I join “CTV News Toronto at Five” with anchor Zuraigah Alman to talk about the playful “Toy Story 5,” the grim historical drama “The Death of Robin Hood” and the supernatural horrors of “Leviticus.”
Watch the whole thing HERE! (Starts at 14:42)
I join CTV Atlantic’s Bruce Frisco to talk about the playful “Toy Story 5,” the grim historical drama “The Death of Robin Hood” and the supernatural horrors of “Leviticus.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
I join “CP24 Breakfast” hosts Nick Dixon and Jennifer Hsiung to talk about the playful “Toy Story 5” and the grim historical drama “The Death of Robin Hood.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
Fast reviews for busy people! Watch as I review three movies in less time than it takes to brush your teeth. Have a look as I race against the clock to tell you about the playful “Toy Story 5,” the grim historical drama “The Death of Robin Hood” and the supernatural horrors of “Leviticus.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
SYNOPSIS: In “The Death of Robin Hood,” a new historical drama now playing in theatres, Hugh Jackman stars as the legendary thief as he reckons with his past and searches for a chance at redemption. “People speak of Robin Hood,” he says. “Tell his stories. They’re all lies. He was not a hero. He were a murderous brigand.”
CAST: Hugh Jackman, Jodie Comer, Bill Skarsgård, Murray Bartlett, Noah Jupe. Written and directed by Michael Sarnoski.
REVIEW: Taking its story from the 17th-century ballad “Robin Hood’s Death,” “The Death of Robin Hood” focusses on the murderous, not merry, legacy of the storied thief and killer. This retelling of the story has more to do with Hugh Jackman’s “Logan” than the traditional take. “He was not a hero. He robbed and killed for the joy of it.”
Grim and uncompromising, the movie begins with an aged Robin Hood (Jackman), outlaw archer and equal opportunity killer contemplating his life and the deaths of his victims. He’s murdered so many men, women and children he has lost count, and now finds himself haunted by generations of those who fell at the end of his arrows and blades.
That doesn’t mean he’s going to stop the mayhem, but he’s had a reckoning and now longer finds the joy in taking lives.
Weary, he’s prepared for death when he is grievously wounded in battle. But instead of letting his die, sidekick Little John (Bill Skarsgård) transports him to a remote island and the medical attention of The Prioress (Jodie Comer).
As she nurses him back to health Robin is torn between salvation and the deadly instincts that brought him to The Prioress’s care.
A brutal act of violence in its opening moments immediately differentiates “The Death of Robin Hood” from the romanticized version of the steal-from-the-rich-to-give-to-the-poor character from medieval poems, folk songs and recent movies and television.
Gone is the dashing Douglas Fairbanks style hero, replaced by Jackman’s deeply flawed rogue, a heartless killer who says things like, “I’ll slit your throat and never think of you again.”
Cursed by a gift for violence, he now contemplates if salvation is even available to a man like him.
Director Michael Sarnoski sets the scene for Hood’s reckoning with a series of startling images of brutality. Raw, mano-a-mano-rip-your-foe’s-jaw-off-with-your-bare-hands violence characterizes the film’s first half. It’s unpleasant, raw savagery; all cracking bones, agonized screams and ripping flesh. To paraphrase Marsellus Wallace, Hood and Little John get “medieval on their enemies’ asses.” Shot in low light, these scenes work because of what you don’t see as much as what you do. They are primal, unadorned and brutally effective in showcasing Hood’s special set of skills.
The cloud of unremitting grimness lifts in the film’s second half as Hood becomes introspective, but even then, this film is no barrel of laughs. It is a serious, some might say dire, look at a half-hearted search for redemption.
Jackman does interesting work as the conflicted Hood, but the script’s flowery language doesn’t do him any favors. He’s looking inward, but it feels like there is a barrier between the character and the audience. We never really feel his pain, other than to witness the winces during the blood lettings The Prioress administers to him throughout.
For all its sturm and drang it’s not the introspection that lingers after “The Death of Robin Hood,” it’s the violence, which blunts the potency of the redemption arc, and any ideas of tenderness and morality that may have been on writer/director Sarnoski’s mind.
“Dreamin’ Wild,” a new film based on real-life musicians Donnie and Joe Emerson, is a movie that examines failure and success, and the toll each takes on the recipients.
Growing up on a 1,600-acre farm in Fruitland, Washington, population 751, Donnie and Joe (played as teens by Noah Jupe and Jack Dylan Grazer) dreamt of becoming professional musicians. At age 15 and 17, respectively, they took a tentative step toward their goal, recording an album of Donnie’s songs in a makeshift studio on the back 40. Soulful, introspective and melodic, their soft-rock album “Dreamin’ Wild” was released to no fanfare and even less acclaim.
Cut to thirty years later. Donnie (now played by Casey Affleck) and his wife Nancy (Zooey Deschanel) make ends meet playing weddings while Joe (Walton Goggins) has given up the drums in favor of building houses. The flames of musical success are rekindled, however, when a copy of the album is rescued from a delete bin and falls into the hands of an indie label executive (Chris Messina) who believes in the music and wants to reissue the album.
The belated success—“To twist a Brian Wilson phrase,” raves online music publication Pitchfork, “[the album] is a godlike symphony to teenhood.”—uncorks a deep wellspring of emotion in Donnie. “I feel like this dream is coming true but the wrong people are in it,” he says.
Filled with regret at a musical life left unfulfilled, at the life-changing amount of money his father lost investing in his music and the toll his decisions made on Joe, he bubbles over with guilt and shame. “Seems like a lot of things were easier when I was a teenager,” he says.
“Dreamin’ Wild” is a slow burn of a movie, like a song that meanders through verse after verse after verse before getting to the chorus. The leisurely approach allows for Affleck’s trademarked sorrowful inner monologue to shine, to do the heavy lifting. His bittersweet performance pits Donnie’s ambitions against his anxieties, a combustible combo that results to one of the film’s highlights, a heartfelt reckoning between Donnie and his father (Beau Bridges). The scene is a quietly eloquent testament, beautifully performed, to music’s ability to bridge generational gaps and it is a highlight in a film that values understated moments.
Pohlad tells the story on a broken timeline, toggling back and forth between Donnie and Joe’s teen years and present day, creating a complete picture of Donnie’s artistic birth and the subsequent turmoil his commitment to music and his dashed dreams has caused over the years.
Anchored by Affleck’s performance, “Dreamin’ Wild’s” portrait of a tortured artist is like the music Donnie performs in the film; thoughtful, gentle and emotionally authentic.
“No Sudden Move,” a new Steven Soderbergh film starring Don Cheadle and Benicio del Toro and now playing on Crave, is a film noir that gets lost in its knotty plot, but is kept on track by a top-notch cast.
Set in 1954 Detroit, the action begins with Jones, a shady character played by Brendan Fraser, recruiting three low level criminals, Curt (Cheadle), Ronald (del Toro) and Charley (Kieran Culkin), for a job that pays too much to be as easy as he says it will be. They all agree, just so long as someone named Frank (Ray Liotta) won’t be involved.
Their job is to invade General Motors accountant Matt Wertz’s (David Harbour) home, keep his family quiet for an hour while he retrieves a document from his boss’s safe.
Sounds simple, but this is Detroit in 1954. Industrial espionage between the Big Three car companies is a dangerous game, and, of course, Frank is involved. “Everybody has a problem with Frank these days.”
As things spin out of control, greed kicks in and the fast cash the small-time criminals hoped to make causes big time problems.
Soderbergh immerses his characters and the viewer in a world that where secrets propel the action. No one is who they seem and motives are even murkier. It makes for a twisty-turny story that is part crime story, part social history of the spark that ignited the slow decline of Detroit.
To add to the disorientation, Soderbergh shoots the action through a fish eye lens that blurs the edges of the screen, mimicking the script’s moral fog.
“No Sudden Move” almost bites off more than it can chew. It’s occasionally clunky, with too many double-crosses and characters vying for screen time, but the star-studded cast cuts through the script’s noise with ease. The result is a caper that flier by, buoyed by surprises (including a big-name uncredited cameo), snappy dialogue and a great debt to Elmore Leonard.
Written as an exercise while in rehab, Shia LeBeouf’s script for “Honey Boy” is a biographical piece about growing up as a child actor with an addicted former rodeo clown and Vietnam Vet father who didn’t always have his son’s best interest in mind. By turns touching and bleak, tender and therapeutic, the film is a testament to art as a tonic to heal wounds.
LeBeouf’s alter ego is Otis, played as a twelve-year-old by Noah Jupe, a twenty-two year-old Hollywood stunt man by Lucas Hedges. We first meet him as a young adult on his way to court-ordered rehab after an altercation. There he begins putting pen to paper as a way to come to grips with an unconventional young life.
Cutting between present day and the events of a decade before, “Honey Boy” documents twelve-year-old Otis’s relationship with his unpredictable father James (LaBeouf). James is a frustrated and frustrating burn-out who relies on his son financially. He is the very embodiment of a man “doing the best he can” with his son, but it’s not nearly enough. Otis, an innocent, is forced to grow up fast, to define his love-hate relationship with James. He imagines telling his old man, “I’ve always been waiting for you to act like a real dad,” but, instead he says, “You work for me. I’m your boss.”
“Honey Boy” is about a terrible relationship but it isn’t an angry movie. LeBeouf’s script and the direction of Alma Har’el, capture a heartbreaking melancholy of a father who never recovered from having his dreams shattered. Otis may say “The only thing my father gave me of any value was pain,” but there is empathy in the words and in LeBeouf’s portrayal of James. He’s abusive, drunk, prone to violence, but he’s broken and knows no other path. It’s not an excuse, simply an observation. “Stop bringing up the past,” James tells Otis. “I can’t get out from under it.”
The film’s coda, an earnest reckoning between father and son, sheds light on the aftermath of their abusive relationship. It’s here “Honey Boy” shows its greatest compassion for a damaged person. Raw and powerful, it’s father and son coming to an understanding after a lifetime of turmoil. When James says, “As you get older you get to learn about life. You get to know where you come from,” it feels like LeBeouf’s acceptance of their relationship. The choice of closing credit song, Bob Dylan’s “All I Really Want to Do” reinforces the feeling. “All I really want to do,” Dylan rasps, “Is, baby, be friends with you.”
The cars of the early 1960s were sexy beasts. Sleek and metallic on the outside, perfumed with the sweet smell of fine Corinthian leather on the inside, they tore along the highways and byways like, to paraphrase Bruce Springsteen, like big old dinosaurs. The action in “Ford v Ferrari,” however, begins in 1963 with the least sexy things ever, a failed corporate takeover.
Suffering a slump in sales the Ford Motor Company tries unsuccessfully to take over the infinitely more seductive Ferrari. The Italian car company, on a winning streak with at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, replies in no uncertain terms. “Ford makes ugly little cars in ugly factories,” says Enzo Ferrari (Remo Girone).
That’s a no.
Insulted, Henry Ford II (Tracy Letts) flip-flops an old maxim. If he can’t join ‘em, he can beat ‘em. “This isn’t the first time Ford Motors’ gone to war,” he says. “We know how to do more than push papers. When early attempts to create a race car to take the wind out of Ferrari’s sails fails Ford marketing executive Lee Iacocca (Jon Bernthal) brings in car designer Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon) to make a Ford that will rule at La Mans. “My name is Carroll Shelby and performance is my business.” A former racer—he won the Le Mans in 1959 with partner Roy Salvadori—heart problems forced him off the track.
Shelby asks hot-headed British racer Ken Miles (Christian Bale) to help. “How long did you tell them that you needed?” he asks. “Two, three hundred years?” Together they work to make a sports car that will appeal to young consumers and “go like hell.”
Some basic knowledge of how cars work may enhance your enjoyment of “Ford v Ferrari” but the resonate part of the story has nothing to do with horsepower or Gurney flaps. At its fuel Injected heart the James Mangold-directed movie is a Davey and Goliath story about friendship and burning rubber.
The bromance angle comes in the bond between Shelby and Miles. The two men are like brothers who fight and love in almost equal measure. Damon and Bale share an easy camaraderie, fuelled by their character’s love of the art of racing and the desire to stick it to the big guys, the Ford Motor Company. Shelby is the diplomat, Miles the one more likely to punch a Ford executive, but both are underdogs who take pleasure in making the suits squirm.
“Ford v Ferrari” is formulaic in laying out the story. It’s a longshot tale with revving engines and many predictable twists and turns but Mangold injects some real excitement in the extended racing scenes.
