Posts Tagged ‘Martha Stewart’

CTVNEWS.CA: “THE CROUSE REVIEW FOR ‘GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL. 2’ & MORE!”

A new feature from from ctvnews.ca! The Crouse Review is a quick, hot take on the weekend’s biggest movies! This week Richard looks at the giddy “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2,” the delicious documentary “Jeremiah Tower: The Last Magnificent” and the bruising “First Round Down.”

Watch the whole thing HERE!

RICHARD’S WEEKEND MOVIE REVIEWS FROM CP24! FRIDAY MAY 05, 2017.

Richard joins CP24 to have a look at the weekend’s new movies, the giddy “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2,” the delicious documentary “Jeremiah Tower: The Last Magnificent,” the bruising “First Round Down” and the grim and grimy “I, Daniel Blake.”

Watch the whole thing HERE!

RICHARD’S CTV NEWSCHANNEL WEEKEND MOVIE REVIEWS & MORE FOR APR 28.

Richard sits in with CTV NewsChannel anchor Jennifer Burke to have a look at the big weekend movies, the giddy “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2,” the delicious documentary “Jeremiah Tower: The Last Magnificent,” the bruising “First Round Down” and the grim and grimy “I, Daniel Blake.”

Watch the whole thing HERE!

JEREMIAH TOWER: THE LAST MAGNIFICENT: 3 ½ STARS. “delicious and charismatic.”

Jeremiah Tower is the most famous celebrity chef you have never heard of.

Martha Stewart calls him “a father of the American cuisine.” Anthony Bourdain says he changed the world and Mario Batali calls him “the darling, the glamour puss, the sexy guy, the smart guy and the innovative chef that everybody wanted to know something about.”

The man himself, who pulled a D. B. Cooper style disappearing act at the height of his fame, after defining what an American restaurant could be says, “I have to stay away from human beings,” he says, “because somehow I am not one.”

A new documentary, “Jeremiah Tower: The Last Magnificent,” from director Lydia Tenaglia (and executive produced by Bourdain) aims to shed light on this enigma of man. “I’ve known Jeremiah for forty years,” says former Town and Country Magazine food and wine editor, James Villas, “and I am one of his oldest friends but I still don’t know Jeremiah.”

Born into wealth and privilege Tower had a troubled childhood with an alcoholic mother and a father he refers to as “a prick.”

“From early on food was my best pal, my companion,” he says. Trips to the world’s grandest hotels and voyages on ocean liners ignited a love of glamour—the Queen Mary, he says, “made me fall in love immediately with first class”—and restaurants. He read menus before he read books.

It was his mother’s elaborate garden parties that began his cooking career. His mother was usually drunk before the food was ready so he would help out, jumping into the kitchen to prepare the food.

At Harvard he studied architecture but spent much time seriously cooking for friends on a dorm hotplate. At school his friends encouraged him to get off his butt and join the 1960s youth revolution, but he was too busy cooking. It was there he created ideas about changing the culture through food. Cooking and the quest for a “utopian ideal of living” kept the darkness of his childhood from taking over.

After Harvard he was at loose ends. He had never worked and wasn’t interested in pursuing a career in architecture but had to get a job. He applied at Chez Panisse, a Berkeley, California resto Villas described as “a hippie, drug ridden explosion in a playpen.” “If I hadn’t been so broke I wouldn’t have paid attention,” he says.

As chef de cuisine he applied all he had learned eating around the world to the menu. Everything that had gone before in his life, the theatrics, the complexity, all of it, came into play and it became a sensation when he dropped the traditional French menu in favour of local California produce, dishes and wines. It was the match that started the fire of the new American cuisine revolution.

A fall out over credit with owner Alice Waters turned ugly. Refusing to become a footnote in the Chez Panisse story he left in a huff to create Stars, a San Francisco restaurant that would become a super nova and one of the top-grossing restaurants in the United States for years. Instead of going out to a movie after dinner, at Stars dinner was the entertainment. The success of the place made him a superstar, one of the first celebrity chefs.

In 1998 the place closed and he disappeared, leaving everyone behind.

Tower’s decades long exile ended in 2014 when out of the blue it was announced he would take over New York City’s legendary Tavern on the Green, a place Bourdain calls, “one of the biggest, most thankless operations going?” Why? Tower cites Proust, “Work while you still have the light,” he says. “I wanted to see if my light was still on.”

“Jeremiah Tower: The Last Magnificent” isn’t a food network special. There’s no cooking competitions or Top Five Moments in the Career of Jeremiah Tower. Instead we’re offered a methodical look at the man behind a foodie revolution. Like a chef who over perfumes everything with truffle oil, Tenaglia overuses recreations of Tower’s young life. The footage is stilted and overpowers the telling of the rebellious chef’s troubled childhood.

Archival footage from the well-documented Chez Panisse years onward is livelier, adding a badly needed you-are-there element to the film’s tale of food as an emotional crutch. But then, just as the film works up a head of steam Tenaglia skims over Tower’s decades out of the spotlight, picking up the story again when he lands in New York.

Still “Jeremiah Tower: The Last Magnificent” is a compelling watch thanks to its charismatic subject. In his mid-seventies Tower is as elegant as he is difficult. The film plays a little too heavily into the tortured chef cliché but since Tower had a hand in creating the cliché the movie gets a pass on that count. As the portrait of an enigma, it’s entertaining enough but despite the backstory, the recreations and the myriad of heavyweight talking heads, by the end credits Tower is still an enigma. Perhaps Bourdain sums it up best when he says, “there is a locked room inside Jeremiah, I haven’t been there, I don’t believe anyone has.”

RICHARD’S WEEKEND MOVIE REVIEWS FROM CP24! FRIDAY APRIL 8, 2016.

Screen Shot 2016-04-08 at 2.21.04 PMRichard and CP24 anchor host Nneka Elliot have a look at he weekend’s big releases, Melissa McCarthy’s “The Boss,” Jake Gyllenhaal in “Demolition” and “Hardcore Henry’s” wild action.

Watch the whole thing HERE!

RICHARD’S “CANADA AM” REVIEWS FOR APRIL 8 WITH JEFF HUTCHESON.

Screen Shot 2016-04-08 at 10.38.38 AMRichard and “Canada AM” host Jeff Hutcheson kick around the weekend’s big releases. They find out if the boss is always right in Melissa McCarthy’s “The Boss,” if Jake Gyllenhaal can overcome his grief in “Demolition,” how Hank Williams became a star in “I Saw the Light” and if “Hardcore Henry” should come with a medical advisory.

Watch the whole thing HERE!

 

THE BOSS: 2 STARS. “time to admit that “The Boss” is not always right.”

The BossMelissa McCarthy is funny. Committed to wringing every last laugh out of her scripts, she’ll do anything to get a giggle and I think that’s what makes her latest film, “The Boss,” kind of an uncomfortable watch. You can tell she’s working on overdrive trying to mine jokes out of as script that is unwilling to give them up. Few bosses have ever worked this hard for this little return.

She plays Michelle Darnell, a mix and match of Leona Helmsley and Martha Stewart. A child of neglect, she’s now the ruthless ideal of the virtues of greed whose brash attitude and potty mouth have made her a “cash champion” and the 47th wealthiest woman in America. When her ex-lover and nemesis Renault (Peter Dinklage) leaks information to the SEC a conviction for insider trading brings down her empire. After a jail sentence she’s freed, homeless and without a dime to her name.

Her former assistant Claire (Kristen Bell) grudgingly gives Michelle a place to stay, allowing her to move into the small walk-up apartment she shares with her preteen daughter Rachel (Ella Anderson). With the new living arrangement comes a new business opportunity in the form of Claire’s delicious home baked brownies. “This is my way back,” she says. “You’re looking at Darnell 2.0.”

A mix of vulgarity, slapstick and sentimentality, “The Boss” starts slow and despite a funny-ish midsection never fully recovers. McCarthy pulls out all the stops, leading the violent charge in a turf war between Darnell’s Darlings and a Girl Guides troop called the Dandelions and never misses a pratfall, but the material just isn’t there.

Her trademark is making unlikeable characters likable. We’ve seen her do it in everything from “Tammy” to “Identity Thief” and beyond, but she’s met her match with Michelle Darnell. She’s so terrible she was returned to an orphanage by three sets of adoptive parents. Later in life she’s told at a country club, “no one at this table likes you,” and it’s not hard to see why. The warmth of her previous characters is AWOL and no amount of late movie sentimentality will change that.

Coming off a career high with the very funny “Spy” makes “The Boss” an even bigger disappointment. A capable and agreeable cast surrounds her—but I wish they had given Bell something more interesting to do—and certainly the idea of unchecked avarice is ripe with comedic possibilities but it never gels. When the best you can say about it is that it’s better than “Tammy,” the last film she made with director (and husband) Ben Falcone, it’s time to admit that “The Boss” is not always right.