Richard and CP24 anchor Jamie Gutfreund have a look at the weekend’s new movies,“The Accountant,” starring Ben Affleck as a deadly bookkeeper, “American Honey” starring Sasha Lane, “Unless” with Catherine Keener and “Christine” with Rebecca Hall!
Watch the whole thing HERE!
“If it bleeds it leads,” is an accepted mantra around newsrooms these days but back in 1974 it was a new, controversial idea. Christine Chubbuck (Rebecca Hall), an investigative reporter at a local ABC affiliate in Sarasota, Florida, was particularly disdainful of the idea until she became the poster child for news sensationalism.
In “Christine,” a based-on-true-events film, Chubbuck is working at local station WZRB. She’s a steely presence, a serious person doing light news. “People are listening to me,” she says, “so I have to be sure I’m really saying something.” Reports on strawberry festivals and local events are the station’s stock in trade but the station manager (Tracey Letts) is desperate to get higher ratings. How? “Juicier stories,” he says. “If it bleeds it leads.” When the station owner (John Cullum) decides to poach one or two of the Sarasota on-air talents for his much larger Baltimore new division, Christine sees that as a way out. “So if I get some footage of fat people burning in cars and I’m on my way to Baltimore?”
Her progression to the larger market is stymied by illness and depression—“My life is a cesspool,” she says.”—and culminates with the news reporter becoming the news. On July 15, 1974 Chubbuck was on air, reading the news when announced, “In keeping with WZRB’s policy of bringing you the latest in blood and guts, and in living color, you are going to see complete coverage of an attempted suicide,” before putting a gun to her head and pulling the trigger.
The events in “Christine” are well documented, so the shocking finale doesn’t come so much as a shock but the inevitable consequence of history. With the element of surprise removed what’s left is a look at the woman at the heart of the story. Hall plays Chubbuck as an almost otherworldly presence, someone who doesn’t quite feel comfortable in her own skin, always judging herself and those around her. “You’re not always the most approachable person,” co-worker George Ryan (Michael C. Hall) tells her, and that is the beauty of Hall’s work. In a terrific performance that elevates the movie, she plays Chubbuck as aloof but human, edgy and without a trace of sentimentality.
By Richard Crouse – Metro Canada
“If it bleeds it leads,” is an accepted mantra around newsrooms these days but back in 1974 it was a new, controversial idea. In the based-on-true-events film Christine Rebecca Hall plays Christine Chubbuck, an investigative reporter at a local ABC affiliate in Sarasota, Florida. She was particularly disdainful of the idea until she became the poster child for news sensationalism by announcing to her viewers, “In keeping with WZRB’s policy of bringing you the latest in blood and guts, and in living color, you are going to see complete coverage of an attempted suicide,” before putting a gun to her head and pulling the trigger.
“There are a lot of films that portray misfits and odd the people as cool,” says Hall during a stop at the Toronto International Film Festival. “I don’t want to say it fetishizes it but sometimes it makes it seem aspirational or trendy. The access [to Christine] for me personally was feeling like you are different and not excepted. That can be excruciating. Especially if you are a woman, especially at that time when you were operating it in un-meritocratic system. She had integrity. She wanted to serve your community. That was her driving force but she was not rewarded for that. [People around her] thought, ‘Well, you’re a lady in a bit weird.’ They didn’t know how to deal with that.”
Chubbuck’s progression to larger markets was stymied by illness and depression—“My life is a cesspool,” she says in the film.—and culminated with the news reporter becoming the news.
“To me Christine is someone who went through her life every day thinking, ‘OK what does it look like to be normal?’ What she perceives to be normal. She looks to everyone for affirmation. Am I doing OK? Did I get away with it today? Am I like you? Am I accepted? Sometimes she’s really good at it and sometime she’s really bad at it but regardless her community accepts her. The tragedy of the film is that she doesn’t see that. It is a compassionate film. It is a cautiously optimistic film about people.”
REBECCA HALL SIDEBAR:
“I don’t think I have given [a role] like it before and I probably won’t again because it is one of those jobs that if you are incredibly lucky you get maybe three of them in a career. And that’s only if you are incredibly successful and lucky and often only if you were a man.”
If “Kill Your Darlings” was a superhero movie it would be an origin story. Like “Batman Begins,” or “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” which detail the formative years of Bruce Wayne and James Howlett before they made their mark on the world, “Kill Your Darlings” looks at the lives of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs before they became the superheroes of the Beat Generation.
Set in 1944 the film follows Ginsberg (Daniel Radcliffe) through his rebellious years at Columbia College. “There’s more life in this paper, “ he says handing his work into a stuffy college professor (John Callum), “than in all the sonnets you’ve had us read this year.”
The shy wannabe poet falls in with a crowd of intellectuals—William Burroughs (Ben Foster), David Kammerer (Michael C. Hall), Jack Kerouac (Jack Huston) and Lucien Carr (Dane DeHaan)—whose ethos rubs against the grain of “square” societal norms. They experiment with drugs, booze, sexuality and their art, laying the groundwork for the Beats, (although that term didn’t come into use until 1948), a loose collective who valued free expression over the accepted communal and political systems of the West.
But all that came later. “Kill Your Darlings” is the groundwork; the opening of Ginsberg’s eyes. Thirteen years before he wrote “Howl,” one of the most famous and controversial American poems, he first explores his homosexuality through an attraction to Carr and opens his mind to new ideas.
It’s a slick, stylish movie that captures the excitement of the time through fast paced editing and lots of shots of Ginsberg furiously typing and smoking. That we’ve seen before in almost every period piece involving writers, but I’d have hoped for more revolutionary filmmaking in a movie about revolutionaries. (For that rent David Cronenberg’s “Naked Lunch.”)
Clichés aside director John Krokidas has good performances to work with.
As the manipulative, troublemaking Lucien, DeHaan is perfectly cast. He’s the engine that drives the movie, both thematically—“You were ordinary like every other freshman and I made you extraordinary,” he says to Ginsberg—as well as dramatically. His (SPOILER ALERT) arrest for the murder of his lover Kammerer, and the questions of personal responsibility it raises, takes over the last half hour of the film.
It is Ginsberg’s story, however, and Radcliffe sheds off any hint of Harry Potter to hand in a very good performance. He brings Ginsberg to youthful life, from nebbish to rebel to confident man who proclaims in the film’s final moment, “I am a poet.”
“Kill Your Darlings” makes a few missteps—the closing song by Bloc Party would make jazz fan Kerouac turn over in his grave—but allows the performances to bring the characters to vivid life.
