RICHARD’S WEEKEND MOVIE REVIEWS FROM CP24! FRIDAY JULY 24, 2015.
Richard’s CP24 reviews for “Southpaw,” “Pixels” and “Paper Towns.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
Posts Tagged ‘Nat Wolff’
RICHARD’S “CANADA AM” REVIEWS FOR JULY 24 WITH MARCI IEN.
Richard’s “Canada AM” reviews for “Southpaw,” “Pixels” and “Paper Towns.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
PAPER TOWNS: 3 STARS. “simultaneously overwritten and under realised.”
“Paper Towns,” the new teen movie from the writer of “The Fault in Our Stars,” is a coming-of-age-mystery-love story-road trip-romance about a teenage boy and the mysterious girl of his dreams.
Nat Wolff is Quentin, an Orlando, Florida A-student just weeks away from graduation. His childhood crush, Margo Roth Spiegelman (Cara Delevingne), lives across the street but they haven’t spoken in nine years. He’s a nerd, she’s an exotic beauty who looks like she just walked out of a Victoria Secrets catalogue—because, in real life, Delevingne was a VS model—and he still loves her. One night, out of the blue, she appears and asks a favour with her husky voice, like a young Brenda Vaccaro.
“I have nine things to do tonight, and I need a get-a-way driver.”
It’s a mission of revenge against her cheating boyfriend and BFFs who have betrayed her. “It’s a night to right some wrongs and wrong some rights,” she tells him. “Basically it will be the best night of your life.”
Among other things they cloak a car in Saran Wrap, complete with a note that reads “That’s a wrap on our friendship,” and share a quick tender moment. The next morning, she’s gone.
Her parents are unconcerned. “She’s not missing,” says her mother, “she’s gone. There’s a difference. She’ll come back when people stop talking about her.”
Quentin isn’t so sure, and soon begins to find clues Margo left behind. Convinced she wants him to find her, he becomes a teenage Columbo, piecing together a series of obscure clues that would give Sherlock Holmes a headache. The clues lead him and a car load of friends (Halston Sage as Lacey, Austin Abrams as Ben, Justice Smith as Radar and Jaz Sinclair as Angela) to a tiny “paper town” (a fictional place on a map used by cartographers as copyright protection) in New York State.
Whether or not Quentin finds her is irrelevant. It’s the journey, not the destination that counts. Margo is the McGuffin, an impossible pixie dream girl who, despite reading Walt Whitman and being the only millennial who knows who Woody Guthrie is, is the least interesting part of the story. She exists simply to put everything in motion.
Is the journey worth your time and money? Sure, if you consider pop psychology like, “You have to get lost to find yourself,” to be a deep insight to the human condition. It rides the line between existential teen drama and the above-mentioned mishmash of styles (coming-of-age-mystery-love story-road trip-romance) that never exactly dins its tone. For a movie whose mantra is, “Take a risk,” it certainly plays it safe with the storytelling.
Keeping that in mind, “Paper Towns” is populated with likeable, compelling characters. Delevingne is a charismatic catalyst, and the trio of boys have the genuine chemistry of friends who have “known one another since they were foetuses.” They bring the material to life, breathing life into a story that is simultaneously overwritten and under realised.
ADMISSION: 4 STARS
“30 Rock,” the beloved but low rated comedy is gone now, having passed on to the great boob tube in the sky, but Tina Fey fans can get their fix of her trademarked brand of witty and wise humor in “Admission,” a “mom com” co-starring Paul Rudd.
Fey is Portia Nathan, a mildly compulsive Princeton admissions officer—they jokingly call her their “golden retriever” because of her record of recruiting a-plus students—who leads a quiet, ordered life with professor Mark (Michael Sheen). They share a love of poetry, hatred of kids and not much else. Her well ordered life is thrown into disarray when John Pressman (Rudd), a free-spirited former classmate and now teacher at an alternative school, introduces her to Jeremiah Balakian (Nat Wolff), a brilliant young man who may be the child she gave up for adoption seventeen years ago.
Fey didn’t write “Admission,” but it is firmly in her wheelhouse. Like “30 Rock” before it, “Admission” takes a recognizable style and subverts it with smarts. It’s a female driven romantic comedy, but there isn’t a rom com clichés in sight. Instead there are René Descartes jokes and Bella Abzug sight gags, but what else, exactly, did you expect in a movie set at Princeton?
But it also more than that. It’s a big studio comedy—the first half-hour is hysterical and then it evens out, although Lily Tomlin as Portia’s militant mom is hilarious throughout—that has all the laughs but none of the vulgarity (unless you’re offended by the line, “You’re not the only one who smells of cow placenta”) of the recent Hollywood amusements.
Fey fans will remember “Baby Mama” and the late season “30 Rock” motherhood storyline, so Portia’s maternal development completes the trilogy of motherhood movies, except, that like in those other stories, not everything works out exactly as planned.
As a recruiter Portia uses the line, “What’s the secret to getting in? I can’t tell you—you have to find out for yourself,” in her pitch to students. Those words also echo her character arc—she must find independence to find herself. That’s a heady concept for a rom com and pretty much the opposite of every romantic comedy plotline every written.
There she goes again subverting the genre.
“Admission” is familiar enough to not jar the sensibilities of undemanding rom com fans, but there is more here than immediately meets the eye.
