I join the Bell Media Radio Network national night time show “Shane Hewitt and the Night Shift” to raise a toast to the New Year and explain why we drink champagne on New Year’s Eve.
Listen to the whole thing HERE!
It’s time to buy a new calendar and think ahead to the next year. For some the New Year is a new start on old habits, for others, like me, it’s a time to make some resolutions, but why do we make them every year, when every year we break them. On the show today we’ll talk about resolutions, whether they help or hurt and how to make your life a little better in 2023.
Listen top the whole thing HERE!
Here’s some info on The Richard Crouse Show!
Each week on the nationally syndicated Richard Crouse Show, Canada’s most recognized movie critic brings together some of the most interesting and opinionated people from the movies, television and music to put a fresh spin on news from the world of lifestyle and pop-culture. Tune into this show to hear in-depth interviews with actors and directors, to find out what’s going on behind the scenes of your favourite shows and movies and get a new take on current trends. Recent guests include Chris Pratt, Elvis Costello, Baz Luhrmann, Martin Freeman, David Cronenberg, Mayim Bialik, The Kids in the Hall and many more!
Listen to the show live here:
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Richard and CTV News at Noon host Ken Shaw discuss the life and legacy of Garry Marshall who passed away at age 81. “There is more to life than show business,” he said.
Watch the whole ting HERE! (Starts at 14:13)
Richard and CTV NewsChannel host Marcia McMillan discuss the life and legacy of Garry Marshall who passed away at age 81. “In the education of the American people,” he said, “I am recess.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
By Richard Crouse – Metro In Focus
Julia Roberts is one of the biggest female movie stars of all time. With a career box office north of $2 billion she, and her megawatt smile, were the stuff of blockbusters throughout the 90s and early 2000s. She was everywhere, and then, somewhere around the time Jennifer Lawrence was celebrating her thirteenth birthday Roberts stepped away. Not completely, but she jumped off the Hollywood treadmill, doing what movie stars who have nothing left to prove do.
That is, whatever she wanted. She stayed out of view, voicing a couple of animated movies and popping up in the occasional film, some high profile—like the ensemble of Ocean’s Twelve—some not—like Fireflies in the Garden—but the days of solo Pretty Woman-esque success were, by her own choosing, behind her. By and large her choices became a bit more eclectic as she relied less on the famous smile and more on flexing her acting muscles. Since 2004’s Closer her filmography has been splintered between crowd pleasers like Eat Pray Love, dramas like August: Osage County and misfires like Secret in Their Eyes.
This weekend she’s back working with the director who helped make her famous starring in Mother’s Day, her fourth collaboration with filmmaker Garry Marshall. The pair make a movie roughly every ten years, from 1990’s Pretty Woman to Runaway Bride in 1999 to 2010’s Valentine’s Day to this year’s entry, and their combo usually delivers big box office.
In between her the commercial films she makes with Marshall, Roberts makes a movie a year and while they haven’t always connected with audiences many are worth a look.
Duplicity is a romantic comedy about espionage. Imagine if Rock Hudson and Doris Day starred in Mission Impossible. Instead you have Roberts as an experienced CIA officer looking for a change and Clive Owen as a charming MI6 agent. Both left the world of international intrigue for the infinitely more profitable task of corporate security. Together they launch an elaborate plan of corporate dirty tricks to steal a top-secret formula that will revolutionize the cosmetics industry. Roberts and Owen are witty and charming and Duplicity, with its entertaining performances and stylish look, is a bit of fun despite its convoluted story.
August: Osage County, an all-star remounting of Tracey Letts’s hit Broadway play, gives Roberts her juiciest role in years. As Barbara she’s a bit of an enigma. She’s a jumble of mixed, complicated emotions, capable of both great kindness and compassion but able only to express herself through tough love. When she explodes she lets loose a lifetime of rage stemming from her mother’s (played by Meryl Streep) mistreatment. When they go head-to-head it is the clash of the titans and an unforgettable scene.
Finally, there’s Larry Crowne, a boomer comedy aimed at audiences with memories long enough to remember when gas only cost 54 cents a litre, none of your neighbours had foreclosure signs on their front lawns and Tom Hanks and Roberts ruled the box office. It’s an uplifting comedy about middle age, brave enough to tackle modern problems like downsizing and foreclosure, but non-challenging enough to weave all the bad stuff into a pseudo romantic comedy. Hanks and Roberts cut through the material like hot knives through butter and Julia treats audiences to one of her trademarked laughing scenes.
Does Garry Marshall work for Hallmark or does he just love holidays? In the last few years he has turned his lens toward “Valentine’s Day” and “New Year’s Eve,” movies that bundle stars of dubious box office power in big, glittery packages to celebrate the holidays with all the joy and emotional resonance of a Budweiser Clydesdale commercial.
This weekend he casts his maudlin eye toward “Mother’s Day,” a look at mother’s and daughters featuring a Holiday Parade Womb Float.
Marshall continues with the scattershot story telling of his other holiday movies, presenting the story montage style. It’s as though he’s surfing the net, jumping from site to site, looking for something interesting to rest on. Three stories randomly dovetail together with contemporary motherhood as the glue that binds them.
Sandy (Jennifer Aniston) is a divorced mother of two whose kids like her ex’s much younger wife (Shay Mitchell). Sandy’s gym is run by widower Bradley (Jason Sudeikis), a guy with kids of his own who dreads Mother’s Day. Then there’s Kristin (Britt Robertson), a young woman searching for biological mom, Home Shopping Network star Miranda (Julia Roberts). The final flower in the Mother’s Day bouquet is Jesse (Kate Hudson), an overstressed mom who, along with her doctor husband Russell (Aasif Mandvi), is trying to deal with an unexpected visit from her squabbling, judgemental parents (Margo Martindale and Robert Pine).
There’s more—it’s a Gary Marshall All-Star-Holiday-Extravaganza so there’s always more—like Jesse’s gay sister Gabi (Sarah Chalke), Timothy Olyphant as Sandy’s former flame and a Jennifer Garner cameo—which I suppose is appropriate because the holidays are supposed to bring everyone together are they not?
“Mother’s Day” is filled to over flowing with faux heart warming moments, like a Lifetime movie on steroids. It hits all the emotional hot buttons—a dead wife who also happens to be a veteran, abandonment, first love, an awkward dad, kids growing up too fast—and tops off the whole thing with two, count ‘em two, dewy-eyed American sweethearts, Roberts and Aniston. To avoid troubling the audience with actual human emotions Marshall runs the whole thing through The Sitcomizer™ to ensure maximum blandness and erase the possibility that viewers will see something they haven’t already witnessed a hundred times before.
None of that would matter much if the movie was funny but real laughs are scarcer than last minute Mother’s Day brunch reservations. A likeable cast is wasted on a movie that panders to greeting card sentiment and slapstick.
The best part of “Mother’s Day” is that it puts Marshall one closer to running out of holidays to cinematically celebrate. What’s next? Hug Your Cat Day starring Courteney Cox and Luke Perry?
Got a great New Years gift from the folks at “Canada AM” today.
For as long as I can remember Canada AM has been the soundtrack to my morning. When I was a kid my parents relied on Carole Taylor, Percy Saltzman, Helen Hutchinson and Norm Perry to start their mornings. I grew up watching and listening to those people. In our 1970s two channel universe they linked us in Nova Scotia to the rest of Canada and the world.
Every Friday for the last eleven years I have chatted with either Beverly Thomson, Marci Ien, Jeff Hutcheson or Seamus O’Regan (before he left to become King of Newfoundland) about movies. They always make me feel at home, welcoming me into the Canada AM family.
Today, instead of sitting at my usual seat at the coffee bar, I was invited to sit at the desk. The iconic desk. It’s like being asked to bang Judge Judy’s gavel or dribble Meadowlark Lemon’s basketball. For the last half hour of the show (from 8:30 to 9) I was thrilled to sit alongside Marci and Anwar Knight on the final show of 2015. I talked, listened, laughed and even ate some champagne jello. It was a great way to spend the morning and I’m happy and honoured they entrusted me with use of the middle chair today. Hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.
Watch the whole thing HERE! (My bit begins at the 8:30 mark.)
From ‘Bridget Jones’ Diary’ to ‘Sleepless in Seattle,’ Richard Crouse reveals his list of movies best suited to ring in the New Year.
Watch the whole thing HERE!
“New Year’s Eve” isn’t so much a movie as it is a cavalcade of familiar names in situations geared to make you understand why everybody hates December 31st.
This mishmash of easy sentiment, romance, illness, musical numbers, product placement—Disaronno anyone?—tradition and a version of “I Can’t Turn You Loose” that makes the kids from Glee sound like Otis Redding, flip flops from story to story so often it’s like a five-year-old grabbed the remote and is wildly channel surfing.
There’s Robert De Niro as a terminally ill man; Halle Berry as his kindly nurse. Then there’s Michelle Pfeiffer as a dowdy “executive secretary who decides to tackle her unfulfilled resolutions,” and Zac Efron as the courier who makes her reams come true. Hillary Swank is the acrophobic producer of the Times Square New Year’s Eve show, Katherine Heigl and Jon Bon Jovi are a caterer and a rock star with a romantic history, Ashton Kutcher as a curmudgeonly cartoonist who gets trapped in an elevator with back-up singer Lea Michelle and even Ryan Seacrest pops up playing—who else?—himself.
Have I left anyone out? Probably, there are more stars here than in the heavens, but rest assured, by the end of the movie stories have woven together and no hearts are broken.
Like its predecessor “Valentine’s Day'” “New Year’s Eve” takes a bunch of stars with little or no box office cache on their own—Zac Efron, Jessica Biel—and packages them into one large, over-stuffed package that somehow, in terms of star power, is bigger than the sum of its parts. To quote the movie, “there’s more celebrities here than rehab.”
Too bad they are wasted in a movie that is little more than a collection of clichés salvaged from every romantic comedy, Hallmark holiday special and sitcom you’ve ever seen. From its generic opening song played over generic shots of New York City, every moment of “New Year’s Eve” inspires déjà vu, the feeling of been there and done that.
There are Walmart commercials with more real emotion than director Gary Marshall manages to bring to this manipulative mess. His idea of romance is Josh Duhamel doing the rom com run through the streets of New York as the ball drops in Times Square. His idea of humor is old people saying inappropriate things and by the time Mayor Bloomberg kicks off the New Year’s Eve countdown with the words, “Let’s drop the ball,” its already abundantly clear that Marshall already dropped the ball with this movie.
