthur, an actor’s connection to their director and not being imprisoned by fear. Maybe it was just me but for a moment it felt like we were talking over a beer in a bar and not fulfilling our respective contractual duties. It was, in his words, a little less of a dog and pony show.
“I feel more satisfied now,’ said Hunnam as I left and another press person walked into the room to repeat the process. “I really felt bad after the [television] interview [with you]. I thought, ‘Man, that’s a serious cat and we really just f–ed around for four minutes.’ I’m glad we got into some of the nitty-gritty.”
Terry Gilliam once told me a story about the making of his medieval epic “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.” He wanted Arthur, King of the Britons and his men to ride to the crest of a hill on horseback but couldn’t afford enough horses for everyone. Instead he put them on broomsticks with the clomp-clomp of the horses provided by trusty servant Patsy.
“You’ve got two empty halves of coconut and you’re bangin’ ’em together,” says a guard.
It is now the scene everyone remembers from the film but, Gilliam says, if he had the money he wouldn’t have had to use his imagination. Arthur would have been on horseback, no laughs, no memories.
I thought of this while watching “King Arthur: Legend of the Sword,” a big budget retelling of the Camelot myth written and directed by Guy Ritchie. It’s a huge, no-expense-spared film with without an ounce of these vim and vigour that once made Guy Ritchie’s movies like “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels” and “Snatch” so much fun.
The story begins with a coup. King Uther Pendragon (Eric Bana), overthrown by his power mad brother Vortigern (Jude Law), is killed, his son Arthur a witness to the murder. The youngster escapes, shuttled off to the safety outside the castle. Raised in a brothel and unaware of his place as the “born King” Arthur grows up on Londinium’s scrappy streets as a pimp and practitioner of the ancient art of UFC battling.
Obsessed in finding and eliminating Arthur, Vortigern subjects every young male in the country to the Excalibur test. Only the “born King” can pull Pendragon’s magical sword Excalibur from the stone it is embedded in, and Vortigern wants to find him.
When it is Arthur’s turn to pull the sword no one is more surprised than he when Excalibur slides out of the stone like greased lightening. He is arrested and will soon be executed, thus cementing Vortigern’s power.
Escaping execution Arthur—with the help of his loyal followers and the anti- Vortigern Resistance—learns to harness the power of the sword and perhaps get revenge on his uncle.
I can only imagine the guy who made “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels” would look at the excesses of “King Arthur: Legend of the Sword” with wonderment. All the Ritchie trademarks are present and accounted for. There’s the cool English accents, stylish (for the time) clothing, interesting use of music, tricky slow-motion editing plus loads of violence but there’s also a giant kingdom crushing elephant. And that’s just the first five minutes. It is jam-packed but it’s not that interesting. It’s like Gilliam but with money. Instead of innovation we’re treated to a series of expensive set pieces that fill the screen but not our imaginations.
Ritchie takes some liberties with the story, but by-and-large that’s OK. People have been telling and re-telling the Arthurian legend for years. It could use a freshening up but like the “Sherlock Holmes” movies “King Arthur” is more a showcase for Ritchie’s stylistic flourishes then his storytelling ability.
“King Arthur: Legend of the Sword” isn’t your father’s “Camelot.” It’s a Guy Ritchie’s “Camelot,” a male fantasy—if it weren’t for prostitutes and witchy women there’d be no women here at all—with plenty of bluster but not enough Gilliam.
By Richard Crouse – Metro Canada
Those only familiar with Holliday Grainger from her high profile appearance as the 1930s gangster Bonnie Parker in the much-hyped A&E miniseries Bonnie & Clyde could be forgiven for thinking she was born and raised on American soil. A perfect Texas drawl disguised her natural English accent.
“I’m from Manchester,” she said in our recent sit down, “northwest England.”
“Home of the Stone Roses,” I replied, mentioning the Mancunian hit makers of Love Spreads.
“I’m a bit too young for that but it’s a small town so the Stone Roses are never too far away,” she replied with a wicked laugh.
This weekend the twenty-seven year old brings a new accent to the maritime drama The Finest Hours. She plays Massachusetts native Miriam, a bride-to-be anxiously awaiting the return of her Coast Guard fiancée (Chris Pine) from a life and death mission during a brutal New England nor’easter.
“I think I’m quite good at adopting accents,” she says. “Once I started the Bonnie and Clyde Texas accent it was very easy. Within a day I was speaking in the accent all the time and I found it quite comfortable.”
She was so secure with the twang she’d often keep the accent going even when not on camera. The Finest Hours presented more of a challenge.
“I found this much harder. I actually stayed in my own accent on set for the first week or two because I didn’t feel comfortable enough in the accent to stay in it.”
To master the 1950s coastal Massachusetts brogue she worked with a dialect coach and tried, unsuccessfully, to get some real life input.
“I went to Chatham (Massachusetts] and spent an afternoon trying to record people but Chatham is now so affluent and touristy. I was going into bars and restaurants and talking to people. ‘Where are you from? Oh, you’re from New York. You’ve just moved here. Which pubs have young girls working in them who are from around here?’ I’d go and record some of them and they’d sound like they were from bloody Manhattan. Like bloody Valley Girls or something. It was not like the 1950s accent I needed to hear.”
Her character’s real life daughter Patty ended up helping out, introducing Grainger to a contemporary of Miriam’s who “had the right way of talking. The resonance.”
The actress nailed the New England burr and then refined it during production.
“In the middle of shooting the producers would say, ‘It’s too strong, bring it back.’ In my mind [I was thinking] has she been at work where she speaks quite well or is she angry? It’s fluid. People change their accents all the time.”
Ironically after all that work it’s likely Miriam didn’t have the usual regional accent.
“In actual fact Miriam’s first language wasn’t even English,” says Grainger, who will next be seen starring opposite Alicia Vikander and Judi Dench in Tulip Fever. “She was brought up speaking Finnish so she didn’t actually have the traditional accent but for the purposes of our movie we’re not going to play around with that. It’s too complicated.”
As for her own Mancunian lilt, don’t expect to hear it every time she opens her mouth.
“I change my accent all the time depending on whom I’m talking too,” she says. “If anyone had to characterise me they’d be bloody lost.”
THE FINEST HOURS SIDEBAR WITH JODY THOMAS, CANADIAN COAST GUARD COMMISSIONER
“We work very closely with the American Coast Guard, there is no mile of our coast line that we don’t share along the lower parallel. We do the same work they do. I’m watching them but I could be watching my own people. I feel enormous pride in what a Coast Guard does. To have a movie like this produced that talks about the kind of work we do, even if it’s not the Canadian Coast Guard is quite extraordinary.”
A new movie based on the book “The Finest Hours: The True Story Behind the US Coast Guard’s Most Daring Rescue,” is the kind of thriller that tries to get the audience excited by constantly reminding them that what we’re seeing is impossible.
“There’s no way they can get over that sandbar!” “This [insert hopeless situation] is a hopeless situation!” “We’ll never make it back to shore!”
Of course in this tale of greatest generation gumption most everything is going to work out well and that lack of any real stakes sucks much of the tension out of “The Finest Hours.”
Set in 1952 against the backdrop of a brutal New England nor’easter, the action begins when an oil tanker is ripped in half, stranding thirty soldiers in a floating coffin. As it fills with water their chances of survival reduce by the minute. On board engineer Ray Sybert (Casey Affleck) makes desperate attempts to stay afloat, hoping against hope that someone will brave the vicious 70-foot waves to rescue them.
Luckily for them a four-man Coast Guard crew led by Boatswains Mate First Class Bernie Webber (Chris Pine along with Ben Foster, John Magaro and Kyle Gallner) in a small motor lifeboat CG 36500 are willing to brave the waves and bring the men back home.
The bulk of the film takes place on the water—imagine the H2O budget!—but while the men are battling the elements their families—most notably Bernie’s fiancée Miriam (Holliday Granger)—anxiously await the return of their loved ones from the grip of the storm.
“The Finest Hours” is a big, handsome movie with stern jawed heroes and plucky dames. It’s a story about the men who go to sea in ships, weather bombs and Hollywood heroism. It’s also a tad dull. Director Craig Gillespie doesn’t skimp on the action—there are waves a plenty—and the men are thrown into one precarious situation after the next but beyond the most cursory character work it never feels like a great deal of thought was put into the people populating the screen. Pine turns Bernie into a shy, insecure man who finds his heroic side but the charisma the actor usually brings to his roles is missing. The other actors hand in competent performances but the characters are so underwritten it feels as if they stumbled out of Central Casting before Gillespie shanghaied them for this film.
With few compelling characters the movie drifts along, hoping to reel you in with big, splashy (literally) visuals, but it’s all for naught. Filling the screen with action might entertain the eye but if you don’t care about the characters, how can you care about the action?
“The Finest Hours” has its heart in the right place but is sunk by earnestness and mannered presentation.
