A very unusual thing happened when I saw Richard Linklater’s “Hit Man” at last year’s TIFF. After the movie’s best and funniest scene, one that shows the comedic chops and chemistry of leads Glen Powell and Adria Arjona, the audience burst into applause. It was a spontaneous, organic moment, the kind usually reserved for comedy clubs, not sold-out festival screenings.
Powell, who also wrote the script, plays Gary, a seemingly mild-mannered psychology and philosophy professor at the University of New Orleans. When he isn’t lecturing to bored students about breaking out of their comfort zones, he leads a quiet life, tending to his pet birds and two cats, Id and Ego.
On the side he works with local law enforcement as a sound technician, secretly recording undercover officer Jasper (Austin Amelio) as he entraps people who want to hire him to kill a spouse or a business partner.
When Jasper is suspended for bad behavior, Gary subs in.
Turns out, he’s a natural, and more importantly, it gives him an adrenaline rush he hasn’t felt for many years. With Jasper out of the picture, Gary dives in, wearing disguises to create a new hitman character for every meeting.
“I realized not everyone fantasized about the same hit man,” he says. “Every sting operation was a performance. And each arrest was like a standing ovation.”
When he meets Madison (Adria Arjona), a distressed wife who wants him to kill her husband, he immediately falls for her. In their meeting he gets her to stop talking before she incriminates herself, and soon, they begin dating. Trouble is, she knows him as self-assured badass Ron, not as the affable Gary.
Complications ensue, culminating in the above-mentioned applause-worthy scene, a mix of slapstick and the pure chemistry between Powell and Arjona, where they know the police are recording them, but continue their conversation as though they don’t.
Very loosely based on the true story of Gary Johnson, as written by Skip Hollandsworth in “Texas Monthly,” “Hit Man” is a rom com with some thrilling twists. Light and frothy, it’s anchored by a smart script that acts as a showcase for the lead performances.
Powell pulls off a full-on leading man turn as a guy who embodies an ideal by creating a role-playing fantasy of what a hit man would be like, based on the wants and needs of the client. It gives him a chance to show his versatility and step away from the bland leading man roles that have marked some of his most popular work to date.
“Hit Man” makes the most of that performance. As the disguises get nuttier and nuttier, and the plot more pretzel-shaped, director Richard Linklater finds a balance between Powell’s showcase work, the script’s big laughs and the story’s inherent tension. It could have gone south very easily, but Linklater pulls off a bit of a magic trick and keeps it hilariously humming along on all cylinders.
Richard joins CTV NewsChannel and anchor Jennifer Burke to have a look at new movies coming to VOD and streaming services, including Johnny Knoxville and the unnatural acts of “Jackass Forever,” the reboot of “Scream,” the unhappily ever after fairy tale “The King’s Daughter” AND the great punk rock doc “Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché.”
Kevin Smith has long been thought of as a renegade, a movie director who has never played by Hollywood’s rules. As such his life and career are a natural for the documentary treatment.
Films like “Clerks” and “Mallrats” made him an avatar of indie filmmaking and his early adoption of the internet made him the Methuselah of geek culture. So, it is surprising that “Clerk,” a look at Smith’s legacy now on VOD, doesn’t have any of the rebel spirit that make his story, from “Clerks” to “Tusk” to his popular podcast SModcast, so compelling.
Near the beginning of its chronological look at Smith, director Malcolm Ingram shows a video the young filmmaker made as he prepared to leave home to attend the Vancouver Film School. A thank you to his parents for instilling in him a passion for movies, it’s lovely found footage that displays Smith’s heart and his devotion of his chosen industry.
If the rest of the movie struck the same tone as this footage, “Clerk” might have the depth to make it feel like something beyond an entertaining, but shallow, DVD extra.
Smith is an intriguing character. From DIY filmmaker (“Clerks”) to studio outsider (“Cop Out”) to self-distributor of his movies to podcast superstar and Geek God, he has forged an unlikely but prolific career.
Through interviews with friends—like Ben Affleck, Richard Linklater and BFF Jason Mewes—fans and family—his mother Grace, wife Jennifer Schwalbach Smith and daughter Harley Quinn all appear—a portrait emerges of a man who created a world for himself.
We’re told about his drive to create, how he has rolled with the punches and health scares, and also rolled thousands of joints, to become a cultural touchstone who has turned his love of pop culture, into a career. “I didn’t want to be a footnote,” he says.
The most revealing part of the film comes midway. Smith calls a scene in “Clerks II” the moment where he learned who he was “through the art.” The characters, Quick Stop (the convenience store the action revolves aorund) store manager Dante (Brian O’Halloran) and slacker Randall (Jeff Anderson), are in jail.
Dante says, “What would the great Randall Graves do if he was the master of his own destiny?” The answer? “I’d buy the Quick Stop and reopen it myself.”
In that moment, Smith says, this character, once defined by his cynicism and disappointment with the world, is laid bare. That scene tells “the story of my life,” the director says. “The day I realized you could just buy the Quick Stop and reopen it yourself. That’s how you’d be happiest. That was me going, ‘I’m never going to be what other cats would like me to be. The only reason you like me in the first place is because I was me. So, I’m going to go and be me for the rest of my life now.’”
It is a teary moment—Smith wells up several times during the almost two hour run time—that sums up an epiphany for Smith that appears to have influenced much of his career moving forward from that moment.
Self-acceptance is a great message—”I want to be the Smithiest Kevin Smith I can be.”—and it is one of the things that has made Smith so popular with his rabid fans. But by the end of the “Clerk” it’s clear that, despite that life lesson, the documentary is more fan service than deep dive. Smith devotees—that is, anyone who knows what “Snoochie Boochies” refers to—will enjoy revisiting the movies that made the charismatic director famous, but holes—Mewes’ drug addiction for instance—in the storytelling and hagiographic interviews prevent it from being a definitive portrait.
Based on Maria Semple’s 2012 bestseller “Where’d You Go, Bernadette,” is a mystery-comedy that explores motherhood and mental illness.
Cate Blanchett plays the title character, an agoraphobic architect, once heralded as a genius, now a hermit who hasn’t designed a building in decades. Described as one of architecture’s “true enigmas,” she hates travelling, complains that people are rude and yammer too much, can’t sleep—“Anxiety causes insomnia,” she claims, “and insomnia causes anxiety.”—rarely leaves the house and has poured all her prescription drugs into one jar. “The colours and shapes are amazing together,” she says.
The other moms in the area, next door neighbor Audrey (Kristen Wiig) and “all her flying monkeys,” don’t like her and Bernadette makes no effort to build bridges with them. “I’m not good when exposed to people.”
The only bright spots in her life are husband Elgin (Billy Crudup), 15-year-old daughter Bee (Emma Nelson) and her virtual, on-line assistant. A series of unrelated but catastrophic events, including a mini-mud slide, an identity theft ring and an intervention, prompt Bernadette to disappear without a trace, leaving Bee and Elgin to figure out where she went.
“Where’d You Go, Bernadette” is more story driven than director Richard Linklater’s recent, more slice-of-life films. In movies like “Everybody Wants Some!!” he excelled in crafting interesting situations for his characters to inhabit. Here the details aren’t so much focussed on the location or building atmosphere, but in creating a layered and compelling central character.
Blanchett applies a light touch here, playing up the funny moments, but still digging in when it comes time to deal with the “formality of life.” It’s a lovely performance in a film that rambles somewhat, but ultimately finds touching moments in the story of a woman who had to get lost to find herself.
Director Richard Linklater makes films that are more interested in presenting slices of life than delving deep into story. Beautiful romantic character studies like “Before Sunrise,” or coming-of-age stories like “Boyhood” or nostalgic throwbacks like “Everybody Wants Some,” get under the skins of the people who populate them, making us care about them not just their stories. His latest, “Last Flag Flying,” fits into this mould but doesn’t have the sense of connection that makes the other films feel so memorable.
The year is 2003. Former Marine Sal Nealon (Bryan Cranston) is a Virginia bar owner with a metal plate in his head and a motor mouth. When his old Vietnam buddy Larry ‘Doc’ Shepherd (Steve Carell) shows up at the bar the two haven’t seen one another for decades, since Doc earned a Bad Conduct Discharge and was thrown into the brig for two years.
Turns out Doc isn’t just making a social call. He’s there to put the gang back together, including former badass Mueller (Laurence Fishburne), now a God fearing preacher who prefers to be called Reverend Richard. He’s leaning on his old friends in a time of grief. He would like his old buddies to accompany him to his son’s funeral. Larry was told the young man died a hero in Bagdad and will be buried with full honours at Arlington but when they arrive to view the body the father discovers a different story. It’s then he makes a profound decision. “I’m not going to bury a marine,” he says, “I’m just going to bury my son.” The old friends take the body and embark on a forlorn road trip back to Larry’s New Hampshire home for a civilian funeral.
“Last Flag Flying” is a talky affair about the passing of time, loss and disillusionment that glows with occasional moments of aching poignancy but too often feels adrift. Gifted as the leads are, they never truly bring Sal, Larry and Mueller off the page. Each man is a walking cliché, almost crushed by the weight of the heavy-handed and often overwritten script. Sombre and sentimental, it is, unlike Linklater’s other films, also largely forgettable.
Richard Linklater’s new film Everybody Wants Some!! is set in that sweet spot between Saturday Night Fever and the Reagan Years. Ripe with feathered hair, bell bottom pants and milk crates used as LP storage, it’s the story of college life over the course of one weekend in 1980 set to the throbbing beat of disco and new wave music.
“It was a raunchy time,” says Linklater. “It was pretty hedonistic. Sex, drugs and rock and roll. I had to impose that back on my cast. Disco was sex. Dancing was foreplay. You were hoping to keep it going and that it would get personal. The humour was really raunchy. It was not innocent but there was a certain kind of playfulness to it.”
The fifty-five year old director calls the 1980s “a good time for me. A good time to be in your twenties. I was that guy who took his album collection and his music and his speakers off to college. My entire net worth at that age was in music.”
“You do a movie to examine your feelings or what you think,” he says. “I thought a lot about my own life at that time and also the culture. It’s my little anthropological look [at 1980]. I came out of it thinking that was the end of something. The eighties got much more serious. There was the AIDS epidemic but also there was the cultural backlash. There was the Reagan administration, Pat Robertson, [Jerry] Falwell and it kind of a war and not only a war on drugs. They were trying to move the culture back to the fifties or some mythical past before all this corruption, i.e. the freedoms of the sixties, women’s liberation. That was really in full gear by 82, 83 so I look at this and think, this was the last time there was that unabashed, raunchy hedonistic pure fun. I look at it and go, that was a good time to be young because that was all going to change.”
The Texas born filmmaker says he spent his 80s college years underground, immersed in punk rock. “It was getting kind of ugly in accepted culture so I zoned out a lot of it.” Since then he has made a career chronicling contemporary suburban culture in films like Slacker, Dazed and Confused and most recently in the twelve-years-in-the-making Boyhood. Along the way he’s learned a thing or two about how society is changing.
“I think the culture has actually changed less and less,” he says. “I observed that on Boyhood. I thought the world would look a lot different in those twelve years. If you take 1969 to 1981 you got a lot of different looks, cars, everything. In Boyhood nothing changed. The phones changed but the cars all looked the same, the hairstyles. I think we’ve hit a wall. Technology is so quick moving that it satisfies that desire in us for change. Punk comes out of [the idea] that I want something new. I don’t think humans don’t feel that deep need for demonstrable rejection of the old and embracing of the new because they feel there is so much being satisfied technologically. Whatever urge that was to stick a safety pin in your cheek and go create a new dance, you don’t see that anymore.”
Director Richard Linklater’s last film, the Oscar wining “Boyhood,” was a slice of life that showcased twelve years in the life of a growing boy. His new movie is also a slice of life but in a much-condensed form, spanning just three days in the life of a college baseball player.
It’s 1980 and when we first meet Jake (Blake Jenner) driving toward the next phase of his life, college. In the backseat are a small bag of clothes and a milk carton filled with his favourite LPs. Arriving just three days before classes start, he bonds with his teammates over KISS pinball machines, longneck Lone Star beers and boings filled with Maui Waui. They party, talk baseball, play a more violent version of Rock! Paper! Scissors! called “knuckles” and try and meet girls as the clock ticks down to the first day of classes.
Largely conflict free, this isn’t a story so much as it is a snapshot of a time and place. It’s a transport back to the time of waterbeds, “My Sharona,” fashionable mullets and trippy Carl Sagan cosmology. Linklater recreates the freewheeling feel of the era and the last blast of childhood before the responsibilities of adulthood. The temptation will be to label this a more innocent time, but that isn’t exactly accurate. These guys are just as interested in scoring with girls as they are soring runs on the field so innocent they are not. At most this is an affectionately nostalgic glimpse back into our recent past.
“Everybody Wants Some!!” is a charming reminiscence. Linklater gets the details right—including a crude warning against the pleasures of waterbed sex—but more importantly populates the film with characters that feel like real people and not stereotypes conjured up by a 1980s way-back machine. It’s troubling that the female characters are given little to do—perhaps Linklater’s next could be from the point of view of the woman’s experience—but the men are entertaining and compelling sorts whose conversations are occasionally inane, occasionally philosophical, just like real life.
In the last shot of “Everybody Wants Some!!”Jake watches his professor scrawl “Frontiers Are Where You Find Them” on the blackboard. The film doesn’t bother with its character’s boundaries, choosing instead to introduce to them as they are beginning the searching for their frontiers. The movie and its characters live in the moment, and that’s a pretty fun place to be.
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”
