On the Saturday October 19, 2024 episode of The Richard Crouse Show we’ll meet director Ali Abbasi. His film “The Apprentice,” which is now playing in theatres, is a controversial coming-of-age look at Donald Trump’s early years under the mentorship of lawyer Roy Cohn. It paints a picture of the future president of the United States as an ambitious, if slightly awkward guy, who came to believe that there are only two kinds of people in the world, “killers and losers.” Ali Abbasi joined me on the phone to discuss his six year journey to getting this film made and released and much more.
Then, Elijah Wood stops by. He began his career as a child actor, appearing in everything from “Back to the Future II” to “Internal Affairs” opposite Richard Gere. He became an international star after playing Frodo Baggins in the acclaimed “Lord of the Rings” trilogy. His extensive filmography now includes “Bookworm,” an intriguing film about a 12-year-old named Mildred whose life is turned upside down when her mother lands in hospital and estranged, American magician father, Strawn Wise, played by Elijah Wood, comes to look after her. Hoping to entertain the bookish tween, Strawn takes Mildred camping in the notoriously rugged New Zealand wilderness, and the pair embark on the ultimate test of family bonding — a quest to find the mythological beast known as the Canterbury Panther. It’s a lovely film and it was lovely to speak with Elijah Wood about it and his secret regarding “Lord of the Rings.”
Finally, we’ll meet Jenny Heijun Wills. She was born in Seoul, South Korea, raised in Southern Ontario, and currently lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba. She is the author of Older Sister. “Not Necessarily Related.: A Memoir.” As a self-described transnational and transracial adoptee, she has spent her life navigating the space between ethnicity and belonging, a subject she tackles in her new book “Everything and Nothing at All.”
Each week on the nationally syndicated Richard Crouse Show, Canada’s most recognized movie critic brings together some of the most interesting and opinionated people from the movies, television and music to put a fresh spin on news from the world of lifestyle and pop-culture. Tune into this show to hear in-depth interviews with actors and directors, to find out what’s going on behind the scenes of your favourite shows and movies and get a new take on current trends. Recent guests include Chris Pratt, Elvis Costello, Baz Luhrmann, Martin Freeman, David Cronenberg, Mayim Bialik, The Kids in the Hall and many more!
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I appear on “CTV News at 11:30” with anchor Andria Case to talk about the best movies and television to watch this weekend, including the origin story “The Apprentice” and the series “English Teacher” on Amazon Prime.
I sit in with hosts Jim Richards and Deb Hutton on NewsTalk 1010 to play the game “Did Richard Crouse Like This?” This week we talk about the Pharrell Williams Lego music doc “Piece by Piece,” the crime thriller “Woman of the Hour” and the origin story “The Apprentice.”
I sit in on the CFRA Ottawa morning show with host Bill Carroll to talk the new movies coming to theatres and streaming including the Pharrell Williams Lego music doc “Piece by Piece,” the crime thriller “Woman of the Hour” and the origin story “The Apprentice.”
I join the CTV NewsChannel anchor Akshay Tandon to talk about the Pharrell Williams Lego music doc “Piece by Piece,” the crime thriller “Woman of the Hour” and the origin story “The Apprentice.”
SYNOPSIS: “The Apprentice,” the controversial coming-of-age look at Donald Trump’s early years under the mentorship of lawyer Roy Cohn, now playing in theatres, paints a picture of the future president of the United States as an ambitious, if slightly awkward guy, who came to believe that there are only two kinds of people in the world, “killers and losers.”
CAST: Sebastian Stan, Jeremy Strong, Maria Bakalova, Martin Donovan, Gabriel Sherman. Directed by Ali Abbasi.
REVIEW: In 1972 photographer Robert Frank was given carte blanch to follo and film The Rolling Stones on their American tour. The result was “Cocksucker Blues,” a film deemed unleasable by the band, but not because of the overwhelming amount of sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll on display. Rumor has it the band banned the film because Frank unblinkingly showed the tedium of life on the road and revealed the real lives of the band members.
It’s hardly the high glam life that would be expected from the “World’s Greatest Rock and Roll Band,” although these are the scenes that humanize the group and put a pinprick in the bubble of fame that surrounded the Stones in their glory days.
Director Jim Jarmusch said, “It makes you think that being a rock star is one of the last things you’d ever want to do.”
I mention all this because I think there is a correlation between “Cocksucker Blues” and “The Apprentice.” The Trump campaign unsuccessfully worked to suppress this film, and I would guess—and that’s all this is—they wanted it shelved not because of the harder edged portrait of Trump in the film’s second half, which falls in line with the candidate’s strongman image, but because of the softer, more humanist tone of the first hour.
When we first meet Trump (Sebastian Stan) he’s a desperate man, going door-to-door in his father’s buildings to collect rents from tenants who clearly loathe him, a lawsuit looms that could potentially bankrupt the Trump family and his brother Freddy is a drunk who is slowly losing his battle with the bottle.
Enter Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), a lawyer Trump affectionately calls “evil incarnate.” The prosecutor in the espionage trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy’s investigations of suspected communists, he had a fearsome take-no-prisoners reputation. The closeted lawyer took Trump under his wing, greasing the wheels for him socially and professionally in 1970s New York City.
“You’re the client,” says Cohn, “but you work for me. You do what I say, when I say.”
The ambitious Trump begins as a lump of clay but is soon molded into an effigy of Roy Cohn, merciless in business and in life.
“The Apprentice” is several things. It’s the making of a monster. It’s a story of unchecked ambition. It’s a cautionary tale. It’s a period piece of New York City in the go-go 1980s.
Mostly though, it’s an entertaining character study of one of the world’s most famous people that comes with the good, the bad and the ugly.
The good? Stan, who (mostly) avoids doing an “SNL” style Trump caricature. In the last hour, when he has absorbed Cohn’s lessons and the student has surpassed the master, he’s recognizably Trump.
Before that, he is more fully rounded as a character. There are flashes of compassion when he interacts with Freddy, frustration at being under his father’s thumb and vulnerability. When he becomes the blustery Trump we’re more familiar with, it becomes less interesting, but still avoids imitation.
As Cohn, Strong is serpentine, to the point of predatorially flicking his tongue. Eyelids at half mast, he exudes maximum confidence in his ability to control every situation. When the tide turns for him, Strong manages to create empathy for a character who never had any in real life. When he complains to Trump that “he’s lost the last trace of decency you ever had,” the words hit hard.
The bad? While Maria Bakalova, who plays Trump’s first wife Ivana, is credible in the role, it feels a bit cheeky to cast her, given her headlining encounter with Trump associate Rudy Giuliani in “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm.”
The ugly? The casual venality on display. It’s the kind that powerful people use to intimidate and control the people in their lives, and it is gruesome. It’s an ugly glimpse into the halls of power where cold-blooded mercenaries like Cohn will do anything to win.
There’s also a graphic and cruel scene of sexual assault, unflinchingly captured by director Ali Abbasi’s camera.
Donald Trump dismisses “The Apprentice” as “pure fiction” and for sure it isn’t the whole truth and nothing but the truth. An opening title card acknowledges that, announcing that “some events have been fictionalized for dramatic effect,” but it does capture the tenor of the times and the dynamic between Trump and Cohn. It’s an origin story, and while you may not learn anything new, it paints a potent picture of pure ambition run amok.
You do not exit “The Zone of Interest,” the latest from director Jonathan Glazer, now playing in theatres, with the words, “I really enjoyed that,” spilling from your lips. Loosely based on the 2014 novel of the same name by Martin Amis, it is a study of the banality of evil that is unsettlingly ordinary and hauntingly uncomfortable.
A largely plotless, slice-of-life of the comings and goings of Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) and with his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), “Zone of Interest” paints a picture of a typical family.
Set in 1943, Hedwig runs the house, raises their five kids, with the help of nannies and maids, and tends to the couple’s gardens. Rudolf works next door as the Commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp. As the kids play in their large yard, swim in the pool and have friends over for birthday parties, in the background the unimaginable horrors of the camp can be heard. The cries of anguish, gun shots and barked orders fall on deaf ears in the Höss household, where life goes on as normal.
Höss’s facility at delivering death earns him promotions, which threaten to uproot his family from their beloved country home to the mean streets of Berlin. Showing the kind of concern for his family he could never muster for his victims, the Commandant arranges for his Hedwig and the kids to remain in the house while he is on the road, laying the roadmap for Operation Höss in which 430,000 Hungarian Jews were killed in 56 days.
Director Glazer never goes inside the camp. Instead, he focusses his camera, by and large, on the family. The disconnect between the imagery—smiling children in the pool, Hedwig and her mother lounging in the guest bedroom—and the sounds emanating from the camp, is devastating.
Composer Mica Levy’s score is confined to the beginning and end, with only an additional burst of music here and there. The absence of music becomes deafening, forcing the ear to focus on the brutality we can hear but not see.
It harkens back to old horror movies like Val Lewton’s “Cat People,” which understood that it’s the things you cannot see, that you must be forced to imagine, that will have the greatest impact. Glazer knows whatever we think is happening on the other side of the wall between the house and the camp, will be worse than anything he could show us. “The Zone of Interest” presents an intellectual atrocity that burrows into the brain and will not soon be forgotten.
“The Zone of Interest” is a singular film. Confident in its uneasy, experimental execution, unblinking in its representation of the facilitation of evil, it isn’t an easy watch, but will resonate long after the end credits have rolled.
“The Courier,” a new Benedict Cumberbatch Cold War drama now on PVOD, is the mostly true tale of how an unassuming British businessman helped prevent World War III. “You must convince them you are an ordinary businessman,” he is told, “and nothing more than an ordinary businessman.”
Set in 1962, Cumberbatch is Greville Wynne, a buttoned-down Brit chosen by a joint task force, CIA agent Emily Donovan (Rachel Brosnahan) and MI6’s Bertrand (Anton Lesser), to go undercover and act as a courier between them and Soviet officer Oleg Penkovsky (Merab Ninidze). Wynne’s down-to-earth manner and the fact that he already was doing business in Eastern Europe made him a perfect undercover agent.
As presented, the job was simple. Travel to Moscow under the pretense of work, up a package from Penkovsky and return home. Of course, international intrigue is never that easy, particularly when the information they are passing back and forth is related to preventing a nuclear confrontation.
When the Americans learn that Russia has positioned nuclear warheads on Cuba it becomes a race to get Penkovsky to safety. Out of a sense of loyalty to his business partner-turned-friend, Wynne volunteers to make one more trip to Russia.
“The Courier” is an old-fashioned espionage drama that is more about relationships than it is about James Bond style antics. Loyalty, betrayal and forgiveness go hand-in-hand in the complicated game of making the world a safer place and it is in its portrayal of those qualities that “The Courier” shines.
Wynne has several important relationships in the film. There is his wife, Jessie Buckley bringing much to an underwritten role, and his handler Emily, but it is with Penkovsky that he truly bonds. Trust forms over dinners and even at the ballet, but it is their shared desire to prevent a war that binds them.
Cumberbatch brings much to the role, allowing true feelings to slip past Wynne’s stiff-upper-lip. It’s subtle yet commanding work that steers the film past its grey-ish, icy façade to a place where the cloak-and-dagger story becomes driven by feelings and not intrigue.
Cumberbatch‘s wouldn’t be nearly as effective if he didn’t have such a strong actor playing Penkovsky. Ninidze plays the Russian as an idealogue, a man convinced his country is playing a very dangerous game with the world, It’s a quietly powerful performance, one where what he doesn’t say is as important as what he does say. Ninidze nails it, playing a man whose every move could have massive consequences for him and his family.
“The Courier” is a welcome addition to the Cold War genre.
On the Saturday October 19, 2024 episode of The Richard Crouse Show we’ll meet director Ali Abbasi. His film “The Apprentice,” which is now playing in theatres, is a controversial coming-of-age look at Donald Trump’s early years under the mentorship of lawyer Roy Cohn. It paints a picture of the future president of the United States as an ambitious, if slightly awkward guy, who came to believe that there are only two kinds of people in the world, “killers and losers.” Ali Abbasi joined me on the phone to discuss his six year journey to getting this film made and released and much more.
