I join the national night time show “Shane Hewitt and the Night Shift” to suggest the perfect cocktail to enjoy while taking in the new George Clooney/Brad Pitt comedic thriller “Wolfs” and then have a look at the big entertainment headlines of the night.
Listen to Booze and Reviews HERE! (Starts at 39:34)
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SYNOPSIS: In “Wolfs,” a new crime comedy in select theatres before moving to Apple TV+ on September 27, George Clooney plays Jack, a lone wolf fixer who aids the rich and powerful when they get into hot water. Need to get rid of a body? He’s your bagman.
“I was told that if I ever need help to call you,” says Margaret (Amy Smart), who finds herself in a hotel room with an inconveniently dead body. “I didn’t know people like you really existed.”
“They don’t,” he says. “There’s nobody who can do what I do.”
Except there is.
That person is Nick (Brad Pitt), a smug Mr. Fixit sent by the hotel. ”I’m here to fix your problem,” he says.
They don’t want to work together, but the hotel’s owner, whose been watching everything on hidden cameras intervenes. “The only course of action is for you to work together,” says Pamela Dowd-Henry (voiced by Frances McDormand), “to clean up this mess.”
As events spiral out of control, the two competitive troubleshooters reluctantly agree to partner up. “It’s gonna be a long night,” says Nick.
CAST: George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Amy Ryan, Austin Abrams, Poorna Jagannathan. Written and directed by Jon Watts.
REVIEW: By the time the end credits roll “Wolfs” has revealed itself to not be about men immersed in a world of murder and mayhem, but as a study in loneliness.
Clooney and Pitt play loners—the title is meant to suggest they are each a lone wolf, not part of a pack, and therefore aren’t wolves, but wolfs… or something like that—whose job, for safety reasons, requires that friendships do not get in the way of the work. But, when thrown together, they slowly form a bond. They don’t exactly become Bert and Ernie, but find commonalities and form a bond of trust, possibly for the first time in their lives.
The movie is at its best as Clooney and Pitt fall in “like.” The rest is finely tuned filmmaking, with a few laughs and some shoot ‘em up action. It’s slick and fleet-of-foot but the events surrounding the characters are not quite as interesting as the characters themselves.
The two leads begin as enemies, become frenemies and finally allies. It is their banter, chemistry and gentle acknowledgment of age that drives the movie, not the intrigue. Clooney and Pitt have an easy charm, and their combination of humorous self-depreciation and charisma is where the action is, not in the car chases or gun battles.
“Wolfs” is a great argument for the existence of movie stars. It’s a good example of how star power (alongside the goofy charm of Austin Abrams as an optimistic kid in constantly thrust into life-and-death situations) can amp an up a run-of-the-mill movie.
There are underdog sports movies, and then there is “The Boys in the Boat,” the new film from director George Clooney, now playing in theatres. Set during the Great Depression, the characters in this film fight expectations and fascism.
Based upon Daniel James Brown’s book of the same name, “The Boys in the Boat” centers on Joe Rantz (Callum Turner), a struggling University of Washington student who, unable to pay the balance of his tuition for the semester, signs up for the school’s rowing team because it comes with a part-time job and a place to live.
“The depression hit everyone hard,” he says. “No jobs. No food. We were broke.”
Under the tutelage of coach Al Ulbrickson (Joel Edgerton) and boatbuilder George Pocock (Peter Guinness), Rantz and the Washington Huskies, his team of inexperienced, working-class student rowers, are pitted against the richest schools in the country.
“We rowed out of need,” Rantz says. “The need to stay in school. The need to eat. To sleep.”
Through need and determination, the Huskies earned a run at the gold at the 1936’s Nazi-overseen Berlin Olympics.
“They said we couldn’t compete with the richest schools in the nation,” Rantz says. “They said we couldn’t beat the Germans. But they didn’t understand who we were.”
An old-fashioned story of grit and perseverance, “The Boys on the Boat” is a mix of stoicism and sports. Of course, the sport is simply the vessel by which the characters glide through the story. The movie spends a fair amount of time on the water, but rowing is secondary to the rush of inspiration that fuels the story. It’s a story of team work, of young men coming together to overcome not only the economic hardships of their lives and illness on the eve of their big row, but also the Nazis.
Unfortunately, the movie also attempts to play tug-a-rope with your heartstrings. It works its way through to the inevitable happy ending with crowd-pleasing beats that will seem very familiar to anyone with a knowledge of 1990s era sports flicks.
Still, it is a handsomely mounted movie with several intense competition scenes that will set your pulse racing, even if the overly sentimental presentation doesn’t.
Nuptial disruption has played a major role in Julia Roberts’s career. From “The Runaway Bride” to “My Best Friend’s Wedding,” making a walk down the aisle for Roberts is no walk in the park and should be its own sub-genre on her IMDB page.
After a layoff of almost twenty-five years, she’s back at it, attempting fresh matrimonial mayhem in “Ticket to Paradise,” a new rom com co-starring George Clooney, and now playing in theatres.
Roberts and Clooney are Georgia and David, college sweethearts whose short-lived marriage dissolved into acrimony two decades ago. “When it started out,” David says, “it was unreal, then it got real.”
On the odd time they see one another they make the Bickersons look like a happy, loving couple.
The only good thing that came out of their time together is daughter Lily (Kaitlyn Dever), a twenty-something who abandons her promising law career in Chicago to marry Balinese seaweed farmer Gede (Maxime Bouttier). “It’s like I looked up for thew first time and realized everything I ever wanted was right in front of me,” Lily says.
Despite their differences, the only thing Georgia and David agree on is that Lily is making a misake. “I won’t let her throw her life away,” says Georgia on the flight to Bali. “We need to trick her into dumping him.”
You don’t need a degree in advanced scriptology to know where “Ticket to Paradise” is headed. Firstly, it’s a rom, com, which always guarantee a happy ending. Secondly, it’s called “Ticket to Paradise,” not “Ticket to Misery.” But, no matter. Good rom coms should offer an interesting journey on the way to the predetermined ending, and that’s exactly what Clooney and Company do.
This is a good-natured romantic comedy that exists to showcase the considerable charisma of its leads. Roberts and Clooney have great chemistry and use every trick in their collective book to sell their snappy banter and screwball comedy.
“Ticket to Paradise” isn’t destined to become a classic, but it is a diverting watch, kind of like a cinematic equivalent to a beach read.
Richard and CTV NewsChannel host Angie Seth have a look “The Tender Bar” (Amazon Prime), the Olivia Coleman drama “The Lost Daughter” (on Netflix) and the heartwarming “June Again” (VOD/Digital).
There are many life lessons in “The Tender Bar,” a new easygoing drama starring Ben Affleck based on the life of journalist and author J.R. Moehringer, and now streaming on Amazon Prime. Set in and around The Dickens, a bar named after the author of “David Copperfield,” barstool wisdom about the value of books, education, taking care of your mother and “not keeping money like a drunk” in the front pocket of your shirt, abounds.
The story begins in 1973 Long Island. “Radar Love” by Golden Earring out of the car the car radio and the impressionable J.R. (played as a youngster by Daniel Ranieri) lives with his mom Dorothy (Lily Rabe) and cranky grandfather (Christopher Lloyd). His father, a radio DJ nicknamed The Voice (Max Martini), isn’t in the picture.
J.R.’s father figure is Uncle Charlie (Affleck), charming bookworm and owner of the Dickens. He is a font of advice, all of which J.R. soaks up “the male sciences” like a sponge. Charlie’s instructions range from the pragmatic—never order bar scotch neat—to the ideological—he urges J.R. to study philosophy. “You always do well in that class,” he says, “because there’s no right answers.”
Charlie’s guidance and the colorful regulars who populate the bar, like Bobo (Michael Braun) and Joey D (Matthew Delamater), help form J.R.’s young life. “When you’re 11 years old,” he says, “you want an Uncle Charlie.”
Cut to a decade later.
J.R., having inherited his Uncle Charlie’s love of storytelling and words, is a student at Yale, studying law but with aspirations to be a writer. Now played by Tye Sheridan, he falls in love with Sidney (Briana Middleton), a smart, “lower upper middle class” schoolmate who gives J.R. another lesson in heartbreak.
“The Tender Bar” is a low key coming-of-age story that works best when it has a glass in front of it. That is to say, when it concentrates on the Dickens and the life lessons young J.R. absorbs at the bar. Those scenes have a lovely nostalgic feel. Director George Clooney vividly recreates a time when ten-year-olds were sent to the local corner bar to by a pack of cigarettes for grandpa. Clooney sets the stage, but it is the actors who bring it to life.
As Affleck settles in to the character actor phase of his career, he’s doing some of his best work. His Uncle Charlie has an effortless charm, a fierce intellect and is a bit of a scoundrel. It’s a performance that feels perfectly shaped and worn in, like an old baseball glove.
The scenes Affleck shares with Ranieri provide the film’s highlights. The young actor, making his film debut, brings genuine curiosity to J.R., a kid who has been knocked around but who always has his eyes to the future. It’s a delightful performance. Sheridan nicely mirrors the character as a young adult, but it is Ranieri who makes us care about J.R.
“The Tender Bar” is a nicely crafted, circumspect look at J.R.’s life. The stakes feel low and big dramatic moments are few and far between, but this textured look at the importance of community, including the drunks at the bar, in the formative stages of J.R.’s life is an understated winner.
Although “The Midnight Sky,” a new apocalyptic thriller from George Clooney and now streaming on Netflix, was written and filmed before the pandemic, timely themes of isolation and the importance of human connection resonate loudly throughout.
Set in the near future, Clooney, who directed, produced and resembles q post “Late Show” David Letterman here, stars as Augustine, an astronomer battling cancer and loneliness at the Barbeau Observatory, a remote Arctic research station. Some sort of global nuclear catastrophe has devastated life on earth, leaving him isolated and alone until Iris, a wide-eyed, silent girl (Caoilinn Springall) mysteriously turns up at the station.
While tending to his new charge, Augustine is duty bound to contact and warn the Aether, a NASA space station returning home after a two-year mission exploring a newly discovered moon of Jupiter.
Led by husband-and-wife Adewole and Sully (David Oyelowo and Felicity Jones), the crew (Kyle Chandler, Demian Bichir, Tiffany Boone), hurtle toward the barren planet, unaware that life as they knew it on earth has ceased.
“Are you receiving this?” Augustine, says, fruitlessly trying to communicate with the Aether. “Is anyone out there?” To reach them Augustine and Iris take on a dangerous mission, a trek through kilometres of deadly ice, snow and 80-kilometre-per-hour winds. “There is antenna that’s stronger than ours,” he says. “If we can get to that antenna, they’ll hear us.”
“The Midnight Sky” is a multi-hyphenate, a dystopian-sci-fi-outer-space-thriller. While that’s accurate, that’s also six too many words to correctly describe what Clooney has created. All those elements exist in the film but the unwieldy list leaves out the film’s humanity. Sure, there’s some wild blue yonder action with people floating through space capsules and a barren planet, but this is a story of regret and redemption, handled with subtlety and grace.
The story has two distinct halves. Clooney says “half of it is “Gravity” and the other half of it is “The Revenant,” and sometimes they feel too distinct; disconnected. Augustine’s journey to redemption as he nears death is heavy-hearted and austere. The crew’s situation is different. Although they are cut loose in space, they represent the future of humankind, in whatever form that may take. The two halves sit side-by-side but don’t always fit together like puzzle pieces.
The thing that binds the story threads is a search for salvation. Augustine and Iris and Sully, who is expecting a child, are among the last of human life, and face an uncertain future. Each is doing what they can to determine whether mankind has a chance or not. And while the film offers hope and a chance of recovery, both personally for the characters and for the world as a whole, it does so without pandering to easy plot points.
Based on the 2016 Lily Brooks-Dalton novel “Good Morning, Midnight” with a screenplay by Mark L. Smith (screenwriter of “The Revenant”), “The Midnight Sky” is deliberately paced, humanistic sci fi that values ideas over action. It has epic scenes—particularly the snow storm trek—but feels more like an intimate drama than high action film. Clooney uses silence to speak loudly about the film’s most timely and important theme, the need for connection. It’s the lesson of the film and, these days, in real life.
“Always at the Carlyle” can’t rightly be called a documentary. It’s more of a love letter to one of Manhattan’s great hotels. Plump with celebrity interviews, glamorous people and the attentive—if somewhat secretive—staff who coddle the one percenters who stay there, it’s a glossy, uncritical look at a hotel whose rooms can cost as much as a car.
Director Matthew Miele lines up a who’s who of a-lister types to talk about the hotel’s special charms. George Clooney and the late great Anthony Bourdain wax poetic, while Harrison Ford grouses, good naturedly, about not ever being housed in the hotel’s $20,000 a night suite. Sophia Coppola describes what it was like to live there when she was a child and rich people you’ve never heard of describe the hotel’s upwardly mobile ambiance in hushed reverential terms.
Miele provides a peak at the colourful murals in Bemelmans Bar, painted by Ludwig Bemelmans, artist of the “Madeline” books, and tells of the legendary Bobby Short’s musical contributions to New York nightlife via his work at the equally legendary Carlyle Café.
It’s not very deep, but it is all very swanky, as crisp as the monogrammed pillowcases that adorn every bed. “Always at the Carlyle” works best when it recounts the hotel’s sophisticated history, told by former guests and employees with eye candy photos for illustration, but like the best hoteliers the doc chooses discretion over gossip. That’s good for the guests, but not good for the viewers of the film who might want something more. If only those walls could talk—they might tell a more interesting story.
In “Suburbicon” director George Clooney pays tribute to the great melodramatic thrillers of the past with a timely story about two families, one in a quagmire of their own making, another harassed by outside forces. It’s a morality—or should that be a-morality—play that is as grim as it
Set in Suburbicon, a picture perfect suburb, new, sparkling with all the amenities, we first meet Gardner Lodge (Matt Damon) and his family, wife Rose (Julianne Moore), son Nicky (Noah Jupe) and sister-in-law Margaret (also Julianne Moore). It’s a “Leave it to Beaver” life until a home invasion shatters the American Dream idyll. “Nothing like that ever happened here,” a neighbour says. “This was a safe place.”
Meanwhile an African-American family moves in next door and immediately becomes the target of racial intolerance from the townsfolk. Based on the real-life harassment of the Myers family, husband William (Leith M. Burke), wife Daisy (Karimah Westbrook) and son Andy (Tony Espinosa) in Levittown, Pennsylvania in 1957, the citizens of Suburbicon create a twenty-four-hour-a-day disturbance outside their home, making normal life almost impossible inside.
As the police investigate the invasion and the murder of Rose, uncomfortable questions arise. When an insurance inspector (Oscar Isaac) starts poking around it little Nicky begins to suspect his father might not be the man he thought he was.
On one fateful night tensions come to boil at both the Lodge and Myers households.
There will be no spoilers here, just know that “Suburbicon” plays like the leering devil child of Alfred Hitchcock and David Lynch or the evil godchild of the Coen Brothers, who wrote the original script before Clooney and long time collaborator Grant Heslov did a rewrite. It’s a beautifully nasty film, nicely made but marching to the beat of a very dark heart.
Against a seemingly wholesome backdrop Clooney paints a picture of greed, murder, racism and infidelity. There are laughs—like the ridiculous sight of Damon riding a kid’s bicycle away from a crime scene—but make no mistake this is not “Ocean’s Eleven.” He builds the story block-by-block, carefully creating character facades only to shatter them. Hardly anyone is who they seem. Only Nicky is pure-of-heart and if this was real life Nicky would need some serious therapy. It’s gripping and grim stuff about the American Dream gone wrong.
Murder and infidelity are, I guess, the timeless aspects of the story. The racism, particularly in light of recent events in Charlottesville, Virginia, brings a timely and urgent facet. The portrayal of the racism levelled at the Myers family is ugly and, sadly, all too believable. The “decent” folks of Suburbicon are all too quick to grab a Confederate flag when an African-American family moves in next door. It’s a strong anti-segregation message that contrasts the craven behaviour of the Lodge family.
Damon doles out the creepy vibe sparingly, bring the character to a slow simmer, only to have it boil when things go sideways. Moore is a dim-witted femme fatale with a mean streak. Isaac inserts some smarmy energy mid-movie, but it is Jupe as little Nicky who grounds things. We see Suburbicon’s carefully constructed world fall apart through his eyes, taking the ride with him. He’s a Hitchcockian figure in short pants, the boy who knew too much, and he’s an effective mirror of the dangers of conformity.
“Suburbicon” is a horror film, but the monster is us.