LOGLINE: In this absurdist comedy, three adult children (Ewan McGregor, Rhys Ifans and Lara Flynn Boyle) must figure out why their mother, played by Ellen Burstyn, refuses to leave a green couch on the second floor of a rundown furniture store. With the help of the store managers (Taylor Russell and F. Murray Abraham) the siblings go on a voyage of self-discovery as they work on getting their couch potato mother out of the store.
CAST: Ewan McGregor, Rhys Ifans, Taylor Russell, Lara Flynn Boyle, Lake Bell, F. Murray Abraham, Ellen Burstyn. Written and directed by Niclas Larsson.
REVIEW: A mystery with no real solution, “Mother, Couch” is a family drama that examines themes of parenting and toxic relationships through a dreamlike lens. It offers loads of existential atmosphere, but no easy answers. Writer/director Niclas Larsson, adapting the novel “Mamma i sofa” by Jerker Virdborg, presents a strange mix of surrealism and sentimentality that never quite gels.
It’s a shame because the actor’s ensemble, led by McGregor, hand in solid, earthbound performances that keep this flight of fancy from spinning completely out of control. Standouts include McGregor, who plays the genuine befuddlement of the situation, allowing his long-suppressed emotions to overflow as things grow weirder and weirder, and Boyle, whose bitterness hangs over the situation like a shroud.
Drenched in metaphor and allegory, the dark comedy “Mother, Couch” breathes the same air as Charlie Kaufman and Ari Aster, but Larsson allows the metaphysical aspects of the movie to overwhelm the story’s true emotion.
“Pinocchio,” the wooden boy with a lie detector for a nose and dreams of becoming a real boy bouncing around his sawdusty brain, is one of the most reimagined characters in children’s literature. Earlier this year Tom Hanks starred in a traditional remake of the 138 year-old-story that echoed the classic Disney film.
The Oscar winning director of “The Shape of Water” takes the story in his own direction in “Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio,” a stop motion retelling, now playing in theatres and coming soon to Netflix. In what may be the only version of the story featuring a cameo by Mussolini, the movie travels a different, darker path than previous adaptations.
Del Toro keeps the original story’s Italian location, but places the action between World Wars I and II. Woodworker Geppetto (voiced by David Bradley) is a skilled artisan, lovingly teaching his young son Carlo the ropes of the craft while working on large crucifix at a local church. When Carlo is killed in a bombing raid, Geppetto spirals into despair and alcoholism.
While soothing his loss with booze, the heartbroken Geppetto cuts down an Italian pine tree near his late son’s grave and builds a roughhewn puppet as a replacement for his boy. Gangly, with a long nose, the puppet sits slumped in Geppetto’s workshop until a magical Wood Sprite (voice of Tilda Swinton) breathes life into him and appoints Sebastian J. Cricket (voice of Ewan McGregor), a mustachioed insect who lives inside the puppet, as his guide and conscience.
The rowdy newborn, dubbed Pinocchio (voice of Gregory Mann), doesn’t make a great first impression on Geppetto or the local townsfolk. But as Geppetto warms to him, the locals, including fascist government official Podestà (Ron Perlman), don’t quite know what to make of him.
“Everybody likes him,” says Pinocchio, pointing to the still under construction crucifix. “He’s made of wood too. Why do they like him and not me?”
As Pinocchio tries to figure out his place in the world, he soon discovers that not everyone has his best interests in mind.
This is not your parent’s “Pinocchio.” Del Toro sticks to the bones of author Carlo Collodi’s original plot, but expands the story with a deep dive into what it means to be human, mortality, the weight of expectation and the horrors of fascism. It doesn’t sound particularly family friendly, but while there are some intense, nightmarish images, this is a fairy tale in the Brothers Grimm tradition. It speaks to the issues surrounding growing up, whether you’re made of wood or flesh and blood, and should be fine for kids ten and up.
Visually spectacular, the stop motion animation gives the movie a more organic feel than it may have had if rendered in computer generated images. Rich in detail and imagination, the film’s style mixes and matches dreams with nightmares to create a palette that paints the fanciful and the earthbound in equal measure.
“Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio” does something remarkable. Just as the Wood Sprite breathed new life into Geppetto’s puppet, Del Toro breathes new life into a very familiar and often-told story. He is buoyed by fine voice work and visuals, but it is the auteur’s allegorical stamp that really brings this wooden boy to life.
The main characters of “Raymond & Ray,” played by Ewan McGregor and Ethan Hawke, pack a great deal of emotional baggage on the trip to their father’s funeral.
The leads play estranged half-brothers reunited after five years, on the occasion of their abusive father’s death.
Ray is a clean-and-sober widower and former trumpet player with a temper. His life has been colored by his father’s abuse, and that fractious relationship has been a burden to him for decades.
Raymond, equally scarred by his upbringing, is outwardly more successful, but the cracks are beginning to show. He’s not allowed to drive because of a recent DUI and his marriage is in tatters.
They are not close, but are bonded by the bad treatment suffered at the hand of their father.
The funeral is the next day, hours away in Richmond, Virginia, and Ray is reluctant. “Are you really going to go, after the things he did to you?” he asks Raymond. “We don’t have to go,” says Ray. “He’s dead. He’ll never know.”
On the subsequent trip they rehash the sins of their father, and later confront the many surprises that await in Richmond. There are more half-siblings, an ex-lover Lucía (Maribel Verdú) and, most surprising of all, everyone speaks warmly of the man they feared.
This tragicomic story of suppressed rage, of confronting the past, healing and facing the future, is wonderfully brought to life by the leads.
The easy-going pacing allows McGregor and Hawke to bite down hard and make a meal of the characters of Raymond and Ray. McGregor hides a simmering rage under Raymond’s button-down façade, while Hawke gives Ray a world-weary roughness to the free-spirited former musician and addict. They bring a winning combo of frustration and humor to the movie, while Verdú provides real warmth in this existential look at life.
“Raymond & Ray,” now streaming on Apple TV+, is a low-key dramedy with a high-level ensemble cast that elevates the story of family trauma.
As “Joker” sweeps through Awards Season, scooping up a motherlode of Best Actor gold for Joaquin Phoenix, along comes the standalone story of the Clown Prince of Crime’s former female sidekick. “Birds of Prey (And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn)” sees Margot Robbie revisit her unpredictable “Suicide Squad” character in an R-rated film that is part action, part comedy and all attitude. More in tune with the antics of “Deadpool” than the serious tone of “Joker,” “Birds of Prey” is a fourth-wall-breaking story that doesn’t feel like other superhero movies.
Picking up after the events of “Suicide Squad,” Gotham City has become a cesspool of crime. Batman has flown the coop leaving the city unprotected from the likes of crime lord Black Mask (Ewan McGregor). The baseball wielding Quinn has rid herself of her former “partner in madness,” the Joker—” I am so over clowns!” she says—and now travels with a new squad of vigilantes. “As it turns out, I wasn’t the only dame in Gotham looking for emancipation,” she says. Black Canary (Jurnee Smollett-Bell), Huntress (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and Renee Montoya (Rosie Perez) come together to help Harley protect Cassandra Cain (Ella Jay Basco), a young pickpocket who had the bad luck of coming into possession of a diamond ebcoded with a valuable secret, a secret Black Mask desperately wants. “I’m back on my feet,” Harley says, “ready to embrace the fierce goddess within.”
“Birds of Prey” is a story of survivors, of feminism, of tough women out on the town and it is the most fun DC has offered up at the movies. The stripped-down story sheds “Suicide Squad’s” nihilistic nonsense in favor of empowerment and general kick assery.
It gets off to a slow start, establishing the characters and situation, but erupts in the last third with bombastic action choreographed by director Cathy Yan and “John Wick” fight maestro Chad Stahelski. Forget the CGI finales of the Marvel Universe, this is blood-soaked up-close-and-personal stunt action with a wicked sense of humour.
Robbie has a gleeful, cheeky commitment to the character that sets the tone for the movie’s 80s new wave kaleidoscopic aesthetic. With a habit of settling disputes with a baseball bat to the groin she isn’t a role model but is unpredictable, scrappy fun to watch on screen. Ditto McGregor who actually seems to be having fun wearing Black Mask’s hyped-up wardrobe after a series of movies that have left his charisma relegated to the backroom.
“Birds of Prey” is loads of fun but manages to weave some serious ideas about not needing men to survive into the chaos. Most of all, though, it feels like a welcome antidote to the monotony of so many comic book inspired films.
“Don’t go getting all grown up on us.“ That’s the sentiment that hangs over “Christopher Robin,” a new film about regaining an intangible starring Ewan McGregor and Winnie the Pooh (voice of Jim Cummings), like a shroud.
The movie begins with 10-year-old Christopher Robin‘s going away party, just before he leaves for boarding school. His playmates, Piglet (voice of Nick Mohammed), Eeyore (Brad Garrett), Tigger (Cummings again), Owl (Toby Jones), Rabbit (Peter Capaldi), Kanga (Sophie Okonedo) and the honey loving bear have gathered to see him off from 100 Acre Woods, their home and Christopher’s escape from real life.
“I will never forget you Pooh,“ Christopher says, “even if I live to be 100 years old.“
But of course he does.
Like the quickly flipped pages of a story park the film rockets through Christopher’s boarding school, marriage, efforts in WWII and his difficulties after the war. Now a husband to Evelyn (Hayley Atwell) and a father to Madeline (Bronte Carmichael), he has a job he doesn’t like and responsibilities that keep him away from his family.
Christopher Robin got all grown up.
When his boss instructs him to cut 20% of his operating budget Christopher is pushed against the wall. The frivolities of youth are pushed even further to the background until Pooh, looking for his friends and in search of honey, shows up in London with the grumbling tummy and some sage words of advice. “I’ve cracked,” says Christopher when his childhood friend shows up. “I’ve totally cracked. “I don’t see any cracks,” replies Pooh sweetly, “some wrinkles maybe.”
A mix of live action and CGI characters, “Christopher Robin” doesn’t allow the special effects to get in the way of the film’s message of staying young at heart. The stuffed animals—Winnie and friends—don’t feel like and excuse to sell toys. Instead they are given distinct and engaging personalities that move the story and the message forward. Cummings, who has voiced Winnie since 1988, brings real personality to the character, imbuing his elliptical speaking patterns with equal parts humour and melancholy. Pooh also causes some Paddington-style chaos in the Robin household, adding to the slapstick factor in a movie that toggles between heartfelt and farce.
There is an undeniable sense of loss and longing in “Christopher Robin.” Loss, in the form of a childhood innocence gone missing—“I’m lost,” says Pooh, “but I found you.”—longing in the efforts made to regain the connection to childlike wonder and, in Robin’s case, his own daughter Madeline. Children might not get it, although I’m sure they will enjoy the stuffed characters, but adults will understand the curious tale about the importance of old friends and embracing the inner child.
Poet Paul Éluard said that to understand Jean Cocteau’s 1946 version of La Belle et la Bête — Beauty and the Beast — you must love your dog more than your car. His comment is baffling only if you haven’t seen the movie.
Once Cocteau’s film is seen, it’s apparent that what makes his version rewarding is that it values the organic over the mechanical — even the special effects are handmade. It refuses to allow the technical aspects of the film to interfere with the humanity of the story.
This weekend Disney will have their collective fingers crossed that audiences will favour their poodles over their RVs as they release the big-budget, live-action version of Beauty and the Beast starring Emma Watson.
Director Bill Condon says the animated 1991 Disney classic was an inspiration for the new film, but adds he also drew from everything from Twilight and Frankenstein to a 1932 musical comedy called Love Me Tonight when creating the look for the new movie.
He also mentions La Belle et la Bête. “A film I really love.” His take on the Beast looked back to the movie, cribbing the character’s combination of ferocity and romance from Cocteau.
Before taking in the new version this weekend, let’s have a look back at the little-seen 70-year old Cocteau classic.
Loosely based on the timeless Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont fairy tale, the action in La Belle et la Bête begins when a poverty-stricken merchant pilfers a rose from a grand estate owned by a strange creature. The Beast strikes a deal with the man.
He’ll spare the life of the merchant in return for the hand of one of the man’s daughters. Reluctantly the merchant offers Belle, a beautiful girl who had been courted by the oafish Avenant.
At first she is repulsed by the Beast, who looks like the love child of the Wolf Man and Mrs. Chewbacca, but over time his tender ways and nightly offers of marriage warm her heart and she learns to love him for his inner beauty.
Cocteau’s version strays from the original story and Condon’s adaptation with the addition of a subplot involving Avenant’s scheme to kill the Beast and make off with his treasures and an unexpected magical personality switcheroo.
It’s meant to be a happy ending, but not everyone loved the new coda. When Marlene Dietrich saw an early cut of the film at a private screening, she squeezed Cocteau’s hand and said, “Where is my beautiful Beast?”
Other audiences embraced Cocteau’s vision. In his diary the poet wrote of a test screening held for the technicians in the Joinville Studio were the film had been made. “The welcome the picture received from that audience of workers was unforgettable,” he wrote.
Others criticized La Belle et la Bête for its straightforwardness, complaining that the characters are simply drawn, the story one dimensional. Taking that view, however, misses Cocteau’s point.
At the beginning of the film he asks for “childlike simplicity,” inviting the viewer to connect with their inner child, eschew cynicism and embrace naiveté for the film’s 96-minute running time.
In 1946 the request was meant as a salve for a post-occupation France that was still dealing with the aftermath of a terrible war.
Today, in an increasingly contemptuous world, the message still seems timely and welcome.
Poet Paul Éluard said that to understand Jean Cocteau’s 1946 version of “La Belle et la Bête”—“Beauty and the Beast”—you must love your dog more than your car. It’s a good line that suggests Cocteau’s adaptation values the organic elements of the film — even the special effects are handmade—while refusing to allow the technical aspects of the film to interfere with the humanity of the story.
The same can’t be said of the new, big budget live action Disney version of the story. Inspired by their classic 1991 animated story of belle and beast, the remake relies too heavily on computer generated splendour and too little on the innate charms of the story.
Emma Watson plays the bright and beautiful Belle, the independent-minded daughter of eccentric inventor Maurice (Kevin Kline). She is, as the townsfolk warble, “strange but special, A most peculiar mad’moiselle!” She has caught the eye of dimwitted war hero Gaston (Luke Evans) who unsuccessfully tries to win her hand.
Taking one of his new gizmos to market Maurice picks a rose as a present for Belle but runs afoul of the Beast (Dan Stevens). Once a self-centered prince, he was changed into a part-man, part-wolf, part Chewbacca creature by a witch as punishment for his hedonistic life. The only way to beak the spell, she cackles, is to find someone to love him before the last petal falls off an enchanted rose. “Who could love a beast?” he asks.
Enter Belle.
On the hunt for her father, she makes her way to the Beast’s remote castle only to find Maurice locked up for rose theft. She pleads with her hairy host for a moment with her father, and while giving him a hug pushes him out of the cell, slamming the door behind her. Trading her freedom for his, she is now the Beast’s prisoner. The staff—once human, now transformed into the enchanted candlestick Lumiere (Ewan McGregor), Cogsworth the clock (Ian McKellen), a teapot Mrs. Potts (Emma Thompson) and wardrobe (Audra McDonald) although it feels like a missed opportunity to not have Daniel Craig play a eavesdropping microwave—see Belle as just the person to look past his ghastly appearance and see the true princely beauty within and lift his curse and theirs.
Director Bill Condon has made a classic big screen musical with state of the art special effects. Up front is a perfectly cast Emma Watson, who brings more tenacity to the character than we’ve seen in past versions as well as a considerable amount of charm. She is the movie’s beating heart, the human presence in the midst of a considerable amount of pomp and circumstance.
Condon decorates the screen, over-dressing almost every scene with layers of pageantry and CGI. It entertains the eye, particularly in the Busby Berkeley style “Be Our Guest” sequence but overwhelms the film’s humanity. This is a movie that loves its car more than its dog.
“Beauty and the Beast” is a handsome, straightforward movie that adds little to the animated classic. Some of the details have changed. Belle and Beast mourn their deceased mothers and Gaston’s minion Le Fou (Josh Gad) is now gay but the dreamlike of the 1991 version is lacking. The story just seems less magical when built from a collection of pixels.
Twenty-one years on from the full on frontal assault that was “Trainspotting,” the old gang is back together but the only things that truly binds them is a shared past. “You’re a tourist in your own youth,” says Sick Boy/Simon (Jonny Lee Miller).
At the center of it all is Mark Renton (Ewan McGregor). The last time we saw him he was a wastrel and double-crosser who cheated his friends out of £16,000 in a drug deal. After hightailing it to Amsterdam he’s now a fitness freak who spends more time running in a treadmill than running from the law.
His former friends, now all in their forties, are in various states of personal disrepair. “The wave of gentrification has yet to wash over us,” Simon quips.
Sick Boy/Simon is still a dodgy dude with a King Kong size Coke problem, who makes ends meet by blackmailing the wealthy customers of his prostitute business partner Veronika (Anjela Nedyalkova).
Spud/Daniel (Ewen Bremner), still an impressive mash-up of ears, teeth and gangly limbs, is now a pathetic creature that chooses heroin addiction over a life with his wife Shirley Henderson) and child.
The fourth member of the group, Begbie (Robert Carlyle), he of the bad attitude and broken pint glasses to the face, is indisposed, locked up but with a way out and a gut full of hate for Renton.
Loosely based on author Irvine Welsh’s “Trainspotting” follow-up novel “Porno,” the new film from Danny Boyle, asks if it is ever possible to go home again—in this case Edinburgh—especially if home involves a dangerous psychopath with a grudge and an ex-BFF who wants revenge.
“T2 Trainspotting” does something quite remarkable. It places nostalgia in the rear view mirror while, at the same time, celebrating bygone days. To see Mark confront his past complete with the emotional attachments and entanglements that come along with it feels like a universal reckoning, a reminder that the world changes even if we don’t.
That’s the beating heart of the film, the rest is window dressing, It’s fun to hang out with these almost lovable villains for a couple more hours, to catch up on old times, immerse ourselves in their down-and-dirty lives and even get a new Choose Life riff but a heavy air of regret hangs over the proceedings. It reinforces the idea that we can’t relive the glory days no matter how hard we try. It’s a middle-age truism brought to vivid life by Boyle and cast.
In revisiting the past the director does, however, put an intimate spin on the story with clever visual integration of past memories—present day characters mournfully share the screen with their younger counterparts—and a melancholy sense that no matter how hard we try to move forward ultimately our lives are simply a continuation of everything that came before. As Renton says, “choose history repeating itself.” It’s not a thunderbolt revelation but revisiting these characters—particularly the tragicomic Spud—puts a face to those anchored in the nostalgia.
For fans of the original film “T2 Trainspotting” will be an enjoyable ride. It is as good a sequel to a classic film as you could hope for. It’s a shame the returning female characters played by Kelly MacDonald and Shirley Henderson are relegated to cameos and the original’s sense of infectious anarchy has been dulled somewhat but the film’s mix of redemption and regret are ample replacements.
Ewan McGregor makes his directorial debut with “American Pastoral,” a crime-drama based on a novel by Phillip Roth. He deftly presents nice performances from Dakota Fanning, Jennifer Connelly, Rupert Evans and Valorie Curry but tells a story that feels disjointed.
McGregor stars as Seymour ‘Swede’ Levov, a man with a charmed life. He was a football star in high school, married Dawn (Connelly) his beautiful girlfriend, inherited a thriving business and was blessed with a daughter, Merry (played by Hannah Nordberg as a child, Fanning as a teen). He was “Our hero, our Kennedy,” says a schoolmate.
When little Merry, aged eleven, sees a news report of Buddhist monk Thích Quang Duc burning himself to death to protest the war in Vietnam, it awakens something inside her. “Why does that gentle man have to burn himself?” she cries. “Doesn’t anyone care? Doesn’t anyone have a conscience?”
Cut to several years later. Merry is now a politically engaged revolutionary teenager living under her father’s suburban Old Rim Rock, New Jersey roof. She calls the president, “Linden ‘Baby Burner’ Johnson,” and heads off to meet her radical friends in New York whenever possible. “What do you care about the war?” she shrieks at her parents. “You’re just contented middle-class people!”
The ‘Swede,’ concerned about his daughter’s behaviour forbids her to go to the city. Instead, he suggests, why doesn’t she protest a little closer to home? When the local post office blows up, killing the postmaster, and Merry disappears the human cost of her actions becomes clear. The bomb destroys the building, kills a man and presents ‘Swede’ with the first crisis of his charmed life.
“American Pastoral” is a handsome movie that tackles one of the most tumultuous times in American history. McGregor gets inside the stateside protest of the Vietnam War by keeping the story tight, focussed on one family and the devastating effect of radicalism has on them and, peripherally, on the victims of Merry’s crimes. Getting inside the head of a young woman driven to push away the comfy-cosy life provided by her wealthy parents for a life on the run would be fascinating. Too bad it isn’t here. Instead, Fanning plays Merry like a petulant teen, more likely to sneak out to meet boys than blow up government buildings.
Ditto the resulting toll Merry’s actions take on her decent, hardworking parents. Dawn falls apart, ending up in hospital before taking the most superficial way out of her heartbreaking problems.
There’s an affair and some intrigue but it’s all skin deep. There are many shots of McGregor looking concerned, but the full weight of the family’s tragedy is never truly felt. It feels by times as though sections of the movie are missing, either edited out from a longer version or left unfilmed. It’s a shame because what could have been an interesting look at what happens when radicalization comes home is neutered by some swiss cheese storytelling—lots of holes.
