I join the CTV NewsChannel to talk about the new MCU offering “Captain America: Brave New World,” the adorable “Paddington in Peru,” the romantic entanglements of “Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy” and the sci fi love story “The Gorge.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
SYNOPSIS: In “The Gorge,” a new thriller now streaming on Apple TV+, Anya Taylor-Joy and Miles Teller star as elite snipers, one Lithuanian, one American, posted for a yearlong hitch as guards on either side of a deep gorge. “Do we need to stop people from going on the gorge?” asks Levi (Teller). “No,” comes the reply. “You need to stop what’s in the gorge from coming out.”
CAST: Miles Teller, Anya Taylor-Joy, Sigourney Weaver, Sope Dirisu, William Houston. Directed by Scott Derrickson.
REVIEW: A mix of science fiction, horror, action with a dollop of romance (it’s coming out on Valentine’s Day after all), the genre-bending “The Gorge” is about two mad, bad and dangerous people who fall in love. Drasa (Anya Taylor-Joy) and Levi (Miles Teller) are star crossed lovers, but before they can be together, they must first battle some zombie-ish baddies.
Director Scott Derrickson throws every genre in book at “The Gorge” but at the end, after the sci fi, horror, conspiracy, action and more, this is a story of soulmates finding one another. The other stuff, the sharp shooting and monster action, is set dressing. Pretty cool set dressing, but set dec nonetheless. The leap across the gorge, isn’t just a feat of derring-do, It’s a leap of romantic faith.
It’s a daring mix, that sometimes feels like a jigsaw puzzle with too many pieces.
Surprisingly, it’s the romance that carries the day. The initial long-distance flirting—remember there is a huge gorge separating them—is goofy, but lighthearted. They hold up signs and dance, and while it isn’t perhaps exactly the kind of behavior you expect from two highly trained killers, it works. Even snipers can get smitten.
When all hell breaks loose—literally—“The Gorge” loses some of its uniqueness, even though the action sequences are large scale and well staged.
The creature designs, kind of a cross between Groot and a Yeti are cool and achieved through makeup and costumes. It gives the fight scenes a dynamic feel and heightens the stakes. Drasa and Levi aren’t battling CGI creations, they’re fighting creatures that feel organic.
At its heart, however, “The Gorge” isn’t really just a creature feature. It’s big budget actioner about human connection, but when it is running, jumping, shooting etc, it feels less inventive than it does when it focusses on the simple stuff, like the bond between two people who have searched for love.
I compare the experience of watching “Spiderhead,” a new psychological prison thriller starring Chris Hemsworth, Jurnee Smollett and Miles Teller and now streaming on Netflix, with going to a nice restaurant with a dirty bathroom. The food, service and atmosphere are top notch, but go to the restroom after dinner and if it’s dirty, that’s what you’ll remember most about your visit.
Such is the fate of “Spiderhead,” a movie that makes a good impression right up until the final minutes.
Hemsworth is visionary Steve Abnesti, a chemist who runs Spiderhead, a remote penal institution where his experimental, mind-altering drugs are tested on inmates. Prisoners live in beautiful cells that resemble hip hotel rooms and eat gourmet food. There are no bars on the doors and not a single orange jumpsuit in sight. “Your presence in this facility,” says Abnesti, “while technically a punishment, is a privilege.”
In return for the relaxed rules and relative luxury of the prison, inmates are equipped with a module or Mobi-Pak containing mood altering drugs. Administered by the amiable Abnesti, these concoctions are part of a larger study analyze the effects of manipulating emotions. “Our work will save lives,” says Abnesti. “Not just one life, many lives. We’re making the world a better place.”
Inmate Jeff (Teller) is Abnesti’s go to guinea pig. The pair have a special bond forged over a shared belief that the inmate experiments are for the good of all humanity. But when Jeff is forced into partaking in a cruel drug trial, he suspects his trust has been misplaced. “The time to worry about crossing lines,” Abnesti says, “was a lot of lines ago.”
Based on the New Yorker short story “Escape from Spiderhead” by George Saunders, the film explores moral dilemmas and the ethical quandary of exerting control over the powerless for personal gain. The very idea of forced injections is an even bigger hot button topic than when Saunders wrote the short story.
So why did I feel like I just left a dirty bathroom as the end credits rolled?
It’s the recency theory. The last thing you see is the thing that makes the lasting impression and “Spiderhead,” despite an interesting premise, some good performances and a growing atmosphere of apprehension and mistrust, rushes the ending to the point where you wonder if the filmmakers ran out of film, time or interest in the story. Tonally, the all-of-a-sudden action packed ending feels tacked on and uninspired.
Ultimately, “Spiderhead” disappoints because it gets so much right, but, in the end, doesn’t trust the idea-driven story to satisfy.
Richard joins CTV NewsChannel anchor Marcia MacMillan to talk about the highway to the danger zone and Tom Cruise in “Top Gun: Maverick.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
It’s been thirty-six years, but movie goers can once again ride into the danger zone.
Kind of.
Hotheaded test pilot Pete “Maverick” Mitchell (Tom Cruise) returns to the screen and sky in the high-flying sequel “Top Gun: Maverick,” which, despite the main character’s feats of daring do, plays it mostly by-the-book.
When we first get reacquainted with Captain Maverick, he’s still the hotshot, risky pilot we remember from the first film. His cocky attitude and bad boy behavior has kept him from being promoted. “I’m where I belong,” he says when asked why he’s not an Admiral after decades of distinguished service. He’s popular with his peers but not with the brass, save for his old friend and guardian angel, Admiral Tom “Iceman” Kazansky (Val Kilmer in an extended cameo).
“Your reputation precedes you,” says Vice Admiral Beau “Cyclone” Simpson (Jon Hamm). “That’s not a compliment.”
Called back to Top Gun, the United States Navy training program where he learned fighter and strike tactics and technique, Maverick is presented with a last chance for glory. “You fly for Top Gun or you don’t ever fly for the Navy again.”
Cyclone is obviously disdainful of the arrogant Maverick, but acknowledges he is the best person to train twelve of the brightest and best recent Top Gun graduates for a dangerous mission to locate and destroy an underground uranium enrichment site.
For Maverick, the job comes with baggage. It places him in the vicinity of on-again, off-again girlfriend Penny (Jennifer Connelly), a new character, referenced in the first film as the daughter of an admiral. Most dramatically, one of his students is Lieutenant Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw (Miles Teller), the son of Maverick’s late best friend, “Goose,” played by Anthony Edwards in the first film. Rooster holds Maverick responsible for his father’s death and is resistant to Maverick’s training. “My dad believed in you,” he says. “I’m not going to make the same mistake.”
Of the twelve recruits, half will make the cut, one will be the leader, if Maverick can teach them the precision and “Don’t think, just do” attitude needed to come home alive.
“Top Gun: Maverick” screenwriters Ehren Kruger, Eric Warren Singer and Christopher McQuarrie keep the story simple; a splash of romance, a dash of remorse, some shirtless volleyball and a mountain of eye-popping aerial action. It’s a recipe that echoes the events of the first film to the point of déjà vu. Still, as an exercise in nostalgia, complete with callbacks to the original, and an emotional appearance by Kilmer, “Maverick” works because it blends old and new in a crowd-pleasing way. Unlike other recent 1980s and 1990s reboots, it salutes the original in tribute. Loud and proud, it wears its superficiality on its sleeve in an old fashioned, last century style that is unabashed fan service.
But what really sets the new and old films apart is Cruise. He was a movie star then, and he’s a movie star now, but with age, the stakes for his character are higher. Maverick has a lot to prove, regrets to be dealt with and while the actor doesn’t appear to have aged at all, that trademarked Tom Cruise Run can’t be as easy as it once was. Maverick is a still a hotshot, but here the character is tempered by the sins of the past and a real concern for the future. Cruise’s work shaves some of the hypermasculine edges off Maverick to reveal a more human and humane character than the first time around. It centers the movie with some earthbound emotion to counter the sky-high action.
“Top Gun: Maverick” is a sequel that plays it safe with the story, but lets it rip in the blockbuster action sequences, giving the audience the expected need for speed.
The Miles Teller boxing film “Bleed for This,” like most sports movies, isn’t really about the sport. Sure there are TKOs and the smack of glove against skin, but really it’s about the indomitable human spirit with one of the greatest real life comebacks in sports history as a backdrop.
Teller plays Vincenzo Pazienza, a.k.a. Vinny Paz a.k.a. the Pazmanian Devil, a championship boxer in lightweight, light middleweight and super middleweight categories. At the beginning of the film he is a wild card, a talented pugilist, but an undisciplined one. The night before a big fight he hits the town, gambling. The next day Roger Mayweather (Peter ‘Kid Chocolate’ Quillin) pummels him in the ring, soundly thrashing the former champ.
Despite his manager insistence that he retire, Vinny lumbers on, working out with Kevin Rooney (Aaron Eckhart), Mike Tyson’s former trainer. Pumped up, he jumps two weight classes and becomes a champion in the light middleweight category before tragedy strikes.
Flush with cash after his win, he buys a sports car. Within hours of owning it he’s involved in an accident that leaves him with a broken neck. “How much time till I can fight again?” he asks his doctor. “I can’t say with certainty you’ll ever walk again,” comes the grim response. His doctor wants to fuse the bone, Vinny instead opts for a halo procedure that involves screwing a circular metal brace into his head for six months to stabilize the injury. During his recuperation Vin secretly works out, preparing himself for a return to the ring. Within thirteen months the halo is gone, and he’s on the comeback trail.
“Bleed For This” aims to be a bigger-than-life tale of resilience and perseverance over adversity but plays like a gritty television movie. Pazienza overcame great odds and proved a lot of people—including his doctors and trainers wrong—but he’s not a particularly likeable champ. Teller emphasizes the character’s never-say-die spirit, but instead of wining us over his cockiness comes off a caricature of chutzpah. Ditto the portrait of Pazienza’s hard-scrapple family. They fight, they argue and worship at a home altar so loaded with Catholic iconography it looks like a page out of the Italian Stereotypes 101 textbook. If the Order Sons of Italy in America were outraged by “The Sopranos” wait till they get a load of this bunch.
Writer-director Ben Younger is a muscular filmmaker, all macho posturing and turbo-charged momentum which may not do his characters any favours but works well when the movie is in the boxing ring.
The final fight scene hits hard with stylish flourishes, like dropping out all the sound safe for the smack of clubs against skin and a pep speech with flashbacks, but it is more compelling than anything that came before it.
As a retelling of one of the most unlikely comebacks in sports history “Bleed for This” succeeds in getting across its predictable ‘never-say-die’ lesson. It’s a shame Younger settle for a made-for-TV-movie sentiment instead of digging deeper to dins a subtext that would really knock the audience out.
By definition the term ‘war dogs’ refers to “bottom feeders who make money off war without ever stepping foot on the battlefield.” In the film “War Dogs” Jonah Hill plays Efraim Diveroli, a true to life 20-something arms dealer who fits that description to a tee. Richard sat with HIll to discuss the film on the CTV NewsChannel.
Watch the whole thing HERE!
By Richard Crouse – Metro Canada
By definition the term ‘war dogs’ refers to “bottom feeders who make money off war without ever stepping foot on the battlefield.”
In the new film War Dogs Jonah Hill plays Efraim Diveroli, a true to life 20-something arms dealer who fits that description to a tee.
“You try to understand why someone would end up like that,” Hill says when I ask how he got inside the head of the fast-talking character. “It might be a combination of wiring, lack of empathy, ego and insecurity and obsessiveness. I don’t know. I try to approach it from a therapeutic point of view. Get into the psychology of why people behave the way they do. Probably most actors do that.”
He wasn’t able to meet the real-life Diveroli but he was able to piece together the character without a face-to-face.
“I would always prefer to meet the person but if someone was playing me in a movie I would give them the best version of myself. A lot of times when you meet the person you end up having to be a really good editor, choosing what to include, but always I found meeting the people around them ends up being more helpful to me because they are giving you a warts-and-all portrayal of the person at that time.”
Hill found that version of Diveroli from many sources.
“I had a lot of help,” he says. “I got to meet David, who Miles (Teller) plays, and a few people who knew Efraim at that time. The biggest key was that they are from Miami and Miami culture is very specific. There is a very big sense of the American dream there, in a positive and negative way. There’s a big immigrant culture. People from Cuba and Haiti end up in America for the first time through Miami. Efraim is a corruption of that (American) dream.”
In the film Efraim is a self- described “Ugly American,” a borderline sociopath for whom belligerence is a default setting.
The unhinged nature of the character and Hill’s venal glee in playing up the worst in human nature keeps War Dogs interesting but some audience members see it differently.
Recently a crew of South African arms dealers approached Hill in a restaurant after seeing a trailer for War Dogs.
They were impressed and wanted to high five the actor. He says the same thing happened after he made Wolf of Wall Street, another film where he played a morally ambiguous character who struck a chord with the very people it was satirizing.
“A lot of times Wall Street bros will come up to me as if the movie is their Goodfellas or Scarface. People see what they want to see. It is a little scary sometimes when people misinterpret.”
He describes the run in with the arms dealers as “uncomfortable.”
“You don’t want to make it an overly uncomfortable environment while that is happening,” he says, “but you also don’t want to lie and be dishonest that you are agreeing with them. You don’t want to make them feel bad about their misinterpretation. It’s an unusual an awkward situation to be sure. In the end, we all want to be seen as heroes in our own story, I guess.”
In “War Dogs,” the new film from “The Hangover” director Todd Phillips, war profiteer David Packouz (Miles Teller) describes how arms dealers think. We see a soldier in battle, he sees $17,500, the cost of outfitting GI Joe with weapons and gear. “War is an economy,” he says. “Anyone who tells you otherwise is either in on it or stupid.”
When we first meet Packouz he is a twenty-something massage therapist father-to-be barely making ends meet. His fortunes change when his childhood friend Efraim Diveroli (Jonah Hill) recruits him to sell weapons to the U.S. military. Taking advantage of new rules regarding the allocation of military funds, they bid on small contracts, profiting on deals that aren’t big enough to attract the attention of huge players like Halliburton. “I live on crumbs like a rat,” says Diveroli, “and when you’re dealing with the Pentagon you can live on crumbs.”
It’s a lucrative business. Claiming “we’re not pro war, we’re pro money,” they soon have matching Miami condos, Porsches and an appetite to get a bigger slice of the “gold rush in Iraq.” Enter Henry Girard (Bradley Cooper), a legendary arms dealer rumoured to have sold the government the rope used to hang Saddam Hussein. With his shady connections—“This is the job,” Efraim says, “to do the business with people and places in the US can’t deal with directly.”—David and Efraim make the biggest deal of their lives, a $300 million contract to arm the Afghan Military. It is smooth sailing until they realize they’re in over their heads and greed and hubris
Based on Guy Lawson’s 2011 Rolling Stone article “The Stoner Arms Dealers,” the main hurdle “War Dogs” faces is the obnoxious nature of its main characters. David and Efraim are, to varying degrees, are not likeable but luckily Teller and Hill make sure they are watchable.
Teller plays David as a guy caught up in the fast pace even though he’s in way over his head. Of the two bros, he’s the everyman, the character we’re meant to identify with and the actor makes us understand—but probably not agree with—his choices. He makes terrible decisions and it takes him too long to grasp the moral and legal repercussions of his actions (MILD SPOILER ALERT) but at least he eventually does.
Hill has a steeper mountain to climb. By definition the term ‘war dogs’ refers to “bottom feeders to make money off war without ever stepping foot on the battlefield,” and Efraim, a fast talking “Scarface” aficionado, lives up to the description. He is a self described “Ugly American,” a borderline sociopath for whom belligerence is a default setting. The unhinged nature of the character and Hill’s venal glee in playing up the worst in human nature keeps “War Dogs” interesting even when the filmmaking gets choppy.
“War Dogs” is an odd beast. It’s a star driven message movie that condemns the Pentagon procurement process while balancing elements of satire and intrigue. Films like “The Big Short” breathe the same air, but take deeper breaths. Phillips has made a film that entertains but remains a character study rather than a searing, insider’s look at the business of war.
