Watch Richard Crouse review three movies in less time than it takes to buy a dress! Have a look as he races against the clock to tell you about the feel-good “Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris,” the music documentary “Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song” and the drama “Where the Crawdads Sing.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
I join CTV NewsChannel anchor Angie Seth to talk about the feel-good “Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris,” the music documentary “Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song” and the drama “Where the Crawdads Sing.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
Richard appears on “CTV News at 6” with anchor Pauline Chan to talk about the best movies and television to watch this weekend. This week he has a look at Dakota Johnson in Netflix’s Jane Austin adaptation “Persuasion,” Jennifer Hudson as Aretha Franklin in “Respect” on Crave, “Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris” on the big screen and the documentary “Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song.”
Watch the whole thing HERE! (Starts at 38:16)
Richard joins CP24 to have a look at new movies coming to VOD, streaming services and theatres. Today we talk about the murder mystery “Where the Crawdads Sing,” the historical feel-good flick “Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris” and the story of one of an iconic Canadian’s most famous song, “Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
Richard joins CTV NewsChannel anchor Marcia MacMillan to talk about the feel-good “Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris,” the music documentary “Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song” and the drama “Where the Crawdads Sing.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
Richard sits in on the CKTB Niagara in the Morning morning show with guest host Stephanie Vivier to talk the new movies coming to theatres. This week we look at the mystery drama “Where the Crawdads Sing,” the feel-good historical drama “Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris” and the documentary “Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song.”
Listen to the whole thing HERE!
Richard sits in on the CFRA Ottawa morning show with host Bill Carroll to talk the new movies coming to theatres including the mystery drama “Where the Crawdads Sing,” the feel-good historical drama “Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris” and the documentary “Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song.”
Listen to the whole thing HERE!
Richard joins NewsTalk 1010 host David Cooper on the coast-to-coast-to-coast late night “Showgram” to play the game “Did Richard Crouse Like This?” This week we talk about the southern drama “Where the Crawdads Sing,” the feel-good “Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris” and the documentary “Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song.”
Listen to the whole thing HERE!
I usually avoid movies with titles that rhyme. For every “Be Kind Rewind” or “Chop Shop,” which I liked, there’s a “From Prada to Nada” or “Good Luck Chuck” that remind me that some of the time, a rhyme equals grime.
OK, that was lame, but you get the idea.
Cutesy titles are often the first warning sign of what is to follow. A new film, “Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris,” commits the name game sin, but Academy Award nominee Lesley Manville brings the poetry to the movie.
Set in 1957, Manville plays Ada Harris, an optimistic London house cleaner. “Today’s my lucky day,” she says. A self-described “invisible woman,” she is also a dreamer, a person who hangs on to the belief that her husband Eddie will finally come home from war, and that something better is always around the corner.
Only one of those things is true.
When Eddie is officially declared killed in action, she is devastated, but stoic. “I should have known he would have gotten back to me if he could have,” she said, holding back tears. “Well, footloose and fancy free.”
When she sees a beautiful Dior haute couture gown belonging to one of her aristocratic customers, it is an epiphany. Although the dress costs double what she makes a year, she makes it her goal to visit Paris’s 30 Avenue Montaigne, Christian Dior’s namesake boutique, and treat herself to a dress.
Through a series of unlikely happenstances, Mrs. Harris raises enough money to get to the City of Lights, pay cash for the dress and fulfil her dream, but how will she, as the snobby Dior house manager Claudine Colbert (Isabelle Huppert) asks, “give the dress the life it deserves.”
“Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris” is the kind of feel good-movie that seems as though it was written by an algorithm. Of course, it’s based on the 1958 novel “Mrs. ‘Arris Goes to Paris” by Paul Gallico, which later a became TV movie of the same name starring Angela Lansbury, Diana Rigg, and Omar Sharif, but it feels as though a bot was asked, “What makes people feel all cuddly- cushy?”
How about some old school British slang, some romance, the Eiffel Tower, glittering dresses, some class warfare and even a tad of existentialism? Nothing like a movie about aspirations with a side of Jean-Paul Sartre.
The philosopher’s name is used as a prop to illustrate the intellectual prowess of the French love interests (Alba Baptista and Lucas Bravo) but Mrs. Harris appears to take Sartre’s ideas to heart.
When Sartre said, “Life begins on the other side of despair,” he may have been talking about Mrs. Harris’s rebirth after she learned Eddie wasn’t coming back to her. Sartre’s observation, “We are our choices,” applies to the title character’s indomitable spirit and her decision to find the beauty in her world, no matter how frivolous. While the movie reduces the existentialist’s theories to pop psychology, the uplift in Manville’s winning performance provides an escape to a more glamorous time (even if it takes place in Paris during a garbage strike).
“Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris” is predictable and overlong, but Manville brings the heart and soul.
