I joined NewsTalk 1010 guest host Deb Hutton on The Rush to respond to the “Wired” article “Shockbuster Season: Why the Death of the Summer Movie Is a Good Thing.”
Listen to the whole thing HERE! (Starts at 19:50)
I joined BNN Bloomberg to talk about the weakest Memorial Day long weekend in nearly three decades.
Watch the whole thing HERE!
I spoke with legendary film director George Miller about making five “Mad Max” films over the last forty-five years, the political timeliness of “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” and what all his movies have in common.
Listen to the whole thing HERE!
LOGLINE: A mix of Norse and Greek mythology set against an apocalyptic backdrop, and set 15 to 20 years before the events of “Mad Max: Fury Road,” “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” is a high-octane origin story. Kidnapped from the Place of Great Abundance by Warlord Dementus’s (Chris Hemsworth) henchmen, young Furiosa (played by Alyla Browne as a child, Anya Taylor-Joy as an adult) vows vengeance for the death of her mother as Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme) and Dementus vie for supremacy of the Wasteland. “When things go bonkers,” says Dementus, “you have to adapt.”
CAST: Anya Taylor-Joy, Alyla Browne, Chris Hemsworth, Tom Burke, Lachy Hulme, Nathan Jones, Josh Helman, John Howard, Angus Sampson, Charlee Fraser, Quaden Bayles, Daniel Webber. Directed by George Miller.
REVIEW: A pedal-to-the-metal epic, “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” follows the big-block engine power of “Fury Road” with a film that brings a backstory to the strong-willed Furiosa (Taylor-Joy). As expected, Miller delivers a high-octane apocalyptic tale with a fierce Taylor-Joy and charismatic warlord Hemsworth, that features action scenes that’ll make your eyes pop out of their sockets.
The extended “Stowaway” action sequence, for instance, featuring all manner of souped-up vehicles blazing through the dusty Wasteland, makes Monster Trucks look like a Hot Wheels rally. Frenetic in the extreme, Miller’s restless camera is in constant motion, capturing the (mostly) practical stunts in his singular, propulsive style.
The actual revenge story is “Fury Road”-Lite, but the breeziness of the plot is offset by the scorching leads. The transition between Alyla Browne as the young Furiosa to Taylor-Joy, who is a reflection of the character played by Charlize Theron, is graceful and effective.
With a minimum of dialogue—she speaks maybe 30 lines in total—Taylor-Joy portrays the strong will, intelligence and furious emotion that drives the character on her hero’s journey, even if we don’t meet the adult Furiosa until roughly an hour into the action. As a warlord who snacks on human blood sausages, Hemsworth has a fake nose and the showier role. He’s an operatic villain who licks the tears of his victims and gets around on a grand Roman chariot powered by motorbikes, not horses. He’s entertainingly over-the-top, even in a bigger-than-life movie featuring characters with names like The People Eater and Rictus Erectus.
“Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” is an experience. It doesn’t hit the heights of “Fury Road,” one of the greatest action movies ever made, but in its examination of love and hope in hopeless times, it is both ridiculous and sublime as it tears across the screen like greased lightning.
What to watch when you’ve already watched everything Part Three! Binge worthy, not cringe worthy recommendations from Isolation Studios in the eerily quiet downtown Toronto. Three movies to stream, rent or buy from the comfort of home isolation. Today, road warriors, romantic zombies and an underemployed dancer.
Listen to the whole thing HERE!
By Richard Crouse – Metro Canada
In American Honey, a road trip movie now playing at the Toronto International Film Festival before it heads to a national release later this year, Riley Keough plays a Fagin-like character, tough-as-nails with a glare that could peel the paint off the walls.
She is Krystal, the leader of a travelling band of door-to-door magazine sellers who picks up new recruits along the way with one simple job interview question: “Do you got anyone who’s going to miss you?”
It is a bravura performance in a movie that, once and for all, proves she’s not just Elvis Presley’s granddaughter; she can really act.
Making the free-form drama with British director Andrea Arnold and a cast of mostly newcomers was an unconventional occurrence for the Girlfriend Experience star.
“I didn’t know what the (bleep) anybody else was doing,” she says.
“I wasn’t on set for anything except for my own stuff. Nobody knew what the movie was about until we watched it. I literally had no idea.”
Keough, who has appeared in Magic Mike, Mad Max: Fury Road and will soon be seen in the Netflix film The Discovery and Steven Soderbergh’s Logan Lucky, says the lack of traditional structure did “all the right things” for her performance.
“It makes you able to do anything,” she says.
“You don’t want to get into the habit of only doing things that are structured and safe. Hit your mark and look that way.
“You have nothing, so you actually have to do something. You’re not going off a whole script and character arc and knowing all these blah, blah, blah things. You’re just existing as this person. You are forced to exist as this person. You don’t get a chance to think about anything at all.”
Hitting marks and finding the light “is just (bleeping) annoying,” she says. “Excuse my French. This was a nice break from it.”
Set in a world where regular folks still open the door for rattily dressed kids selling magazines, it’s a story about families lost and families found, about poverty, disenfranchised youth and finding freedom on the road.
“I think Krystal had been doing this for a long time so that’s all she knew,” Keough says of her tough-talking character.
“This world does exist. I think she grew up ‘on crew’ and she knows the most. We ran into another mag crew. In the movie you see us shaking hands with another mag crew.”
At well over two-and-a-half hours American Honey has an emphasis on naturalism and all that entails: the mundane and the pulse racing in equal measure.
It’s not a traditional road flick. Here, the destination isn’t as important as the journey.
Life on the road taught Keough a thing or two. “I learned not to drink too much,” she says.
“I really think I learned it. Legitimately.”
She laughs, perhaps remembering some long nights while making this movie, then adds in a more serious tone, “I learned a lot of really profound things but I don’t know how comfortable I am talking about them.”
By Richard Crouse – Metro In Focus
In polite society no one would dare ask a stranger about his or her father’s violent death, but celebrity culture is not polite society.
Over the years I’ve heard interviewers ask questions ranging from the innocuous — “What are you wearing?” — to the silly — “How do you keep your bum in such great shape?” — but rarely have I heard anything as unnecessarily meddling as the query aimed at Charlize Theron during a press conference I hosted several years ago.
A reporter asked the actress about seeing her mother shoot her abusive, alcoholic father dead when she was a teenager. But instead of breaking down Theron said, “I’m not talking about that,” with an icy finality that made everyone freeze.
I admired her for not over sharing, not spilling the intimate details of her life à la the Kardashian Klan. She’s careful what she says to the press, avoids scandal and damage controls the ones that inevitably pop up in every celeb’s life. For instance, recently she said, short and sweetly, “We both decided to separate,” when accused of “ghosting” on her romance with Sean Penn.
She understands some things should only be spoken about when and where she chooses and not at the behest of an aggressive reporter looking to dredge up painful memories for the sake of “good television.” Theron is media savvy so I was surprised a few weeks ago when she caused a media hurly burly with comments about the burden of being beautiful.
Chatting up her new film The Huntsman: Winter’s War with British GQ she said, “How many roles are out there for the gorgeous, BLEEPINGing, gown-wearing eight-foot model? When meaty roles come through, I’ve been in the room and pretty people get turned away first.”
She is a beautiful woman, that is as clear as the perfectly positioned nose on her face, but is she intimating that being beautiful has harmed her career?
Turns out she wasn’t, or so she claims. Alleging a misquote, she later apologized, saying that playing “deconstructed characters” appeals because, “how many characters really are there out there for a woman wearing a gown? You have to play real people.
The mea culpa was unnecessary. She works in a business where beauty is a commodity.
The problem with her earlier statement is that publicly acknowledging one’s own looks carries with it a hint of arrogance, a suggestion that winning the genetic lottery somehow makes you superior, but she simply said something others already have.
Keira Knightley claims she almost lost the role in Pride and Prejudice because the director thought she was too pretty and Jessica Biel says being Esquire’s 2005 Sexiest Woman cost her work.
Theron may have missed out on a job or two because of her looks, but it’s also an element of what made her a star.
That and talent, and just as you wouldn’t apologize for skin colour or having red hair or being tall or short, she doesn’t need to say sorry for being beautiful.
“Richard Crouse, a film critic and pop culture expert, was part of the group that selected the movies that would be included as part of the festival. It basically involved them sitting around and lightheartedly arguing about what movies they would like to see back on the big screen.
“As Crouse said, there’s just something about going to see a film in the theatre and how watching a movie can be a rather enjoyable collective experience with others.
“There’s no better way to see a film than going to see it in the theatre,” said Crouse.”
Read the while thing HERE!
Richard swings by InnerSpace to chat with hosts Teddy Wilson and Ajay Fry about Cineplex’s Great Digital Film Festival. Find out which other GDFF flick is a perfect companion to “Mad Max: FuryRoad” and why seeing movies in a theatre is hardwired into our DNA.
InnerSpace airs on the Space Channel at 6 pm!
