Richard joins CP24 to have a look at new movies coming to VOD, streaming services and theatres including Steven Spielberg’s finger-snapping remake of “West Side Story,” the Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence satire “Don’t Look Up” and the story of one very bad week in the lives of Lucy and Desi in “Being the Ricardos.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
Richard joins Jim Richards and guest host Tamara Cherry of the NewsTalk 1010 afternoon show The Rush for Booze and Reviews! Today they play a round of Did Richard Crouse Like These Movies? We review Steven Spielberg’s finger-snapping remake of “West Side Story,” the Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence satire “Don’t Look Up” and the story of one very bad week in the lives of Lucy and Desi in “Being the Ricardos.” For the boozy portion of the show we talk about the drink “Sex and the City” made famous.
Listen to the whole thing HERE!
Richard joins CTV NewsChannel and anchor Akshay Tandon to have a look at new movies coming to VOD, streaming services and theatres including Steven Spielberg’s remake of West Side Story, the star-studded “Don’t Look Up” and the story of one very bad week in the lives of Lucy and Desi in “Being the Ricardos.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
Richard sits in on the CFRA Ottawa morning show with host Bill Carroll to talk the new movies coming to theatres, VOD and streaming services including Steven Spielberg’s remake of West Side Story, the star-studded “Don’t Look Up” and the story of one very bad week in the lives of Lucy and Desi in “Being the Ricardos.”
Listen to the whole thing HERE!
Movies about giant things hurdling through space toward Earth are almost as plentiful as the stars in the sky. “Armageddon,” “Deep Impact” and “Judgment Day” all pose end-of-the-world scenarios but none have the satirical edge of “Don’t Look Up.” The darkly comedic movie, now in theatres but coming soon to Netflix, paints a grim, on-the-nose picture of how the world responds to a crisis.
Jennifer Lawrence is PhD candidate Dr. Kate Dibiasky, a student astronomer who discovers a comet the size of Mount Everest aimed directly at our planet. Her professor, Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio), comes to the alarming conclusion that the comet will collide with Earth in six months and fourteen days in what he calls an “extinction level event.”
They take their concerns to NASA and the White House, but are met with President Janie Orlean’s (Meryl Streep) concerns about optics, costs and the up-coming mid-term elections. “The timing is just disastrous,” she says. “Let’s sit tight and assess.”
With the clock ticking to total destruction Dibiasky and Mindy go public, but their dire warnings on the perky news show “The Rip”—“We keep the bad news light!”—go unheeded. Social media focusses on Dibiasky’s panic, creating memes of her face, while dubbing Mindy the Bedroom Eyed Doomsday Prophet.
As the comet hurdles toward Earth the world becomes divided between those willing to Look Up and do something about the incoming disaster and the deniers who think that scientists “want you to look up because they are looking down their noses at you.”
Chaos breaks out, and the division widens as the comet closes in on its target.
It is not difficult to find parallels between the events in “Don’t Look Up” and recent world occurrences. Director and co-writer Adam McKay explores the reaction to world affairs through a lens of Fake News, clickbait journalism, skepticism of science, political spin and social media gone amok. In fact, the topics McKay hits on don’t really play like satire at all. The social media outrage, bizarro-land decisions made by people in high offices and the influence of tech companies all sound very real world, ripped out of today’s newspapers.
It’s timely, but perhaps too timely. Social satire is important, and popular—“Saturday Night Live” has done it successfully for decades—but “Don’t Look Up,” while brimming with good ideas, often feels like an overkill of familiarity. The comet is fiction, at least I hope it is, but the reaction to it and the on-coming catastrophe feels like something I might see on Twitter just before the lights go down in the theatre.
It feels a little too real to be pure satire. There are laughs throughout, but it’s the serious questions that resonate. When Mindy, on TV having his “Network” moment, rages, “What the hell happened to us? What have we done to ourselves and how do we fix it?” the movie becomes a beacon. The satire is comes easily—let’s face it, the world is full of easy targets—but it’s the asking of hard questions and in the frustration of a world gone mad, when McKay’s point that we’re broken and don’t appreciate the world around us, shines through.
Despite big glitzy Hollywood names above the title and many laugh lines, “Don’t Look Up” isn’t escapism. It’s a serious movie that aims to entertain but really wants to make you think.
Richard sits in on the CFRA Ottawa morning show with host Bill Carroll to talk the new movies coming to VOD and streaming services including the new Kevin Bacon psychological thriller “You Should Have Left,” the Heather Graham family drama “The Rest of Us,” the “Showgirls” rethink “You Don’t Nomi” and “Mr. Jones,” the true-life story of one journalist’s journey to tell the truth.
Listen to the whole thing HERE!
The title “You Don’t Nomi” is a pun based on the name of the character played by Elizabeth Berkley in the notorious movie “Showgirls.” A new documentary by Jeffrey McHale, now on VOD, digs deep into a movie “New York Times” critic Janet Maslin called a “bare-butted bore” in 1995 but has since been given a critical reassessment. “I don’t think we’re done with it,” says writer Haley Mlotek, “because I don’t think we know what it means as a film.”
For the initiated “Showgirls” is a big-budget “erotic drama”—one writer called it a “$40 million stag party”—penned by Joe Eszterhas and directed by Paul Verhoeven, the team behind “Basic Instinct.” It’s the tawdry tale of Polly Ann Costello, a.k.a. Nomi Malone (Elizabeth Berkley), a young drifter who will do almost anything (or anyone) to become a star as a Las Vegas showgirl.
It was meant to be Berkley’s move to adult roles after finding fame on the squeaky-clean kiddie sitcom “Saved by the Bell.” Instead, the over-the-top film was savaged by critics, dismissed as misogynistic by audiences, protested by LGBTQ groups as it became an albatross around the Berkley’s boa clad neck.
Using clips aplenty from Verhoeven’s film and the disembodied voices of film critics and academics, “You Don’t Nomi” aims to reexamine the perceived wisdom about the film. Is it a terrible joke, a campy “All About Eve” or is it a misunderstood masterpiece?
The truth is that it is probably somewhere in the middle of those two extremes. “Showgirls” superfan and critic Adam Nayman offers up a compelling breakdown of Verhoeven’s visual style dispelling early criticism of the film as a poorly made exploitation flick. It may be exploitive, but it is not poorly made. Other voices chimes in, some dissenting but most leaning toward the film as an exercise in maximal cinema. One critic suggests that if we brush aside any expectation of realism or naturalism and the movie takes on a new life as a hyper-stylized kind of filmmaking.
“It’s completely singular,” says another. “Like nothing else.”
Poet Jeffrey Conway likens the film to camp classics like “Valley of the Dolls” and “Mommie Dearest,” movies that are “impossibly bad and impossibly thrilling at the same time.”
As a clever assemblage of clips and opinion “You Don’t Nomi” is entertaining and may make you want to revisit the film’s sleazy milieu, but it feels more like a DVD extra for a new, deluxe “Showgirls” release than a feature doc.
A weekly feature from from ctvnews.ca! The Crouse Review is a quick, hot take on the weekend’s biggest movies! This week Richard looks at “Fifty Shades Freed,” “Permission” with Rebecca Hall and the meta-movie romance “Entanglement.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
Richard and CP24 anchor Nathan Downer have a look at the weekend’s new movies including the continuing and endless erotic (ish) adventure of the “Fifty Shades Freed” gang, the sorta-kinda-rom-com “Permission” with Rebecca Hall, the meta-movie romance “Entanglement” and the mockumentary “Fake Blood.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
