RICHARD’S REVIEWS FOR JULY 25, 2014 W “CANADA AM” HOST MARCI IEN.
“Canada AM” film critic Richard Crouse gives 3 stars for ‘Lucy’, 2 stars for ‘And So It Goes’, and 2-and-a-half stars for ‘A Most Wanted Man’.
Watch the whole thing HERE!
Posts Tagged ‘Rachel McAdams’
A MOST WANTED MAN: 2 ½ STARS. “an intense performance from Hoffman.”
“A Most Wanted Man” is one of the trio of movies Philip Seymour Hoffman had in the can when he passed away last February. The spy thriller, based on a novel by John le Carré, is his final leading role and it is difficult to watch the film without a sense of dark foreboding.
One throwaway moment that has more resonance now takes place in a bar. Günther Bachmann (Hoffman) offers Annabel (Rachel McAdams) a cigarette.
“It’s OK,” she says. “I’ve given up.”
“Good luck with that,” he replies with the sardonic tone of someone who has tried and failed to let go of their vices. Blink and you’ll miss it, but taken in context his reaction is chilling, as is CIA agent Martha Sullivan’s (Robin Wright) line, “Even good men have a little bit of bad in them… and that little bit could kill you.”
Hindsight is twenty-twenty, of course, but these references to addiction and mortality, no matter how subtle, add pathos to an already poignant performance.
Hoffman plays Bachman, the head an anti-terrorism unit working in Hamburg, Germany. “Not many people know about it,” he says, “even less like it.” He works deep undercover with a small team, but this is no high flying spy style adventure. Instead, it’s a spy story about money transfers, private bankers (Willem Dafoe), a human-rights attorney (who Günther “a social worker for terrorists,” played by McAdams), a respected Muslim academic and philanthropist (Homayoun Ershadi), and Issa Karpov (Grigoriy Dobrygin) a half-Chechen, half-Russian refugee who might be worth $10 million. As he follows the money Bachman must untangle the web of intrigue in just 72 hours or the German police will upend his plans.
Looking like an unmade bed, Hoffman plays Günther as a hard drinking, chain smoking, heavy-breathing anti-James Bond. His one action scene involves walking across a bar ton punch someone in the face. The thrills here come from his methodical piecing together of the clues and his manipulation of the personalities involved. It’s a terrific performance in which you can feel the weight of the world in every decision he makes, every step he takes. It’s just a shame that the movie seems to value the minutiae over its characters.
Hoffman shines, but others aren’t given the opportunity. Wright has a handful of scenes but is primarily a plot point and not a rounded character. Dobrygin succeeds in looking mournful and Dafoe, while believable as a shady banker, isn’t given enough to do. Only McAdams as the idealistic but conflicted lawyer and the city of Hamburg—whose suitably seedy underbelly is as well developed a character as is on display here—keeps up with Hoffman.
“A Most Wanted Man” features a measured but intense performance from Hoffman, but the film itself isn’t as interesting as he is.
ABOUT TIME: 3 STARS. “Rachel McAdams gets a time travel romance right!”
The time travel in “About Time,” a new rom com starring Domhnall Gleeson and Rachel McAdams, is what Alfred Hitchcock would have called the McGuffin. It’s the thing that drives the movie’s plot but ultimately isn’t that important to the story.
When Tim Lake (Domhnall Gleeson) turned 21 his father (Bill Nighy) lets him in on a family secret—he comes from a long line of time travellers. “We can go back and kill Hitler,” or shag Helen of Troy,” explains dad, they can simply go back to the recent history and make minor changes.
With visions of inter-dimensional travel in his head he does what any twenty-one year might do. Use his unique ability to get a girlfriend. The object of his affections is Mary (Rachel McAdams), but to win her over he’ll have to use his special gift to hone his Casanova skills.
As they live their lives together, however, he comes to discover that not everything can be solved with a quick trip back in time.
“About Time” is the kind of movie critics will call sappy and sentimental. They’ll bash it because it wears its heart on its sleeve, which is exactly the reason I liked it.
After “The Time Traveller’s Wife” it’s time Rachel McAdams got a time travel romance right!
It’s a silly premise but for me the idea wasn’t about the time travel but the lessons Tim learns while jumping dimensions about life and happiness. It is sweetly romantic, but it plays better as a comedy about family than a rom com or sci fi farce mainly because of its unlikely and charming leading man.
If John Hughes had made British films he would have loved this guy. He does have a bad haircut, but I thought he was a charming, if unlikely, leading man. He has a way with a line and I felt there was a real arc to his character. He literally grows up and becomes a man on screen, which is something you don’t see in rom coms very often.
“About Time” is a bit labored at times, but McAdams is an engaging presence, Nighy is warm and odd and Richard E. Grant, who is only on screen for three minutes manages to steal the show with a beautifully timed slow burn.
Rachel McAdams’ strange history with time travel movies. Metro October 30, 2013
When British author H.G. Wells created the term “time machine” way back in 1895, he could never have imagined the lasting impact his ideas of fourth dimension travel would have on the career of Rachel McAdams.
His book, The Time Machine, has been filmed twice for the big screen, but the ideas of shifting ripples of time have also inspired three very different movies starring the London, Ont., born actress.
This weekend she co-stars with Domhnall Gleeson and Bill Nighy in About Time as the present day girlfriend of a 21-year-old who uses his ability to switch time zones to learn information to woo her.
“I know I have a little bit of time travel in my past but this is different,” McAdams says. “The element of time travel thrown in was unique and quirky and dealt with lightly.”
Previously the Mean Girls star appeared as Clare Abshire in The Time Traveler’s Wife, starring opposite Eric Bana playing a Chicago librarian with a genetic disorder known as Chrono-Displacement that causes him to involuntarily travel through time.
From the outset their relationship is a strange one. When they first meet she has known him since she was six years old, but because his syndrome flips him to random times in his life on an ever shifting timeline he is always meeting her for the first time. Confused? Not as confused as Clare, who tries to build a life with Henry even though his ailment keeps them apart.
Based on a best-selling novel, it’s a three-hankie story about love with no boundaries and how romance can transcend everything, even death.
In Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris it’s Owen Wilson who jumps through time — finding himself transported back to 1920s Paris and hanging with F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (Tom Hiddleston and Alison Pill), seeing Cole Porter sing at a party, drinking with Hemmingway — while McAdams stays put, bringing him back to reality, as his irritating present-day fiancée Inez.
But what about actual time travel? When she was asked by AOL if there was anything she would go back in time and change in real life, McAdams said, “I was a figure skater, so I would take back a lot of fashion choices on the ice. A lot of sequins. I would pull back on the sequins a little bit and maybe less blue eye shadow.”
RACHEL McADAMS, “dawdler and a daydreamer” By Richard Crouse
On-screen and off Rachel McAdams defies categorization. A bundle of contradictions—she describes herself as “a daydreamer and a dawdler,” and “a very serious person” who has “always been kind of girly”—she lives in Toronto despite having a thriving career in Hollywood.
The common thread that links her movies, from the über-romance of The Notebook to the bawdy comedy of Wedding Crashers and the intrigue of State of Play is a simple, yet indefinable quality: intelligence. Her intellect informs every role she takes, even in a completely silly comedy like The Hot Chick, her first hit. It takes smarts to suggestively deliver a line like, “I hear it’s good for the skin if you take your towel off,” to a sauna full of women while playing a boy trapped in a woman’s body and still have a career once critics get through with the film.
“That brain is substantial,” says Diane Keaton of her frequent co-star, “and if you have that along with a face you can’t take your eyes off, it’s so compelling. It’s rare.”
She is a rarity, one of the few gilded members of young Hollywood who has made her work the focus of her career and avoided becoming a tabloid punching bag like her Mean Girls co-star Lindsay Lohan.
“I want to pick good projects,” she said in 2004, “I want to work with great directors and try not to put too much pressure on myself and just read things for the story and recognize when I’m drawn to something for the right reasons.”
After years of figure skating at ice carnivals, working at MacDonald’s in southwestern Ontario, studying drama at York University and appearing in forgettable TV shows (Shotgun Love Dolls anyone?) the smart and funny exposé of high school caste systems Mean Girls was the movie that put her on the map.
She modeled the flamboyantly wicked Regina George on Alec Baldwin’s performance in Glengarry Glen Ross. Spitting out lines like, “So you think you’re pretty?” through a cobra smile, she won critical praise and very nearly stole the show.
Then, just when audiences thought they had her typecast along came 2004s The Notebook, the deeply romantic Nicolas Sparks story. Given the script just one day in advance of the auditions McAdams beat out nine other actresses (including Ashley Judd, Britney Spears and Reese Witherspoon) for the now iconic role of Allie, the woman who finds freedom in the arms of a man (Ryan Gostling) her mother calls “trash.” Roger Ebert said her performance contained “beauty and clarity” and suddenly Hollywood had a new “it” girl.
Although she admits to being a “sucker for sweeping love stories” she didn’t capitalize on the breakout success of The Notebook by churning out a series of cookie-cutter romances or taking advantage of the huge offers coming her way—she turned down the role of Bond girl Vesper Lynd in Casino Royale—instead she opted for a variety of projects, none of which was a romance in the traditional sense.
She made waves as Owen Wilson’s love interest in the raunchy comedy Wedding Crashers, became an action star in Wes Craven’s thriller Red Eye and played the outspoken daughter of Diane Keaton and Craig T. Nelson in the critically lauded ensemble family drama The Family Stone.
Then, as quickly as she came to prominence, she was gone. For almost two years she was absent from screens until she took on the role of Kay, the platinum blonde focus of a love triangle between Chris Cooper and Pierce Brosnan, in the suspenseful psychological thriller Married Life. It’s the film she credits with rejuvenating her interest in filmmaking after some time off.
Since then she’s been a mainstay at festivals and multiplexes playing everything from a soldier whose boyfriend was killed saving her life in The Lucky Ones to the titular spouse in the sci fi romance The Time Traveler’s Wife and Sherlock Holmes’s beguiling Irene Adler opposite Robert Downey Jr.
Her best reviews of 2009 came with State of Play (which airs on TMN and Movie Central this month), a political drama in the spirit of All the Presidents Men. She co-stars with Russell Crowe and Helen Mirren as a Washington Post blogger working with Crowe’s investigative reporter to unravel clues in the murder of a congressman’s mistress.
With a full slate of films announced for the next couple of years—including Morning Glory with Harrison Ford and Diane Keaton and a project with legend Terrence Malick—it seems the chameleon spirit of Rachel McAdams is just as restless as ever.
“It’s fun to experiment,” she says, “I’m always kind of a slave to the character. Whatever kind of vision comes to my head I just have to go with it.”
The Family Stone
Hollywood has a long standing tradition of churning out holiday films in which large, loving but dysfunctional families gather to celebrate Christmas and end up bring up old feuds, swapping girlfriends (or boyfriends) and over-cooking the turkey. So the idea for The Family Stone, a new comedy starring Diane Keaton and Sarah Jessica Parker, isn’t a new one, but despite the ring of familiarity The Family Stone works as both a comedy and a poignant family drama.
The story centers around Dermot Mulroney—the oldest and favorite Stone son—who brings his uptight girlfriend, played by Sarah Jessica Parker, home for Christmas. The Stone siblings and parents take an instant dislike to her and united in the cause of tormenting her they try to drive her away. For support she brings in her beautiful younger sister, played by Claire Danes who only complicates an already strange situation.
This is normally the kind of thing that makes me run to the theatre—to see something else—but the great ensemble cast really salvages this from the treacly depths. As Meredith Sarah Jessica Parker leaves her Sex in the City character far behind daring to be unlikable and along the way proves that there is more to her than simply being Carrie Bradshaw.
We also get a welcome glimpse of Canadian actress Rachel McAdams as the nasty Stone sister Amy. This is her third good film this year after The Wedding Crashers and Red Eye, and in it she proves that she has mastered the role of the cinematic mean girl.
There are many humorous moments but the film packs an emotional punch in the scenes between the elder Stones, played by Diane Keaton and Craig T. Nelson. In their best moment together they tell us all we need to know about their relationship in one quiet bedroom scene and one gentle touch of a scar.
MORNING GLORY: 3 STARS
In “Morning Glory” Canadian Sweetheart Rachel McAdams plays an eternally optimistic television producer. That’s how we know this is a work of fantasy. Like unicorns or a good Matthew Lillard movie, there’s no such thing an eternally optimistic television producer. She may be completely fictitious but she’s also perky, precocious and fighting for the survival of her morning television show.
After being fired from the producer’s chair of “Good Morning New Jersey,” Becky (McAdams) moves up to the big leagues, executive producing a network morning show in New York City. The trouble is the network is IBS—it can’t be a co-incidence that their name is an acronym for Irritable Bowel Syndrome because their ratings are in the toilet—and the show is Daybreak, a telecast so lowly rated one observer says “half the audience has lost their remotes and the other half are waiting for their nurse to turn them over.” It’s her job to whip the show into shape, despite the protests of its two high maintenance hosts, former Miss Arizona Colleen Peck (Diane Keaton) and the “third worst person in the world,” Mike Pomeroy (Harrison Ford).
“Morning Glory” is a screwball romantic comedy that has a sit com-ish edge, but is rescued by the charm of its leads. It’s a pleasure to see Harrison Ford grumping it up in his first all out comedic role in some time (that is, if you don’t count the ill-advised Indiana Jones reboot) and Diane Keaton has some good bitchy fun here but it is McAdams who really saves the day.
Her effervescent screen presence keeps us interested even when the script is content to rely on predictable, feel-good story turns. “Morning Glory” often feels like a collection of good ideas that don’t quite hang together. The Patrick Wilson love interest angle feels tagged on and near the end the movie becomes a series of montages as various story threads are a little too conveniently wrapped up, but through it all McAdams shines.
There are echoes of “Broadcast News” throughout. That movie played up the romance a bit more than “Morning Glory” does and twenty-three years ago when the Albert Brooks comedy first addressed the trend of the show business-ification of hard news to pander to ratings the hard news side won. This time around Mike Pomeroy, a seasoned journalist with impeccable credentials, is told by the upstart Becky, “Your side lost” and asked to bring along a camera to his prostate exam. “Broadcast News” had interesting things to say about television and how TV is changing. “Morning Glory” doesn’t have that same kind of insight but it does have Rachel McAdams, which for this lightweight comedy, is enough.
TO THE WONDER: 2 STARS
Terrence Malick took twenty years between making “Days of Heaven” and “The Thin Red Line” and has released just six films in a career that dates back to Badlands in 1973.
Then in the last two years he’s shot and made five films—three set to come out this year and next—a hectic schedule for anyone but particularly remarkable for one of moviedom’s more notorious procrastinators.
But don’t imagine that he is on autopilot, pumping out movies for the sake of plumping up his resume.
His latest film, “To the Wonder,” starring Ben Affleck, Rachel McAdams, Javier Bardem and Olga Kurylenko, is as daring as anything he’s ever made. In fact his disinterest in traditional narrative has taken him from the oblique to almost experimental.
The “story” begins with Neil (Affleck, as a character so taciturn almost all his dialogue could fit on the back of a matchbook) and Marina (Kurylenko) falling in love in Paris. He’s an American, she’s a Ukrainian divorcée with a small daughter (Tatiana Chiline). Relocating to the states their once torrid relationship becomes lice cold. She goes back to Paris, but soon finds herself missing her old life. Meanwhile Neil begins seeing Jane (Rachel McAdams), a friend from high school as a priest, Father Quintana (Javier Bardem), grapples with his own sense of faith.
Some will describe “To the Wonder” as lyrical and provocative while others will use words like impenetrable and pretentious.
It’s show me don’t tell me cinema—there’s very little actual dialogue, and what there is doesn’t really forward the story—that could easily have been subtitled “Olga Dances and Twirls” given the amount of time we spend watching her in whirling dervish mode.
Her endless dipping and weaving aside, “To the Wonder” has all Malick ‘s trademarks in place—LOADS of narration, the restless camera, even close-ups of grass—but as his films become more like visual poems they also become denser and harder to fathom.
Malik’s films are singular, dreamy experiences that polarize audiences. If you’re like Jane, whose mother said was “chasing moonbeams,” then you’ll find something in the abstract way the story is told.
If not, you may identify with another of her lines. “All we had was… nothing.”
Both views are valid and the deciding factor is you. Adventurous viewers will find something beautiful in the impressionistic storytelling and the subtle way Malik connects Mother Nature with human nature. Others may simply be frustrated by the director’s disregard for customary storytelling.
THE TIME TRAVELER’S WIFE: 2 STARS
The Time Traveler’s Wife is part of a rare genre: romantic science fiction. But just because one of the characters flits through time and space doesn’t mean this is like an episode of Star Trek. Nope. The Time Traveler’s Wife is a romance first and sci fi second. Based on a best selling novel the story is equal parts Back to the Future, Benjamin Button and The Notebook. It’s a story about love with no boundaries and how romance can transcend everything, even death. Sounds like a three Kleenex kind of movie, doesn’t it?
Eric Bana is Henry DeTamble, a Chicago librarian with a genetic disorder known as Chrono-Displacement that causes him to involuntarily travel through time. Clare Abshire (Rachel McAdams) is an artist. From the outset their relationship is a strange one. When they first meet she has known him since she was six years old, but because his syndrome flips him to random times in his life on an ever shifting timeline he is meeting her for the first time. Confused? Not as confused as Clare who tries to build a life with Henry even though his ailment keep them apart.
Once you get past the twisty-turny time travel story device, I’m sorry to say there isn’t much left. The Time Traveler’s Wife is at its core a very old fashioned romance about the enduring qualities of true love tarted up with a sci fi twist that only serves to muddle the story. (On film at least, I haven’t read the book.) It’s theme of love conquering all is well played out, but the flat performance from leading man Eric Bana casts a pall over the whole movie.
Bana has been in my bad books for some time now, although he redeemed himself recently with a star turn as the bad guy in Star Trek. Unfortunately The Time Traveler’s Wife was shot before Star Trek gave him a boost on the old charisma meter. His work here is understated to the point of indifference. Henry should be one of the wonders of the world, a man who can jump from year to year, but instead is played as a mope; a sad sack crippled by his remarkable ability.
Rachel McAdams, on the other hand, underplays the role of Clare, but instead of disappearing into the fabric of the film as Bana does, brings subtlety and grace to the character. When she tells her friend about Henry’s condition, adding, with rueful understatement, “It’s a problem,” she shows us a vulnerable side to Clare, the side that realizes her life will never be normal, but also the side that knows she is powerless to change her situation. It’s a nice, quiet performance that conveys the power of her love for Henry and the frustration of the predetermination of her fate.
But it takes two to tango and unfortunately no matter how lovely McAdams’s performance is, she’s twirling around an empty dance floor. The themes from the book are firmly in place but there is no real spark between the actors.
Don’t bother with the Kleenex for this one.
