Posts Tagged ‘Jane Levy’

MONSTER TRUCKS: 0 STARS. “TODAY! TODAY! TODAY! The worst movie on four wheels!”

TODAY! TODAY! TODAY! The worst movie on four wheels! No adrenaline pumping action! “Monster Trucks!” We’ll sell you the whole seat… to make it easy to take a nap!

“Monster Trucks” begins when avaricious oil baron Reece Tenneson (Rob Lowe) insists on drilling through an underground water main to get to “the ocean of oil” that lies underneath despite the possibility of disturbing the life forms that may live down there. “If we keep this quiet will all do very well,” cackles Tenneson. His greed unleashes several strange creatures, sort of land squids with big googly eyes, whom he immediately orders destroyed.

On the other side of town Tripp (Lucas Till) is a curiously old high school student and scrap yard worker. He’s a blonde James Dean type, an outsider more comfortable around cars than people. When one of these creatures shows up at his junkyard he doesn’t set it free, nor does he call the authorities. After discovering oil is this tentacled creature’s mother’s milk, as any true grease monkey would do, he straps it to the underside of an old truck he’s been working on, using it as a super-charged engine, literally turning his old junker into a “monster truck.”

With the help of biology student Meredith (Jane Levy) and the creature—who Tripp inventively nicknames Creatch—our hero tries find out exactly where his oil-guzzling new friend came from.

Fittingly “Monster Trucks,” a movie about automobiles, is my first seatbelt movie of the year. It is a film so bad I needed to a seatbelt to keep me in my chair for the entire movie.

Forget that Tripp looks old enough to be his high school classmates’ hip guidance counsellor or that the sum total of the great Amy Smart’s role is advising her son what to eat for lunch or that a sea monster appears in the landlocked state of North Dakota. That stuff is bad enough, but the thing that really puts “Monster Trucks” on a collision course with the ditch is a complete lack of playfulness.

What might have been a fun action-adventure with a kid friendly sci fi twist is, instead, a collection of lame brained ideas that feel strung and in search of a heartwarming or interesting moment. “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial,” another alien movie, works not because we believe the little rubber alien is real but because we care about the way that Elliot, Gertie and Michael interact with him. Despite the presence of a rubber alien it feels authentic and not cobbled together by a marketing department.

When Tripp’s dad (Frank Whaley) says, “It’s like the earth got mad and let something bad out,” he may well have been speaking about this movie and not Creatch.

DON’T BREATHE: 4 STARS. “best bug-eyed acting in a horror film in some time.”

Half lit hallways and gloomy basements are standard backdrops for spooky stories. “Don’t Breathe” makes good use of them, playing on our primal fear of the dark in a topsy turvy home invasion story that sees the invaders terrorized by the man who was meant to be their victim.

Set in Detroit, the movie follows Alex (Dylan Minnette), Rocky (Jane Levy) and Money (Daniel Zovatto) as they hatch a plan to rob the house of a blind military vet (Stephen Lang). “I got our ticket outta here,” says Money. “Rumour is, this guy is sitting on at least three hundred K.” Their goal is to grab the stack of cash The Blind Man won in a wrongful death settlement when his only child was killed and hightail it to California to start new lives. Despite Alex’s reservations—“It’s pretty messed up to rob a blind guy, isnt’ it?”—the trio go to the man’s house on an abandoned block of the city’s downtown, drug the guard dog and search for the money. Their easy score proves elusive when their victim turns the table, and hunts them in the dark.

“Don’t Breathe” presents a conundrum. Who do you root for the bad people who broke into the house or the bad man who lives in the house? Either way, one thing is clear, you don’t need to be afraid of the dark, you need to be afraid of what’s in the dark. “Evil Dead” rebooter Fede Alvarez combines the primal scares that come along with claustrophobic, dark spaces with a weird anxiety inducing soundtrack a slow building sense a=of dread and some of the best bug-eyed acting I’ve seen in a horror film in some time to create a down-‘n-dirty horror flick.

From Lang sniffing, as though tracking his prey through scent to Levy’s large expressive eyes to the prerequisite gore—although the film gets more violent than clever near the end—“Don’t Breathe” is suspenseful and unpredictable, just like whatever is out there hiding in the dark.

Metro: Bang Bang Baby takes Jane Levy back to her singing, dancing roots

Screen Shot 2015-08-19 at 1.27.41 PMBy Richard Crouse – Metro Canada

Jane Levy has a diverse resume that includes the cable hit Shameless (where she dies in a most fiery way), the sitcom Suburgatory and the 2013 remake of Evil Dead. But her new film, Bang Bang Baby takes her back to where she began: singing and dancing.

“I did musical theatre, mostly because it was the only theatre available, not to say anything negative about that, but I wanted to be an actor. I loved drama and that was the way to do it so I was in all the plays. I was in Annie. I was in Oklahoma. I was in Annie Get Your Gun and The Wizard of Oz,” When she was seven years old the California native recalls about her seven -year-old self.

She warbled her way through Broadway-style shows until she was about thirteen when she traded the stage for the soccer field. It took a few years but eventually she felt a familiar draw.

“I was eighteen and I just finished my first year of college and I hated school,” she says. “I was miserable the whole year and I couldn’t quite figure out why.

“I was in Europe with my friend and I said, ‘You know what? I’m not going to do it anymore. I’m not going to school. Why not pursue the thing that I know has always been, deep down, my dream?’”

She’s back to basics in Bang Bang Baby, a strange new big screen sci-fi musical that gives her the chance to strut her stuff. In it, she plays Stepphy, a 1960s teenager whose dreams of rock ’n’ roll stardom are dashed when a chemical leak in her town causes mass mutations and “threatens to turn her dream into a nightmare.”

When she first saw the script she says, “I thought, how cool and how strange. I thought it would be a challenge to explore singing and dancing which is something I had done as a kid but not since. And I also thought how unusual, how peculiar, how fun.”

Levy has a whole slate of films on the way, including the much-anticipated animated movie Monster Trucks, but the best part of it all, she says, is that she is able to act in a variety of projects.

“For me, I feel like this is the thing I have to do. This is the thing I enjoy the most and this is the thing I’m best at.”

a look at this year’s crop of potential crowd pleasers at the festival.

Maps-To-The-Stars-1000x625By Richard Crouse & Mark Breslin – Metro Reel Guys

Metro’s Reel Guys columnists Richard Crouse and Mark Breslin take a look at this year’s crop of potential crowd pleasers at the festival.

Richard: Mark, every year I look forward to covering the festival with a mix of dread and anticipation. The dread part comes from knowing how I’m going to feel once the 10 days of 18-hour shifts is finally over. The drooling anticipation part comes along with the slate of films TIFF offers up. This year the new David Cronenberg film is top of my list. In Maps to the Stars, he showcases the stupid, venal and stratospherically self-involved behaviour that goes on behind the scenes in Beverly Hills’ gated communities. The idea of debuting a jaundiced look at Hollywood at the biggest film festival in North America appeals to my rebellious side.

Mark: Can’t wait, Richard, for this or any other Cronenberg! I’m also a big fan of Jason Reitman, who consistently delivers movies that plumb the abyss of the zeitgeist. His latest, Men, Women, and Children, should be no exception. Based on one of my favourite novels by Chad Kultgen, it’s a look at how the Internet is warping families, twisting our sexuality and mediating our desires. Oh, and it’s a comedy.

RC: Mark, the sci-fi musical genre has been sadly overlooked at TIFF in past years. That changes with Bang Bang Baby, starring Jane Levy as a 1960s teenager whose dreams of rock ’n’ roll stardom are dashed when a chemical leak in her town causes mass mutations and “threatens to turn her dream into a nightmare.” Then there’s The Editor, a giallo-comedy tribute to the films of Mario Bava and Dario Argento about a one-handed film editor who becomes the prime suspect in a brutal series of murders.

MB: Sounds great, Richard! I’ll stand in line to see the new Denys Arcand film, An Eye For Beauty. Here’s a director not afraid to take a satirical look at our modern mores, but he’s never tackled a love story before. Some of it takes place in Toronto, so I’m expecting a sly gimlet-eyed view from this great Québécois director.

RC: Speaking of great Québécois directors, Jean-Marc Vallée, the Canadian Oscar nominee for Dallas Buyers Club, returns to TIFF with Wild, starring Reese Witherspoon in the story of a woman who finds an escape from her self-destructive ways on a 1,100-mile solo hike along the Pacific Crest Trail. I’m also psyched about Haemoo. With a script by Snowpiercer penner Bong Joon-ho, this movie about a fishing crew smuggling illegal immigrants from China to Korea promises wild action and unexpected thrills.

MB: Richard, do you realize all our picks inadvertently turned out to be Canadian directors? I’m looking forward to Black and White by Mike Binder. It promises to be a heartfelt drama about an interracial family with issues. Binder is from Detroit but went to summer camp in Muskoka, so he qualifies as an honorary Canuck.

ABOUT ALEX: 2 ½ STARS. “leans heavily on ‘The Big Chill’ for its basic structure.”

“You know what this is like?” asks Sarah (Aubrey Plaza) in the new dramedy “About Alex.” “It’s like one of those 80s movies with a big group of people.”

Bang on Sarah. In fact, it’s exactly like ”The Big Chill” with new names and faces.

The movie begins with the title character Alex (Jason Ritter) soaking in a tub, texting a Romeo & Juliet quote– “ask for me tomorrow, and you shall find me a grave man.”—to his friends before taking a razor blade to his wrists. The news of his suicide attempt quickly spread to his closest, although mostly estranged, friends from college.

Coming together in an upstate New York house to support and comfort their old friend each brings with them their own issues.

Sarah is insecure, stuck living in the past. Ben and Siri (Nate Parker and Maggie Grace) have been together for years, but may be torn apart by job opportunities on opposite coasts, while Isaac’s (Max Minghella) young girlfriend Kate (Jane Levy) is an unwelcome newcomer in this group while Josh’s (Max Greenfield) abrasiveness is the sand in the Vaseline that opens old wounds.

“About Alex” leans heavily on “The Big Chill” and similar college-reunion movies for its basic structure, but ups the navel-gazing quotient. These aren’t the self-obsessed Boomers of yesteryear, they’re the self-reflective Millennials of today. Faced with uncertain futures and an unsettled present. Not too different from their cinematic predecessors, but their reactions to their situation isn’t formed by the turbulent 1960s or the Vietnam War but by social media filtered through a quarter-life crisis.

Much of cultural the substance of “After Alex” is keenly observed by the engaging cast–“[People] don’t talk about anything [today], says Josh. “They just reference things. ‘I had a great weekend. I went to this wedding. It was a lot like Wedding Crashers, but meets Memento.”—but as good as the performances are, by the end of the film the story descends into melodrama which underscores the overall unoriginality of the script.