I appear on “CTV News at 6” with anchor Andria Case to talk about the two dinosaur movcies in theatres this weekend, “The End of Oak Street” and “PAW Patrol 3: The Dino Movie.”
Watch the whole thing HERE! (Starts at 37:50)
I join CTV Atlantic’s Stephanie Tsicos to talk about the biopic “Tony,” the dino drama “The End of Oak Street,” the kid’s flick “PAW Patrol: The Dino Movie” and the stoner comedy “The Wrong Girls.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
I join “CTV News Toronto at Five” with anchor Zuraidah Alman to talk about the biopic “Tony,” the dino drama “The End of Oak Street,” the kid’s flick “PAW Patrol: The Dino Movie” and the stoner comedy “The Wrong Girls.”
Watch the whole thing HERE! (Starts at 15:06)
Listen to the whole thing HERE!
SYNOPSIS: In “Paw Patrol: The Dino Movie,” a new animated film for kids spun off from the popular TV series about a heroic puppy search-and-rescue team, the canine heroes discover an island populated by dinosaurs. “No dino’s too big, no pup’s too small!”
CAST: Carter Young, Mckenna Grace, Terry Crews, Jennifer Hudson, Jameela Jamil, Paris Hilton, Snoop Dogg, Mckenna Grace, Ron Pardo, Lucien Duncan-Reid, and Nylan Parthipan, Bill Nye, Henry Bolan. Directed by Cal Brunker.
REVIEW: After a daring adventure to rescue a cat named Mr. Fluffy Butt from a burning yacht, the Paw Patrol finds themselves shipwrecked on what they think is a deserted island. When the clumsy Dalmatian Marshall (voice of Carter Young) tumbles down a hill, he soon finds himself face-to-face with one of the island’s many inhabitants, a dinosaur named Timmy the T-Rex.
But this isn’t Jurassic Park.
These dinosaurs are friendly, at least that’s what Rex (Hayden Chamberlain), a friendly paraplegic Bernese Mountain Dog who has been stranded on the island after falling overboard years before, says. “Dino Island is the greatest discovery in the history of the world.”
Meanwhile, the Paw Patrol’s arch-nemesis Mayor Humdinger (Ron Pardo), and his coterie of naught6y cats, are released from jail. “No more cheating,” he says. “No more lying! No more get rich quick schemes!” But, when he sees a news report on Dino Island, and notices a large cache of diamonds in the background, his path on the straight and narrow takes a U-turn and he heads to the island to face his old canine foes and steal as many diamonds as he can.
“Paw Patrol: Dino Island” does not cater to adult sensibilities by wedging in jokes or double entendres for the older folks à la “Shrek” or “King Fu Panda.” Instead, it’s a gently paced action adventure aimed directly at kids. So, no clever pop culture references just kid-friendly action that, as the third movie in the franchise, is bigger than anything they’ve attempted in the past.
The richness of Pixar and the playfulness of Illumination and their millions of Minions is missing in “Paw Patrol: The Dino Movie.” The direction, by Cal Brunker, who co-wrote the screenplay with Bob Barlen, is workmanlike, keeping their core audience, age 3 to about 8, top of mind. The result is a cute but bland movie stuffed with good messages about teamwork, helping others and perseverance, and some high-flying action but little in the way of memorable sequences.
By Richard Crouse – In Focus Metro Canada
For many people, especially those who troll around in the more unsavoury corners of the Internet, the first exposure to celebs like Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian came from that most modern form of celebrity introduction: the sex tape.
Paris and Kim’s videoed sexcapades weren’t the first tapes to become public — in 1988 Rob Lowe was embarrassed when VHS images of him and two women popped up on the news — and they weren’t the last.
This week in Sex Tape, Jason Segel and Cameron Diaz are Jay and Annie, a married couple who try to spice things up in the bedroom by videotaping themselves. All goes well until Jay forgets to erase the tape and mistakenly stores it on the Internet. “Our sex tape has been synced to several devices,” he says, “all of which are in the possession of friends!”
Given how many actors have appeared in sex tapes it’s not surprising that several movies have used the raunchy videos as a plot point.
In Brüno, the titular Austrian fashion reporter (Sacha Baron Cohen) tries to make a name for himself in America by making a sex tape with another famous American, U.S. Congressman Ron Paul. Trouble was, Paul wasn’t in on the joke. “I was expecting an interview on Austrian economics,” said Paul. “But, by the time he started pulling his pants down, I was like ‘What is going on here?’ I ran out of the room. This interview has ended.”
The 2006 comedy Drop Box has production values not unlike that of an actual sex tape but despite its low budget it offers up the funny and often brutal story about Mindy (Rachel Sehl), a big-time bubblegum pop star (think Britney or Miley), who accidentally returns her homemade sex tape to her local video store instead of Glitter, the movie she rented. Realizing her mistake, she tries to re-rent the tape.
Clocking in at just 80 minutes, it’s a character study about a spoiled pop princess who butts heads with an unmovable force in the form of the uncooperative and inquisitive clerk (David Cormican).
Finally, Auto Focus exposes sex tapes’ dark side. Hogan’s Heroes star Bob Crane’s (Greg Kinnear) all-American public persona hid a secret obsession. “I’m a normal, red-blooded American man,” he says. “I like to look at naked women.” According to the film, he liked making sex tapes with women, usually without their knowledge. The movie speculates his 1978 murder may have been related to this unlawful pastime.
Some movies become cult items after audiences have had time to consider their merits, or lack thereof. Sometimes it takes years. The Phantom of the Paradise, for example, dive bombed at the box office in its original release, but found a rabid following a decade later and now there’s even a yearly convention dedicated to the film and its outlandish characters. Other movies are born for a cult audience. El Topo and Eraserhead never found mainstream success, but both films were instant hits on the underground cult circuit.
I suspect Repo! The Genetic Opera falls into the latter category.
Despite the presence of tabloid favorite Paris Hilton it’s unlikely that a musical about a mad business man who sends a hired killer to repossess human organs is ever going to beat High School Musical at the box office.
Set in the near future Repo! The Genetic Opera starts with a world plagued by an epidemic of organ failure, and I don’t mean Wurlizter. Hearts stop beating, spleens turn to mush. To the rescue is GeneCo, a biotech company specializing in synthetic organs. Like any business though, if you don’t pay up you might have an unpleasant, and in this case, deadly, encounter with the Repo Man. Running parallel to the organ replacement payment plan plot is a second story thread involving a young girl (Spy Kids’ Alexa Vega) who is searching for a cure for her rare blood disease. When she becomes involved with GeneCo’s evil owner (Paul Sorvino) and his twisted kids (Paris Hilton, Skinny Puppy singer Ogre and Bill Moseley) she learns some terrible secrets about her family and illness. The two storylines collide head-on in the film’s bloody climax—The Genetic Opera.
Repo! The Genetic Opera looks like a music video with feature film aspirations. Director Darren Lynn Bousman, best known as the helmer for Saws 2 through 4, has spared no expense in the dry ice department, flooding many scenes with enough atmospheric smoke to rival any Platinum Blonde music video. And while he creates a convincingly dystopian atmosphere on screen the look of the film too often resembles an Iron Maiden music promo. It would be interesting to see what a visionary director like Tim Burton could have done with the same material.
Bousman isn’t aided by a leaden musical score which too often sounds like the result of an unholy ménage à trois between Ywengie Malmsteen, Marilyn Manson and Kurt Weill. Actually written by Darren Smith and Terrance Zdunich there are no catchy tunes and only the occasional interesting line. This is the rare musical that might have been a much better movie without the songs.
Operas are supposed to be about big ideas and passion and Repo succeeds on both counts. The story raises interesting parallels to America’s health care crisis and there are some fun over-the-top performances from Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Anthony Stewart Head (his human hand puppet scene is a highlight), a spectacularly mascara-ed Sarah Brightman and Paul Goodfellas Sorvino but they are let down by a grating score that will leave no one humming as the credits roll. It’s not that I crave the ear-soothing, non-interruptive sounds of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musicals, but a little less atonal racket and a bit more actual score would have been nice.
The movie almost redeems itself with a wild, gory finale that literally gets the blood pumping but by that time I was lost, pining for the more tuneful days of Rocky Horror and The Phantom of the Paradise.
We’ve all heard those disclaimers at the end of pharmaceutical commercials.
“May be-harmful-to-humans-if-swallowed-the-most-common-side-effects-are-temporary-eyelid-droop-nausea-decreased-sweating-avoid-contact-with-skin.”
Usually they sound like one long breathless sentence that seems scarier than the disease the drugs are meant to prevent.
A new film, Love and Other Drugs, starring Jake Gylennhaal and Anne Hathaway as a pharmaceutical salesman and the girl he loves respectively, however, forgoes the disclaimer. In fact, in what almost seems like a 90-minute ad for Viagra, it appears that the drug’s—Vitamin V, Jake calls it—only side effect is that it works too well.
It is the rare movie that uses a real brand name drug as a plot device. Even though the odd movie like Prozac Nation dares to name names, often filmmakers use fictitious drugs to advance their stories (and avoid lawsuits from notoriously litigious Big Pharma), but even in fantasy, side effects abound.
Brain Candy, the 1996 Kids in the Hall comedy, created a cure for depression called GLeeMONEX that “makes you feel like it’s 72°F in your head all the time.” Unfortunately the pill’s patients also turn into comatose zombies.
David Cronenberg devised Ephemerol, a tranquilizer used as a morning sickness remedy for his film Scanners. Side effects? Telekinetic and telepathic abilities. Later, in Naked Lunch, Cronenberg featured the more recreational drug Bug Powder, a yellow dust formally used by exterminators, informally by people looking to find a “literary high.”
In Repo! The Genetic Opera, Paris Hilton’s character Amber Sweet was addicted to a powerful blue, glowing opiate extracted from dead bodies called Zydrate. I’ll do wild things to “your soul for one more hit of that glow,” she sings. An alternative cinematic painkiller is Novril, the pills that kept James Caan sedated in Misery.
Filmmakers don’t just fictionalize pharmaceuticals, however. Plenty of recreational drugs get the Hollywood treatment. Remember Space Coke from Cheech and Chong’s Next Movie? One snort was enough to send both Cheech and Chong literally into outer space.
A Clockwork Orange was chock-a-block with fake drugs; everything from Drencrom to the synthetic mescaline Synthemesc to Vellocet, which produced ultra-violent tendencies and sudden outbursts of Singing in the Rain.
Perhaps the strangest recreational drug from the movies is Alien Nation’s Jabroka. Aliens find it highly addictive and grow to monstrous proportions when they take it, but to humans it tastes like dish soap and has no effect.
