Posts Tagged ‘John Cusack’

David Cronenberg Q&A after Halloween screening of MAPS TO THE STARS

B1UyEJMIEAAkGUwExclusive Q&A with David Cronenberg following opening night
Halloween screening of MAPS TO THE STARS

Q&A to follow 7:10 p.m. screening at Varsity Cinemas, to be moderated by Richard Crouse

Opening Night Screening
Friday, October 31
7:10 p.m.
Varsity Cinemas (55 Bloor St. W.)

This is a public event. Tickets available via Cineplex.com.

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Maps to the Stars
Directed by David Cronenberg
Starring Julianne Moore, John Cusack, Mia Wasikowska, Robert Pattinson, Olivia Williams

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With this tale of a secret-filled Hollywood family on the verge of implosion, award-winning director David Cronenberg forges both a wicked social satire and a very human ghost story from our celebrity-obsessed culture. From a screenplay by acclaimed author, screenwriter and West Coast chronicler Bruce Wagner, and featuring an ensemble cast that includes Julianne Moore, Mia Wasikowska, John Cusack, Robert Pattinson, Olivia Williams and Sarah Gadon, MAPS TO THE STARS tours the seductive allure and the tender, darkly comic underbelly of contemporary success.

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Julianne Moore talks living in L.A. and how egos aren’t exclusive to Hollywood

MTTS_00870.NEFBy Richard Crouse – Metro Canada

In the new David Cronenberg film Maps to the Stars, Julianne Moore plays actress Havana Segrand.

A child of Hollywood, she’s the daughter of a movie star who became a star herself but is now, as Moore says, “monstrous and childlike.”

Havana is a bundle of exposed ego and neurosis, a Hollywood stereotype, but Moore promises she’s not based on anyone in particular.

“I swear to you she sprung to life from the page,” she says.

“That was what was great about it. (Screenwriter) Bruce Wagner’s language is so precise, so spectacular, so emotional; it was almost like poetry.

“There was a rhythm to it. I could hear her voice in the rhythm of the speech and how things were supposed to be delivered.

“The key to Havana for me was her arrested development. She’s stuck at the age her mother died. She’s so childlike.

“Everything is all about her mother and not being parented. All this childish, even sexpot behaviour — the ‘Look at me!’ — is all about not being parented. That’s all she wants.”

The film is a wonderfully sadistic portrait of Tinsel Town and its citizens, portraying the wild side of Los Angeles where venal and stratospherically self-involved behaviour plays itself out on the public stage. It’s a dark picture of life in Hollywood, but longtime New York City resident Moore says the conduct isn’t exclusive to the movie biz.

“I‘m sure there can be a certain kind of permissiveness in any business,” she says, “on Wall Street and Silicon Valley and in certain socialite circles.

“People try and pin it on Hollywood as the only place it happens, and of course, it’s not.

“I only lived in L.A. for a while in the ’90s. There was a different quality to socializing than I had ever seen before. I’m pretty bourgeois. I’m not a partier. I don’t really go out, but when I moved to L.A. there was a degree of socialization. I was like, ‘Whoa, there’s a lot of parties out here.’

“I was also single and out in a way I hadn’t been before. Very soon after that I met my husband, we had children and I went right back into my hole.”

She does, however, go out from time to time.

“I have a school event later tonight,” she laughs as we end the interview.

TIFF 2014: Pattinson reflects on a changing L.A. with new TIFF film, Maps to the Stars

Robert-Pattinson-Maps-to-the-Stars.jpg-mediumBy Richard Crouse – Metro Canada

“This is the weirdest hotel ever,” says Robert Pattinson. He’s at TIFF to promote his latest collaboration with David Cronenberg, the Hollywood satire Maps to the Stars, and he doesn’t much like the suite we’ve been given to do the interview. “I just keep picturing if I was actually staying in a room here… there’s such bad terrible vibes in every room.”

A self-described spiritual person, the former Twilight heartthrob picks up on vibes in hotel rooms and in film scripts.

“There is something so jarring and weird about it. I can’t really tell what it is.”

He’s not talking about the room anymore, he’s on to Maps to the Stars. It’s a Hollywood satire, a jaundiced look at child stardom, the thirst for fame and hard-to-keep secrets, but Pattinson says it was something else that grabbed his attention.

“I don’t think I really thought of the Hollywood aspect of it,” he says. “I liked the mystic aspects of it. David is always talking about being this militant atheist but every single movie he does is so spiritual. He says, ‘It’s not that at all,’ but yes it is!’

“Maybe I’m just reading into it because I’m a very spiritual person but the last scene is this weirdly transcendent thing. There’s an altar and a burnt house. It’s like family as religion. And also the way the family reacts to one another, there are these weird blood honor oaths, like all the priests hiding stuff in the Catholic Church. Hiding these disgusting secrets they think are going to destroy them.”

The movie uses the notion of Hollywood mythology as a palette to paint a picture of the stupid, venal and stratospherically self-involved behavior that goes on behind the scenes in Beverly Hills’ gated communities and nightclubs.

The movie, says Pattinson, reflects “what it used to be. It’s changed quite a lot in LA. When I first started going to LA everyone was underage and if you were a famous actor the rules did not apply. You could be a sixteen-year-old and go into a club but now that there are camera phones everywhere that doesn’t exist anymore. That period was so weird. You’d see a fourteen-year-old actor wasted, doing lines of blow on the table. It was crazy. Now they just do it at their parent’s house.”

This is the second film Pattison has made with Cronenberg. The young actor says the seventy-one-year-old director is “fun to be around,” and also shares a love of pushing the envelope.

“I like to do things that feel a little bit dangerous and there’s not many people who do that. I don’t really relate to that many normal things. I like things that are sort of surreal. I find them easier to play. I don’t gravitate toward kitchen sink dramas. I don’t feel like that. I like things that are slightly off the wall.”

 

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.

From Field of Dreams to Million Dollar Arm: A short history of baseball films.

baseballBy Richard Crouse – In Focus Metro Canada

“I still get such a bang out of it,” says Buck Weaver (John Cusack) in Eight Men Out, “playing ball.”

Given the number of sports movies that have been released in the last 30 years, apparently audiences also get a bang out of watching films about baseball.

This weekend, Jon Hamm stars in a new ball picture, Million Dollar Arm. The Mad Men star plays real-life sports agent J.B. Bernstein who recruited Indian cricket players Rinku Singh and Dinesh Patel for the Pittsburgh Pirates.

It’s an unconventional baseball movie, but there seems to be something about the sport that lends itself to fantastic stories and fables.

Roger Ebert called Field of Dreams, “a religious picture,” then added, “but the religion is baseball.” In this 1989 hit Kevin Costner plays an Iowa corn farmer who hears a mysterious voice. “If you build it, he will come.” The “it” is a baseball diamond and the “he” is Shoeless Joe Jackson, the legendary outfielder for the disgraced 1919 Chicago White Sox.

The movie uses a baseball theme as a backdrop for a story about following your dreams, believing in the impossible and the idea that baseball was “a symbol of all that was once good in America.”

The film struck a chord with audiences and tourists alike. Since its release, the field built for the film in Dubuque County, Iowa has attracted hundreds of thousands of people, and spawned new restaurants, shops, a hotel, all in a town of only 4,000 people.

Robert Redford’s film The Natural looks to Arthurian legends for its story. Redford plays Roy Hobbs, a young pitcher with natural ability. Cut down in his prime by a tragic accident, he disappears, only to return many years later to become a star at an age when most players are hanging up their gloves. “It took me 16 years to get here,” he says. “You play me, and I’ll give you the best I got.”

The Holy Grail of baseball

Based on a novel by Bernard Malamud, the characters in The Natural each represent a person from ancient literature.

There are elements of Round Table Knight Percival’s pursuit of the Holy Grail present in Hobbs’ story. He’s a Knight (literally, his team is called The Knights) who must bring back the Grail, or pennant, to team manager Pop Fisher, whose name is an alias for the Fisher King, keeper of the Grail.

If you think that is reading too much into the story, perhaps Woody Allen in Zelig is more your speed. “I love baseball. You know it doesn’t have to mean anything, it’s just beautiful to watch.”

 

 

HOT TUB TIME MACHINE: 3 STARS

hot-tub-time-machine“Hot Tub Time Machine” has a Frank Capra life is wonderful feel. The story of three old friends who try and relive the wildest weekend of their lives, and literally jump back in time all the way to the Regan years, is Capra-esque… if Capra swore like a sailor and infused his movies with sexual humor and vomit gags.

Following the attempted suicide of Lou (Rob Corddry) his only two friends Adam (John Cusack) and Nick (Craig Robinson), try and cheer him with a trip to the scene of their greatest party weekend ever—the Kodiack Valley Lodge. The place has seen better days, but through a magical combination of a hot tub and some illegal Russian Red Bull they are transported back in time to a sea of fluorescent coloured ski suits, Walk men and oversized Ray Bans—a.k.a. the Regan years. To a soundtrack of 80s hits like “Kick Start My Heart” and “Safety Dance” the guys and Adam’s nephew (Clark Duke) grapple with the mysteries of the space and time continuum. By exactly recreating the Winter Fest 86 weekend they hope to find a crack in time and get back to present day. Of course, the only thing more complicated than a fissure in time is three middle aged guys with a case stuffed with cocaine and booze.

I’m sure director Steve Pink (and producer Cusack) are likely hoping to emulate the success of that other recent buddy comedy of bad manners “The Hangover.” They have a good chance—it’s the only comedy opening this weekend—but its sense of absurdity and disjointed feel may dampen audience enthusiasm a tad.

Having said that, the movie aims to please audiences who would pay to see a movie called “Hot Tub Time Machine;” the nudity—both male and female—you’d expect from a whirlpool movie is in place, although just enough to keep it on this side of a PG rating. There’s also loads of Apatow style toilet jokes, barfing and off colour jokes, but what good time audiences may not be as prepared for the sentimentality that follows the Cusack character. Luckily that and the “will it be their chance to start over” dilemma is dispensed with fairly quickly and only briefly throws the movie off balance.

Comedy wise “Hot Tub Time Machine” belongs to the lesser known members of the cast. Corddry, best remembered as the manic second banana in movies like “Blades of Glory” and “Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay,” is off the hook as the volatile Lou. Rather than worry about the consequences of tampering with time, he looks at the upside of a slightly altered world—a future where Miley Cyrus doesn’t exist and “Manimal” is still on the air. Finally someone has figured out how to put Corddry`s unhinged energy to good use.

Craig Robison, seen every week on “The Office” and, recently, as the best thing in lame movies like “The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard,” and “Miss March,” brings a great deadpan to the mix and owns several of the film’s funniest moments.

“Hot Tub Time Machine” could have been the comedy equivalent of “Snakes on a Plane,“ a great title and not much else, but despite a couple of dead spots and jokes that may not mean much to anyone born after 1976—will they get the Cold War jokes?—it aims to please and is loud, overbearing and fun—kind of like the decade it pokes fun at.

IGOR: 3 STARS

John_Cusack_in_Igor_Wallpaper_2_800The observance of Halloween dates back thousands of years to the Celts who used the date as a celebration of the end of harvest season. Since Irish immigrants brought the tradition to North America in the nineteenth century the way we celebrate October 31st has changed from a time used by the ancient pagans to take stock of supplies and slaughter livestock for winter to our tradition of dressing up in outlandish costumes, carving pumpkins and gorging ourselves on Creepy Crawlers Gummy Candy and Twist & Glow Halloween Pops. These days it’s second only to Christmas in terms of the amount of people who decorate their homes for the holidays and North American revelers spend upwards of 5 billion dollars a year on Halloween costumes. Another great treat of the fall season are Halloween specials like It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown and Mr. Boogedy. The latest entry on the Halloween scene is Igor, a new animated film for kids starring the voice of John Cusack.

Igor is a riff on the classic mad scientist movies, this time told from the lab assistant’s point of view. Igor (John Cusack) is a lowly hunchback with a “major in slurred speech and a ‘Yes, Master’ degree” who dreams of becoming a scientist. When his master is killed by his own invention Igor gets his chance to shine and maybe even win the annual Evil Science Fair. His invention, a female Frankenstein monster named Eva, is meant to be the most evil creature the world has ever seen, but turns out to be a sweet natured giant with aspirations of becoming an actress. To this end she says she’s interested in adopting kids from other countries and says she’ll become an environmentalist and only fly private when necessary. If she doesn’t drop her ideas of stardom and turn nasty how will Igor win the Evil Science Fair?

Igor is aimed at little kids. Written by Chris McKenna, who previously penned American Dad and voiced by an all star cast featuring Cusack, Steve Buscemi, John Cleese, Jay Leno and Christian Slater, it is a great looking cartoon that’s equal parts German Expressionism and Pee Wee’s Playhouse. The highly stylized characters look like they just walked off the set of The Nightmare Before Christmas, and the inventive backgrounds are bound to set off kid’s imaginations. The camera work, often so static in animated films like this, is fluid and cinematic.

The story is stretched a bit thin even at the compact running time of 85 minutes, but there is enough going on to keep the under ten crowd entertained. Most of the irreverent humor is meant for the little ones, for example:

“I’m all thumbs,” says Eva the giantess. “Yeah, sorry about that,” replies Igor, “I got the thumbs on sale.”

Parents probably won’t find any big yuks in lines like that or the slapstick or even the bathroom jokes, but there are gags to keep older viewers interested peppered throughout.

Igor is a cute Halloween story with stylish animation; jokes that should make ten-year-olds laugh and good messages about the importance of friends and determination and at 85 minutes shouldn’t tax growing attention spans. 

MARTIAN CHILD: 2 STARS

Bobby_Coleman_in_Martian_Child_Wallpaper_3_800If there is one message the filmmakers behind Martian Child would like you to take home it is: You Are What You Is. The latest from John Cusack is a family film about spare pegs and round holes which extols the virtues of being yourself. It’s a great message in this age where conformity seems to be king, but I wish it had presented in a more interesting movie.

Cusack plays a widowed science fiction writer who—rather improbably—adopts a troubled young boy (Bobby Coleman). Abused and neglected, when we first meet the youngster he is spending his daylight hours in a large box with just an eye slot cut in the side. Inside his sanctuary he protects himself from dangerous UV rays and occasionally takes a Polaroid of the outside world. You see, young Dennis believes he is from Mars and that the sun’s deadly rays will eat away at his skin. The snap shots, he says, are part of his larger mission to observe and document the human race as part of a Martian scientific study. With his pale skin, reddish hair and ever present camera he like the strange love-child of The Man Who Fell to Earth and Andy Warhol.

Cusack, having been a bit of a social outcast himself, understands that the boy has obviously created the story to cover for a traumatic upbringing by his birth family, and allows him to keep one foot in outer space while trying to keep the other firmly planted on planet Earth. When the boy tries to conform to what others expect from him, and live by “Earth” rules, it leads to an epiphany between adopted father and son.

It’s hard to dislike a movie as earnest as Martian Child. It has interesting messages for kids on growing up and acceptance of others, and seems to understand that kid’s early days are not easy—Cusack’s character even says, “Childhood is barbaric”—but despite all the good stuff, it falls flat.

Like the weight belt that Dennis wears to stabilize his Martian gravity and prevent him from floating away into the ether, the movie too seems weighed down by a predictable plot and heavy handed lesson. We get it. There’s no harm in being a little eccentric. We got that in the first twenty minutes, and yet seventy minutes later we’re still being hit over the head with that sentiment. If the film had heeded its own advice and taken some chances, tried to be bit more eccentric it may have been a much better movie going experience