I join CTV NewsChannel anchor Akshay Tandon to talk about the fantasy of “The Magic Faraway Tree,” the horrors of “Insidious: Out of the Further,” the character study of “The Rivals of Amziah King” and the drama of “Late Fame.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
Watch the whole thing HERE!
SYNOPSIS: In “The Rivals of Amziah King,” a new crime thriller now playing in theatres, Matthew McConaughey stars as a beekeeper whose life is upended by the return of his estranged stepdaughter and violent business rivals. “Get ready, my little chickadee. Bees only swarm when they are ready for a fight.”
CAST: Matthew McConaughey, Angelina LookingGlass, Jake Horowitz, Scott Shepherd, Rob Morgan, Tony Revolori, Kurt Russell. Directed by Andrew Patterson.
REVIEW: Set in the backwoods of rural Oklahoma, “The Rivals of Amziah King” stars Matthew McConaughey as the title character, a beekeeper and bluegrass musician who runs the biggest honey operation in his area. “I know the weather. I know the bees. I know the point where anyone else would give up and I won’t.”
His life is changed for the better when his foster daughter Kateri (Angelina LookingGlass) reappears in his life. As the pair become reacquainted, making the most of their second chance at having a meaningful relationship, Amziah opens his heart and business to the young women.
But as their efforts to create a true family business are threatened by powerful rivals looking to undo everything Amziah and Kateri have built.
“This isn’t just theft. There’s a design and a cruelty to this. Someone loaded up everything he built and took it all away. And I’m going to find them and I’m going to take it all back.”
“The Rivals of Amziah King” feels like two films.
With no spoilers I can tell you that the first hour is a hang out movie disguised as a character study of Amziah. In McConaughey’s hands he is a bigger-than-life man, who doesn’t speak, but rather pontificates, on bees, life and whatever else strikes his fancy. He’s a William Faulkner-esque character, a distinctly southern person, poetically earthy with a deep reservoir of humanity and spirituality.
Director Andrew Patterson takes his time, allowing us to get to know Azmiah, Kateri and other members of the tight knit community through storytelling, music and lots of talk about bees. In fact, it sometimes feels like “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Bees but Were Afraid to Ask” would be a better title but there’s a sanctity to Amziah’s connection with the bees that is intriguing.
Which is why it comes as such a surprise when around the hour mark, the movie drops its tone poem tendencies in favor of shift toward crime thrills and revenge. It’s not an easy fit, and the movie loses much of its heartfelt charm as it becomes about stolen bee colonies and amateur sleuthing.
Up until that part, however, “The Rivals of Amziah King” is a wonderfully offbeat movie that creates a beautiful portrait of community that sprouted up around its central character.
SYNOPSIS: Based on the non-fiction 2021 book “Paradise: One Town’s Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire” by Lizzie Johnson, “The Lost Bus” sees Matthew McConaughey navigate a bus full of children through one of California’s deadliest wildfires.
CAST: Matthew McConaughey, America Ferrera, Yul Vazquez, and Ashlie Atkinson. Directed by Paul Greengrass.
REVIEW: The old saying that something “spread like wildfire” is brought to literal life by director Paul Greengrass and stars Matthew McConaughey and America Ferrera. Shot cinema verité style, “The Lost Bus’s” story of heroism amid the burning inferno of the 2018 California Camp Fire is an intense, you-are-there experience.
McConaughey is Kevin McKay, a struggling, divorced dad living in small town California. His son Shaun (Levi McConaughey) would rather live with McKay’s estranged wife, his elderly mother (played by McConaughey’s real-life mom Kay McCabe McConaughey) is in failing health, and even his dog is ill. His job as a school bus driver gives him barely enough hours to make ends meet.
When a spark from a downed power line erupts into an out-of-control wildfire, McKay is pressed into service. What begins as a straightforward pick-up of twenty-two kids and their teacher, Mary Ludwig (America Ferrera), becomes a life-and-death drive into the blazing heart of the inferno.
Greengrass’s restless camera is in constant motion as he captures the fiery action, but this isn’t an action film. Instead, it’s a horror film that casts the relentless fire as the monster. If you have ever wondered how a fire can spread so quickly, so intensely, wonder no more. Greengrass’s powerful images show the flaming rampage in vivid detail. From a spark to a living hell, you can almost feel the heat coming off the screen as the flames rapidly eat up everything in their path.
Driven by the intensity of the images, the movie is an immersive experience. Add to that the inherent peril for the kids on the bus who risk being cooked alive inside the 18-ton oven and you have relentless, high stakes storytelling.
Greengrass’s visuals are top shelf, urgent depictions of the hellish inferno so it’s unfortunate the dialogue and character development don’t keep pace. McConaughey’s McKay is all struggle and furrowed brows, but the character feels like a generic everyman hero plucked from a 90s-era disaster movie.
Made for Apple TV+, “The Lost Bus” will get a short run in theatres before moving to streaming, but Greengrass clearly had the big screen in mind when composing the film’s visuals. The epic nature of the film’s fire scenes may not translate well onto smaller screens.
Anyone who thinks the Guy Ritchie of old has disappeared, crushed under the weight of the huge box office grosses of the family-friendly “Aladdin,” need look no further than the blood splattered pint mug of “The Gentlemen’s” opening scene for proof to the contrary.
Highly stylized crime comedies like “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels” and “Snatch” made Ritchie the king of fast-paced, politically-incorrect stories of life on the streets. The big budget movies, his Sherlock Holmes series and “Aladdin,” among others, made more money but lacked the visceral thrills of his early work. His new film, “The Gentlemen,” starring Matthew McConaughey, Henry Golding, Michelle Dockery, Colin Farrell and Hugh Grant, feels like a hybrid of the two phases of his career. A spiritual cousin to “Lock, Stock” and ”Snatch,” it brings Ritchie back to London’s underworld, a place populated by Saville Row suit-wearing tough guys, ruthless tabloid editors and henchmen who speak like down-on-their-heels Oxford drop outs.
Matthew McConaughey is Mickey Pearson, an American who built a weed empire in his adopted home country of England. Intelligent and ruthless—qualities matched only by his wife Rosalind (Dockery)—he’s now middle-aged and looking to cash out. His offers to sell the business to billionaire drug lord Matthew Berger (a very mannered Jeremy Strong) for $400 million attracts unwanted attention from Dry Eye (Golding), the ruthless youngest nephew of an aging crime lord.
There’s more, but this is a pretzel of a story, twisted and tied in knots.
“The Gentlemen” is not a sequel or a reboot but it feels like one. The hyper-masculine story telling style, inventive use of swear words and spider-web plotting, while audacious, will be very familiar to Ritchie-philes. It’s “Snatch 2.0” with the same kind of big name cast who seem to be having fun mouthing Ritchie’s profanity laden dialogue but no amount of fast cutting and fast talking can replace real energy. As rock ‘n rolling as the filmmaking is, the story acts as an anchor, bogging things down as it gets more and more convoluted.
It’s too bad because Ritchie takes pains to create the very specific world his characters inhabit, and it is a colourful place but it seems that he never met a plot twist he didn’t love. As the plot thickens, and it does thicken almost to the point of impenetrability, the movie begins to feel overstuffed. To help the audience along Ritchie binds everything together with a silly framing device involving Fletcher (Grant), a private eye/blackmailer who unfurls the complicated story to Pearson’s right-hand-man Raymond (Charlie Hunnam). It’s time consuming and adds little to the picture except for Hugh Grant’s exaggerated accent as he delivers flowery lines like, “Our antagonist explodes on the scene, like a millennial firework.”
“The Gentlemen” feels like an exercise in nostalgia, back to era of Ritchie’s frenetic jump cuts and outdated attitudes about race disguised as quippy dialogue.
Based on a 1927 science fiction/horror story by H. P. Lovecraft, “Color Out of Space” is a strange film starring everyone’s favorite purveyor of strange performances, Nicolas “Dad’s been acting weird” Cage.
Cage is Nathan Gardner, a former artist living on his late father’s remote farm near the fictional town of Arkham, one of Lovecraft’s favorite settings. His family, Wiccan practitioner Lavinia (Madeleine Arthur), weed aficionado Benny and youngster Jack (Brendan Meyer and Julian Hilliard) and mother Theresa (Joely Richardson), leads a quiet if unconventional life until late one night when a meteorite crash lands on their front lawn. Unsure of what it is, Nathan calls the police. “I’m sorry about the smell,” he says. “Can you smell it? It’s like somebody lit a dog on fire.”
The smell will turn out to be the least of his problems.
The meteorite disappears over time but the effects of the crash landing linger. The Gardeners and their animals—they raise alpacas—begin acting strangely. Mom cuts her own fingers off as psychedelic hallucinations shroud the family’s thoughts. Hydrologist Ward (Elliot Knight), in the area surveying for a future dam project, thinks the water is poisoned but the real answer is a little more out there, as in outer space alien brain, out there.
Directed by Richard Stanley, who hasn’t made a feature since infamously being fired from 1996’s “The Island of Dr. Moreau,” “Color Out of Space” is a trippy, darkly humorous descent into madness. Lovecraft has proven tricky to adapt to the screen but Stanley does a good job here, building a sense of unease with a clever mix of CGI and practical special effects that build upon the natural disorienting nature of the story. Add to that body horror and cosmic terror, each heightened by the committed—read unhinged—performances from the leads and you have a movie that keeps the viewer as off-kilter as the characters they are watching.
“Color Out of Space” is a little uneven, cramming too many ideas into the mix, but the mix of two gonzo artists like Cage and Stanley offers up a movie that amps up the cinematic anxiety in unpredictable ways.
People who complain trailers give away too much or that movies have become predictable may find something to keep them guessing in “Serenity,” the strange new Matthew McConaughey thriller. Or is it a metaphysical drama? Or should I call it a new age noir? I honestly don’t know what to file this under. However you classify it, this weird film will keep you guessing for better and for worse. Strange days indeed.
McConaughey is Baker Dill, the broke, headstrong owner of a boat for hire in the crystal clear waters surrounding the remote Plymouth Island. “In Plymouth everyone knows everything,” says Reid Miller (Jeremy Strong). “Except what’s going on,” drawls Dill.
He’s a Captain Ahab type, minus the prosthetic leg made out of whalebone, and obsessed with hooking and reeling in a giant tuna he calls Justice. Everyone on the tiny island knows of his obsession. Even the local radio announcer broadcasts, “It’s a perfect day to go out and catch that damn fish,“ during his weather update.
He’s a haunted man, troubled by the carnage he witnessed in Iraq and the family, wife Karen (Anne Hathaway) and son Patrick (Rafael Sayegh), he lost to divorce. When Karen reappears with a job offer it sends him into a tailspin. “I’m here to tell you that you were right and I was wrong about Frank,” she says about her new husband, a wealthy but abusive man played by Jason Clarke. Her deal is simple. “Take him out on your boat, let him get drunk and dump him in the ocean. Do it and I’ll give you $10 million.” Divorce is not an option she adds. “He’ll find a hole for me in one of his construction sites.“ Dill is conflicted until he hears that Frank has been violent with Patrick. Now all bets are off.
There’s more but you won’t read it here because this is about the time in “Serenity” where the story takes a left turn that would make M. Night” Shyamalan green with envy. Does it work? Not really but you have to give credit to writer-director Steven Knight for swinging for the fences. That it’s a foul ball is unfortunate because the gears shift from neo-noir to existential treatise on the fundamentals of life is the kind of risky move that we don’t see much of these days.
You don’t just see a movie like “Serenity,” you witness it.
It is one of the most baffling movies to come along in years. McConaughey is in full-blown “are-we-all-just-pawns-in-a-great-big-game?” mode while Hathaway convincing channels femme-fatale Veronica Lake. Both give heightened performances but the tone of the piece is so off kilter I can’t decide whether they are sleepwalking through this toward a paycheque or doing some edgy work.
If nothing else “Serenity” takes chances, not the kind of chances that are likely to please an audience but at least you can’t guess how it will end. Intrigued?
In real life Richard Wershe Jr. lived twenty lives all before the time he could legally have a drink. As a teenage FBI informant he lived the high life before it all came crashing down. A new film, “White Boy Rick,” details his rise and terrible tumble.
14-year-old Wershe Jr. (Richie Merritt) a.k.a. White Boy Rick, lives with his father Rick Sr. (Matthew McConaughey),and older sister Dawn (Bel Powley) across the street from his grandparents (Bruce Dern and Piper Laurie) in 1980s Detroit. Despite the newly launched “Just Say No to Drugs” campaign crack is everywhere, seducing many in his neighbourhood.
Sr. is a small time dealer in illegal guns with aspirations of one day opening up a legit business. Before he can do that, however, Jr. is convinced to become an undercover agent for the FBI. If he snitches on local drug dealers, they say, the feds will leave his father’s operation alone. The teenager takes the deal and soon is dealing cocaine and rolling in cash. His run comes to a sudden end when he becomes a victim of the war on drugs. Arrested for drug possession of an enormous amount of cocaine the feds drop him like a hot potato and he is sentenced to thirty years behind bars.
There’s a lot going on in “White Boy Rick.” The main thrust of the story, Jr.’s rise and fall, is muddied by the addition of side characters. They’re often entertaining—particularly in the case of the grandparents—or unexpectedly touching—Powley nicely portrays Dawn’s fragility and descent into addiction—but feel like after thoughts in an already busy movie.
Newcomer Merrit and McConaughey have great chemistry. Merrit, found at a Detroit casting call, isn’t quite up to the emotional heights necessary for us to care about him but fares better when he’s required to swagger around the screen.
While overstuffed, “White Boy Rick” does give McConaughey a chance to act as anchor, deftly portraying his desperation for the American Dream while keeping his family together in the only way he knows how.
“White Boy Rick” nicely captures the grit of 1980s Detroit and makes a powerful statement of the failure of the war on drugs but despite the multi-pronged story and dramatic turns in Jr.’s life it never completely grabs our attention.
The eight “Dark Tower” novels by Stephen King make up an award winning fantasy series that has spawned a comic, a videogame and now a movie starring Idris Elba. Spread over 4,000-plus-pages King wove the story of Roland Deschain, gunslinger and relation of Arthur Eld, an alternative universe King Arthur.
The film, directed and co-written by Nikolaj Arcel, sidesteps King’s series, presenting instead a sequel to the book series. Fans, he says, will recognize the world and the characters while newcomers will have no trouble figuring out the story.
As the film begins we meet teenage Jake Chambers (Tom Taylor). Troubled by disturbing apocalyptic dreams—are they dreams orr are they omens?—he can’t sleep and is getting into trouble at school. Concerned, his mom (Katheryn Winnick) makes arrangements for him to be sent to a psychiatric facility for tests. Before he can be taken away he makes a run for it and discovers a creepy old New York City mansion, abandoned, its covered in graffiti that reads, “all hail the Crimson King.” It also contains a portal into Roland’s world. He jumps through the glittering gateway only to find himself stranded in a desolate New World. He walks, talking to himself. “It’s good.” he says, “It’s not real.” But it is real and dangerous. He’s in the universe he’s been dreaming about, Roland’s realm.
Deschain (Elba) is the last gunslinger, a 300-year-old descendant from a long line of peacekeepers and diplomats from the Mid-World land of Gilead. Decked out in head-to-toe leather, he’s a mysterious presence, a throwback to the Man with No Name. His nemesis is demonic sorcerer and emissary of the Crimson King, Walter O’Dim (Matthew McConaughey), a.k.a. the Man in Black a.k.a. Walter Padick. “His name is Walter?” Jake asks incredulously. Mortal enemies, Roland and Walter are at odds over the Dark Tower, the centre of all creation. It is a classic battle of good and evil with the fate of the universe in the balance. “All that matters to me is that I find and kill Walter,” says Walter. “That’s it.”
You can smell the wannabe franchise sauce all over “The Dark Tower” but something tells me there won’t be a “Darker Tower,” or whatever clever name they might come up with for a sequel.
Director Arcel, working from King’s template, creates a world with its own villains and nasty creatures. Unfortunately it’s not a very interesting world. It feels like it might have been better served by a multi-part television serial, a series that could fully explore the complicated world of the novels. Then take the references to “The Shining” and other Stephen King books plus an unexpected turn to comedy when the action moves to “Keystone Earth” and you’re left with just another end of the world story where elements from the books appear but feel distilled down to a thick syrupy mush that moves like molasses.
McConaughey has the film’s best lines—“Have a great apocalypse!”—and can kill just by uttering the words “stop breathing” but he hands in a disengaged yet campy performance. Also, and this is a small thing, but it was the small things—and some big things too—that took me out of the story, but it bugged me whenever he referred to his powers. “Roland has an annoying resistance to my magics.” Plural. Not magic. Magics. It’s annoyings.
Taylor is an appealing enough juvenile lead but he’s held back by some strange story decisions. Why allow the villain to mostly work remotely—from his evil headquarters—and showcase a hero who means well but is largely hobbled by an injury? These two should be mano-a-mano 24-7 instead of sporadically throughout the film. By the time their inevitable bullet ballet comes—Roland is a gunslinger after all—it’s too little too late.
Aside from being dull “The Dark Tower” feels like a missed opportunity. The books are rich source material but have been let down by a film that feels like it was once an ambitious project but was neutered in the editing room.
