This year, St. John’s will be participating in Cineplex’s annual Great Digital Film Festival. 2015 marks the sixth year of the festival, in which certain Cineplex theatres all over Canada screen a set of films spanning a variety of genres and years. This year’s lineup, playing from January 30 to February 5, includes selections from Alien all the way to X-Men: Days of Future Past. Behind the selections are Matt DeVuono and well-known film critic Richard Crouse, who spoke with the Muse before the festival.
Award season is a busy time for Crouse. When it comes to perhaps the most popular award show, the Oscars, Crouse believed there were certain notable snubs. In terms of the best picture nominees, he felt that The Lego Movie was overlooked. Crouse also noticed an underrepresentation of female directors… READ THE WHOLE THING HERE!
Like most movie critics, Richard Crouse has strong and fairly predictable views of how to best watch films.
“The best way to see a movie is in a big dark room surrounded by strangers, watching it as big and loud as possible, they way that the director intended you to see it and hear it,” says Crouse, in an interview from Toronto. “I love sitting in a crowd of strangers, hearing them laugh or hearing them scream at something that scares them. Whatever the reaction might be, I really like being part of the community of all that.”‘
Which is a guiding principle for Cineplex’s Great Digital Film Fest, which will start on Friday at Scotiabank Theatre Chinook.
Crouse, an author and film critic who appears on CTV’s Canada AM and CP24, co-programmed the sixth annual festival with a focus on films that beg to be seen on a giant screen… READ THE WHOLE THING HERE!
THUNDER BAY — Movies are meant to be seen on the big screen.
“For me the best way to see a movie is to see it on the big screen surrounded by strangers so you can listen as they laugh all at the same time or as they gasp in horror or whatever reaction they have,” said film expert Richard Crouse.
Crouse, who is Canada AM’s regular film critic, is participating in Cineplex’s sixth annual Great Digital Film Festival from Jan. 30 to Feb. 5 by interacting with fans on Twitter, answering questions and engaging in conversation on the classic and fan-favourite films chosen for this year’s lineup.
Thunder Bay’s SilverCity is one of the theatres that will be hosting the festival.
As a reviewer, Crouse has every closet and cupboard in his house filled with DVDs and Blu-rays, but he finds he doesn’t watch them that often.
“Given the choice, I’d always rather see something on the big screen,” he said, adding this festival is a way for him to see some of these films the way they were meant to be seen…” READ THE WHOLE THING HERE!
Early on in Filth and Wisdom the movie’s narrator and star A.K. (Eugene Hutz) says, “In my country we have a saying… He who licks knives will eventually cut his tongue.” In film critic land we also have a saying. “He who watches this movie all the way to the end will want to cut their eyes out…” Filth and Wisdom is so amateurish, so poorly made that if Madonna’s name wasn’t on it as director and screenwriter you’d only be able to find it in delete bins nestled against copies of Shanghai Surprise.
The story, such that it is, centers around three flat mates in a rundown London boarding house. A.K. (Ukrainian punk singer Hutz) is an aspiring musician by day, male dominatrix by night, while Holly (Holly Weston) is an unemployed ballet dancer who moonlights as a pole dancer and Juliette (Vicky McClure) is a pharmacist who steals drugs from her place of business to send to sick orphans in Africa.
Madonna claims Godard, Pasolini, Fellini and Visconti as her cinematic inspirations, but the slap dash nature of the film points more towards Benny Hill than any of the French New Wave or Italian neorealists she apparently so admires. From the incompetent performances to the dated, silly—and unsexy—sexual content to its Philosophy 101 meanderings Filth and Wisdom feels like cutting edge ideas… from 1982. It‘s the work yo’d expect from an overly earnest and inexperienced film student, not an international superstar who is usually anything but earnest and certainly not inexperienced.
The addition of a kickin’ soundtrack and some interesting work from the strangely charismatic Hutz cannot rescue Filth and Wisdom from the cinematic dung heap.
Actress Andrea Riseborough has no time to be intimidated by co-workers, even when they are world-famous icons.
“Making a movie is no small feat,” she says, “and there is so little time and you can enter into something being paralyzed by fear or you can just experience it.”
She’s referring to being directed by Madonna in W.E., a film that mixes-and-matches a modern day New York tale with the scandalous 1930s love affair between Wallis Simpson and King Edward VIII. “I didn’t know her personally,” she says of the singer-turned-director.
“I went to meet her and was taken aback at her ultimate passion for wanting to tell the story. That was really what ignited me.”
“When she sent me the script I read it and thought it was totally unique in the sense that it existed in the surreal. There are two time frames intertwined with one another and I found that really unique.”
She says as the project started she had only a peripheral idea about Wallis Simpson, the American socialite whose husband, Prince Edward, abdicated his throne to marry her. Wallis was, says the actress, “a still image, unmoving.”
That picture soon started coming to life, but it took some time for both director and actress to flesh a real character out of Wallis’s life. “We were really quite complicit from the outset in terms of who we might discover this woman to be,” Riseborough says.
“Neither of us really knew yet. We knew what we had researched but that really is the suit that you then have to unzip and forget about. (Madonna) talks about trusting the DNA being within you but not being a slave to it.”
The result sheds some light on why the story of the divorcee and the king still resonates with people almost 80 years after the event.
“It’s interesting for us all to question why we find it such a fascination that the king might give up his throne for someone who’s not terribly beautiful,” she says.
In recent years filmmakers haven’t been content to simply tell one story. Recently Steven Soderbergh semi-successfully wove together a multitude of storylines to create the germ-o-phobic tapestry of “Contagion,” and “360” sees Antony Hopkins leading a mind bogglingly large cast of characters vying for screen time.
Madonna is a little less ambitious in “W.E.,” melding only two stories together. But you know what? It’s still one too many.
Cutting between 1990s New York and the scandalous 1930s love affair between Wallis Simpson (Andrea Riseborough) and King Edward VIII (James D’Arcy) that shook the world, the film struggles to make a connection between the two story threads.
In New York Wally Winthrop (Abbie Cornish) is a desperate housewife, the wife of a doctor who becomes obsessed with the decades old love story. She visits Sotheby’s every day, admiring the Simpson artifacts up for auction. There she meets a handsome security guard (Oscar Isaac) who helps her see happiness through her fog of depression.
Running parallel to this is Simpson’s story.
If you squint, and look very closely you may be able to find a thread of logic that connects these two stories, but as presented it’s a stretch. The Winthrop story is simply tiresome and takes away from the historical aspect of the story, which, in light of the recent success of “The King’s Speech,” might have worked as a love story.
Certainly it doesn’t work as an historical piece. It is sumptuously laid out and shot, but Madonna (who also co-wrote the script) seems content to ignore Simpson’s Nazi sympathies and some of the unseemly aspects of her relationship with Edward. Nonetheless Andrea Riseborough as Simpson and James D’Arcy as Edward acquit themselves quite well, it’s just a pity they don’t have a more focused movie to showcase their talents.
