I join CTV NewsChannel anchor Akshay Tandon to talk about the new releases in theatres, including the live-action “Moana,” the sport comedy “Racewalkers” and the wacky “Wizard of Oz” homage “Gail Daughtery and the Celebrity Sex Pass.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
Fast reviews for busy people! Watch as I review three movies in less time than it takes to drink a Mai Tai. Have a look as I race against the clock to tell you about the live-action “Moana,” the sport comedy “Racewalkers” and the wacky “Wizard of Oz” homage “Gail Daughtery and the Celebrity Sex Pass.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
SYNOPSIS: In “Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass,” Zoey Deutch plays a Midwestern hairdresser who travels to Hollywood in search of her “celebrity sex pass” after her fiancée hooks up with an a-lister.
CAST: Zoey Deutch, John Slattery, Ken Marino, Miles Gutierrez-Riley, Ben Wang, Sabrina Impacciatore, Jon Hamm, Weird Al” Yankovic, Henry Winkler, Elizabeth Perkins. Directed by David Wain.
REVIEW: A Hollywood farce that mistakes sincerity and commitment-to-the-bit for humor, “Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass” stretches its “Wizard of Oz” parody to the breaking point.
The idea of a celebrity hall pass is simple. An agreement between couples, it allows both partners to get a one-time “pass” to sleep with a specific celebrity without it counting as cheating.
It’s a simple and fun hypothetical unless it actually happens.
That’s the case in “Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass.” Small town Kansas woman Gail (Zoey Deutch) and her fiancé, Tom’s (Michael Cassidy) relationship is put into doubt when the unlikely happens, and Tom meets and has relations with his celebrity pass, Jennifer Aniston, who plays herself.
Gail decides she must “even the scales.”
“I had a celebrity free pass thing with my fiancé,” she says, “but he took it literally. So now I need to have sex with Jon Hamm to even up the score and save my relationship.”
On her quest for some “Hammertime,” Gail and BFF Otto (Miles Gutierrez-Riley) travel to Los Angeles in what becomes a loose riff on “The Wizard of Oz,” complete with stand-ins for Toto, The Tin Man, The Cowardly Lion and the Scarecrow and, of course, Jon Hamm as The Wizard.
Along the way they’re joined aspiring talent agent Caleb (Ben Wang), a paparazzo (Ken Marino) whose lifelong dream is to get a candid snap of Jon Hamm, Hamm’s former “Mad Man” co-star John Slattery who plays a comedic version of himself as an out-of-work, down-on-his-luck actor whose texts to Hamm always go unanswered, and a group of assassins (Sabrina Impacciatore, Joe Lo Truglio, Mather Zickel).
“Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass” travels its own Yellow Brick Road in search of whimsy. It’s light and frothy, a nonsensical collection of scenes performed in a heightened, upbeat way, by a cast who energetically commits to the general ludicrous tone of the piece.
The consistent tone, however, when amplified, doesn’t have enough variance from scene to scene to hold interest.
That the cast are stymied by a script that leans into its absurdist style more than presenting genuinely funny moments blunts the film’s effectiveness.
The satire of celebrity culture and the chasm between Hollywood and the small-town Gail, representing Anytown USA, should have provided fertile ground but, time after time, the script, written by director David Wain and co-star Ken Marino, goes for silly over sentiment or any kind of satire with real bite. The result is a film that wastes a hall pass.
SYNOPSIS: In “Nuremberg,” a new historical drama starring Russell Crowe and Rami Malek, and now playing in theatres, a U.S. Army psychiatrist studies high-ranking Nazi officers, including Hermann Göring (Crowe), the notorious former Reichsmarschall and Hitler’s second in command, to determine their competency to stand trial for war crimes.
CAST: Russell Crowe, Rami Malek, Michael Shannon, Leo Woodall, John Slattery, Mark O’Brien, Colin Hanks, Wrenn Schmidt, Lydia Peckham, Richard E. Grant. Directed by James Vanderbilt.
REVIEW: Based on Jack El-Hai’s non-fiction book “The Nazi and the Psychiatrist,” “Nuremberg” is a handsomely mounted, old-fashioned drama that aims to comment on timely issues.
Set at the end of World War II the film sees U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson (Michael Shannon) spearheading the world’s first International Military Tribunal. Among those accused of committing atrocities are Hitler’s right hand man Hermann Göring (Russell Crowe) and 21 other members of the Nazi high command.
To determine the prisoner’s fitness for trial Army psychologist Lt. Col. Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek) is brought in to assess the men and their mental states. Entering into a “battle of wits” with the charismatic and intelligent Göring, Kelley attempts to understand the true nature of evil.
“Nuremberg” clarifies its intent in the film’s final moment when a title card reading, “The only clue to what man can do is what man has done,” a quote from English philosopher R.G. Collingwood, appears on the screen. Writer, co-producer, and director by James Vanderbilt (best known as the writer of “Zodiac” and “The Amazing Spider-Man”) makes an urgent plea for today’s audience to never forget how fascism can take hold. In our modern world, where intolerance is on the rise, the lessons of the past echo loudly and demand our attention.
I just wish the film was a more powerful vehicle for the messaging.
Despite scenes of trauma, suicide and a downbeat ending, “Nuremberg” is too restrained to leave a mark on viewers. Crowe and Malek spark in their scenes, creating a cat-and-mouse game in which the power dynamic is ever shifting, and while thier performances have dramatic heft, there’s a melodramatic edge to the storytelling that blunts the impact of the film’s central premise.
“Nuremberg” is packed with big, timely lessons but its stilted presentation doesn’t deliver the emotional impact to accompany its warnings.
Almost forty years after Chevy Chase portrayed the smarty-pants investigative reporter Irwin M. Fletcher, aka Fletch, on the big screen, the character is back in action. The gum shoe, who, ironically, doesn’t like to wear shoes, is now played by John Hamm in “Confess, Fletch,” a murder mystery now playing in theatres and on VOD, that aims to reboot the franchise.
Based on Gregory Mcdonald’s 1976 book of the same name but set in the present day, the story begins as Fletch, who now lives in Italy with his wealthy girlfriend Angela (Lorenza Izzo), visits Boston to track down stolen paintings worth millions of dollars. On his first night in town, he returns to his swanky rented townhouse to find a dead woman in the living room.
He calls it in and immediately becomes a suspect, but being his usual unflappable self, he cracks a few jokes, and continues his search for the art, while also trying to clear his name. Complicating his investigation are the slow-and-steady-wins-the-race Detective Monroe (Roy Wood Jr.), germophobe art dealer Horan (Kyle MacLachlan) and a randy Countess (Marcia Gay Harden) who pronounces Fletch’s name as “Flesh.”
This is not your father’s cinematic “Fletch.” Gone are Chevy Chase’s disguises, slapstick and doubletakes. They’ve been replaced with a more sardonic, dead pan, smart-alecky delivery that more closely resembles the tone of Mcdonald’s popular novels. In the back of a police car, for instance, murder suspect Fletch asks if they could go on a coffee run. “I’d kill for a macchiato,” he says, “not literally!” That is the movie’s mood; it’s a flippant crime story that could have used a splash or two of Chase’s heightened irreverence.
Hamm’s slick performance feels like neither fish nor fowl. His, “I have a line for everything,” glibness wears thin early on. The film does have some funny moments—a conversation with a designer about the meaning of the word “bespoke” is laugh out loud—and it is a hoot to see Hamm and his old “Mad Men” co-star John Slattery, who plays a Boston newspaper editor, together again in their foul-mouthed and funny scenes, but Hamm doesn’t register as either serious or comedic. It is a bland performance from an award-winning dramatic actor and one whose comedic work on “30 Rock” was raucous and really funny.
Part of it is the script. “We obtained surveillance footage from a store around the corner,” says Slo-mo Monroe. “Where the fudge is made?” is Fletch’s comeback.
And part of it is the TV-movie-of-the-week feel. The murder mystery is less important than the characters, who are very broadly sketched, and that leaves the film stuck somewhere between first and second gear.
Winston Churchill, two time Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and, according to a 2002 poll, the Greatest Briton of all time, has been played on screens big and small by everyone from Orson Welles and John Houseman to John Cleese and Richard Burton. Recently John Lithgow was nominated for a Golden Globe for his performance of the British Bulldog on “The Crown,” and now along comes Brian Cox as the great man in a not-so-great movie.
Set in the four day lead up to the Allied D-Day landings in Normandy, France in June, 1944 “Churchill” presents a different take on the prime minister than we’ve seen before. Cox plays him as a sixty-nine-year-old man exhausted by the weight of power, terrified of repeating the mistakes made at the bloody World War I Battle of Gallipoli. A personal and professional downward spiral following discord with Generals Eisenhower (John Slattery) and Montgomery (Julian Wadham), is slowed by intervention from the PM’s wife, the strong willed Clementine Churchill (Miranda Richardson)
Feature films are not documentaries nor are they history lessons, but “Churchill’s” fast-and-loose relationship with the truth does not play well. While it is true that Churchill did have misgivings about the D-Day invasion the timeframe has been twisted for dramatic effect. Writer Godfrey Cheshire reports that writer and historian Alex von Tunzelmann “’telescoped’ the events of Churchill’s opposition, bringing them from months earlier to the days just before the invasion.” In an effort to link Churchill’s documented depression with one of the key events of WWII she goes nonlinear with history but fails to draw any real drama from her contrived version of events.
Cox grandstands throughout, perhaps in an effort to overcompensate for the cliché dialogue. “Sometimes you can’t lead everything from the front,” he bellows as though saying it louder amplifies its meaning. The gruff portrayal falls into caricature early on and has a hard time transcending into something compelling, let alone the psychological examination director Jonathan Teplitzky had in mind.
James Purefoy as King George VI and Richardson fare better but are bowled over by a script that suffers form a lack of subtlety.
“Churchill” is a beautiful looking movie, but it isn’t history or a portrait of a real person. Instead it is a misleading look at one of the most important eras in modern history.
