We’ve all seen boy and his dog movies about the deep relationship between humans and animals like “White Fang” and the simply named “Dog,” with Channing Tatum and a Belgian Malinois.
“Blueback,” a new Australian family picture starting Mia Wasikowska and now playing in theatres, mines similar territory, but this time it’s the story of a girl, her blue groper and the love of the ocean.
Wasikowska Is marine biologist Abby who grew up exploring the ocean around the coast of her Western Australian childhood home. “We were born in the water,” says her mother Dora (Elizabeth Alexander).
When Dora suffers a debilitating stroke that leaves her unable to speak, Abby returns home. Hoping a return to the sea will aid in Dora’s recovery, they travel to the coast.
From here, the story toggles between Abby’s childhood and the discovery of a rare blue groper—the Blueback of the title—that inspired the eco-activism that shaped her life, and the present day.
“Blueback” is a well-intentioned but heavy-handed film that mixes-and-matches mother and daughter dynamics with messages about the fragility of marine environments and the importance of conservationism. The movie’s main thrusts are intertwined and, unfortunately, over explained. Repetition and excessive exposition blunt the movie’s mission somewhat, despite fine performances from Wasikowska and Radha Mitchell, who plays Dora in the flashbacks.
The film’s storytelling deficiencies, however, are alleviated somewhat by beautiful underwater photography and the urgency of the conservation messaging.
“Blackbird,” the new Susan Sarandon end-of-life drama now on VOD, is a remake of the 2014 Danish film “Silent Heart.” Equal parts heartbreaking and humorous, it’s a movie whose humanity is first and foremost.
Sarandon is Lily, a vey sick woman whose body has betrayed her. Her long battle with ALS has taken the use of one of her arms and she struggles to maintain her dignity in the face of ever declining health. A self-diagnosed A-type personality, Lily has made the decision to end her life on her own terms. With her husband Paul (Sam Neill) she has arranged one last weekend with the family, a celebration of life complete with holiday traditions.
In attendance are daughters Jennifer (Kate Winslet) and Anna (Mia Wasikowska), their significant others, husband Michael (Rainn Wilson) and girlfriend Chris (Bex Taylor-Klaus), grandson Jonathan (Anson Boon) and Lily’s lifelong friend Liz (Lindsay Duncan).
Lily has found a sense of comfort in her decision, but as the fateful time nears, unresolved issues arise as the children reveal they may not be accepting of her choice.
“Blackbird” is an end-of-life drama, bold in its presentation of delicate matters, that never dips into soap-opera sentimentality. With sensitivity and unexpected humor director Roger Michell transcends the disease-of-the-week genre, staging intricate scenes that allow for drama and discourse.
A Christmas dinner scene, for example, begins as a lighthearted gathering. It’s funny, warm, even romantic but deepens into something else as Lily gifts some of her prized possessions to family members. “I haven’t taken this bracelet off in 22 years,” she says, passing it along to her daughter. “I’ve never taken this wedding ring off.” It could have dipped into melodrama but Sarandon, in a tremendous performance, never allows the scene to become maudlin. It’s incredibly sad and for the members of her family, and for the viewer, it’s the moment when Lily’s decision to say goodbye becomes heartbreakingly real.
All the action in “Blackbird” happens inside Lily and Paul’s beautiful home, a powerful architectural presence that almost becomes a character on its own. On the downside the limited setting gives the movie a stagey feeling, as though we’re watching an elaborate play instead of a movie.
The lack of backgrounds, however, helps focus on the issue at hand. “Blackbird” doesn’t debate the ethics of assisted suicide or wallow in any sort of moral quandary. Instead, it celebrates life in all its multi-faceted and messy glory as the characters approach Lily’s end of life in their own, unique ways.
In its examination of the end-of-life “Blackbird” packs an emotional punch, illuminating not only Lily’s end but the entirety of a precious life well lived.
“Judy and Punch,” a new film starring Mia Wasikowska and now on VOD, is set in mid-17th century. There’s lace collars and cuffs, petticoats, breeches and jerkins on display but make no mistake, this is a timely tale of ideology over logic, of justice, revenge and puppetry.
The action begins in Seaside, an English town the movie tells us is nowhere near the sea. It’s the first clue that not everything is right in this small settlement. It’s a place where women are stoned to death on the suspicion of witchcraft (one woman is killed because she stared “at the moon for a suspiciously long time.”) and law and order is administered by angry mobs. It’s here that Judy (Wasikowska) and Punch (Damon Herriman) eke out a living as puppeteers, making money by passing around a hat. She is clearly the more gifted artist but there is little room left for her in the spotlight as his ego takes up so much space. He is an ambitious but arrogant artist who craves attention almost as much as he thirsts for booze.
When his drinking leads to an unspeakable turn of events, Punch’s venal nature comes to the fore, and in a case of his Punch and Judy style art imitating real life, he puts his own self interest ahead of everyone, particularly his gentle-natured wife who must seek vengeance for his deeds.
“Judy and Punch” finally gives Punch his comeuppance after centuries of bad behavior. That’s not a spoiler, just the premise of the movie. The why and how of his punishment provide the subtext that makes the movie timely. A study in toxic masculinity, of abuse and misogyny, the movie mixes very dark satire, brutality and puppets to tell a story of addiction and domestic abuse.
Wasikowska grounds the story, playing Judy as a gentle soul pushed to extremes by tragic circumstances. Herriman—who played Charles Manson in both “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” and “Mindhunter”—is a flamboyant Punch, a calculating drunk incapable of loving anyone as much as he loves himself. They are the movie’s yin and yang, and the conflict between them leads to a dark conclusion, equal parts magic realism and real life.
“Judy and Punch” is an impressive debut from actor-turned-director Mirrah Foulkes. Although uneven it cleverly balances everything from humour and tragedy to fairy tales and feminism, in a sly story of love and vengeance.
Alice Through The Looking Glass, the six-years-in-the-making sequel to Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, takes place in a world where chess pieces come to life and the Cheshire Cat’s grin is as toothy as ever. It’s a flight of fantasy, based on a story published by Lewis Carroll in 1871, but grounded by the very human character of Alice Kingsley.
Mia Wasikowska has played Alice since the 2010 film, signing on to the first movie when she was just 18 years old.
“There is always a little bit of trepidation especially when you’re dealing with a character who is so iconic and so beloved by so many people and so many generations,” she told me on the release of the first film.
“But there is also a certain amount of realism to it because you know you can’t please everyone and not everyone is going to be pleased so it is more just making the character your own and feeling comfortable in the decisions you make.”
Originally imagined by Carroll in 1865, the little girl who found a world of wonder down the rabbit hole has become one of literature and film’s more enduring and malleable characters.
She was the insane character of America McGee’s video game Alice and the martial arts instructor of a Syfy channel adaptation. In 2010 Wasikowska said she thinks the stories have lasted because people relate to the strange characters and situations.
“I don’t believe in normal,” she said. “Nobody is normal. Everyone is crazy in his or her own way. So although these are extreme characters I think that just makes them more identifiable.
People want to see these characters, understand these characters, love these characters, feel comfortable with these characters because they are like everybody in this world who are kind of crazy. Everyone has felt like an outsider at some time in their life so it is a very identifiable story.”
Alice first got the big screen treatment in 1903 in a 12-minute silent version starring Mabel Clark, who was also employed on the set as a “help-out girl,” making costumes and running errands.
In 1966 director Jonathan Miller cast Anne-Marie Mallik as the lead in Alice, a mad-as-a-hatter made-for-BBC movie. Miller called Mallik, who auditioned by reciting a poem, a “rather extraordinary, solemn child.”
Not everyone agreed. Peter Cook’s biographer described the teenager’s take on Alice as “sullen, pouting, pubescent with no sense of bewilderment.” Mallik later said she wasn’t impressed with her illustrious co-stars — John Gielgud as the Mock Turtle and Peter Sellers as the King of Hearts — because she had grown up surrounded by the very accomplished friends of her “much older” parents.
After production wrapped she “retired” from acting and afterward the BBC had trouble paying her a royalty because they couldn’t find her.
It’s hard to know what Alice Liddell, the young girl who inspired the character would have thought of any of the wild and wacky versions of the story, but we do know she enjoyed the 1933 Paramount version.
“I am delighted with the film and am now convinced that only through the medium of the talking picture art could this delicious fantasy be faithfully interpreted,” she told the New York Times. “Alice is a picture which represents a revolution in cinema history!”
“Alice Through The Looking Glass,” the six years in the making sequel to Tim Burton’s $1 billion grossing “Alice in Wonderland,” takes place in a world where butterflies speak and the Red Queen applies her lipstick in a heart-shaped motif, but what should be a flight of fancy is grounded by a dull story.
The topsy-turvy world of Underland is more or less intact since the last time Alice Kingsleigh (Mia Wasikowska) visited. Chess pieces still come to life, Tweedledee and Tweedledumb (Matt Lucas) continue to speak in rhyme and the Cheshire Cat’s (Stephen Fry) grin is as toothy as it ever was.
One thing is different, however. The Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp), Alice’s greatest friend and ally in the otherworld, is having some problems. Call him the Sad Hatter. “He’s just not the same anymore.” Thinking of his family’s demise courtesy of the fiery breath of the Jabberwocky has thrown him into a depression. To help the Mad Hatter out of his funk Alice steals a time travel device from Time (Sacha Baron Cohen) himself (“I am time,” he says, “the infinite, the immortal, the measurable… unless you have a clock.”) ignores warnings about changing the past and careens across the ocean of time to find out what happened to Hatter’s folks. “Do try not to break the past, present or future,” purrs the Cheshire Cat.
“Looking Glass” is an epic fantasy artfully directed by James Bobin but lacking the effortlessly odd feel of Tim Burton’s work on the first film. It’s a trippy story that transverses time and space and should invite the viewer to turn on, tune in and drop out but the true weirdness of the story, the unhinged voyages of imagination, are absent. Instead we’re thrown into a world that feels like we’ve seen it all before: familiar and not nearly whimsical enough. It’s a sea of CGI with a story cut adrift inside it.
It’s lovely to hear Alan Rickman’s voice, if only briefly, as Absolem the Caterpillar on screen again and Baron Cohen does his best to breath life into his character, but no one, not even the Mad Hatter—who should more rightly be called the Quirky Hatter—is interesting enough to merit the movie’s hour-and-forty minute running time. There is a high level of craft evident in the computer-generated images, the costumes and set decoration, everywhere, in fact, except the story that seems to value “time” puns over actual plot.
Perhaps in six years or so, if they decide to add another film to this franchise, they’ll take heed of a bit of “Looking Glass’s” theme about learning something from the past and give the next movie the excitement and story Lewis Carroll’s creation deserves.
Guillermo del Toro’s love letter to both V.C. Andrews and Edgar Allen Poe is a beautifully crafted gothic horror that will make you squirm in your seat as your eyeballs dance around the wonderfully appointed screen.
It takes the elements of gothic literature—love transcending death, seductive strangers—and the weirdness we expect from del Toro—haunted houses, ghosts, vats of blood and even incest—to create a whole that is one of the most singular films of the year.
Period-piece It Girl Mia Wasikowska is Edith Cushing, daughter of a Buffalo, New York construction magnate. She’s a writer, penning a story of ghosts and love, when she is swept away by a mysterious stranger. Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston) and his sister Lucille (Jessica Chastain) are British gentry in America to raise money to perfect and build a machine to mine the rich, crimson red clay that lies under their family estate. Edith is immediately taken with Mr. British Tall Dark and Handsome, leaving her previous suitor Dr. Alan McMichael (Charlie Hunnam) behind.
Soon they are married and off to Sharpe’s family estate, nicknamed Crimson Peak because in the winter the red clay it sits on turns the snow a lurid shade of cerise. The crumbling building holds many secrets in its rotting walls, secrets Edith must unravel if she is to survive.
Bloody and by times bloody terrifying, every frame of “Crimson Peak” drips with del Toro’s Grand-Guignol sensibility. Madness and murder are front and center, coupled with arch performances—Chastain in particular embodies the Hammer Horror style of wild-eye-acting—and the director’s flawless instinct for creating unease in the audience. It’s a transport to another world, a place where the ground seeps red and old houses moan in the wind. With atmosphere to burn it’s an operatic companion piece to “The Devil’s Backbone” and “Pan’s Labyrinth” that plays like a fever dream.
Anyone unfamiliar with the novel or countless retellings of Gustave Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary” could be forgiven in thinking Sophie’s Barthes’s version is some sort of period film noir. Like the classic noirs it begins at the end with the tragic fate of its protagonist and then ricochets backwards to the start to show how the main character met their fate.
If the film was set in the 1940s instead of the 1870s Emma Bovary (Mia Wasikowska) could have made a convincing femme fatale. Like the best noir characters she is ambitious, philandering and has a taste for the finer things in life.
Married to humble country doctor Charles Bovary (Henry Lloyd-Hughes) she longs for the bright lights of Paris. To elevate her status she engages in a series of illicit affairs with wealthy men—Leon Dupuis (Ezra Miller) and The Marquis (Logan Marshall-Green)—but is ultimately done in by her short-sightedness, spendthrift ways and social climbing. Drowning in debt, she is “standing under an apple tree longing for the scent of orange blossom.”
The problem with this “Madame Bovary” adaptation lies with the main character. She is the architect of her own doom and to my eye a thoroughly unlikeable character. As her life crumbled part of me wanted to scream at the screen, “What did you expect?” She is blinded to the consequences of her actions until it’s too late and then blames everyone around her. “You are all evil, all men,” she rants without taking any personal responsibility for the mess she has made. Wasikowska does a good job of bringing intelligence to Emma, but she never plays her like a grown-up. She’s more a petulant child and not a very interesting one at that.
That Wasikowska is trapped within a naturalistic but stodgy film that doesn’t allow her more than just a cursory take on the character. The tragedy is ladled on thick but the passions that fuelled her aristocratic aspirations are absent, leaving us with a handsomely presented but ultimately empty experience. A bit more noir and a bit less “Masterpiece Theatre” would have served this adaptation well.
Exclusive Q&A with David Cronenberg following opening night
Halloween screening of MAPS TO THE STARS
Q&A to follow 7:10 p.m. screening at Varsity Cinemas, to be moderated by Richard Crouse
Opening Night Screening
Friday, October 31
7:10 p.m.
Varsity Cinemas (55 Bloor St. W.)
This is a public event. Tickets available via Cineplex.com.
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Maps to the Stars
Directed by David Cronenberg
Starring Julianne Moore, John Cusack, Mia Wasikowska, Robert Pattinson, Olivia Williams
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With this tale of a secret-filled Hollywood family on the verge of implosion, award-winning director David Cronenberg forges both a wicked social satire and a very human ghost story from our celebrity-obsessed culture. From a screenplay by acclaimed author, screenwriter and West Coast chronicler Bruce Wagner, and featuring an ensemble cast that includes Julianne Moore, Mia Wasikowska, John Cusack, Robert Pattinson, Olivia Williams and Sarah Gadon, MAPS TO THE STARS tours the seductive allure and the tender, darkly comic underbelly of contemporary success.
In the new David Cronenberg film Maps to the Stars, Julianne Moore plays actress Havana Segrand.
A child of Hollywood, she’s the daughter of a movie star who became a star herself but is now, as Moore says, “monstrous and childlike.”
Havana is a bundle of exposed ego and neurosis, a Hollywood stereotype, but Moore promises she’s not based on anyone in particular.
“I swear to you she sprung to life from the page,” she says.
“That was what was great about it. (Screenwriter) Bruce Wagner’s language is so precise, so spectacular, so emotional; it was almost like poetry.
“There was a rhythm to it. I could hear her voice in the rhythm of the speech and how things were supposed to be delivered.
“The key to Havana for me was her arrested development. She’s stuck at the age her mother died. She’s so childlike.
“Everything is all about her mother and not being parented. All this childish, even sexpot behaviour — the ‘Look at me!’ — is all about not being parented. That’s all she wants.”
The film is a wonderfully sadistic portrait of Tinsel Town and its citizens, portraying the wild side of Los Angeles where venal and stratospherically self-involved behaviour plays itself out on the public stage. It’s a dark picture of life in Hollywood, but longtime New York City resident Moore says the conduct isn’t exclusive to the movie biz.
“I‘m sure there can be a certain kind of permissiveness in any business,” she says, “on Wall Street and Silicon Valley and in certain socialite circles.
“People try and pin it on Hollywood as the only place it happens, and of course, it’s not.
“I only lived in L.A. for a while in the ’90s. There was a different quality to socializing than I had ever seen before. I’m pretty bourgeois. I’m not a partier. I don’t really go out, but when I moved to L.A. there was a degree of socialization. I was like, ‘Whoa, there’s a lot of parties out here.’
“I was also single and out in a way I hadn’t been before. Very soon after that I met my husband, we had children and I went right back into my hole.”
She does, however, go out from time to time.
“I have a school event later tonight,” she laughs as we end the interview.
