I join CTV Atlantic’s Stephanie Tsicos to talk about the biopic “Tony,” the dino drama “The End of Oak Street,” the kid’s flick “PAW Patrol: The Dino Movie” and the stoner comedy “The Wrong Girls.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
SYNOPSIS: In “The Wrong Girls,” a new stoner comedy starring Kristen Stewart, and now playing in theatres, a case of mistaken identity throws the lives of codependent best friends into chaos. “Two girls. One wrong move. Zero clue what to do.”
CAST: Kristen Stewart, Alia Shawkat, LaKeith Stanfield, Kumail Nanjiani, Geena Davis, James Weaver, Alex McAtee, Kate McKinnon, Cate Blanchett, Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, Allison Rose Carter, Jon Read, Maggie McLean, Dylan Meyer. Written and directed by Dylan Meyer.
REVIEW: A testament to the dual powers of friendship and very strong drugs, “The Wrong Girls” is a trippy throwback to the anything goes style of stoner comedies like “Pineapple Express” and “Half Baked.”
Kristen Stewart and Alia Shawkat are perpetually stoned roommates and best friends Frankie and Molly. Frankie, quit Stanford and now eeks out a living as a delivery person who can’t be bothered to ditch her joints before dropping off packages at people’s homes. At the same time, a spread sheet for Molly’s most recent project has disappeared, leaving the BFFs short on their rent… again.
In a case of mistaken identity Frankie comes into possession of a briefcase filled with vials of powerful experimental psychedelic drugs. After sampling them, they not only trip out hardcore, but also develop telepathic and psychokinetic abilities, allowing them to read their cat’s (voiced by Seth Rogen and Kumail Nanjiani) minds and move things with their thoughts. “I have no idea why you thought it would be a good idea to take the drugs,” says Dr. Chapman (Kate McKinnon). “You are dumb as rocks, and you should be dead.”
Their newfound abilities place them in the sights of operative named Not Metal Head Dave (LaKeith Stanfield) and a group of Danish killers eager to get their hands on the drugs. “We’re very important fugitives. We’re runaways.”
Loudly and proudly silly, “The Wrong Girls” features opinionated cats, bad choices, giant spliffs, psychedelic freak outs and an a-list cast of kooks and killers, but its strongest asset is its portrayal of female friendship. Stoner comedies have long been the domain of the dudes, but Stewart and Shawkat’s off-the-charts chemistry and great comic timing, not only bring these chaotic women to vivid life but also add some emotional stakes to the absurd story.
“The Wrong Girls” is a stoner comedy with all the good and bad that comes along with the genre but even its rough spots go up in smoke courtesy of Stewart, who has never been looser on screen, Shawkat and the steady hand of writer/director (and Stewart’s real-life spouse) Dylan Meyer.
I join CTV NewsChannel anchor Akshay Tandon to talk about the new releases in theatres, including the adventures of Star wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu,” the absurd social commentary of “I Love Boosters” and the demonic road trip “Passenger.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
Fast reviews for busy people! Watch as I review three movies in less time than it takes to brush your teeth. Have a look as I race against the clock to tell you about the adventures of Star wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu,” the absurd social commentary of “I Love Boosters” and the demonic road trip “Passenger.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
SYNOPSIS: In the raucous “I Love Boosters,” a surreal new satire starring Keke Palmer and now playing in theatres, professional shoplifters wage revolutionary war against a cutthroat designer.
CAST: Keke Palmer, Naomi Ackie, Taylour Paige, Poppy Liu, Eiza González, LaKeith Stanfield, Will Poulter, Don Cheadle, Demi Moore. Written and Directed by Boots Riley.
REVIEW: A tale of class warfare filtered through a Looney Tunes filter, “I Love Boosters” is an imaginative, heightened movie whose real-life thought-provoking messages on labor exploitation, capitalism and consumerism cut through the surreal story.
Keke Palmer stars as Corvette, the leader of the Velvet Gang, alongside Sade (Naomi Ackie) and Mariah (Taylour Paige). They’re boosters, i.e. shoplifters, who, like couture Robin Hoods, steal high end fashions to resell at deep discount from make-shift shops in their apartments.
Their main target is Christie Smith (Demi Moore), a high-flying designer whose empire has been built on culture appropriation and exploitative labor.
Their boosting takes a sci fi turn when they meet Chinese garment factory worker Jianhu (Poppy Liu) and her high-tech teleportation device.
“I Love Boosters” is an absurd movie. And I mean that in the best possible way. Writer and director Boots Riley creates a world in which Smith lives in a tall, shiny tower in the city center that is tilted at a steep 45 degrees angle. We’ve seen big buildings before, but this one feels off. It’s familiar and yet quite unlike anything you’ve seen before. Riley uses this and other strange visuals to keep the viewer off balance, as if anything could happen in this strange world.
Keeping pace with Riley’s whimsical vision are a cast who help keep the sky-high story grounded in reality. Even when the film gets outrageous, depicting 30-second lunch breaks, teleporters and a paperwork boulder that follows Corvette around, the charismatic Palmer and the cast are game, bringing a sense of play but also emotion, which prevents the whimsy from taking over completely.
Riley has a lot on his mind. Labor exploitation, materialism and class are essayed but the propulsive comic aspects of “I Love Boosters” are the spoonful of sugar that makes the movie’s messages go down.
SYNOPSIS: In “Die My Love,” a new psychological drama now playing in theatres, Grace (Jennifer Lawrence) and Jackson (Robert Pattinson) leave the hustle and bustle of New York City in search of a quieter life on a rural Montana ranch. As the couple welcome a child, Grace begins to feel isolated, trapped and acts out in unpredictable ways. “I’m right here,” she says to Jackson, “you just can’t see me.”
CAST: Jennifer Lawrence, Robert Pattinson, LaKeith Stanfield, Nick Nolte, Sissy Spacek. Directed by Lynne Ramsay.
REVIEW: A non-linear, stream-of-consciousness look at one woman’s breakdown, “Die My Love” is not a movie you “enjoy” in the traditional sense. Like the recent “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,” a psychological drama that mined similar territory, “Die My Love” is a confrontational, difficult watch.
The difference is in the execution.
While neither film can be called pleasurable, “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” displays a sense of purpose missing from “Die My Love.”
Both feature compelling, raw performances from their leads, but “If I Had Legs” gives the viewer something to hang onto story wise. “Die My Love” has a premise—woman has a breakdown after moving to the country—but is frustratingly shy about fleshing out a complete narrative. The result is a film that feels like a series of escalating events rather than a cohesive whole.
The glue holding the entire thing together is Lawrence, whose fearless and ferocious performance physicalizes the character’s inner turmoil in increasingly unpredictable and upsetting ways. Crushed by postpartum depression and isolation, her behavior spirals, captured by director Lynne Ramsay, who co-wrote with Enda Walsh and Alice Birch, in a series of loosely connected vignettes. With little-to-no narrative accompaniment, however, the incidents, while often shocking, become repetitive and drain away the film’s power as a portrait of postpartum and human frailty.
Lawrence’s portrait of psychological collapse is raw and challenging cinema but as a vehicle for the performance “Die My Love’s” mix of reality and delusion falters.
SYNOPSIS: Based on a true story, “Roofman,” now playing in theatres, stars Channing Tatum as an escaped convict who avoided detection for months by living in a Toys “R” Us store.
CAST: Channing Tatum, Kirsten Dunst, Ben Mendelsohn, LaKeith Stanfield, Juno Temple, Melonie Diaz, Uzo Aduba, Lily Collias, Jimmy O. Yang, and Peter Dinklage. Directed by Derek Cianfrance.
REVIEW: A showcase for its star’s charm, “Roofman” stretches credulity until it is paper thin. If not for Channing Tatum’s innate likeability this story of a vet who turns to a life of crime so he can afford a normal life with his kids would be a stone-cold clunker.
Set in 2004, when Blockbusters still dotted the landscape, “Roofman” is the true story of former United States Army Reserve non-commissioned officer Jeffrey Manchester. His years of service gave him the unique talent of being able to analyze situations and expertly determine operational weaknesses. “I see things other people don’t see,” he says.
The skill comes in handy on his return Stateside.
Unable to get meaningful employment or hold his marriage together, he scopes out McDonald’s locations, learning their routines, particularly when and how they make bank deposits after a brisk weekend business. Discovering all the chain restaurants operate in essentially the same way, he begins a crime spree that sees him enter a restaurant through the roof and hide inside until the first shift arrives. He then gets them to open the safe, grab the “weekend corporate burger money,” lock the workers in a walk-in cooler and flee.
Forty-five or fifty robberies into his crime wave ends with a sentence of forty-five years in prison. Inside, he once again uses his power of observation to make a daring escape. On the run, he settles in Charlotte, North Carolina, finding shelter in a Toys “R” Us store.
It’s here the movie really begins, as we learn about Manchester’s survival skills—he lives, undetected in the store for 8 or 9 months—and his relationship with Leigh Wainscott (Kirsten Dunst), a single mom and Toys “R” Us employee.
Tatum plays Manchester as a nice guy driven to extremes by circumstance. Sure, he locks burger joint employees in room-sized coolers, but he always makes sure they wear jackets to stay warm. He’s a sensitive soul who, on the phone from prison, tells his daughter, “We don’t say goodbye, because goodbye means going away and going away means forgetting.”
It’s an effective performance that brings warmth, humour, some pulse racing sequences and even a wild, nude chase scene to the film’s overlong two-hour running time. But despite Tatum’s presence and Dunst’s kindly work, “Roofman” has a hard time finding its tone. A multi-hyphenate—it’s a romantic-true crime story with farce, light humor and loads of family drama. Tatum runs the gamut and hands in one of the most emotive performances of his career, but the film’s various elements feel like puzzle pieces that don’t quite fit together.
SYNOPSIS: In “Play Dirty,” a new action comedy starring Mark Wahlberg and LaKeith Stanfield, and now streaming on Prime Video, violent criminal Parker gets a chance at the score of a lifetime if he can outsmart, outlast and outwit a South American dictator, the world’s richest man and the New York mob.
CAST: Mark Wahlberg, LaKeith Stanfield, Rosa Salazar, Keegan-Michael Key, Chukwudi Iwuji, Nat Wolff, Thomas Jane, Tony Shalhoub. Directed by Shane Black.
REVIEW: Based on the hard-boiled novels by Donald E. Westlake, writing under the name Richard Stark, “Play Dirty” is an overblown throwback to the action comedies of the 1980s and 1990s.
Director Shane Black opens the movie with a wild and wooly action scene that sees expert thief Parker, the movie’s antihero lead played by a strangely unengaged Mark Wahlberg, as part of a violent bank heist gone wrong. The resulting car chase, that sees the good guys and bad guys careening through a horserace, is nutso and sets the over-the-top tone of what is to follow.
The convoluted story then focuses on Parker, and his gang, which includes, freedom fighter Zen (Rosa Salazar), a South American criminal who instigates the theft of one of her country’s national treasures to bankroll a revolution that will topple her government, Grofield (LaKeith Stanfield), a criminal with dreams of being an actor and scammers Ed and Brenda Mackey (Keegan-Michael Key and Claire Lovering).
Their complicated plan to steal a giant statue takes up most of the overlong two-hour runtime, but the fun isn’t in the heist, it’s in the characters. Black, who cowrote the script with Charles Mondry and Anthony Bagarozzi, has a knack for creating antiheroes with pizazz. Standouts include Stanfield, who easily steals scenes from Wahlberg, Salazar as a femme fatale with a way with a funny line and a weapon, and Nat Wolff, whose character Kincaid takes a licking but keeps on ticking.
They all hand in work that feels like they understand that the absurd nature of Black’s big set pieces and the film’s callous disregard for human life is cartoony in nature. It’s Wahlberg who doesn’t appear to be in on the joke. Parker is a hardened criminal, an unrepentant killer and thief, who only seems to come alive when he is un-aliving someone, which is a lot of the time, but not enough to animate the character.
“Play Dirty” has some of the trademark Shane Black verve. His best work is characterized by odd-couple dynamics, flawed leads, sharp dialogue and twisty-turny plots. He helped define the late 1980s action-comedy genre with the scripts for the “Lethal Weapon” franchise, and his underrated “The Nice Guys” is a near perfect buddy flick.
“Play Dirty” doesn’t stand up by comparison to those films—it’s mostly as generic as its title—but it has enough direct to streaming energy and charm to be earn a watch.
SYNOPSIS: In “Play Dirty,” a new action comedy starring Mark Wahlberg and LaKeith Stanfield, and now streaming on Prime Video, violent criminal Parker gets a chance at the score of a lifetime if he can outsmart, outlast and outwit a South American dictator, the world’s richest man and the New York mob.
CAST: Mark Wahlberg, LaKeith Stanfield, Rosa Salazar, Keegan-Michael Key, Chukwudi Iwuji, Nat Wolff, Thomas Jane, Tony Shalhoub. Directed by Shane Black.
REVIEW: Based on the hard-boiled novels by Donald E. Westlake, writing under the name Richard Stark, “Play Dirty” is an overblown throwback to the action comedies of the 1980s and 1990s.
Director Shane Black opens the movie with a wild and wooly action scene that sees expert thief Parker, the movie’s antihero lead played by a strangely unengaged Mark Wahlberg, as part of a violent bank heist gone wrong. The resulting car chase, that sees the good guys and bad guys careening through a horserace, is nutso and sets the over-the-top tone of what is to follow.
The convoluted story then focuses on Parker, and his gang, which includes, freedom fighter Zen (Rosa Salazar), a South American criminal who instigates the theft of one of her country’s national treasures to bankroll a revolution that will topple her government, Grofield (LaKeith Stanfield), a criminal with dreams of being an actor and scammers Ed and Brenda Mackey (Keegan-Michael Key and Claire Lovering).
Their complicated plan to steal a giant statue takes up most of the overlong two-hour runtime, but the fun isn’t in the heist, it’s in the characters. Black, who cowrote the script with Charles Mondry and Anthony Bagarozzi, has a knack for creating antiheroes with pizazz. Standouts include Stanfield, who easily steals scenes from Wahlberg, Salazar as a femme fatale with a way with a funny line and a weapon, and Nat Wolff, whose character Kincaid takes a licking but keeps on ticking.
They all hand in work that feels like they understand that the absurd nature of Black’s big set pieces and the film’s callous disregard for human life is cartoony in nature. It’s Wahlberg who doesn’t appear to be in on the joke. Parker is a hardened criminal, an unrepentant killer and thief, who only seems to come alive when he is un-aliving someone, which is a lot of the time, but not enough to animate the character.
“Play Dirty” has some of the trademark Shane Black verve. His best work is characterized by odd-couple dynamics, flawed leads, sharp dialogue and twisty-turny plots. He helped define the late 1980s action-comedy genre with the scripts for the “Lethal Weapon” franchise, and his underrated “The Nice Guys” is a near perfect buddy flick.
“Play Dirty” doesn’t stand up by comparison to those films—it’s mostly as generic as its title—but it has enough direct to streaming energy and charm to be earn a watch.
