RICHARD’S REVIEWS FOR NOV 28, 2014 W “CANADA AM” HOST BEVERLEY THOMSON.
“Canada AM” film critic Richard Crouse reviews “The Penguins of Madagascar,” “Horrible Bosses 2” and “Foxcatcher.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
Posts Tagged ‘Jennifer Aniston’
Horrible Bosses: The worst on-screen employers in movie history
By Richard Crouse – Metro In Focus
At one time or another everyone has fantasized about, if not killing, then at least doing grievous bodily harm to an employer. The guys in Horrible Bosses, the 2011 comedy starring Jason Bateman, Charlie Day and Jason Sudeikis, actually tried to make their fantasies reality.
The idea of squaring off against the boss man struck a chord with a lot of people and the movie raked in more than $100 million. So the inevitable sequel, Horrible Bosses 2, hit theatres earlier this week.
They’ll have to go some ways to top the last trio of bad bosses: Jennifer Aniston as a foul-mouthed sexual predator with a bad habit of using laughing gas as foreplay; a manic boss with no scruples in the form of Kevin Spacey; and a drug-addled loser with a penchant for cocaine and masseuses who inherits a business from his papa, played by Colin Farrell, who berates his employees for coming in late after attending his dad’s and their old boss’s funeral.
“Well, maybe that excuse would have flown when my dad was here, but I’m in charge now.”
But even that terrible trio pales in comparison to the worst movie bosses of all time.
One of the worst is Working Girl’s Katharine Parker (Sigourney Weaver). Parker is two-faced, and attempts to pass off her trusted secretary Tess McGill’s (Melanie Griffith) ideas as her own. Roger Ebert said of Weaver’s performance, “From her first frame on the screen, she has to say all the right things while subtly suggesting that she may not mean any of them.”
In the end, Tess teaches her a lesson about honesty and gets Katharine fired.
Katharine looks like a pussycat compared to Buddy Ackerman (Kevin Spacey), the tyrannical Hollywood producer in Swimming with Sharks.
“You are nothing!” he says to his new assistant Guy (Frank Whaley). “If you were in my toilet I wouldn’t bother flushing it. My bathmat means more to me than you!”
Guy finally snaps, kidnaps Buddy and tortures him. But in an unexpected twist, the extreme behaviour earns Buddy’s respect and Guy gets a promotion.
Finally, if you mix the swooping white hair and bad attitude of Cruella DeVille with the people skills of Vlad the Impaler, you will come up with Miranda Priestly, the worst boss in all of moviedom. Played by Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada, Priestly is the editrix of a fictional fashion magazine called Runway who never met an assistant she couldn’t humiliate with a withering glance and a few choice words. “By all means, move at a glacial pace,” she says to newbie Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway). “You know how that thrills me.”
HORRIBLE BOSSES 2: 1 STAR. “When is a comedy not a comedy?”
When is a comedy not a comedy?
“Horrible Bosses 2” is being billed as a comedy and stars people—like the Jasons, Bateman and Sudeikis, Charlie Day and Jennifer Aniston—usually associated with making people laugh, but does the almost complete absence of anything giggle worthy preclude us from labeling it a comedy? Discuss.
In the second peek at the pitiful employment record of Nick (Bateman), Kurt (Sudeikis) and Dale (Day), the guys go into business for themselves. Their product, the Shower Buddy—a shower nozzle that shoots shampoo and conditioner as well as water—seems like a sure fire As-Seen-On-TV hit but when a shady billionaire (Christoph Waltz) tries to swindle them out of their livelihood they decide to get even by kidnapping his son (Chris Pine). “If we’ve learned one thing about ourselves,” says Nick, “it’s that we’re not murderers.”
Off the top it has to be said that Bateman, Sudeikis and Day have great chemistry together. They joke, jostle and jape like brothers, giggling their way through the movie as if they are in on a fantastic gag that only they get. The trio seems to be having fun, and judging by the outtake reel that plays over the credits, the set was filled with laughter every time someone blew a line. If only the audience could have as much fun watching the movie as the cast did making it.
“Horrible Bosses 2” is a demotion from the original film. There are more laughs on the average job application than in this workplace “comedy.” It’s misogyny masquerading as humour, with unlikeable characters and an inane premise that diminishes in interest as the running time increases.
RICHARD’S REVIEWS FOR AUG 22, 2014 W “CANADA AM” HOST BEVERLY THOMSON.
“Canada AM’s” film critic Richard Crouse shares his reviews for ‘The November Man,’ ‘Life of Crime,’ ‘The Calling,’ and ‘As Above, So Below.’
Watch the whole thing HERE!
LIFE OF CRIME: 3 STARS. ” slickly made but blandish Elmore Leonard adaptation.”
“Life of Crime” is slickly made but blandish adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s novel “The Switch.” As usual Leonard’s bad guys are more interesting than the straights. The trick here is figuring out who the bad guys are.
Jennifer Aniston is Mickey, the trophy wife of the abusive and corrupt Frank Dawson. Outwardly they have the perfect marriage, but at home trouble is brewing. At home, at least when Frank isn’t off doing “business” at his hideaway in the Bahamas, tending to his girlfriend Melanie (Isla Fisher) and off shore bank accounts.
When two low-rent criminals, Louis (John Hawkes) and Ordell (Yasiin Bey, the artist formerly known as Mos Def) kidnap Mickey they hadn’t counted on Frank using their plan as a quickie divorce. No ransom, no alimony. Cue the double crosses and intrigue.
The major selling point here is the dialogue. Leonard was a master of the backroom criminal dialogue and here they have the good sense to keep most of his snappy words intact. Hawkes and Bey are particularly adept at delivering the goods, mouthing the words as if they were Leonard’s illegitimate children. Robbins is convincing as the sleazy land developer and Fisher is a femme fatale in the making. The weak link is Aniston, who seems like she might have calibrated her performance for the similarly plotted “Ruthless People” rather than a down-and-dirty crime drama.
Like many of Leonard’s stories “Life of Crime” tends to favor the characters who live on the down low. Hawkes and Bey—despite their association with a neo-Nazi (Mark Boone Jr.)—are treated as the sensitive heroes of the piece, while everyone else is playing some sort of game. It makes for interesting character dynamics but doesn’t sit as well here as it did in “Get Shorty” or “Out of Sight.”
Metro In Focus: “Getting played” in Hollywood movies dates back decades
By Richard Crouse – Metro Canada In Focus
In the new movie The Other Woman Mark King (Game of Thrones’s Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) tries to push infidelity to Tiger Woodsian heights by cheating on his wife (Leslie Mann) with multiple mistresses, including Carly and Amber (Cameron Diaz and Kate Upton). “We got played by the same guy,” says Carly.
“Getting played” in Hollywood movies dates back further than the invention of the ashleymadison website.
In 1960 the Jack Lemmon movie The Apartment tackled the subject of adultery. The film, about a lonely insurance company lackey who allows his bosses to use his apartment as a trysting spot in hopes that they will promote him, was a big hit, but also a controversial one. The Saturday Review called it “a dirty fairy tale” and co-star Fred McMurray says a woman on the street hit him with her purse, taking to him to task for making “a dirty, filthy movie.”
2005’s Derailed, stars Clive Owen as a married man who hooks up with Lucinda (Jennifer Aniston) after meeting her on a commuter train. In a hormone induced rush they decide to consummate their illicit affair at a seedy hotel, only to be interrupted by a burglar who robs them and sexually assaults Lucinda. Things spiral out of control as the robber blackmails the couple and seems to have an unquenchable thirst for Owen’s money.
Derailed is a cautionary tale about staying faithful to your spouse and never, ever renting rooms in sleazy hotels. Part Fatal Attraction, part Hitchcock thriller the movie stays on track through the set-up of the story, but as soon as the going gets rough the story, well… derails.
The most famous infidelity movie has to be 1987’s Fatal Attraction. It begins with Michael “I’m a married man!” Douglas having a fling with Glenn “I’m not gonna be ignored!” Close. When he tries to break off their affair, she becomes a lesson in why not to cheat on your wife.
The film was a sensation on release, inspiring a number of imitators including The Crush, Single White Female and a spoof called Fatal Instinct, and its most famous clip, the rabbit boiling on the stove, even inspired a phrase in the Urban Dictionary. According to the website, cook your rabbit “refers to the moment when someone goes over the edge in their obsession with another person.”
In an interview twenty year after the film’s release Close said, “”Men still come up to me and say, ‘You scared the [crap] out of me.’ Sometimes they say, ‘You saved my marriage.'”
DON JON: 4 STARS
I couple of years ago I had the soul crushing bit of bad luck to have to sit through movies with names like “Just Go With It,” “Friends with Benefits,” “No Strings Attached” and “New Year’s Eve.”
Romantic comedies. Rom coms. Whatever you want to call them, it was a punishing year spent watching good looking do the same thing over and over again—meet cute, fall in love, then fall out of love before walking off into the sunset, happily ever after.
Kathryn Heigl, Jennifer Aniston, Justin Timberlake, Kate Hudson and Chris Evans not only tested my love of movies, but my love of love in that grim year.
At the time I declared the rom com dead.
I suggested it could be resurrected if someone like Quentin Tarantino came along and completely reinvented the genre, but the chances of that happening were about as great as Kristen Bell finding herself alone as the end credits roll.
Then along came Joseph Gordon-Levitt and “Don Jon.” Tarantino must be too busy reinventing the grindhouse genre to bother with rom coms, but the former “Third Rock from the Sun” star isn’t.
Gordon-Levitt, who also wrote and directed, stars as Jon Martello, nicknamed Don Jon because he is the godfather of meeting women in bars. He and his pals (Rob Brown and Jeremy Luke) troll nightclubs in search of “dimes”—perfect tens—but in secret Jon prefers the company of his computer. Addicted to porn sites, he spends an inordinate amount of time surfing the net, looking for the perfect video to “lose himself in.”
He can’t even give the habit up after he meets Barbara Sugarman (Scarlett Johansson), a beautiful, gum snapping Jersey girl who thinks people who watch porn are sick. She encourages him to go back to school, to better himself, which he does, all the while watching porn.
The porn addiction (SPOILER ALERT) eventually drives a wedge between them, but he soon learns about true intimacy when he meets an older woman (Julianne Moore) at night school.
“Don Jon” is a rom com is disguised as a character study. Jon’s romantic dalliances are a context for his intimacy issues, but the romance comes in unexpected places, subverting the formula that makes movies like “Sweet Home Alabama” so predictable.
The comedy comes from the characters. Imagine all the guys from “Jersey Shore” rolled into one porn-obsessed lothario and you have Gordon-Levitt’s foul mouthed but spot on portrayal of Jon.
Johansson, who swallows her words in what may go down as one of the greatest Jersey accents ever to be captured on celluloid, is the movie’s McGuffin. She appears to be the girl of his dreams, but she is simply the physical embodiment of his bombshell porn dreams come to life. It’s because he doesn’t love her that he learns what love actually is.
Cudos also go to Tony Danza as Jon’s father. He’s a carbon copy of the hot headed horn dog, and living proof that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
“Don Jon” is a stylish, crude look at romance with loads of laughs. It shows off Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s promise as a filmmaker, but more importantly it reinvents the rom com in a fun—although vulgar—way.
HORRIBLE BOSSES: 3 STARS
Everyone has fantasizes about if not killing, then at least doing grievous bodily harm on an employer. The guys in “Horrible Bosses,” a new comedy starring Jason Bateman, Charlie Day and Jason Sudeikis, actually do something about it.
Chances are you’ve never had a boss as mean, manipulating or just plain odd as the bosses in this movie. These people make Genghis Khan look like an equal opportunity employer. Bateman works for Kevin Spacey, a corporate shark not above exploiting his workers and then taking a promotion and pay raise for himself. The cast’s other Jason, Sedaris, is saddled with Colin Farrell an unscrupulous coke head with a bad attitude and an even worse comb over. Finally Day works for Jennifer Aniston, a dentist who uses laughing gas as a sex toy.
All are stuck in their jobs and fed up with the daily humiliation offered in their workplaces decide to do the only thing a reasonable person would do—kill their bosses.
OK, I was joking about the reasonable person part. Of course no reasonable person would try to hire a hit man on the Internet or break into their bosses homes looking for ways to kill them, but this is a comedy so we’ll accept that. Or will we? The movie stars off strong, funny and well paced but it’s central premise—let’s kill our bosses!—seems forced and it sucks some of the funny from the middle part of the movie.
There are laughs for sure, but the bungling of the crucial set up scene left me feeling like I was watching a funny enough movie marred with a silly premise.
The cast holds up well. The Jasons bring their usual brand of well practiced funny, and “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” star Charlie Day is a funny find but thesis rises here are Farrell and Aniston. We’ve seen Spacey do this kind of thing before, the manic boss with no scruples (ie: “Swimming with Sharks”) but his cast mates are breaking some new ground. Farrell throws vanity out the window to play a drug addled loser with a penchant for cocaine and masseuses. He’s funny and edgy and does work here unlike we’ve seen before from him.
Aniston leaves her America’s Sweetheart persona behind to play a foul mouthed predator with a bad habit of using gas as foreplay. If this doesn’t wipe away any traces of Rachel left over from her TV work, I don’t know what will.
“Horrible Bosses” is a darkly funny employee revenge film that mostly works, I just wish the motivation felt more authentic.
HE’S JUST NOT THAT INTO YOU: 1 STAR
He’s Just Not That Into You, a new romantic comedy with an all star cast, is being described as Love Actually meets Sex and the City. Not surprising since the book it was based on was inspired by a line from the latter. The book’s authors Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo’s eureka moment came when they saw the episode Pick-A-Little, Talk-A-Little. On the show Miranda (if you don’t know who that is, stop reading now) was telling Carrie’s boyfriend Berger about a date who declined her invitation to come up to her apartment. “I have an early meeting,” he said by way of an excuse. Berger analyzes the situation and concludes that “he’s just not that into you,” adding that “when a guy’s really into you, he’s coming upstairs, meeting or no meeting.” That one exchange inspired a self help book which became a bestseller and now a two hour movie starring Drew Barrymore and Jennifer Aniston.
The multi-pronged plot involves a seemingly unconnected group of Baltimore men and women who by the time the movie is over have swapped spit, broken up, gotten back together, dated, stalked and generally dabbled in all forms of human interaction. The unifying theme is that one person in each relationship is more “into” the other person than vice versa. According to director Ken Kwapis the relationship tango goes like this: “Character A is going out with character B, character B is really into Character A, but Character A is really into Character C who’s dating Character D…”
The first thing you’ll notice about He’s Just Not That Into You is that every good looking actor or actress in Hollywood is in this movie. It’s a panoply of blue eyes, shiny coiffed hair and jaw lines so sharp you could use them to cut granite and, of course they all live in beautifully designed homes and have cool jobs. So go see the movie for the clothes, the apartments, the general beauty of the cast, but don’t expect anything useful in terms of relationship advice.
Despite the movie’s source material and general self-help premise this is one of the most toxic looks at male – female relations since the Brittney Spears, Kevin Federline wedding video. The women are either portrayed as a.) incomplete without a man in their lives, b.) home wreckers, or c.) pathetically man crazy.
The men don’t fare much better. The guys are needy, cheaters, slobs or downright smarmy. One man, played by Bradley Cooper, has a slip of the tongue where he says “funeral” when the word he should have said was “wedding.” That’s about the extent of the character development on display here. (In case you don’t get it, he’s wondering if he ruined his life by marrying too young.) All in all despite their obvious genetic gifts it’s no wonder these characters are terminally single.
He’s Just Not That Into You makes the point that dating is hard and relationships are difficult and confusing. Well, thanks for the info. I get it. I got it after the first hour. By the end of the second hour of watching these hapless characters flop around from one warm body to the next I could only think of one sure fire way to test for a prospective mate. Make them watch He’s Just Not That Into You. If they want to leave midway through you may have found someone worth hanging out with.
