Richard and “Canada AM” host Beverly Thomson kick around the weekend’s big releases. They find out if “Keanu,” the kitten caper movie from Key & Peele is worth a look, if “Mother’s Day” is more than a Hallmark card come to the screen and if “Ratchet & Clank’s” good messages for kids make it a good movie.
Watch the whole thing HERE!
“Ratchet and Clank,” a new animated movie based on a popular video game series, has good messages for kids but is that enough to make it a good movie?
The Chairman (voice of Paul Giamatti) of Drek Industries has a plan. Using the deplanetizer, a terrible war machine invented by Doctor Nefarious (Armin Shimerman), he destroys planets in the Solana Galaxy with the idea of cobbling together one perfect world from the remains.
On the other side of the quickly disappearing galaxy Ratchet (James Arnold Taylor) is a rambunctious mechanic with dreams of one day becoming a Galactic Ranger like his hero Captain Qwark (Jim Ward). Trouble is, he’s a Lombax—ie: a “cat thingy”—and far too small. “Dream smaller,” says his grandfather (John Goodman). “There’s less disappointment that way.”
Rejected by the Rangers as “a weak, muscle less mass of weakness,” Ratchets gets a second chance to do his duty when a helper bot named Clank (David Kaye doing a C3PO impression) crash lands on his planet. Together they are a formidable team who aid the Rangers in the battle against Drek but is being a hero all Ratchet thought it would be?
“Ratchet and Clank” is sci-fi for kids too young for Kylo Ren’s nasty father issues. Starring an underdog character whose disappointment will turn into triumph, its colourful and constantly-in-motion-design will entertain young eyes but is unlikely to engage their brains.
There are lessons about everything young folks need to be successful and happy—not allowing a swelled head to get in the way of doing the job, the virtues of teamwork, friendship and perseverance, being true to who you are, treating people (or aliens) with respect, thinking before you act and even, for Kardashian wannabees in the audience, a warning against the seduction of fame. That’s enough life lessons here to make self-help guru Dale Carnegie’s head spin but that’s the kind of movie this is. There is always something happening, a joke, a moral or more complicated world building. It’s busy, as if the filmmakers didn’t trust the characters to maintain the interest of young minds. Didn’t like that storyline? Don’t worry there’ll be another one shortly.
“Ratchet and Clank,” with its so-so animation and excitable nature is less a move than a PlayStation 2 game blown up for the big screen.
Richard’s CP24 reviews for “Straight Outta Compton,” “The Man from UNCLE,” and “I Am Chris Farley” with Nneka Elliot.
Watch the whole thing HERE!
Richard’s “Canada AM” reviews for “Straight Outta Compton,” “The Man from UNCLE,” and “I Am Chris Farley.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
By Richard Crouse – Metro In Focus
“It’s impossible to talk about N.W.A without talking about South Central LA in the late 1980s.”
Straight Outta Compton is the legendary album by gangsta rap group N.W.A, released Aug. 8, 1988. It’s a sonic blast that plays, as Rolling Stone said, like a “bombastic, cacophonous car ride through Los Angeles’ burnt-out and ignored hoods.” It became the first platinum album to reach that status with no airplay or major tours and now it’s also the title of a biopic that documents the group’s beginnings and turbulent history.
Writing for theverge.com, Lizzie Plaugic observed, “It’s impossible to talk about N.W.A without talking about South Central LA in the late 1980s.” Infected by crack and gang violence, the area was so rough the LAPD created a special unit known as CRASH — Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums — and it was these surroundings that helped birth the ferocious beats of Straight Outta Compton and a genre known as gangsta rap.
Music is unavoidably influenced by the surroundings of those who make it and music biopics have always been quick to use location as a shorthand to help the audience understand how and why musicians produced the music they did.
Just as South Central sets the scene for Straight Outta Compton, Manchester’s drug-fuelled “Madchester” club scene of the late 1980s and early ’90s informs 24 Hour Party People and the mean streets of Brooklyn set the stage for the meteoric rise of rapper Notorious B.I.G. in the 2009 film Notorious.
There is no shortage of John Lennon or his birthplace on celluloid. There are five official Beatles movies, documentaries like The U.S. vs. John Lennon, a 2006 movie that focuses on Lennon’s transformation from musician into antiwar activist, and even experimental short films like the John and Yoko shorts Two Virgins and Apotheosis.
Portrayed by everyone from Paul Rudd (in Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story) to Monty Python’s Eric Idle, rarely has any actor captured both Lennon’s rebelliousness and vulnerability as Aaron Taylor-Johnson does in Nowhere Boy, the story of the musician’s formative years.
Taylor-Johnson, recently seen in blockbusters like Avengers: Age of Ultron and Godzilla, is aided in his performance by a gritty portrait of Lennon’s lower-working-class neighbourhood in Liverpool, England. You can almost smell the bangers and mash coming off the screen and the vivid Merseyside backdrop provides subtle clues about the man Lennon would become.
Set back when you could still drink a bottle of stolen booze in the shade of the Hollywood sign without being arrested for trespassing, The Runaways focuses on two glue-sniffing, glam-rock obsessed tough girls named Joan Jett (Kristen Stewart) and Cherie Currie (Dakota Fanning). Disaffected SoCal teens, they see an exit from their mundane suburban lives through rock ’n’ roll.
Unfortunately their ticket out comes in the form of impresario Kim Fowley, a record producer and self proclaimed “King Hysteria.” He cobbles together the band, trains them to be rock stars, convinced that they will “be bigger than the Beatles.” Before they can play Shea Stadium, however, the band breaks up — knee deep in ego, drug abuse and bad management. Set in and around the Sunset Strip’s late 1970s seedy underbelly, the movie perfectly captures the sun-dappled decadence that illuminated the time.
In the movies, like real life, it’s about Location! Location! Location!
“Straight Outta Compton,” the new biopic of original gangster rap band N.W.A. and their turbulent rise and fall, is at once a very specific look at the birth of a musical genre and a universal music industry story about how money, ego and bad management will break a band a part faster than you can say, “Boyz-N-The Hood.”
We first meet MC Ren (Aldis Hodge), Dr. Dre (Corey Hawkins), Eazy-E (Jason Mitchell), DJ Yella (Neil Brown, Jr.) and Ice Cube (O’Shea Jackson, Jr) as young men growing up in Compton, the most notorious neighbourhood of South Central Los Angeles. Dre and Cube are music obsessed teens, trying to avoid getting “locked up or laid down.” Dre is a genius DJ, a master of beats, while Cube is a journalist of sorts, writing rhymes that report on life in the hood. Their reality is near constant police harassment, casual violence and intimidation by gangs.
Eazy-E, a local drug dealer looking or a way out of the life, puts up the seed money to start a record label and soon he moves from banker to frontman and NWA is born. A couple local hits later they’re approached by Jerry Heller (Paul Giamatti in another role, following this year’s “Love and Mercy” that sees him exploiting a Californian musician) an old school manager with a plan to make them famous and himself rich. They become a sensation, birth gangsta rap and fall to pieces under the weight of their success. Heller, Eazy-E and the shards of NWA on one side, Dr. Dre and Suge Knight (R. Marcos Taylor) on another with Ice Cube completing the triangle. Bad blood and bad business deals blow apart their once tight relationships and it isn’t until they consider getting back to basics that old wounds begin to heal.
“Straight Outta Compton” plays like dozens of music bios that came before but despite featuring music industry clichés—sometimes the clichés of cheating managers, ego and excess are clichés because they’re true—it spends more time on the characters than the situation. It’s funnier and warmer than you might anticipate a movie about the ferocious and profane beginnings of gangster rap, a music born out of frustration and a need to be heard, but the emotional truth of the film is based in the relationship between the leads, particularly Dre, Eazy and Cube. A palpable sense of camaraderie is present throughout, and it grounds the film during its more excessive moments.
Mitchell’s Eazy-E has the widest emotional arc and he pulls it off, bring a steely vulnerability to the character that humanizes him and makes his (SPOILER ONLY IF YOU KNOW NOTHING ABOUT N.W.A.!!) early demise all the more devastating.
Jackson Jr., Ice Cube’s real life son, dispels any talk of nepotism, handing in a performance that captures the familiar mannerisms and essence of his father.
Also strong are Hawkins as the budding megaproducer Dre and Keith Stanfield as the young Snoop Dogg.
On the downside the movie doesn’t have much use for its female characters unless they are playing stern mothers, compliant groupies or supportive wives. We may have to wait for the Salt-N-Pepa biography for a look at the female side of hip hop.
At two-and-a-half hours “Straight Outta Compton” is a detailed look at the band that, although it takes liberties with the facts in favour of drama, grabs the rhythm of the time by the throat and doesn’t let go. Echoes of the Rodney King trial reverberate throughout the film giving the movie, in light of Black Lives Matter, a timely feel that showcases the prescient nature of Ice Cube’s rhymes.
Richard’s CP24 reviews for “San Andreas,” “Aloha” and “I’ll See You in My Dreams.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
Richard’s “Canada AM” reviews for “San Andreas,” “Aloha” and “I’ll See You in My Dreams.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
By Richard Crouse – Metro Canada
Carla Gugino was living in New York in September 2001. Every day she would look at the Twin Towers from her window, and then, one morning they were gone. The rush of emotions she felt on 9/11 stayed with her as she filmed her new movie, the earthquake disaster flick San Andreas.
“I thought about it a lot in the way Dwayne Johnson’s character and my character reconnect in this movie,” she says.
In the film she plays Johnson’s estranged wife who teams with him to rescue their daughter from a devastating earthquake that rips California in half.
“What I found so smart and well done is that they connect not in a cliché way or in a sentimental way; they reconnect because they may not be alive the next day. In those moments, which was very much the case with 9/11 and what happened that morning, you realize you want to go help people. You want to be with the people you love and you want to not sweat the small stuff. It contextualizes life in such a radical way.”
Warner Bros chose not to change the release date of San Andreas in light of the recent deadly earthquakes in Nepal. Instead they’ve used the film’s trailers and ads to raise awareness about relief efforts and have vowed to match donations made by their employees. “There were always going to be public service announcements after the trailer and the film,” Gugino adds, “but then they were specifically geared toward Nepal.”
“This is a movie that does not take Mother Nature or her tics lightly,” says Gugino, “and I think it’s about the triumph of the human spirit, which is what always amazes me. At 9/11 and seeing this terrible situation in Nepal the thing you are reminded of is the resilience of the human spirit.”
The actress, best known for her roles in Spy Kids and Sin City, lives in New York but spent twenty years living in Los Angeles on top of the shaky San Andreas fault line.
“I’ve been in a couple of big ones in LA and they are intense,” she says. “The first one I ran outside which is exactly what you are not supposed to do. That is a good thing about San Andreas, you actually learn some stuff too—the whole under a doorway, or under a desk ting. Or under Dwayne Johnson. That is one of the advantages of his size.”
