Romance and ‘roid rage collide in “Love Lies Bleeding,” a pulpy new romp starring Kristen Stewart, now playing in theatres.
Set in 1989, Stewart is Lou, a loner who works at Crater Gym, a rundown fitness center owned by her estranged father Lou Sr (Ede Harris). When she isn’t fixing plugged toilets at the gym, she listens to How to Quit Smoking cassette tapes while inhaling deeply on cigarettes and helps her sister (Jena Malone) and abusive brother-in-law JJ (Dave Franco) look after their kids.
When ambitious bodybuilding drifter Jackie (Katy O’Brian) blows into town, on a quick pitstop on her way to a Vegas bodybuilding competition, she falls hard for Lou. But will a sudden, violent chain of events get in the way of their love and bodybuilding glory?
“Love Lies Bleeding” is a squirmy, no-holds-barred hybrid of crime thriller, family drama, psychological study and LGBTQ2S+ romance. Director Rose Glass entertainingly juggles the various elements, and isn’t afraid to shock and amuse the audience with audacious breaks from reality. No spoilers here, but the visualization of the protective power of love is eye-popping, funny and, if you are willing to take an artistic leap, really effective.
Stewart is a brooding character whose actions are governed by new love and some old habits (again, no spoilers here). She’s a jumble of rough edges, but underneath her sneering facade is a warm, beating heart, open to those brave enough to get close. As the situation around her spins out of control, old instincts arise, and Lou morphs from taciturn gym worker to a dynamo fueled by anger and lust.
O’Brian plays Jackie as a fit and toned archetype, a drifter with a past and maybe not much of a future. Glass cleverly uses the traits of Jackie’s bodybuilding—the bulging muscles, popping veins shot in extreme close-ups—as a metaphor for the rage that bubbles just underneath her carefully sculpted physique.
The chemistry between them lies at the heart of the success of the film and yet, Anna Baryshnikov (dancer Mikhail’s daughter) as the messy Daisy manages to steal every scene she appears in. As a young woman with an unrequited love for Lou, she is a catalyst for some of the film’s chaos, with a baby voice and some strange, but kinda sweet, energy that almost makes you feel bad for her. Almost, but not quite.
“Love Lies Bleeding” is a bloody and brutal twist on the neo noir that harkens back to films like “Wild at Heart” and early Coen bros. It comes equipped with a scruffy looking Ed Harris, some shocking violence, but also an attitude. It is a wild and occasionally thrilling ride that plays into old crime story tropes with fresh and fun execution.
This week on the Richard Crouse Show Podcast we meet Jena Malone. She is a Golden Globe nominated actress known for her roles in “The Hunger Games” franchise and “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.” She returns to theatres and VOD in the critically acclaimed film “Lorelei.” The gritty story of a man released from prison after 15 years who reunites with his high school girlfriend, who is now a single mother of three, has been called a “moving character study” and that contains some of Jena Malone’s best work.
We’ll also meet author and a journalist Omar El Akkad. His novel “American War” was an international best seller that has been translated into thirteen languages. He returns to the best seller charts with “What Strange Paradise,” a new book that looks at the global refugee crisis through the eyes of a child.
Finally we chat with Spinmaster President, Jennifer Dodge. She’s the producer of “Paw Patrol: The Movie” and has been a part of the Paw brand since the beginning.
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 Ethan Hawke, director Brad Bird, comedian Gilbert Gottfried, Eric Roberts, Brian Henson, Jonathan Goldsmith a.k.a. “The most interesting man in the world,” and best selling author Linwood Barclay.
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A gritty story of second chances, “Lorelei,” starring Jena Malone and Pablo Schreiber and now on VOD, pulls career high performances from its veteran leads.
Schreiber plays Wayland, a biker fresh out of prison after a fifteen-year stint for armed robbery. He kept his mouth shut, didn’t implicate any of his brothers and is welcomed warmly back into the fold. But the next day when he reconnects with Lola (Malone), his childhood sweetheart, he sees a way out of his old life.
They reconnect over drinks, and soon Wayland moves in with Lola and her three kids, Demin (Parker Pascoe-Sheppard), Dodger (Chancellor Perry) and Periwinkle (Amelia Borgerding), all named after different shades of blue. “Time goes fast,” she says. “Not in prison,” he replies. His readjustment into civilian life is rocky, despite his best efforts at holding a job and parenting Lola’s kids.
Money is tight and the lure of his old ways looms and as tensions rise at home, Lola attempts to fulfill a dream they had when they were young. Before prison. Before the kids. Before life’s curveballs.
“Lorelei” could easily have fallen into stereotypes, but director Sabrina Doyle avoids poverty porn to provide an authentic portrait of people struggling to keep their heads above water. The entire movie is on simmer, threatening to boil over at any moments, but the chaotic chemistry Malone and Schreiber keep the relationship interesting. Completing the picture are very strong performances from the kids, all newcomers, who provide the film’s best reason to care about the action on screen. Issues of gender identity and race within the children are handled with sensitivity and realism.
“Lorelei” was produced by the folks behind “The Florida Project,” another slice-of-life movie, ripe with struggle and strife. Like that Oscar nominated film, it shifts from pragmatism to whimsy in the third act, capping the gritty story of second chances with an endearing ending.
There is music in “Stardust,” the new David Bowie biopic starring Johnny Flynn, in theaters and digital and on-demand platforms. Unfortunately, none of it is David Bowie’s music.
The year is 1971, a year before David Bowie (Flynn) achieved superstardom with “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.” He’s a one hit wonder with little support from his record label and a new record languishing on the charts. “I need you to give me a song I can sell,” says manager Tony Defries (Julian Richings). “If you can’t do that, I need you to give me a person I can sell.”
Sent on a low-budget promo tour of the United State, the singer arrives with a suitcase filled with stage wear—“That’s a man’s dress actually,” he tells a nosy customs official—but no work visa. “With the paperwork you have all you can do is talk,” he’s told by his American contact, Mercury Records publicist Ron Oberman (Marc Maron) as they hop into Oberman’s wood panel station wagon and head off to try and create a buzz for an obscure artist who thinks of himself as filling “the gap between Elvis and Dylan.”
Oberman skirts the rules and finds the odd (emphasis on odd) gig for his client. In one of the film’s desperate attempts to avoid playing Bowie’s music, Oberman arranges a show at a vacuum cleaner sales conference. In front of a disinterested crowd the singer strums “Good Ol’ Jane,” a Velvet Underground sound-a-like song written for the film.
The odd couple stay the course, crisscrossing the country. Between shows, arguments and the occasional press interview Bowie formulates his breakthrough image, the androgynous glam rock star Ziggy Stardust.
“Stardust” isn’t a terrible movie but it also isn’t, as advertised, a David Bowie biopic. The first words we see on screen are “What follows is mostly fiction,” and while I realize that biographies must take liberties, I thought the movie lacked the thing that was at the core of Bowie’s life and work, and that’s originality. “Stardust” is a startlingly conventional movie about a man who was anything but. The film is a generic artist coming-of-age story with dialogue that feels borrowed from other show biz flicks—”I think you’re going to be the biggest star in America,” Oberman gushes at one point.—and music that in no way hints at the revolutionary sounds percolating in Bowie’s head. You wonder why director Gabriel Range, who co-wrote the script with Christopher Bell didn’t fictionalize the story à la “Velvet Goldmine,” and create a whole new world to explore.
With no access to Bowie’s music—the musician’s estate denied Range the rights to the tunes—“Stardust” attempts to recreate the era with covers the real Bowie performed around this time, like “I Wish You Would” by the Yardbirds and Jacques Brel’s “My Death.” This approach has worked before in films like “Backbeat,” the story of the early days of The Beatles and the Jimi Hendrix biopic “Jimi: All Is by My Side,” but here the absence of Bowie songs is deafening.
“Antebellum,” starring singer and actor Janelle Monáe in a dual role, is a horror film about the intergenerational impact of slavery.
At the film’s beginning Monáe is Eden, enslaved on a plantation at the onset of the Civil War. The plantation boss, Confederate Captain Jasper (Jack Huston), is a cruel drunk with a strict set of rules. He demands no talking and obedience “with a smile.” The cost of speaking out of turn or not working hard enough is misery. Forced to endure sexual exploitation, physical trauma and mental anguish, one night Eden shuts her eyes and goes to sleep.
When she awakens it’s 2020 and she is Veronica Henley, a famous writer on American race relations with a busy schedule that includes television appearance and live speaking engagements. Her latest work, “Shedding the Coping Persona,” a roadmap to revolution for historically marginalized people, examining the intersectionality of race, class and gender, is a hot button book that touches on some of the same concerns that plagued Eden’s life.
“Black women are expected to be seen and not heard,” she says at a conference. “To the patriarchy we’ve been practically invisible but their arrogance is their greatest vulnerability and our greatest opportunity.” She closes her speech with a quote from Assata Shakur, “The only thing that we have to lose are our chains.”
Although successful, wealthy and well-known, she is treated with condescension from everyone from a white television host to a hotel concierge, from a ghostly little girl in an elevator to a corporate headhunter (Jena Malone) who gives her kudos on her lipstick choice. “It compliments your skin tone,” she says. “I don’t think I could… pull it off.”
Eden and Veronica have a connection, brought forth in a ferocious climax, but there will be no spoilers here.
In a “Twilight Zone” finale “Antebellum” asks if Eden was a figment of Veronica’s imagination or vice versa. It’s hard to describe without giving anything away but the writing-directing duo of Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz have done some of the work for me, foreshadow the ending throughout. For instance, at one point Veronica tells her friend Sarah (Lily Cowles), “Our ancestors haunt our dreams to see themselves more.”
“Antebellum” is a horror film that doesn’t rely on jump scares to raise the hairs on the back of your neck. Instead, with a tip of the hat to Rod Serling, it blends social commentary on the legacy of American slavery with the supernatural to form a provocative essay on how the unresolved past can create turmoil in the present.
Emilio Estevez became a Brat Pack star hanging around in a library in 1985’s “The Breakfast Club.” Years later he returns, this time as a grown up with grown up concerns. As writer-director-producer-star of “The Public” Estevez presents the socially aware story of what happens when people stand up for themselves and speak truth to power.
“The Public” sees Estevez play Stuart Goodson, head librarian and de facto social worker at the Cincinnati Public Library. Inside the library is an oasis of warmth for the city’s homeless community who use it as a drop in centre during the cold winter months. Outside, when the frigid weather claims one of the library regulars, the patrons, led by Jackson (Michael K. Williams), turn the building into an emergency homeless shelter. “There’s some situation at the central library,” says Detective Bill Ramstead (Alec Baldwin). “Probably somebody had a melt down over an overdue book.”
Behind the scenes the stand-off escalates as the sensationalist media, in the form of a TV news reporter played by Gabrielle Union, misrepresents the act of civil disobedience as a possible hostage situation or active shooter. A self-righteous mayoral candidate (Christian Slater) stokes the fire while library administrator Anderson (Jeffrey Wright) tries to keep the situation from boiling over. “Wat’s the downside to having them stay there for the evening,” he asks.
“The Public” takes a long hard look at pressing social concerns. Estevez based part of this story on a Chip Ward essay about public libraries as asylums for the homeless and drives home the point with all the subtlety of one of Cincinnati’s icy winters. Lack of shelter space for the homeless population coupled with governmental cutbacks to social programs are urgent needs brought to life here in a colorful if somewhat cliched way.
The idea that, as Anderson says, public libraries are the last bastion of democracy, truly a place for everyone and anyone, is an important one but delivered with a heavy hand. By the time Goodson reads a long excerpt from “The Grapes of Wrath” to a reporter the noble efforts of the screenplay give way to the stagier aspects of Estevez’s vision.
“The Public” features good performances from Slater, Baldwin, Estevez and Taylor Schilling as a flirtatious building manager but is weighted down by the burden of its good intentions.
How to describe director Nicolas Winding Refn’s “The Neon Demon”? You could use five dollar words like transgressive and hallucinatory. Or make comparisons to “Mulholland Drive” and “The Eyes of Laura Mars,” but none of that really comes close to capturing the nervy essence of what Refn attempts here.
Elle Fanning stars as the underage, somewhat naive model Jessie. An orphaned teen from a small town who’s been in Los Angeles “for like, a minute” scores a shoot with a hot shot photographer (Desmond Harrington). “She has that thing,” says her only friend, a makeup artist named Ruby (Jena Malone). Jessie’s fresh-faced appeal opens doors in the industry—Alessandro Nivola plays a big time designer who gives her the closing spot in his show even though its her first trip down a runway—but earns the ire of established models like Sarah and Gigi (Abbey Lee and Bella Heathcote) who she is replacing. “What does it feel like to walk into a room and it’s like the middle of winter and you’re the sun?” Sarah asks the new girl.
Refn, who also wrote the script, has pulled off something quite extraordinary here. He has made a movie that visually mirrors his subject. Setting the film in the vacuous world of fashion allows him to indulge his filmic sense while mirroring his visual ideas in the script. When the designer says, “True beauty is the highest currency we have,” he may have been talking about the fashion biz or Refn’s style of composing gorgeous images that accompany the film’s performances. I say accompany because there is a chilly disconnect between the story, which, true to its subject, is kind of hollow, and striking images on the screen. To reinforce that notion Refn even has a character say, “Beauty isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.”
A gutsy late movie turn toward necrophilia, horror and violence, while heart pounding and jarring, mostly draws the film even further away from any kind of traditional structure, although does graphically display how far people will go to capture the true essence of beauty.
“The Neon Demon” is a tone poem. The cast is terrific, especially Fanning in a role that requires steely determination and vulnerability, Keanu Reeves fans might get a kick out of seeing him go down ‘n dirty as a scummy motel manager and fans of “Mad Men” will enjoy seeing Christina Hendricks back at work, but this is a film more about feel than narrative and is the very definition of a “not for everyone” movie.
I’m glad I saw the first “Hunger Games” movie because I’m not sure if I would have a clue as to what was going on if I didn’t have that background. I may have been taken in by the beautiful art direction, or Jennifer Lawrence’s intense performance, but I don’t think I would have been able to connect all the dots. Plot points become more obvious in the second hour, but for non-Hungerites it might be confusing.
If you haven’t seen the first movie, or read one of the 26 million copies of the book that are currently in print, here’s a glossary of terms to get you up to speed.
Katniss Everdeen: Sixteen year-old protagonist and citizen of District 12, a poor mining area in the dystopian nation of Panem.
Peeta Mellark: A baker’s son, who, according to Wikipedia has “extensive strength and cake decorating skills that contributed to the art of camouflage.”
Both are “tributes” chosen from the young people of District 12 and forced to participate in an annual Hunger Games, The Hunger Games, an annual televised event in which one teenaged boy and girl from each districts surrounding the Capitol are chosen by lottery to fight to the death until only one remains.
There’s more, but you’ll figure it out.
In the new film combatants and sweethearts Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) and Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) have returned from the 74th Annual Hunger Games victorious to become the toast of the nation. While on a Victory Tour to Panem’s various downtrodden districts, revolution is in the air. They see Katniss as a symbol of freedom, which, of course, doesn’t sit well with President Snow (Donald Sutherland), the country’s autocratic leader. To quell the revolution he and his head gamesmaker (Philip Seymour Hoffman) devise the trickiest Hunger Games yet, the Quarter Quell that will pit former winners against one another in the battle to the death. If Snow gets his way Katniss will be killed and the revolution squashed.
“Hunger Games: Catching Fire” is a better movie than the first installment.
Set decorated and costumed (as played by Elizabeth Banks, District 12 minder Effie Trinket has the most elaborate futurist art deco costumes since “Metropolis”) to within an inch of its life, but has nonetheless has a gritty edge. It doesn’t feel like a budget big franchise movie and that’s a good thing,
Visually as well as thematically it has more edge than any of the recent Marvel movies. And it skirts around the thing that upset many people about the first movie—the idea of kids killing kids—by setting the action between former victors ranging in age from 20s to 70s.
It creates a world with it’s own rules, style and customs and does so convincingly. In part it’s comprised of things we’ve seen before in everything from the human sacrifices of Greek Mythology to reality television to stories of government corruption on the news, but author Suzanne Collins and director Francis “I Am legend” Lawrence tie it together to create something new.
In many ways it breaks the mold of what we expect from a young adult a blockbuster. The focus is on the characters and the underpinning of romance that snakes throughout the story. The action sequences are few and far between and it takes almost an hour before any of Katniss’s trademark bow-and-arrow dexterity comes into play. (Silly complaint: the number of arrows in her quiver changes from shot to shot! Just when you think she’s out, arrows magically appear.)
Sure there’s poison fog, angry animals and vicious victors but it’s about survival and relationships not the wholesale slaughter of the characters. It’s grim, shot in hues of grey with a perpetually overcast sky, which lends it a classic feel, more like 1970s sci fi than the brightly couloured eye catchers Hollywood makes these days.
“Hunger Games: Catching Fire” has a who’s who of a cast—Woody Harrelson, Lenny Kravitz, Jeffrey Wright, Stanley Tucci, Jena Malone, Brit heartthrob Sam Claflin and Amanda Plummer—who all perform well, lending some gravitas to the story, but it is carried by Lawrence whose vision for Katniss is as straight as an arrow.
The title sounds ripped from the headlines, but is actually from a 1994 novel by the late Chris Fuhrman, who died of cancer before the book was released. The story centers around a group of teenaged boys who attend Catholic school. Their ringleader Tim (Kieran Culkin) is a prankster who schemes to get revenge on Sister Assumpta (Jody Foster), the joyless, strict nun with a prosthetic leg. They create a “blasphemous” comic book, and plan to kidnap a cougar from the zoo to give her a fright. The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys is a darkly comic, touching coming-of-age story that could have turned into by-the-book teenage drivel, but is rescued by the performances of Kieran Culkin, Emile Hirsch and Jena Malone and some very cool animation by Spawn creator Todd McFarlane.
