Posts Tagged ‘Homeland’

CTV NEWSCHANNEL: RICHARD ON WHO WAS NOMINATED FOR EMMYS

Screen Shot 2016-07-14 at 1.04.38 PMRichard sits in with CTV NewsChannel’s Merella Fernandez to chat about the morning’s Emmy nominations, who was snubbed and who will win!

Watch the whole thing HERE!

CTV NEWSCHANNEL: RICHARD ON WHO SHOULD BE NOMINATED FOR EMMYS

Screen Shot 2016-07-14 at 1.01.52 PMRichard sits in with Marcia McMillan to discuss the upcoming Emmy Award nominations. Who will earn a nod? Click to find out!

Watch the whole thing HERE!

WISH I WAS HERE: 2 ½ STARS. “plays like two movies in one.”

zach-braff-wish-i-was-hereIn a recent interview Mel Gibson said he’s out of the business of financing his own films because, “I’m not a fool.”

Neither is Zach Braff.

Both must be worth big bucks—Gibson from the movies, Braff from starring on 175 episodes of “Scrubs”—and could likely use some of their own capital to make their own movies but Gibson says he’s out of the game completely while Braff used the popular crowd sourcing site Kickstarter to raise money for his latest.

“Wish I Was Here” is part of the small—but growing—trend of celebrity driven films paid for by contributions from the general public. The almost-mid-life crisis story raised $2 million in just forty eight hours (ultimately procuring $3.1 million of a reported $5.5 million budget), attracted an all-star cast—Kate Hudson, “Frozen’s” Josh Gad, Mandy Patinkin and “The Big Bang Theory’s” Jim Parson—and some backlash from critics who felt that crowdsourcing should be left for artists who aren’t also starring in giant Disney movies.

Fact is, “Wish I Was Here’s” backstory is a bit more interesting than the story on the screen.

Braff plays Aidan, an underemployed actor whose life is unraveling. His kids are about to be kicked out of Hebrew school because his father (Patinkin), who has been paying the bills, has been diagnosed with cancer and can no longer afford the monthly payment. His wife Sarah (Hudson) is supportive of his acting dream but nearing the end of her tether. Brother Noah (Gadd) prefers cos play over actual emotions and his two kids (Joey King and Pierce Gagnon) are maturing faster than he is.

“Wish I Was Here” plays like two movies. The first forty-five minutes is a cleverly written comedic look at Aidan as a manboy with far more responsibility than he can handle. It’s ripe with gentle character based laughs that emerge from the situations and don’t feel forced.

It’s only in the second half when Braff (who co-wrote the script with his brother Adam) allows sentiment to get in the way of the movie’s momentum. Despite Patinkin’s line, “Eventually when things get tragic enough they circle back to comedy,” the final forty-five minutes, which deal with the loss of Aidan’s father, takes a darker tone. That’s OK, life sometimes changes on a dime, but the cleverness of the set-up is replaced with mawkishness.

Sometimes it works. Hudson’s heartfelt “tell your sons you love them” speech to her-father-in-law is shot simply with lingering close-ups on the actor’s faces. The scene has an intimate in-the-moment feel and is very moving.

Less so is Gadd’s big moment, (VERY MILD SPOILER ALERT), a Comic Con sequence that is a bit too quirky to fit the tone of the film that surrounds it.

By the end credits the movie worked for me more often than not, but I wished that there were fewer clunky moments. For every scene that rings emotionally true—and there are quite a few of them—there is another that feels forced. The beauty of “Wish I Was Here” lies in the former, and certainly not in the passages that feel left over from another, lesser quirky indie comedy.

Tracy Letts: the hyphenate actor-writer-producer-Pulitzer-Prize-winner

Variety Awards Studio - Day 2

By Richard Crouse In Focus – Metro Canada

Hollywood is full of hyphenates, the kind of people who introduce themselves as a model-actor-writer-waiter-personal-trainer-dog-walker.

Lately there is one Tinsel Town citizen, however, who has actually earned every word in his hyphenated title.

Tracy Letts is an actor-writer-producer-Pulitzer-Prize-winner who is going to have to get longer business cards if he gets any more successful. You may not recognize the name unless you pay attention to the end credits of Homeland (he plays Senator Andrew Lockhart on the popular show) or if you know who won the 2013 Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?.

He’s a multi-talent with a shelf of awards, some heavyweight acting credits and a new movie screenplay on his resume.

His latest project, the script for August: Osage County, puts words into the mouths of some of the biggest stars in Hollywood. The film brings together the Weston sisters, Barbara (Julia Roberts), Karen (Juliette Lewis) and Ivy (Julianne Nicholson) with their pill-popping mommy-dearest Violet (Meryl Streep).

As a writer Letts says inspiration came from Tennessee Williams, William Faulkner and Jim Thompson, which might explain the dark vein that runs through his work.

How twisted are his plays? “Everybody in Tracy’s stories gets naked or dead,” says his mom, author Billie Letts.

Tracy jokingly says that his mother is “a liar” for saying that, pointing out that “not all of the people in my plays wind up naked or dead.”

Still there is no denying that his screenplay for Killer Joe, the 2011 Matthew McConaughey thriller, is written with what Roger Ebert called, “merciless black humor.” The story of a corrupt cop and a bad insurance claim earned critical praise even if the Women Film Critics Circle cited the film for its presentation of what they called “the worst female and male images” of the year.

According to Entertainment Weekly his script for Bug, starring Ashley Judd and Michael Shannon as a lonely woman and unhinged war veteran trapped in a bug infested Oklahoma motel room, contains an “enjoyably icky heart.”

Tracy Letts seems willing to take on any challenge to add to his hyphenate status. There’s just one thing you can’t ask him to do. “I don’t act in the stuff that I write,” he says. “I have no interest in doing that.”