Deb is off, so I sit in with Jim Richards on NewsTalk 1010 to go over some of the week’s biggest entertainment stories and let you know what’s happening in theatres. We talk about how The Toxic Avenger wiped out medical debt for 10,000, how Bob Ross is helping to save PBS and NPR and I review “TRON: Ares.”
Listen to the whole thing HERE!
I joined CTV NewsChannel to have a look at new movies coming to theatres including the eye-candy of “TRON: Ares,” the crime drama “Roofman” and the touching documentary “John Candy: I Like Me.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
I join CTV Atlantic to talk about the eye-candy of “TRON: Ares,” the crime drama “Roofman” and the touching documentary “John Candy: I Like Me.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
I sit in on the CFRA Ottawa morning show with host Bill Carroll to talk about the new movies coming to theatres including the eye-candy of “TRON: Ares,” the crime drama “Roofman” and the touching documentary “John Candy: I Like Me.”
Listen to the whole thing HERE!
Fast reviews for busy people! Watch as I review three movies in less time than it takes to make the bed! Have a look as I race against the clock to tell you about the eye-candy of “TRON: Ares,” the crime drama “Roofman” and the touching documentary “John Candy: I Like Me.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
SYNOPSIS: The third installment in the “Tron” series and the sequel to 2010s “Tron: Legacy,” “TRON: Ares” follows a super-intelligent AI soldier named Ares (Jared Leto) sent from the digital Grid to Earth on a dangerous mission. “Since time began, man has gazed at the stars and he has wondered, ‘Am I alone?’ So much talk of AI and big tech today,” says Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters). “Virtual worlds. What are they going to look like? When will we get there? Well folks, we’re not going there. They are coming here. I would like you to meet Ares, the ultimate soldier.”
CAST: Jared Leto, Greta Lee, Evan Peters, Jodie Turner-Smith, Hasan Minhaj, Arturo Castro, Gillian Anderson, Jeff Bridges. Directed by Joachim Rønning.
REVIEW: Given the attitude in Hollywood toward AI, it’s no surprise “TRON: Ares” can be boiled down to one basic premise: Humans, great; AI, bad.
The story of rival tech companies, Dillinger Systems, whose megalomaniacal CEO Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters) has his eyes on writing “his name on the face of time… in blood,” and Encom, run by the idealist Eve Kim (Greta Lee), the movie is an old-fashioned story of good and evil dressed up with a bunch of high-tech jargon.
As Dillinger unveils his latest project to an assembled group of military leaders, it seems like he has invented the ultimate fighting machine, an AI warrior named Ares (Jared Leto). He’s the most sophisticated security code ever written, completely controllable, virtually unbeatable, and, if anyone does manage to kill him, Dillinger brags, we’ll just create another version of him.
What Dillinger fails to mention is that his creation can only stay “alive” for 29 minutes before collapsing in a pile of digital dust.
Meanwhile, Kim has discovered the secret “permanence code,” a bit of programming that allows digital creations to survive and thrive in the real world. Dillinger wants the code and sends his fighting machines Ares and Athena (Jodie Turner-Smith) to retrieve it by any means necessary.
There’s more, mostly about Ares and his decision to embrace humanity and Kim’s grief over the loss of her sister to cancer but this movie is more about the whiz-bang special effects and trippy trip into the Grid than it is about Ares’s Pinocchio-esque transformation into a real boy.
As deep as a lunch tray, the story, such that it is, is mostly an excuse to set the AI creations into action with cool, neon-lit Light Cycles and menacing bat wings.
Also a vehicle for large dollops of pop psychology—”I guess that’s the thing about life,” Ares muses as he searches for the permanence code, “there’s nothing permanent about it.”—and even some rom com flourishes—“Can I trust you?” Ares asks Eve a couple times in the film. “Probably not,” replies Eve coyishly. —“TRON: Ares” tells its simple story with a blur of digitized gloss.
Worse, the script by Jesse Wigutow, treats the audience as though they’re not paying attention. For instance, mid-chase Eve pulls out the hard drive with the permanence code she’s carrying to remind us why the chase is happening in the first place. Need to get caught up non information you already have? Check out Ares’s high-tech exposition dump that looks cool but adds nothing new.
“TRON: Ares” will make your eyeballs dance (and you may even want to dance to the dynamic Nine Inch Nails soundtrack) but it won’t engage your brain.
SYNOPSIS: While recounting her life as a fugitive in Nazi-occupied France, hiding in the barn of a classmate, a grandmother (Helen Mirren) gives her troubled grandson a lesson in the importance of kindness and compassion.
CAST: R. J. Palacio, Ariella Glaser, Orlando Schwerdt, Bryce Gheisar, Gillian Anderson, Helen Mirren. Directed by Marc Forster.
REVIEW: “White Bird” wears its heart on its sleeve. An elegant retelling of Grandmère Sara’s story, which originated as a 2019 graphic novel of the same name by R. J. Palacio, it is an earnest testament to the power of imagination and kindness to overcome wickedness.
It’s a Holocaust story told from the point of view of two young people, Sara Blum (as played by Ariella Glaser) who is separated from her parents when the Nazi take over their town, and Julien Beaumier (Orlando Schwerdt) a compassionate youngster with polio who rescues her and hides her away in his parent’s barn. Their bravery in the face of events they can barely understand, let alone control, is moving as this pair of innocents are forced to grow up very quickly.
It’s in the other stuff that the film reveals its origins in young adult literature.
There are several scenes of brutality and violence as the Nazis invade the village and abduct young Jewish students, but director Marc Forster hasn’t made a war film. Instead, he’s made a plea to choose kindness over hatred set against the backdrop of World War II.
The result is a retrained, gently paced character driven tale in need of more urgency.
Forster does a good job of displaying how small gestures can remind us of our humanity in troubled times, but he allows thew cinematic aspects of the storytelling—for example, Sara and Julien’s imaginary travels as an antidote to the world around them—to slow the movie to a crawl.
Much of it looks lovely, and, as an act of kindness, those scenes are on theme, but the flights of fancy plod along, taking away from the more dramatic elements the story has to offer. Danger should hang over every second of Sara’s life, and yet, aside from a scene or two, here is no real sense of peril.
“White Bird” contains potent and timely “Vive l’humanité” messages about compassion—although they are expressed by French villagers, who, by and large, sound like posh BBC broadcasters—and is occasionally touching but doesn’t hit hard enough.
“The Sunlit Night,” a new Jenny Slate comedy now on VOD, feels like a throwback to the oddball indie films of recent decades. No detail is too twee, no setting too obscure. The viewer is reminded of a flood of titles like “Everything Is Illuminated” and “Amelie” come to mind, movies where the quirk factor is set to the max.
Jenny Slate plays Frances, a young woman following in the footsteps of her parents. All three are frustrated artists. “Maybe I’m not an artist,” she says. “Maybe I’m just the daughter of two other artists.” After one spectacularly bad day that sees her break up with her rich boyfriend, get critically savaged by her art professors, find out her lawyer sister is engaged and her parents (David Paymer and Jessica Hecht) are splitting up. As if that wasn’t enough, she gets denied an apprenticeship in Tokyo. Rather than live with her father in his tiny studio she accepts another, less than desirable offer—“He fired his last assistant and now he needs someone to paint a barn, using only the colour yellow.”—with reclusive artist Nils (Fridtjov Såheim) in the far, far north of Norway. “This is where you go when you are exiled,” she says.
Her new life in Lofoten takes some getting used to. She is a fish out of water, the sun never sets, small goats invade her trailer, and the job is a slog, essentially a large paint by numbers project that leaves her little or no time to work on her own paintings. Still, she finds time to explore the nearby Viking Museum run by ex-pat American (Zach Galifianakis) and, despite telling her mother that she is “closed for business, a potential love interest in Yasha (Alex Sharp), a Brooklyn baker who has travelled to the top of the world to give his late father, and not just the ashes, but the whole corpse, a traditional Viking funeral.
“The Sunlit Night” has something offer after a radical rethink following brutal reviews at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. It’s still a bit sloppy and a little too whimsically weird for its own sake, but Slate and a fun cameo from Gillian Anderson as Yasha’s mother do much of the heavy lifting. Most of the other characters seem to exist simply to add flavour to Frances’ rather colourless journey to find herself.
No amount of re-editing could get “The Sunlit Night” past the basic premise of outsiders navigating the strange Arctic Circle surroundings, but Slate brings charm to a story that otherwise may have been devoid of any realistic or interesting human behaviour.
In Toby Young’s aptly named book How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, now a motion picture starring Shawn of the Dead’s Simon Pegg, he detailed how not to become a success in the cut throat world of New York magazine publishing. In 1995 English journalist Young accepted a job with Vanity Fair as a contributing editor. He may have envisioned himself to be the next Alistair Cooke, but from the second he stepped off the plane from London he was doomed to failure. His laddish stunts and seemingly bottomless aptitude for offending people made him an outsider in the oh-so-proper world of Conde Nast.
For example he broke every office sexual harassment rule by hiring a Strip-o-gram for a fellow employee, and to make matters worse he did it on that most politically correct day of days, Take Your Daughter to Work Day. For most of the time he worked at Vanity Fair he sat idle, collecting a large pay packet for doing very little work. He blew the biggest story he was assigned, interviewing actor Nathan Lane by asking him a series of inappropriate questions, culminating with a discussion about his sexual practises. Lane walked out of the interview, and Young’s career at VF was pretty much over. Perhaps his most pathetic move was to add the prefix “Hon” (short for “Honourable”) to his VISA in an attempt to impress New York women. The Sunday Times called the book “the longest self-depreciating joke since the complete works of Woody Allen.”
For legal reasons, I would imagine, many of the names have been changed—Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter becomes Clayton Harding—and some of the details are different—Vanity Fair is now Sharp Magazine—from the famously sharp tongued memoir, but star Simon Pegg does manage to capture most of the “negative charisma” that Young describes himself as having in the book.
Comparisons to the best selling book end there, however. The basic storyline is the same and many of the incidents from the book are faithfully reproduced, but Young’s analysis of where everything went wrong, the thing that made the book a delight, has not translated. Instead we’re offered up a catalogue of his endless faux pas, many of which are quite funny, without much in the way of social commentary. Compared to the book it’s a rather empty exercise in slapstick and humiliation that plays up the romance between Pegg’s character and Kirsten Dunst at the expense of the book’s in-depth fish out of water story. Like the magazine he was fired from Young’s book is a mix of high-brow ideas presented with low brow appeal. The movie, however, tends to concentrate on the low brow.
The actors are well cast and fun to watch. Danny Huston is suitably oily as Lawrence Maddox, the unctuous editor of the magazine’s On the Town column; Jeff Bridges is effortless as the oddball publisher Harding; Dunst brings a frumpy appeal as the damaged love interest; Gillian Anderson is spot on as a manipulative publicist and Megan Fox ups the sex appeal of the character of starlet Sophie Maes, but this is Pegg’s movie.
As usual he is wonderfully watchable as the oafish Sidney Young (for some reason the author’s name was changed) and brings a great deal of charm to a character who should be unlovable in the extreme.
How to Lose Friends and Alienate People suffers for concentrating on the basic elements of the story—his oafish behaviour and the romance—sacrificing the juicy gossip and insight that made the book a best seller, but is saved by engaging performances from Pegg and Bridges and some funny, but cringe worthy moments that redefine social awkwardness.
