Unsurprisingly “Euphoria,” the new end of life drama starring Alicia Vikander and Eva Green and now on VOD, is a rather lifeless affair.
Not to be confused with the Zendaya television series of the same name, which positively sparkles with energy, this dreary story sees estranged sisters Emilie (Green) Ines (Vikander) looking grim for the entirety of the movie’s ninety-five-minute run time. In fact, using the title “Euphoria” on this movie may be the most ironic thing to happen in 2020, and that is saying something.
The “action” centers around the euthanasia clinic run by Marina (Charlotte Rampling), where Emilie, in the late stages of cancer, has chosen to end her life. Lush and lavish, the facility is essentially a five-star hotel, where rich people curate their deaths much the way Influencers curate their lives on Instagram. Bands are hired to play at the going away party for one resident (Charles Dance) who wants to dance his life away while others choose less ostentatious but equally expensive exits.
It soon becomes clear the sisters have little in common except shared DNA. The two attempt a reconciliation but a decade old slight—Ines took off to travel the world after their parent’s divorce, leaving Emilie to pick up the pieces of their mother’s shattered life—has left a deep wound. The argue and throw food at one another before embracing the inevitable, the tolling of the bell (literally a bell rings at a guest’s time of death) for Emile.
It’s a pity “Euphoria” isn’t a better movie. Director Lisa Langseth fills the screen with interesting images and, in Ines and Emile, has two characters ripe with possibility. She’s chosen a serious subject to explore, and has good actors but they are forced to chatter their way through difficult situations while never showing us anything new or interesting.
Assisted death is an issue ripe for drama and yet the movie sidesteps every opportunity for depth with the kind of fake solemnity favored by undertakers.
On this week’s edition of “Pop Life” comedy legend Danny DeVito reflects on the different characters he’s played, working with Tim Burton on “Dumbo” and his audition for the TV show “Taxi.” Then, the “Pop Life” panel, comedian Micheal McCreary, tech expert Takara Small and author and broadcaster Dan Riskin, discuss the term ‘outsider’ and the benefits of being unique.
Film critic and pop culture historian Richard Crouse shares a toast with celebrity guests and entertainment pundits every week on CTV News Channel’s talk show POP LIFE.
Featuring in-depth discussion and debate on pop culture and modern life, POP LIFE features sit-down interviews with celebrities from across the entertainment world, including rock legends Sting and Meat Loaf, musicians Josh Groban and Sarah Brightman, comedian Ken Jeong, writer Fran Lebowitz, superstar jazz musician Diana Krall, stand-up comedian and CNN host W. Kamau Bell, actors Danny DeVito and Jay Baruchel, celebrity chefs Bobby Flay and Nigella Lawson, and many more.
This week on “Pop Life” comedy legend Danny DeVito reflects on the different characters he’s played, working with Tim Burton on “Dumbo” and his audition for the TV show “Taxi.”
“I read this thing was that you should go into a room and take it over, psychologically. So, in other words you want change the room in your own way. I can’t remember if it was Stanislavsky or acting coach or teacher, or who it was.
I used to go in and do things just to make an impression. I don’t even know if I had to but I did. With ‘Taxi’ there’s my famous story where I go in and they’re all in there and I’m going to go sit in the hot seat and read it. And it’s the first audition for that I had for the show and I said to them, “There’s one thing I want to know before I start. Who wrote this shit?” and I threw it on the table. It was like Louie walked into their lives. That was bold, but it worked. ‘Taxi’ was like a gift.”
Film critic and pop culture historian Richard Crouse shares a toast with celebrity guests and entertainment pundits every week on CTV News Channel’s talk show POP LIFE.
Featuring in-depth discussion and debate on pop culture and modern life, POP LIFE features sit-down interviews with celebrities from across the entertainment world, including rock legends Sting and Meat Loaf, musicians Josh Groban and Sarah Brightman, comedian Ken Jeong, writer Fran Lebowitz, superstar jazz musician Diana Krall, stand-up comedian and CNN host W. Kamau Bell, actors Danny DeVito and Jay Baruchel, celebrity chefs Bobby Flay and Nigella Lawson, and many more.
Much of Tim Burton’s live action remake of the Disney classic “Dumbo” concerns itself with putting on a great show. Set in a travelling circus whose ringmaster Max Medici (Danny DeVito) is always looking for new ways to entertain people, the movie made me ask, “Is it possible to put on too much show?”
The Medici Brothers Circus has seen better days. Crowds are sparse and to keep the travelling circus afloat Max has sold off their show horses. When former circus star Holt Farrier (Colin Farrell) returns, injured from the war, his dream of starring in the big top are dashed. The only job available is tending to newly acquired elephant Jumbo. Medici purchased the pregnant pachyderm with the hope of having a baby elephant on display will sell tickets.
When the baby is born Max is convinced that Little Jumbo’s gigantic, floppy ears will turn him into a laughing stock and actually turn audiences off. It’s not until Farrier’s kids, Milly (Nico Parker) and Joe (Finley Hobbins), discover Little Jumbo—now dubbed Dumbo after a catastrophic big top debut—can flap his ears like wings and fly that Max sees a way to earn back his investment. Enter amusement park entrepreneur V. A. Vandevere (Michael Keaton) with an offer that could save the circus or endanger everyone, most of all Dumbo.
“Dumbo” treads familiar ground for director Tim Burton. His best films tell stories of outsiders like Pee-Wee Herman, Edward Scissorhands or Ed Wood, lovable characters who weren’t quite made for this world. He’s drawn to outcasts but finds a narrative route for them to find a connection and a sense of community through their abilities and art. “Dumbo” breathes the same air, focussing on old-fashioned caricatures of circus folk like strongmen and mermaids, and, of course, the underdog elephant whose unique ability makes him a hero.
As such “Dumbo” feels like a Tim Burton movie rather than a remake of the 1941 film. His trademark whimsy is fully on display in the form of highly stylized design, fanciful casting and costuming and, “What’s a Tim Burton movie without Danny DeVito?” It looks and feel like a Burton film for better and for worse.
The better is his unique and heartfelt love of the unloved. He coddles his characters, imbuing Dumbo with soulful eyes to compliment his outsize ears. It’s almost impossible to understand how anyone couldn’t see the beauty in this unusual creature. Dumbo is a waif, an innocent whose inner beauty and strength is well beyond his years. Burton gets the character and keeps Dumbo mostly front and centre as the action swirls around him.
Here’s the issue. There’s too much action. The original film was a brief 63 minutes, a tight telling of the tale. Burton almost doubles that length, adding in anti-corporate subplots, action sequences and new characters. Near the film’s end, however, the extra elements feel superfluous, unnecessary. Sometimes more is less. The heart of the story is found in Dumbo’s character not the layers of CGI action that surround him.
Having said that, “Dumbo” is a treat for the peepers. Every detail from the costumes to Medici’s grinning faced-train are pure Burton eye-candy. Fun performances from DeVito and Keaton keep things lively and the pro-animal message is heartfelt adding up to a movie that doesn’t seem to trust its star, a flying elephant, to be enough of a draw.
From director Tim Burton comes “Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children,” another story of outsiders trying to find place in the world where they belong. Or in this case a place in time.
Teen years are for making friends and having fun but for Jake Portman (Asa Butterfield) they are a hardship. He’s the weird kid in class, friendless except for his grandfather Abraham (Terence Stamp) who keeps the boy entertained with wild stories about a life spent travelling the world and the Home for Peculiar Children where he was raised. He grew up side-by-side with a boy made of bees, a teacher who could turn into a bird, and a balloon girl, lighter than air who had to wear lead shoes so as not to float away.
When his Abe is attacked Jake arrives in time to catch his last, strange words. “I know you think I’m crazy but the bird will explain everything,” he says before urging the youngster to venture off to find out who, what, he really is. “I should have told you years ago. I thought I could protect you.”
Thus begins Jake’s adventure, a journey that leads him to a small island where Miss Alma LeFay Perigrine (Eva Green) a.k.a. The Bird Lady, attends to her brood of peculiar child. She has created a time loop, reset every day, to keep her peculiar safe and protect them from growing old. Every day is September 3, 1943 all day. An attack by Hollows (Samuel L. Jackson and others), evil creatures who steal the eyeballs of peculiar children, upsets Perigrine’s orderly time loop and gives Jake a chance to learn why he was sent to the island.
The first hour of “Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children” is pure Tim Burton. He creates a fanciful world—imagine quirkier “X-Men”—with all his trademarks—mid-century kitsch, topiary sculptures, weird creatures and characters straight out of the outer regions of the imagination—and a mythology all its own. World building is a fantasy director’s strongest asset, and Burton paints a pretty picture, it’s just too bad he gets bogged down in the story in the second half.
The mushy second half erases the charm of the first sixty minutes as fanciful dreaminess and unique stop motion effects give way to CGI overload. The film’s long climax seems to go on forever—as though the audience is in one of Miss. Perigrine’s endless time loops—in an orgy of digital trickery that betrays the feel of the piece. An army of skeletons is a cool homage to Ray Harryhausen and setting its macabre sequence to weird amusement park dance music is a nice Burton touch, but it pales by comparison to the smaller, more intimate touches that give the movie much of its personality.
“Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children” has some beautiful images—like Emma Bloom (Ella Purnell), tethered to Jake like a balloon as he walks and she floats through an amusement park—but like many of Burton’s recent films the story feels like an afterthought.
One writer called the director of Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, Beetle Juice, Batman, Edward Scissorhands and this weekend’s Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children, “the most widely embraced loner in contemporary cinema.”
“I always try to at least spend time, as much as I can everyday, staring out into space; staring out a window,” the director says. “I find that sometimes you get the most ideas and the most feelings when you’re not involved in things you have to do everyday; especially these days when technology is such that you can be reached any time. I try and avoid that.”
Unsurprisingly as a filmmaker the characters he champions tend to echo his sensibility. From warped Mad Hatter in his Alice in Wonderland to the grieving child in Frankenweenie who reanimated a dog’s corpse, Burton’s heroes are often misfits and outsiders.
From his debut, Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, Burton has showcased people on the fringes of society. “You don’t wanna get mixed up with a guy like me,” says man-child Pee-Wee (Paul Reubens), “I’m a loner. A rebel.” Loosely based Vittorio De Sica’s classic film The Bicycle Thief, Burton’s story sees Pee-Wee on a mission to retrieve his stolen fire engine-red customized 1940s Schwinn. David Letterman was a fan, describing the anti-social character as having, “the external structure of a bratty little precocious kid, but you know it’s being controlled by the incubus, the manifestation of evil itself.”
In his next film Burton breathed life into Betelgeuse‘s rancid lungs. In the haunted-house comedy Beetlejuice Michael Keaton plays a “bio-exorcist” with crazy hair, giant teeth and an attitude, hired by two ghosts to scare away the insufferable new owners of their old house.
“I think Beetlejuice shows the complete positive side of being misperceived and being categorized as something different,” Burton says. “He can do whatever he wants! He’s horrible and everybody knows it, so he’s a complete fantasy of all of that.”
Burton’s two greatest misfits, his most intrepid folks on the outside looking in, are the off-kilter Eds—Wood and Scissorhands.
Edward Scissorhands is the strange-but-sweet story of a man with scissors for hands. The first collaboration of Tim Burton and Johnny Depp, the movie is a funny, romantic and moving fantasy was inspired by a sketch Burton created as a teenager. “One look at that drawing was all I needed to understand what Edward was about,” says Depp. “I felt very tortured as a teenager,” says Burton. “That’s where Edward Scissorhands came from. I was probably clinically depressed and didn’t know it.”
Ed Wood, played by Depp in the film of the same name, is the story of one of Hollywood’s great outcasts. Wood wrote, produced and directed low-budget anti-classics like Plan 9 from Outer Space and Glen or Glenda. Burton says he was a fan of Wood’s films and after reading some of the director’s letters was touched by how Wood, “wrote about his films as if he was making Citizen Kane, you know, whereas other people perceived them as, like, the worst movies ever.”
Burton links his best-known creations, labelling them as “semi-antisocial, [having] difficulty communicating or relating, slightly out of touch,” and adds, “I feel very close to those characters. I really do. I feel like they are mutated children.”
From the perspective of an adult here’s how I would describe the new Robert Rodrigues film: “An exercise in extreme neo-noir aesthetics, the movie resembles a graphic novel sprung to life.”
Here’s how my fourteen-year-old self would express his thoughts on the same film: “WOW. Eva Green is naked. Did I mention she has no clothes?”
Neither description gets it wrong. “Sin City: A Dame to Kill For” is the most heavily stylized movie of the year, maybe the century so far. Rodrigues and co-director Frank Miller (the comic book legend who created the original “Sin City” series in print) have created a dark vision of a shadowland known as Sin City, a corrupt place where crime is a way of life for both citizens and all femmes are fatale.
Four stories interweave. The thread that ties them together is Marv (played by noted Putin booster Mickey Rourke), a massive hulk of a man who aids Dwight McCarthy (Josh Brolin) in his efforts to free his former flame Ava Lord (Eva Green) from her abusive husband. He also helps stripper Nancy Callahan (Jessica Alba) settle an old score with a corrupt senator (Powers Booth), the same man who savagely beat gambler Johnny (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) to teach him a lesson about power.
“Sin City” A Dame to Kill For” feels like it was made by someone with an eye for the aesthetics of noir but the interests of a 14-year-old boy. It’s an exercise in style over substance that will make your corneas tingle, tickle your prurient side and provide an experience that may be memorable (especially if you are a fourteen year boy) but not particularly rewarding.
These unendingly grim crime stories aren’t so much hard-boiled as they are over-baked. Rodrigues and Miller’s outlook is as bleak as the stark black-and-white palette they use to illustrate the movie. “Death is just like life in Sin City,” they say, hammering the point home that the only relief from the ennui many of these characters live with is a bullet to the head. The characters seem to welcome it. “He’ll eat you alive,” a bartender tells Johnny about the senator. “I’m a tough chew,” he replies, playing chicken with his life.
The directors try to distract from the cynical goings on with hyper-German Expressionist cinematography and the abovementioned Ms. Green’s wardrobe, or lack thereof, but no matter how much style or skin are exposed, “Sin City: A Dame to Kill For” remains a slickly styled exercise in pointlessness.
Robert Rodriguez, co-director of Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, has assembled an impressive cast of marquee names for the long awaited followup to 2005’s Sin City.
Actors like Jessica Alba, Rosario Dawson and Bruce Willis are returning from the first instalment, while newcomers to the series include Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Eva Green and Josh Brolin.
Rodriguez welcomes back another name, Lady Gaga, who he first cast in Machete Kills.
“When I asked if she was interested in acting she said, ‘I studied acting and I always wanted to be in one of your movies because of the theatricality and the showmanship.”
When she finished shooting her role of a deadly assassin in Machete Kills, Rodriguez tweeted, “Holy Smokes. Blown away!” and promptly cast the singer in A Dame to Kill For.
For years, directors have looked to musicians to bring their natural charisma to the screen. Perhaps no one more than Nicolas Roeg has explored the potential for rock stars to become movie stars. “They have,” he said, “a greater ability to light up the screen than actors.”
In 1970 Roeg and co-director Donald Cammell made the psychedelic crime drama Performance, starring Mick Jagger in his first on screen role. The Rolling Stone played the mysterious Mr. Turner, a jaded former rock star who gives shelter to a violent East London gangster (James Fox). In 2009 Film Comment declared Mick Jagger’s Turner the best performance by a musician in a movie.
Next came The Man Who Fell to Earth, an existential sci-fi film about an extraterrestrial named Thomas Jerome Newton, starring a perfectly cast David Bowie in his feature film debut. Roeg says he “really came to believe that Bowie was a man who had come to Earth from another galaxy. His actual social behavior was extraordinary. He seemed to be alone — which is what Newton is in the film — isolated and alone.”
Finally, Bad Timing was advertised as a “terrifying love story” and called “a sick film made by sick people for sick people” by its own distributor. Art Garfunkel, of 60s folk duo Simon and Garfunkel, stars as a psychology professor living in Vienna whose sadistic relationship with a pill addicted woman (Theresa Russell) ends with a battle for her life. The sexually explicit film was difficult for the actors, and at one point Garfunkel even wanted out. Over martinis Roeg told his nervous actor, “I must ask you to trust that I know where I’m going. It’s a maze, but there is an end to it.’”
Garfunkel stayed on, delivering a performance that the New York Times called “very credible.”
“300: Rise of an Empire,” the sequel to the 2006 Gerard Butler ab-fest, should rightly be called “300: Buckets of Blood” or perhaps “300 Sweaty, Screaming Men & A Lady.”
A parallel story to the original film, the movie shows what else was happening while Spartan King Leonidas (Gerard Butler, who only appears briefly in flashbacks) and three hundred brave men battled against Persian “god-King” Xerxes’s (Rodrigo Santoro) 300,000 soldiers.
This one is a showdown between the freedom-loving Themistocles of Athens (Sullivan Stapleton, from HBO Canada’s “Strike Back”) and Artemisia of Caria (Eva Green), and that old foe of democracy, King Xerxes. Once again the Greeks are wildly outnumbered but put up a valiant fight against Artemisia, who not only wants to beat the Greek army but humiliate them as well.
This is a manly movie, filled with super macho advice like “don’t get killed on the first day,” and “there is no more noble action than lying in the blood of your brothers.” It’s a violent, testosterone soaked story, drenched in gore and more battle scenes per minute than any war movie in recent memory. There’s so much combat that a fight choreographer appears to have called in to devise the one and only sex scene.
The amount of man flesh on display might shame most of us into renewing our gym memberships, but swinging the biggest sword is Artemisia. She’s ruthless, driven by thoughts of revenge and is an all round awesome movie villain. How evil is she? Early on she plants a kiss on the lips of a man she’s just decapitated… and gets nastier from there.
The movie mimics “300‘s” highly stylized visuals. Much of the film resembles gothic oil paintings, but the addition of 3D introduces a “splatter zone” effect in the theatre as gallons of gore are sprayed across the screen. Also, like the first film, slow motion is used to emphasize the action. It’s so prevalent that if you played all the slo mo scenes in real time the 140-minute movie would only be about an hour long.
“300” was a heavy metal blast of sword and steel, an epic story with larger-than-life visuals but almost ten years on “300: Rise of an Empire” feels a bit old hat. A great villain and some fun action scenes almost make up for the plodding plot but the brutishness of the storytelling makes the original feel positively light hearted by comparison.
