Fast reviews for busy people! Watch as I review three movies in less time than it takes to make your bed. Have a look as I race against the clock to tell you about the legacy sequel “The Devil Wears Prada 2,” the unsettling “Hokum” and the shallow “Deep Water.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
I sit with guest host Jim Richards on NewsTalk 1010 to talk about the robotic dogs of Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie, the return of “The Apprentice,” new emojis and I recview “The Devil Wears Prada 2.”
Listen to the whole thing HERE!
I sit in with CKTB morning show host Steph Vivier to have a look at movies in theatres including the legacy sequel “The Devil Wears Prada 2,” the unsettling “Hokum” and the shallow “Deep Water.”
Listen to the whole thing HERE!
SYNOPSIS: In “The Devil Wears Prada 2,” the twenty-years-in-the-making sequel to the 2006 Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway and Emily Blunt hit, Andy Sachs returns to Runway Magazine as Miranda Priestly navigates the new world of media. “Well, look what TJ Maxx dragged in,” says Nigel (Stanley Tucci).
CAST: Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, Emily Blunt, and Stanley Tucci, Justin Theroux, Kenneth Branagh. Directed by David Frankel.
REVIEWS: The clever callbacks and echoes of the past in “The Devil Wears Prada 2” should satisfy fans of the original but may leave series newcomers with a case of the cerulean blues. (Fans will get the joke.)
The movie begins in a much different world from the 2006 movie. Journalism is under fire and the formerly high-flying world of fashion magazines has been grounded, relegated to creating “content for people to scroll past while they pee.”
Even Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep), editor-in-chief of the formerly formidable magazine “Runway,” feels the pinch. She still has a beautiful corner office, longtime right-hand Nigel Kipling (Stanley Tucci) and a withering attitude toward her staff, but these days she is reduced to hanging up her own coat rather than tossing it one of her assistants.
Fate brings together Miranda and her former second assistant Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway) in a perfect storm of journalism woes. Andy loses her job as an investigative reporter just as Miranda is accused of failing to fact check a story about a fashion company that secretly uses sweat shops to produce their clothes.
Much to Miranda’s consternation, “Runway’s” owner hires Andy as Features Editor hoping that her standard of journalistic excellence will rehabilitate the magazine’s tattered reputation. “All I have to do is bide my time until you fail,” Miranda says disdainfully, “and you will.”
Andy’s job at the magazine is to “turn on new readers without turning off old readers,” which, coincidentally, is also director David Frankel’s job with the film’s viewers.
For the most part he succeeds.
The script, by Aline Brosh McKenna, who also wrote the original, follows a similar structure to the first film, placing Andy, once again, as an eager outsider in the exotic world inhabited by Miranda, Nigel and Emily. Frankel puts the band—Streep, Hathaway, Tucci, and Blunt—back together, keeping the traits that made them popular in the first place, while allowing them to grow.
Fans will get a boatload of Miranda’s dismissive remarks, Andy’s puppy dog energy and ambition, Nigel’s quiet mentorship and Emily’s judgmental edge, but all are tweaked. Miranda has vulnerabilities, Andy is more confident, Nigel is an avatar for the changing industry and Emily is still fiercely fashionable and wants to please Miranda but has a modicum of power she didn’t have before.
Reunited, the characters fit together like puzzle pieces, but it is the movie’s macro focus that gives “The Devil Wears Prada 2” its juice.
Of course, the characters click and there are beautiful, over-the-top clothes, but that’s not the point. Amid the laughs and emotional plot turns, mixed in with the runway drama, is a timely, love letter to the importance of journalism. The gloomy picture the movie paints of the future of journalism and media outlets is unexpected, and seemingly at odds with the glamourous backdrop, but it adds a dose of maturity to the story. The audience has grown up and so have the characters and the situation.
“The Devil Wears Prada 2” has style and substance. It isn’t as light and fluffy as the original but has a modern tone that reflects where the world and the characters are today. It’s still a bit of a fairy tale, with callbacks and nostalgia, but a grounded one that fans should enjoy.
Fast reviews for busy people! Watch as I review three movies in less time than it takes to reanimate the dead. Have a look as I race against the clock to tell you about the monstrous and messy “The Bride!,” PIxar’s “Hoppers” and the hockey drama “Youngblood.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
SYNOPSIS: In “Hoppers,” a new animated Pixar science fiction, adventure comedy now playing in theatres, a teen eco warrior goes to extreme lengths to fight city hall’s plan to pave over a nature preserve to build a highway.
CAST: Piper Curda, Bobby Moynihan, Jon Hamm, Kathy Najimy, Dave Franco, Melissa Villaseñor, Isiah Whitlock Jr., Ego Nwodim, Meryl Streep, Vanessa Bayer. Directed by Daniel Chong.
REVIEW: Pixar returns to the top of the animation heap with “Hoppers,” a movie that brims with heart, irreverence, imagination and eye-popping animation.
When we first meet Mabel Tanaka (voice of Piper Curda) she’s a preteen with anger issues who learns to find solace in nature. “It’s hard to be mad when you feel like you’re part of something,” says her grandmother (Karen Huie).
Years later as popular local politician Mayor Jerry (Jon Hamm) is about to have a local nature habitat paved over to make room for a highway that will save commuters “up to four minutes,” Mabel tries to stop the construction. When the Mayor gives her 48 hours to repopulate the area with animals or he’ll continue the building, Mabel uses an experimental process to “hop” her human consciousness into a lifelike, robotic beaver, and communicate directly with animals.
“Hoppers” is an action adventure that zips along at the speed of light. Director Daniel Chong, a veteran storyboard artist on films like “Bolt,” “Cars 2,” “Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax,” “Free Birds” and “Inside Out,” moves the story along quickly enough to engage young minds, but allows the script by Jesse Andrews to feel grown up enough for adults.
The twist on Dr. Dolittle—talking to animals through robotics and mind swapping—is inventive and allows the film’s messages of eco responsibility and community to be approached from the perspective of both animals and humans, deepening the story’s messages while also adding to the entertainment value. Familiar issues of the importance of working together to solve problems, found family and environmental concerns—never mess with Mother Nature!—are carefully addressed in a unique and interesting way.
The messaging may be nothing new, but the animation feels fresh. Energetic and alive, it’s playful, with fun character design and big action set pieces that pay homage to everything from “Jaws” and weirdo 70s flick “Frogs” to “Avatar” (even though one of the scientists says her “hopping” device is, “nothing like Avatar!”) and “Mad Max: Fury Road.” The easiest comparison would be to “Zootopia’s” blend of talking animals and social themes, but “Hoppers” feels different from that billion-dollar franchise. There’s more of a sense of wonder in the action adventure of “Hoppers’” sometimes silly, but always wild ‘n wooly story.
“Hoppers” has fun voicework—Meryl Streep’s imperious Insect Queen is a standout—and an off-the-wall but engaging story, but it stands out because it finds the balance between heart and humor.
Movies about giant things hurdling through space toward Earth are almost as plentiful as the stars in the sky. “Armageddon,” “Deep Impact” and “Judgment Day” all pose end-of-the-world scenarios but none have the satirical edge of “Don’t Look Up.” The darkly comedic movie, now in theatres but coming soon to Netflix, paints a grim, on-the-nose picture of how the world responds to a crisis.
Jennifer Lawrence is PhD candidate Dr. Kate Dibiasky, a student astronomer who discovers a comet the size of Mount Everest aimed directly at our planet. Her professor, Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio), comes to the alarming conclusion that the comet will collide with Earth in six months and fourteen days in what he calls an “extinction level event.”
They take their concerns to NASA and the White House, but are met with President Janie Orlean’s (Meryl Streep) concerns about optics, costs and the up-coming mid-term elections. “The timing is just disastrous,” she says. “Let’s sit tight and assess.”
With the clock ticking to total destruction Dibiasky and Mindy go public, but their dire warnings on the perky news show “The Rip”—“We keep the bad news light!”—go unheeded. Social media focusses on Dibiasky’s panic, creating memes of her face, while dubbing Mindy the Bedroom Eyed Doomsday Prophet.
As the comet hurdles toward Earth the world becomes divided between those willing to Look Up and do something about the incoming disaster and the deniers who think that scientists “want you to look up because they are looking down their noses at you.”
Chaos breaks out, and the division widens as the comet closes in on its target.
It is not difficult to find parallels between the events in “Don’t Look Up” and recent world occurrences. Director and co-writer Adam McKay explores the reaction to world affairs through a lens of Fake News, clickbait journalism, skepticism of science, political spin and social media gone amok. In fact, the topics McKay hits on don’t really play like satire at all. The social media outrage, bizarro-land decisions made by people in high offices and the influence of tech companies all sound very real world, ripped out of today’s newspapers.
It’s timely, but perhaps too timely. Social satire is important, and popular—“Saturday Night Live” has done it successfully for decades—but “Don’t Look Up,” while brimming with good ideas, often feels like an overkill of familiarity. The comet is fiction, at least I hope it is, but the reaction to it and the on-coming catastrophe feels like something I might see on Twitter just before the lights go down in the theatre.
It feels a little too real to be pure satire. There are laughs throughout, but it’s the serious questions that resonate. When Mindy, on TV having his “Network” moment, rages, “What the hell happened to us? What have we done to ourselves and how do we fix it?” the movie becomes a beacon. The satire is comes easily—let’s face it, the world is full of easy targets—but it’s the asking of hard questions and in the frustration of a world gone mad, when McKay’s point that we’re broken and don’t appreciate the world around us, shines through.
Despite big glitzy Hollywood names above the title and many laugh lines, “Don’t Look Up” isn’t escapism. It’s a serious movie that aims to entertain but really wants to make you think.
Director Ryan Murphy returns to familiar territory with “The Prom,” a high school musical adapted from a Broadway show now streaming on Netflix. The creator of the pop culture juggernaut “Glee” throws subtlety out the window and ups the ante with an all-star cast to bring the all-singing-all-dancing story of inclusivity to glittery life.
The action begins on the opening night of a Broadway show, a musical about Eleanor Roosevelt starring two self-involved stage icons, Dee Dee Allen (Meryl Streep) and Barry Glickman (James Corden). When terrible reviews force the show to close on opening night, taking their dreams of Tony Award glory with it, they fear they’ll never work again. Joining in on the pity part are
Trent (Andrew Rannells), a Juilliard grad waiting on his big break by bartending at Sardi’s restaurant and Angie Dickinson (Nicole Kidman), a “Chicago” chorus girl who has spent twenty years for her chance of playing Roxie.
At the same time across the country in small-town Indiana controversy in brewing. Mrs. Greene (Kerry Washington), head of the local PTA, has announced that to preserve community standards, gay high school student Emma Nolan (Jo Ellen Pellman) will be banned from attending the prom with her girlfriend.
Cut to New York where the four actors hatch a plan to find a cause they can support to boost their dented public images. When they hear about Emma’s plight, the self-proclaimed “liberals from Broadway” hop on a bus for Indiana to bring their self-styled (and self-serving) activism to the Midwest.
High jinks and high stepping result.
“The Prom” is a feel-good movie that not only celebrates inclusivity but also the form of the musical. It’s an ode to Broadway and, in these isolated times, the importance of entertaining people. When Dee Dee tells high school principal Tom Hawkins (Keegan-Michael Key) she’s planning to quit the business, he says, earnestly, “You can’t quit because I need you to do what you do.” It’s a lovely sentiment but it makes the clumsy handling of many of the musical numbers somewhat mystifying. If this form is so important, why are the big dance sequences such a mish mash of frenetic camera work, candy colors and flailing choreography? There is a difference between dazzling and dizzying and Murphy errs on the side of the latter too often.
Other than that, “The Prom” fits alongside pop musicals like “Bye Bye Birdie,” another show about actors trying to wring some publicity out of a small town. It’s peppy with a game cast. Streep, Rannells and Kidman have fun in big performances and Corden goes for it, but made me wonder if Nathan Lane, who would have been terrific, or Brooks Ashmanskas, who played Glickman on Broadway, were otherwise engaged while the movie was being shot.
The film’s heart and soul, however, is Jo Ellen Pellman as Emma, the gay high school senior who displays resilience and courage in the face of prejudice. She’s terrific in a role that requires her to sing, dance while pulling on your heartstrings.
If you are someone who has the release date of “West Side Story,” which features Pellman’s co-star Ariana DeBose as Anita, marked on your calendar, or if the words “Meryl Streep raps” grab your attention, then you’ll want to put “The Prom” in your Netflix queue. It aims to please fans of the genre and delivers a blast of feel-good vibes but probably won’t win over people who don’t like it when actors suddenly burst into song.
Director Greta Gerwig keeps the bones of Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women” in the new big screen treatment of the 19th century story, but reshapes the March sisters’ coming-of-age in fresh and exciting ways.
Set at the time of the Civil War, the eighth film adaptation of the tale sees the March’s, debutant Meg (Emma Watson), strong willed Jo (Saoirse Ronan), sickly and sweet Beth (Eliza Scanlen) and self-centerd Amy (Florence Pugh), with mother Marmee (Laura Dern), living a threadbare existence. The war has stripped them of whatever money they once had but they remain committed to charity—helping a destitute family down the road—and one another as they wait for the return of their father (Bob Odenkirk) from the battlefield.
As the story jumps through time their lives intersect with Theodore ‘Laurie’ Laurence (Timothée Chalamet), a charming, wealthy lay-about neighbor who has designs on Jo, his millionaire uncle (Chris Cooper), acid-tongued Aunt March (Meryl Streep) and Mr. Dashwood, the terse-talking newspaper publisher.
Told on a broken timeline, “Little Women” forgoes the linear structure of the novel to jump back-and-forth in time. It’s a clever device that takes some getting used to—at first it’s not immediately obvious the story is skipping around like a flat rock skimming across a lake—but ultimately it provides insightful perspective on the characters and why they make the decisions they do. Gerwig has fiddled with the story’s collision of feminism, romance and family dynamics just enough to amplify its resonance for a modern audience. Playing around with a well loved and well-worn classic is risky, but Gerwig pulls it off with panache, aided by an extraordinary cast who bring the material to vivid life.
As a collective the cast of “Little Women” are as finely tuned as the piano Beth practices on, pitch perfect with no sour notes.
Chalamet, reteaming with Ronan and Gerwig after the success of “Lady Bird,” drips charisma as the foppish and devoted friend/love interest Laurie. He’s equal parts awkward and arrogance, putting a new spin on a character that’s been played by everyone from Peter Lawford to Christian Bale.
Streep and Letts drop in for some comic relief but it is the chemistry between the sisters that is the film’s biggest success. Previous adaptations have tilted in Jo’s favor, giving her the most screen time and the juiciest character arc. Gerwig recalibrates, allowing each of the sisters to shine. The story still revolves around Jo’s interactions with each of the women, but here each of them push the story forward. Watson beings kindness and empathy to Meg. In Scanlen’s hands Beth is sweetly realistic about her lot in life. Ronan and Pugh leave the largest impression, imprinting the tale with their steeliness, humor and humanity.
“Little Women” is a rarity. It’s an adaptation of an often told tale that manages a rethink while still holding true to what made the source material so beloved.
