RICHARD’S WEEKEND MOVIE REVIEWS FROM CP24! FRIDAY MARCH 27, 2015.
Richard’s CP24 reviews for “Get Hard,” “Home” “Boychoir” and “October Gale.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
Posts Tagged ‘Patricia Clarkson’
RICHARD’S “CANADA AM” REVIEWS FOR MARCH 27 WITH BEVERLY THOMSON.
Richard’s “Canada AM” reviews for “Get Hard,” “Home” “Boychoir” and “October Gale.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
Metro Canada: Patricia Clarkson, So many men, so much talent
By Richard Crouse – Metro Canada
Patricia Clarkson’s new thriller, October Gale, sees her working with frequent collaborator Ruba Nadda and starring opposite Callum Keith Rennie, Tim Roth and Scott Speedman.
“Can you imagine I got to be in a film with those men?” she says. “I arrived on the set and said, ‘Oh my God Ruba I have died and gone to heaven.’ Not only are they beautiful men, physically, but if you threw all their handsomeness out the window, they’re gorgeous actors. First class, top of their game, singular actors.”
The New Orleans native, an Academy Award nominee for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in Pieces of April, plays a doctor mourning the loss of her husband. For solace she retreats to a remote cottage in Georgian Bay. Her time of quiet reflection and healing is disrupted, however, by the appearance of a mysterious and seriously injured young man, played by Speedman.
October Gale is the second collaboration between Clarkson and director Ruba Nadda.
“Ruba and I are very similar gals,” Clarkson says. “We like our hair and our lipstick and our high heels. I have four older sisters and Rubba is truly like the little sister I never had. We are like family. We have a second language now. It’s kismet. I think I’m just the luckiest gal to know her and to have her so deeply in my life; in my professional life, in my personal life. I know her family now. I know her sisters. I know her parents. She knows all my friends in New York City and Los Angeles. We’re just family and yet we are able to separate all of that when we enter the workplace. We’re both workhorses. We’re very high energy, we don’t take no for an answer, we’ll fight to the death. She’s Syrian-Palestinian and I’m Southern, so watch out.”
Their first film together, Cairo Time, was the Best Reviewed Romance on Rotten Tomatoes for 2010 and soon they will begin work on a series for HBO. Clarkson says her on-set relationship with Nadda is based on respect and the director’s unique vision.
“Ruba has the courage to make films that people want to make,” she says, “the kind of movies auteurs think they’re making but she actually has the courage to do it.”
October Gale, for instance, Clarkson says, doesn’t have “a traditional thriller pace. It’s Ruba Nada pace.”
OCTOBER GALE: 3 STARS. “Ruba Nadda’s thriller follows her heart.”
“October Gale,” a new film from “Cairo Time” director Ruba Nadda, is a hybrid of romance and thriller that cares about it’s characters more than it does about moving the audience to the edge of their collective seats.
Patricia Clarkson is Helen Matthews, a Toronto doctor grieving the loss of her husband (Callum Keith Rennie). For solace she retreats to a remote, picturesque cottage in Georgian Bay. Her time of quiet reflection and healing is disrupted, however, by the appearance of Will, a mysterious and seriously injured young man, played by Scott Speedman. She plays nurse, they talk and flirt and soon Helen finds herself drawn to the stranger. Trouble is, Tom (Tim Roth), the man who wounded Will to begin with, has every intention of dropping by to finish the job.
“October Gale” has all the elements of a thriller—people with mysterious pasts meet in a remote location on a dark and stormy night—but Nadda subverts the conventions of the genre by taking her time getting to the thrills. Instead she builds the tension carefully, walking through Helen’s grief in a beautifully played first act. Clarkson is at her best here, subtly and beautifully showing not only her loss but also her resiliency in the face of sorrow. Once we get to know Helen, William appears adding another layer to the story. By the time we get to the thriller aspect of “October Gale” Nadda makes sure we care for and are invested in the characters.
“October Gale” isn’t a typical thriller. It’s a thriller without many thrills, but lots of soul. Nadda does not slavishly try and ape Hitchcock or the other masters of the genre, but follows her heart instead.
TIFF 2014: Learning to Drive’s Ben Kingsley always a fan favourite at TIFF
By Richard Crouse – Metro Toronto
Outside the Elgin Theatre premier for his new film Learning to Drive, Sir Ben Kingsley caused quite a stir. He signed autographs, posed for pictures with fans, one of which gushed effusively after he walked away. “He’s my favorite,” she told your reporter excitedly.
When I tell Sir Ben about the enthusiastic fan he smiles broadly.
“If it means that she’s heard the story and it touched her, then I’m delighted,” he says. “The important thing for me is to tell the story. I’m sure I am a storyteller. I’m sure that is the right place for my DNA to be.
“Something happened to me and it stayed with me forever. I was playing Hamlet for the Royal Shakespeare Company and I was walking in open field just outside Stratford Upon Avon. A lovely young woman was on the opposite side of the field and seemed to be walking towards me, so I decided to tack to my right to avoid her feeling that I was intruding on her space. She tacked to her left. In other words, she mirrored me. Then I went the other way and she mirrored me. She was determined to meet me in the middle of this field. Then face-to-face, she said, ‘I saw Hamlet last night. How did you know about me?’ Something [I did] must have gone right in there [he points to his heart], straight through the sternum and I said, ‘I know.’ That’s the connection.
“It never left me. If it means that through storytelling something has been shifted, healed, touched in her, great. Good.”
In the TIFF film Learning to Drive he reunites with his Elegy co-star Patricia Clarkson. She plays Wendy, a divorcee who hires Darwan (Kingsley) to teach her how to drive so she can travel to upstate New York to visit her daughter. As she learns to navigate Manhattan’s mean streets, the pair form a bond, teaching one another about life and love.
“I think in a really beautifully fashioned play or screenplay you have a feeling that the gods look down and say, ‘I’m going to bring you two together,’” says Kingsley. “I love that idea in mythology that the gods look down and send somebody to somebody. It is only through very unfortunate, heartbreaking circumstances that Wendy finds herself in a taxi. Heartbroken. I am driving a heartbroken woman. And I loved in the way, as in all great stories, the little coincidences are the gods guiding and bringing people together for some purpose. Here it is not for a great romance, it is to heal.”
Darwan is the latest in a long list of characters, like Mohandas Gandhi, Itzhak Stern in Schindler’s List and Sexy Beasts’ Don Logan that have surprised Kingsley.
“I don’t know where they are,” Kingsley says about his characters, “if they’re inside me waiting to come out or whether they are outside of me. Are they hunting me or am I hunting them? I don’t know. I love to be surprised by a script and I was very pleased and delighted by the opportunity to play what Patricia Clarkson’s character coins as a ‘good man.’”
The versatile Ms. Clarkson RICHARD CROUSE FOR METRO CANADA September 10, 2009
In the TIFF entry Cairo Time, a magazine editor played by Patricia Clarkson finds herself in Gaza falling for a man who isn’t her husband.
It’s a romantic drama about self discovery and just the kind of role we’ve come accustomed to seeing Clarkson play — serious and complicated.
Her best known work has a weight to it that seems to come naturally to her. Perhaps it is her deep voice or the fact that she’s never really played the ingénue, but I always associate Clarkson with capitol “S” serious films. According to her, I’ve got it all wrong.
“I think most people see me as much darker, more serious and possessing a certain gravitas, when I’m really quite insane,” says the New Orleans born actress.
She chalks up her onscreen image to — what else? — acting. “I go where I need to go. If I need to look glamorous or spiffy or young, or battling cancer, or a drugged-out hippie type, it hopefully will be projected in my face. That’s the beauty of acting. It’s not about hair and makeup; it’s about being malleable.”
That pliability has paid off handsomely in many of her lesser known films.
In High Art, Clarkson plays Greta, a forgotten actress who once starred in Fassbinder films. She’s a drug addict so far gone she actually falls asleep during sex. It’s a colourful, theatrical performance, but Clarkson carefully avoids the clichés of playing a junkie.
On a happier note is Simply Irresistible, a screwball romantic comedy in the vein of 1930s musicals. In this charming film, Clarkson plays Lois, a wisecracking secretary.
“If you need anything call me,” she says to her boss, “although I don’t know how to do anything except buy clothes.” She’s a decidedly earthbound character in this fantasy about a chef whose guardian angel gives her a gift that turns her food into the ultimate aphrodisiac.
Darker than Simply Irresistible is the creepy horror film Wendigo. Promoted as a cross between The Shining and Deliverance, it plays with classic horror conventions — city folks in the country pitted against psycho rednecks and the supernatural — but does so in a unique and compelling way. As usual Clarkson shines as the NYC mother thrown into a situation she doesn’t understand.
These, and her other 40 plus film credits, prove that Patricia Clarkson is as versatile as she is malleable.
