Richard sits in with Erin Paul to have a look at the special Wednesday releases, “Passengers” with Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt, the videogame flick “Assassin’s Creed” with Micheal Fassbender and the animated sing-a-long “Sing.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
“Sing,” like the name would suggest, is a jukebox musical. The hits of Taylor Swift, Elton John and even the late, great Leonard Cohen are all present and sung by a lounge singing mouse and an elephant, among others. Think of it as the “Jersey Boys” of the animal kingdom and you’ll get the idea.
“Sing” is Matthew McConaughey’s second animated movie of the year after Kubo and the Two Strings, but the first film featuring his unique vocal stylings. As Buster Moon, a koala who throws a singing competition to save his failing theatre, the Oscar-winner does an a cappella version of Carly Rae Jepsen’s earworm “Call Me Maybe.”
Before the warbling, however, comes the story of Moon’s show business aspirations. As a child he saw Miss Nana Noodleman (Jennifer Saunders) live on stage and immediately fell in love with the theatre. So much so that he, with the help of this father, saved up and purchased the theatre with dreams of becoming an impresario. Trouble is, he isn’t much of a showman. Filled with passion but short on talent, he staged flop and after flop and by the time we meet him he’s dodging calls from his bank as he tries to figure out a way to pay the mortgage. “None of your shows have worked Mr. Moon!” says Judith from the bank. “Better settle your account by the end of the month!”
His great idea? Throw a singing competition with some of the city’s best undiscovered talent and pack his place to the rafters with people willing to hear them sing. It worked for “American Idol,” so what could go wrong? How about an arrogant lounge singing mouse (Seth MacFarlane) with ties to some nasty underworld bears? Or a stage struck elephant (Tori Kelly)? Perhaps an ill-conceived stage design involving hundreds of shrimps and thousands of gallons of water?
Featuring 85 hit songs from the 1940s to the present day, “Sing” also contains a brand new track by Stevie Wonder and Ariana Grande called “Faith” and good messages for kids about not letting fear get in the way of the things you love, never giving up, about following your dreams. It’s a frenetic package that zips along very quickly you hardly notice it’s a ninety-minute movie stretched to a two hour running time. The songs—many of them earworms that will linger for hours after the end credits roll—pad out the action, prolonging the inevitable happy ending.
Two hours for an animated movie that offers something more than catchy tunes and platitudes is fine. Unfortunately “Sing,” while beautifully animated is too concerned with being a crowd pleaser to be about much of anything. It rises to the level above ‘cute’ on the Animation-O-Meter. Some Pixar level subtext is missing. It’s pretty good eye candy and some giggles but not so much funny stuff as you might imagine in a movie that features a pig in gold lamé.
Richard’s CP24 reviews for “Hot Pursuit,” “Maggie” and “Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief” with anchor Rena Heer.
Watch the whole thing HERE!
Richard’s “Canada AM” film reviews for “Hot Pursuit,” “Maggie” and “Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belife.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
By Richard Crouse – Metro Canada
This weekend Reese Witherspoon and Sofía Vergara play a by-the-book cop and the widow of a drug boss in the comedy Hot Pursuit. The unlikely duo hit the road, teaming up to outrun crooked cops and a murderous cartel. “Right now we can’t trust anyone but each other,” says Reese as they crack wise and dodge bullets.
It’s a movie that follows in the long tradition of Hollywood buddy comedies.
There’s an argument to be made that Abbott and Costello or Laurel and Hardy originated buddy comedies long before Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis donned dresses and camped it up in 1959’s Some Like It Hot. For my money, however, the Billy Wilder film about two musicians who witness the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre and flee the state disguised as women set the template for the modern buddy movie.
The basic formula is there — colliding personalities, gibes and comic conflict between the two actors — but more important than any of that is the chemistry between Lemmon and Curtis. Even though every buddy picture relies on tension between the leads, sparks also have to fly between them or the whole thing will fall flat.
Brett Ratner, director of Rush Hour 1, 2 and 3—which paired Chris Tucker and Jackie Chan to great effect—calls interesting chemistry between actors “an explosion in a bottle” and says it’s crucial to the success of any buddy pic.
Since Some Like It Hot, producers have paired up a laundry list of actors searching for the perfect mix. Lemmon and Walter Matthau were the journeymen of the genre, co-starring in six buddy pictures ranging from the sublime—The Odd Couple, which features the classic buddy picture one-liner, “I’m a neurotic nut, but you’re crazy.”— to the ridiculous — Grumpier Old Men.
The female buddy comedy is a more elusive beast. Recently Melissa McCarthy and Sandra Bullock teamed as a tough-talking street cop and uptight, lone wolf FBI agent to bring down a murderous drug dealer in The Heat and in the 1980s Bette Midler was the Queen of the form, pairing off with Shelley Long for Outrageous Fortune and with Lily Tomlin for Big Business in which both stars played dual roles, making it a buddy comedy times two. “Two’s company. Four’s a riot,” read the movie tagline.
There are others, dating back to 1937’s Stage Door, but there is no debating that Hollywood has been slow to feature female bonding as a subject of buddy movies. It’s wild there are two man-and-his-dog buddy movies—Turner and Hootch and K9—but so few featuring women. Despite the box office success of several female buddy comedies sequels have been as rare as hen’s teeth. For instance, Vulture.com points out that of the duelling buddy comedies released on April 25, 2008—Tina Fey and Amy Poehler’s Baby Mama and Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay—Fey and company grossed $60 million, while Harold and friends made $38 million and yet the guys laughed all the way to another sequel while Baby Mama remains a one off.
Hollywood is finally warming to the idea of female driven comedies, so perhaps this weekend Witherspoon and the highest paid woman on television can generate enough box office dough to warrant another team-up. In the movie biz money usually speaks louder than anything, including gender.
There are buddy comedies galore featuring men, even at least two, “Turner and Hootch” and “K9,” featuring a man and his dog, but relatively few starring two women. This weekend Reese Witherspoon and Sofía Vergara give their chemistry a test run in the road buddy movie “Hot Pursuit.”
Witherspoon is a by-the-book cop Rose Cooper assigned to deliver drug lord Felipe Riva (Vincent Laresca) and his glamorous wife Daniella (Vergara) to a Dallas, Texas court where they will testify against the Cortez Cartel. All hell breaks loose during the transfer and hired killers kill Felipe. Cooper rescues Daniella, taking her on the run to protect her.
This is a buddy comedy, so you know eventually they will bond, but at the beginning they are opposites in every way. Cooper is an uptight second-generation cop, obsessed with rules and regulations while Daniella is an over-the-top sex bomb, unwilling to leave the house without a suitcase full of stilettoes, even as bad men are shooting at them.
Soon allegations suggesting Cooper is a dirty cop arise in the press and the unlikely pair become, as Daniella says, “the most wanted ladies in America.”
Witherspoon and Vergara are a good match. In true buddy comedy tradition they are Mutt and Jeff, physical and personality opposites. Witherspoon is short and spunky, Vergara is like a cartoon, Jessica Rabbit with an accent and a way with a line.
It’s too bad they aren’t given much to work with. The film starts with a gem of a sequence showing Cooper literally growing up in the back of a police car. It’s charming, funny and sweet, which buys the rest if the movie some goodwill, but it doesn’t last. Both actors squeeze laughs out of underwritten material—Vergara’s delivery is all rolling Rs and cleavage, Witherspoon falls into slapstick—but even though they’re funny, the script isn’t. They milk a few giggles out of the situation, but that doesn’t change the fact that they’re starring in a lazily scripted road movie with no real forward motion. There’s not enough energy or laughs to keep things really interesting.
“Hot Pursuit” is a good showcase for its stars but the best it can do is poke fun at the ages and bodies of its leads. Both deserve better and so do we.
Richard predicts Oscar winner on CP24 with Stephen LeDrew!
Watch the whole thing HERE!
Oscar nods: 87th Academy Award nominations announced on “Canada AM” with Richard, Beverly Thomson, Marci Ien and Deadline’s Pete Hammond.
Watch the whole thing HERE!
Best Picture
“American Sniper”
“Birdman”
“Boyhood”
“The Grand Budapest Hotel”
“The Imitation Game”
“Selma”
“The Theory of Everything”
“Whiplash”
Actor in a Leading Role
Steve Carell, “Foxcatcher”
Bradley Cooper, “American Sniper”
Benedict Cumberbatch, “The Imitation Game”
Michael Keaton, “Birdman”
Eddie Redmayne, “The Theory of Everything”
Actress in a Leading Role
Marion Cotillard, “Two Days One Night”
Felicity Jones, “The Theory of Everything”
Julianne Moore, “Still Alice”
Rosamund Pike, “Gone Girl”
Reese Witherspoon, “Wild”
Actor in a Supporting Role
Robert Duvall, “The Judge”
Ethan Hawke, “Boyhood”
Edward Norton, “Birdman”
Mark Ruffalo, “Foxcatcher”
J.K. Simmons, “Whiplash”
Actress in a Supporting Role
Patricia Arquette, “Boyhood”
Laura Dern, “Wild”
Emma Stone, “Birdman”
Keira Knightley, “The Imitation Game”
Meryl Streep, “Into the Woods”
Directing
Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, “Birdman”
Richard Linklater, “Boyhood”
Wes Anderson, “The Grand Budapest Hotel”
Morten Tyldum, “The Imitation Game”
Bennett Miller, “Foxcatcher”
Foreign Language Film
“Ida”
“Leviathan”
“Tangerines”
“Wild Tales”
“Timbuktu”
Writing – Adapted Screenplay
Graham Moore, “The Imitation Game”
Damien Chazelle, “Whiplash”
Anthony McCarten, “The Theory of Everything”
Jason Hall, “American Sniper”
Paul Thomas Anderson, “Inherent Vice”
Writing – Original Screenplay
Richard Linklater, “Boyhood”
Alejandro González Iñárritu, Nicolás Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris and Armando Bo, “Birdman”
Wes Anderson and Hugo Guinness, “The Grand Budapest Hotel”
Dan Gilroy, “Nightcrawler”
E. Max Frye and Dan Futterman, “Foxcatcher”
Cinematography
Emmanuel Lubezki, “Birdman”
Roger Deakins, “Unbroken”
Robert D. Yeoman, “The Grand Budapest Hotel”
Dick Pope, “Mr. Turner”
Lukasz Zal and Ryszard Lynzewski, “Ida”
Music – Original Score
Hans Zimmer, “Interstellar”
Alexandre Desplat, “The Imitation Game”
Johann Johannsson, “The Theory of Everything”
Alexandre Desplat, “The Grand Budapest Hotel”
Gary Yershon, “Mr Turner”
Makeup and Hairstyling
“Foxcatcher”
“The Grand Budapest Hotel”
“Guardians of the Galaxy”
Costume Design
Colleen Atwood, “Into the Woods”
Anna B. Sheppard, “Maleficent”
Milena Canonero, “The Grand Budapest Hotel”
Jacqueline Durran, “Mr. Turner”
Mark Bridges, “Inherent Vice”
Music – Original Song
“Glory” by Common and John Legend, “Selma”
“Lost Stars” by Gregg Alexander, Danielle Brisebois, Nick Lashley and Nick Southwood, “Begin Again”
“Everything Is Awesome” by Shawn Patterson, “The LEGO Movie”
“I’m Not Gonna Miss You,” by Glen Campbell, “Glenn Campbell: I’ll Be Me”
“Grateful,” “Beyond the lights”
Visual Effects
“Interstellar”
“Dawn of the Planet of the Apes”
“Guardians of the Galaxy”
“Captain America: Winter Soldier”
“X-Men: Days of Future Past”
Documentary Short Subject
“Crisis Hotline: Veterans Press 1”
“Joanna”
“Our Curse”
“White Earth”
“The Reaper”
Documentary Feature
“Citizenfour”
“Last Days in Vietnam”
“Virunga”
“The Salt of the Earth”
“Finding Vivian Maier”
Film Editing
Sandra Adair, “Boyhood”
Tom Cross, “Whiplash”
William Goldenberg, “The Imitation Game”
Joel Cox and Gary Roach, “American Sniper”
Barney Pilling, “The Grand Budapest Hotel”
Sound Editing
“Interstellar”
“Unbroken”
“The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies”
“American Sniper”
“Birdman”
Sound Mixing
Mark Weingarten, “Interstellar”
Thomas Curley, ”Whiplash”
“Unbroken”
“American Sniper”
“Birdman”
Production Design
“Into the Woods”
“The Grand Budapest Hotel”
“Interstellar”
“The Imitation Game”
“Mr. Turner”
Short Film – Live Action
“Boogaloo and Graham”
“Aya”
“Butterlamp”
“Parvenah”
“The Phone Call”
Short Film – Animated
“Feast”
“The Bigger Picture”
“A Single Life”
“The Dam Keeper”
“Me and My Moulton”
Animated Feature Film
“Big Hero 6”
“How to Train Your Dragon 2”
“The Boxtrolls”
“The Tale of the Princess Kaguya”
“Song of the Sea”
Richard’s “Canada AM” interview with “Wild” star Laura Dern!
Watch the whole thing HERE!
