Posts Tagged ‘Michael Bay’

RICHARD’S CTV NEWSCHANNEL WEEKEND MOVIE REVIEWS FOR ARPIL 06.

Richard sits in with CTV NewsChannel anchor Marcia MacMillan  to have a look at the weekend’s big releases, the Kennedy crime drama “Chappaquiddick,” the teen sex comedy “Blockers” and the silently spine tingling horror flick “A Quiet Place.”

Watch the whole thing HERE!

Metro Canada: A Quiet Place may be full of silence — but it’s deafening.

By Richard Crouse – Metro Canada

John Krasinski didn’t just direct and star in the thriller A Quiet Place — he and wife Emily Blunt actually lived it. Sort of.

“One night she said, ‘Living silently would be hard,’” he says. “As the weeks went by we would constantly make note of it. It wasn’t even just getting silverware to make the kid’s lunch. It was more like you’re putting the kids to bed and the bed creaks. You think, we are legitimately surrounded by sound.”

The famous couple star as parents fighting for the survival of their kids in a world invaded by monsters that use sound to hunt human prey. The family must live in silence, use sign language and eat off leaves to avoid the clinking of cutlery on china but what happens when their newborn baby cries? Can life go on?

Krasinski, who starred as Jim Halpert on The Office for eight years, calls the spec script “truly one of the best ideas I’d ever heard,” but admits worrying “that a lack of dialogue would be a thing.”

“Then on about Day 2 or 3 was, ‘Wait a minute. Maybe the thing I am most scared of is our superpower. This is actually super engaging.’ The fact that people are going to be able to experience sound in a completely different way was really fun.”

The silence of the first half of A Quiet Place is deafening. In the way that many filmmakers use bombast to grab your attention Krasinski uses the absence of sound to focus the audience on the situation.

“One of my favourite things about this whole experience has been listening to audiences understand what’s happening,” he says. “Usually the first thirty seconds of the movie you hear people shifting in their seats. Maybe they take a couple bites of popcorn. Then you realise collectively in the room people say, ‘I can’t do this.’ I love that.”

Krasinski and Blunt have been married since 2010 and have two children, Hazel and Violet, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t nervous to ask her to co-star in the film.

“I always wanted Emily to do it but the two versions of this in my head were going to go really wrong. I ask her to do it and she says no, which makes dinner really awkward. Or she says yes, ‘For you I’ll do it.’ I didn’t want her to choose this for me and have it be a weird experience. I’ve seen how good a career she has because of what she’s chosen to do. I needed her to come to it on her own.

“When she asked me to read the script I didn’t think she’d say yes. She was doing Mary Poppins and we had our second child, so she was busy. Then she said, ‘You can’t let anybody else do this role.’ I know it sounds corny but it is true. It is still the greatest compliment of my career because I know what it takes for her to say yes.”

As director, writer, star and executive producer Krasinski has had a hand in all aspects of A Quiet Place. How does he feel now that the film is winning critical raves? “It goes back to that primal thing of the kids at school thinking what you think is cool, is cool.”

A QUIET PLACE: 4 STARS. “a unique and unsettling horror film.”

Imagine living in complete silence. Never raising your voice over the level of a faint whisper. No music. No heavy footsteps. You can’t even sneeze. Silence. Then imagine your life depends on staying completely noiseless. That’s the situation for the Abbott family—and the rest of the world—in the effective new thriller “A Quiet Place.”

Real life couple John Krasinski (who also wrote, produced and directed) and Emily Blunt are Lee and Evelyn, a mother and father fighting for the survival of their kids Beau (Cade Woodward), Regan (Millicent Simmonds) and Marcus (Noah Jupe) in a world where making a sound, any sound, can be deadly. Deadly blind aliens who hunt their prey through sound have invaded the world turning noisy people into human cold cuts. The family lives in silence, using sign language and eating off leaves to avoid the clinking of cutlery on china but what happens when a newborn baby cries? Can life go on?

The silence of the first half of “A Quiet Place” is deafening. There is no spoken dialogue for forty minutes, just dead air. In the way that many filmmakers use bombast to grab your attention Krasinski uses the absence of sound to focus the audience on the situation. Very little information is passed along. We don’t know where the aliens came from, why they’re terrorizing earth or how many there are. Ditto the Abbotts. We know nothing about them. The connection the family feels is transmitted through looks and actions, not words. This isn’t a story where character development is important, it’s a tale of survival pure and simple.

Tension grows in the first, artier half and pays dividends in the second more genre-based half. Set up out of the way Krasinski raises the stakes, putting the family directly in the way of the creatures. Like all good genre movies as the story escalates it becomes not simply about predatory monsters, all teeth and giant ears, but about a universal truth. In this case it is about a parent’s primal need to protect their kids at any cost. Krasinski nails this, providing both the b-movie thrills and chills necessary to the genre and a deep undercurrent of humanity.

He’s aided by the actors. Blunt is all poignancy and strength. Krasinski brings stoicism while the kids make us care about the family.

“A Quiet Place” is a nervy little film. Other filmmakers might have tried to find a way to wedge in more dialogue or spell things out more clearly but the beauty of Krasinski’s approach is its simplicity. Uncluttered and low key, it’s a unique and unsettling horror film.

CTVNEWS.CA: “THE CROUSE REVIEW FOR ‘TRANSFORMERS: THE LAST KNIGHT’ & 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 “Transformers: the Last Night,” “The Hero’s” tale of redemption and the underwater terror of “47 Metres Down.”

Watch the whole thing HERE!

RICHARD’S WEEKEND MOVIE REVIEWS FROM CP24! FRIDAY JUNE 23, 2017.

Richard and CP24 anchor Jamie Gutfreund have a look at the weekend’s new movies, “Transformers: the Last Night,” “The Hero’s” tale of redemption and the underwater terror of “47 Metres Down.”

Watch the whole thing HERE!

RICHARD’S CTV NEWSCHANNEL WEEKEND MOVIE REVIEWS & MORE FOR JUNE 23.

Richard sits in with CTV NewsChannel anchor Marcia MacMillan to have a look at the big weekend movies including the eye scorching visuals of “Transformers: the Last Night,” “The Hero’s” tale of redemption and the underwater terror of “47 Metres Down.”

Watch the whole thing HERE!

Metro In Focus: Transformers is coming this summer fresh from the recycling bin

By Richard Crouse – Metro In Focus

Familiar but fresh. If you are a Hollywood executive you probably say these words a hundred times a day. In pitch meetings and story conferences those f-words are a mantra in a town that never met an idea it couldn’t recycle.

Convinced that audiences will only respond to variations on brands they are already familiar with, this summer the studios are offering freshened up versions of The Mummy, Amityville Horror and Spider-Man among others. Hollywood, the Nation’s Blue Bin. The biggest and loudest of the bunch will likely be Transformers: The Last Knight, the fifth film based on the toys created by Hasbro and Tomy.

Once again directed by Michael Bay, the movie reportedly cost a budget-busting $260 million. The special effects-laden story of humans vs. Transformers and a mysterious artifact is on track to make multi-millions domestically and worldwide, one of the few aging tentpole films to beat audience blockbuster fatigue.

It’s familiar but fresh.

In the familiar department you have Mark Wahlberg as star, the return of heroic Autobot leader Optimus Prime and director Bay’s trademarked bombast. He makes action orgy movies for audiences who crave a rumbling theatre seat. His Transformers films engage three of the five senses — only smell and taste are exempt — that leave viewers with scorched eyes and ringing ears and his audience eat up his gladiatorial sense of spectacle.

Freshening up the story is the addition of screen legend (and Marvel Cinematic Universe actor) Anthony Hopkins as an astronomer and historian knowledgeable in the history of the Transformers on Earth and a healthy dose of Arthurian myth woven into the story.

It sounds like the perfect mix of familiar and fresh but there are no guarantees in the blockbuster business. Recently, despite the presence of Tom Cruise and two — count ’em, two — classic horror characters, critics, audiences and the box office met The Mummy with a collective yawn. Although it has done better business overseas one pundit suggested the movie’s poor showing “stems from being an antiquated property paired with an antiquated star.”

Now there’s a statement that’ll send the collective shivers that were so sorely missing from The Mummy down the backs of studio executives. Perhaps the revamped story of an ancient malevolent evil wasn’t familiar or fresh enough for audiences. Or perhaps it’s because potential moviegoers sensed the cynicism in The Mummy. Bundling Cruise and legendary monsters in the movie with a few laughs, some typical blockbuster action and a CGI climax that wouldn’t be out of place in an Avengers movie, felt like a carefully constructed exercise in marketing first and a movie second.

The blockbuster business is a big one with high risk and reward. It didn’t work for Cruise and Co.’s The Mummy or Dwayne Johnson’s raunchy Baywatch reboot, but the Autobots have been good producers for Hollywood. Transformers: The Last Knight, wedged into a summer packed to the gills with big-budget blockbusters, likely won’t make the coin of its predecessors but Michael Bay doesn’t seem worried.

Although The Last Knight will be his last Transformers as director, he says the film lays the groundwork and backstory for 14 upcoming movies. At the rate they’re going, that’s almost 30 more years of Bumblebee and Megatron. That’s a lot of bot battles, and a lot of freshening up.

TRANSFORMERS: THE LAST KNIGHT: 3 STARS. “heavy metal filmmaking.”

Audiences complain that Hollywood has no new ideas, that everything is a rebrand, reboot or remake. “They don’t make ‘em like they used to!” they say.

The “Transformers” franchise should encapsulate everything that is wrong with summer blockbusters. It’s a story based on a line of toys, it values spectacle over story and the paper thin characters feel more like place holders for the action than real people and yet, here we are on episode five, with (according to director Michael Bay) fourteen more in the pipeline.

In fact, they do make ‘em like they used to. You could be forgiven for experiencing déjà vu while watching “Transformers: The Last Knight.” The “Transformers” movies are remarkably consistent. They are heavy metal filmmaking, all bluster and retina roasting visuals and people eat them up.

People go see “Transformers” for the robots—their transformation scenes remain the coolest thing about the series—and the new movie doesn’t disappoint, creating a new backstory for its mechanical stars. According to the new movie the Transformers were friendly with King Arthur and the Knights of the Roundtable and fought the Nazis during World War II.

A decade into Bay’s franchise good guy leader of the Autobots Optimus Prime has high tailed it back to his home planet Cybertron. Humans are at war with the Transformers—“Two species at war, one flesh, one metal.”—and the future of the world is at stake. As a short prologue with King Arthur suggests, the key to Earth’s survival lies in the secret history of the Transformers and a 1600-year-old secret artefact. To unlock this mystery enter Autobot ally, inventor and single father Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg), Transformers historian and English lord Sir Edmund Exposition (Anthony Hopkins)—he’s got some mansplainin’ to do!—Oxford University Professor of English Literature (and descendant of the most famous wizard of all time other than Harry Potter) Viviane Wembly (Laura Haddock) and Autobot Bumblebee (voice of Erik Aadahi).

Director Michael Bay has finally taken the Transformers where they always should’ve been, to the Realm of the Ridiculous. Any movie based on a line of toys is bound to be silly but this may be one of the silliest films ever made. From a prologue set in the Middle Ages and robots hanging out on Cuban beaches to a wisecracking Merlin the Magician and a 700-year-old opera singing robot, this is wacky stuff.

Is it good stuff, you may ask? It doesn’t take itself as seriously as some of the other entries in the series, so that’s good but like the other “Transformers” movies, it’s too long and gets lost in an orgy of action and gravity defying stunts.

Hopkins seems to be having fun cavorting with his sassy C-3PO wannabe Cogman (Jim Carter) but it’s a thankless job. He’s there mostly to provide the convoluted backstory. As a member of the secret society to protect the history of Transformers, which also includes suck luminaries as Harriet Tubman and Stephen Hawking among others, he’s the keeper of the info and boy, does he over share. He scrolls through hundreds of years of nonsensical Transformers history but at least he does says thing like, “It was alien power or as they knew it in those days, magic,” in his distinctive Hannibal Lecter voice.

It’s all a bit much. With a story this convoluted why bother with the story at all? Those who want to see the Transformers battle will not be disappointed. The chunks of metal are cooler and than ever before and when Hopkins isn’t explaining what’s going on the robots are going at it.

“Transformers: The Last Knight” is Bay’s farewell to the franchise as director (he’ll stay on as a producer) and he has not held back. It’s heavy metal filmmaking, loud and proud, like a drum solo that goes on for just a hair too long.

RICHARD’S WEEKEND MOVIE REVIEWS FROM CP24! FRIDAY OCT 21, 2016.

screen-shot-2016-10-21-at-4-42-43-pmRichard and CP24 anchor Stephanie Smythe have a look at the weekend’s new movies, the up-close-and-personal action of “Jack Reacher: Never Go Back,” the supernatural thrills of “Ouija: Origin of Evil,” the spy comedy “Keeping Up with the Joneses” and the new Canadian indie “Mean Dreams.”

Watch the whole thing HERE!