Richard joins CP24 anchor Nathan Downer to have a look at the weekend’s new movies including “Shazam!,” the remake of “Pet Sematary” and the documentary “Carmine Street Guitars.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
Richard sits in on the CTV NewsChannel to have a look at the weekend’s big releases including “Shazam!,” the remake of “Pet Sematary” and the documentary “Carmine Street Guitars.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
Richard has a look at the new movies coming to theatres, including the kid-friendly superhero flick “Shazam!,” the remake of “Pet Sematary” and the documentary “Carmine Street Guitars” with CFRA Morning Rush host Bill Carroll.
Listen to the whole thing HERE!
A weekly feature from ctvnews.ca! The Crouse Review is a quick, hot take on the weekend’s biggest movies! This week Richard looks at the family-friendly superhero flick “Shazam!,” the remake of “Pet Sematary” and the documentary “Carmine Street Guitars.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
As promised “Carmine Street Guitars,” the new documentary from Ron Mann, is about guitars. Beautiful stringed instruments hand made with love by artesian Rick Kelly. But it isn’t just about guitars. Sure, we hear music, solo performances by pickers and grinners like “Captain” Kirk Douglas, Lenny Kaye, Eleanor Friedberger, Charlie Sexton and Bill Frisell, but it’s about tradition and the personal connections between creators and their instruments.
For decades Kelly and his shop Carmine Street Guitars has been a Greenwich Village landmark. Untouched by modern conveniences like cell phones and computers, Kelly uses tools handed down from his grandfather, salvages old wood from New York landmarks like McSorley’s Old Ale House—the “bones of the city,” he calls them—to create one-of-a-kind instruments he says have a resonance that newer materials cannot duplicate. With him is apprentice, Cindy Hulej, a woodworker who burns beautiful designs into the faces of the guitars she creates.
It’s a slice of life doc, a week in the life of the shop as musicians come in, hang out and talk about guitars. Mann creates a rhythm that echoes the slow pace of life inside the store. Kelly is soft spoken, an old-school artist in a rapidly changing city, somehow dodging the homogenization that is putting people like him out of business. His icy demeanor toward a high rolling real estate agent tells you everything you need to know regarding his feelings toward the people who value glass and steel over heart and soul.
“Carmine Street Guitars” is an ode to tradition, to artistry, to slowing down. It’s an understated hang-out movie that has as much resonance as the old wood Kelly uses to make his guitars.
Richard sits in on the CJAD Montreal morning show with host Andrew Carter to talk the new movies coming to theatres including the kid-friendly superhero flick “Shazam!,” the remake of “Pet Sematary” and the documentary “Carmine Street Guitars.”
Listen to the whole thing HERE!
By Richard Crouse – Metro Canada
Near the beginning of a new documentary called The Music of Strangers: Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble, world famous cellist Yo-Yo Ma tells a joke.
A little boy says to his father, “When I grow up I want to be a musician.”
“Sorry son,” the father replies, “you can’t do both.”
It’s a subject Ma knows something about. Performing since the age of five, by seven had played for Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy. Since then he has appeared with all the world’s great orchestras, released 90 albums and won eighteen Grammys.
“The idea of being a musician means that you have access to wonder,” he says. “When you become too adult-like and concerned about responsibility you tend to push wonder aside. That moment where you take a step back and look at where we are and look at what the world is about. Those are decisions we have to remake every single day, to engage, to love and care for and to recommit. It’s a form of positive will and expression. If you don’t have that you can’t do anything. To me it is the ultimate antidote to paranoia, to hate, to terror is to care about things. To care about truth and be open.”
The cellist’s openness led him on a twenty-year journey to form The Silk Road Ensemble, a loose collective of international master musicians named after the ancient trade route between China and the Mediterranean. Featuring instruments from the Silk Road region, Ma mixes-and-matches his cello with the exotic sounds of the pipa, a Chinese short-necked plucked lute, a Mongolian horse head fiddle called a morin khuur and a Shakuhachi, a Japanese bamboo flute among others to produce an otherworldly sound that blends different cultures and styles.
“It’s not so much what makes stuff different but more the fact that we work in such a connected world,” says Ma. “Part of it is that and part of it is to recognize the strength of individuality but also inherent in that strength is flexibility. It doesn’t mean that because the bagpipe is louder than the violin we should never put the two together. It’s more like, unlikely bedfellows, ‘O my gosh, there could be something extraordinary that could come from that.’”
The movie, directed by Morgan Neville, who won an Oscar and a Grammy for his 2013 documentary 20 Feet from Stardom, chronicles the evolution of the collective and the individual journeys of the players. Wrapped around those portraits is the story of the group’s most famous member. Ma is revealed to be a thoughtful man with a wandering, restless creative spirit.
“I was scared to death before doing something like this,” he says. “I’m drawn to what I don’t know versus what I do know. I think my life is kind of boring because if you ask me questions about myself you will very often get the same answers. I know the answers. What little I know I can tell you about but that is not particularly interesting. What I don’t know is, for me, the source of all knowledge, everything you know is actually very little. We are constantly trying to understand more and moving forward can actually help us reconsider old things and decisions.”
“The Music Of Strangers: Yo-Yo Ma And The Silk Road Ensemble” is a journey through music and culture. The documentary, directed by Morgan Neville, who won an Oscar and a Grammy for his 2013 documentary “20 Feet from Stardom,” is based on the cellist’s twenty-year journey to form The Silk Road Ensemble, a loose collective of international master musicians named after the ancient trade route between China and the Mediterranean.
Featuring instruments from the Silk Road region, Ma mixes-and-matches his cello with the exotic sounds of the pipa, a Chinese short-necked plucked lute, a Mongolian horse head fiddle called a morin khuur, the gaita bagpipes, played by a woman known as the Jimi Hendrix of Galicia and a Shakuhachi, a Japanese bamboo flute among others to produce an otherworldly sound that blends different cultures and styles.
Wrapped around the individual journeys of the players is the story of the group’s most famous member. Ma is revealed to be a thoughtful man with a wandering, restless creative spirit. A child prodigy, it’s interesting to hear him sum up his career with the words, “I never committed to being a musician,” says Ma, “I just fell into it.”
Most interesting, however, is the otherworldly music. It’s a cultural democracy of sounds that shouldn’t mix and yet blend together beautifully to create music that sounds simultaneously alien and familiar. The filmmaking is basic, staying out of the way of the music, but the message of harmony in diversity is clear and anything but mundane.
Richard and CP24 anchor host Nneka Elliot have a look at he weekend’s big releases, Melissa McCarthy’s “The Boss,” Jake Gyllenhaal in “Demolition” and “Hardcore Henry’s” wild action.
Watch the whole thing HERE!
