Richard sits in on the CFRA Ottawa morning show with host Bill Carroll to talk the new movies coming to theatres, VOD and streaming services including the mean-spirited crime dramedy “I Care a Lot” (Amazon Prime Video in Canada), the heartfelt drama “Supernova” (Apple TV app, and everywhere you rent or buy movies) and the kid’s flick Flora & Ulysses (Disney+).
Listen to the whole thing HERE!
In an early scene in “I Care a Lot,” the new thriller starring Rosamund Pike as professional legal guardian to the elderly Marla Grayson, says “I care. I care a lot,” referring to her wards, but it soon becomes clear that she really only cares for one thing. Money.
If you were to look up the word irredeemable in the dictionary you may well find a picture of Marla Grayson alongside the definition. She is an elegantly dressed, smiling viper who takes advantage of the old and infirm for profit. She’s a court appointed guardian who swoops in, cuts off family members as she sequesters her wards in care homes that feel more like prisons while she siphons their bank accounts and sells their homes to cover her exorbitant fees.
When Grayson and girlfriend Fran (Eiza González) pay off Dr. Karen Amos (Alicia Witt),a crooked doctor who gussies up medical records so Grayson Guardianship can take control of her patient’s lives.
On the face of it their latest mark, Jennifer Peterson (Dianne Wiest), seems like a perfect victim. Wealthy and without family, she’s vulnerable and just waiting to be bilked. Or is she? Turns out Jennifer has some secrets, and worse than that, some very important and dangerous friends. “I’m the worst mistake you’ll ever make,” Jennifer hisses at Marla.
With stories of elder abuse making front page news far too often, “I Care a Lot” provides a modicum of revenge, turning the tables in a delicious way.
Pike revisits the cold and calculating character that won her raves in “Gone Girl” but ups the ante to plumb the depths of depravity. To describe the predatory Marla as a shark does a disservice to Great Whites. “Playing fair. Being scared, that gets you nowhere,” she says. “That gets you beat.” Seemingly born without a heart, she masks her viciousness with a veneer of professionalism and her well-practised mantra of “I care, a lot.” Pike is clearly having fun here playing cold and calculating, but never resorts to the usual villain schtick. Her composure is disarming but, like an Oleander bloom, cut her and she bleeds poison.
Wiest is devilishly engaging as a woman with secrets and Peter Dinklage brings a barely contained rage to his role (NO SPOILERS HERE) but it is Pike who dominates.
“I Care a Lot” is a rarity, a truly mean-spirited movie where the best you can do is find yourself rooting for the least terrible person to persevere. It sags in the last half hour, becoming slightly more conventional but ends with a bang.
These days journalists aren’t just reporting the stories, often they are the story. Just ask Jim Acosta. A new film, “A Private War,” places the journalist front-and-centre while detailing a story from our recent past.
Rosamund Pike plays Marie Colvin, long serving war correspondent for The Sunday Times. For three decades she put herself in harm’s way, covering conflicts the world over. “I care enough to go to these places,” she says, “and write about it in a way that makes people want to care about it as much as I do.” While on assignment in Sri Lanka she loses an eye in a bomb blast. Later, when accused of being “stupid“ for going into that war zone she says “I think stupid is writing about the dinner party you went to last night.“
Years of witnessing bloodshed have taken a toll. “You’ve seen more war than most soldiers,” says her photographer Paul Conroy (Jamie Dornan). Plagued by nightmares, she would drink a quart of vodka to calm herself. Her PTSD didn’t keep her from the job, in fact it may have been the engine that kept her going.
In 2012 she, along with Conroy, embarked on her most dangerous assignment, covering the siege of Homs in Syria. Her reporting revealed the Syrian government was targeting civilians in an effort to quell the Arab Spring uprising. “I see it,” she says of the horrors of war, “so you don’t have to.”
As the title suggests “A Private War” is about the push and pull inside Colvin. The battle between her life in England with boyfriend Tony Shaw (Stanley Tucci) and the adrenaline rush provided by her work in the field. “Maybe I would have liked a normal life,” she says, “or maybe I don’t know how. Or maybe this is where I feel most comfortable.”
Pike brings passion and fire to the role, although while on duty in Sri Lanka she looks like she’s part of a “Vogue” fashion spread, not a reporter in the field. Emotionally raw, it’s a portrait of a single-minded person who always put her work first. Unfortunately we don’t learn much more than that. It’s a jittery performance that effectively portrays Covin’s state of mind but by the film’s second half it feels one note.
“A Private War” comes at an interesting time for journalism. With the profession under fire from Fake-Newsers it’s important to discover the stories of the people who report on “the rough draft of history.”
Richard joins CP24 anchor Nathan Downer to have a look at the weekend’s new movies including the giant ape movie “Rampage,” the touching drama “Indian Horse,” the Middle East thriller “Beirut” starring Jon Hamm and Joaquin Phoenix in “You Were Never Really Here.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
Richard sits in with CTV NewsChannel anchor Marcia MacMillan to have a look at the weekend’s big releases, the giant ape movie “Rampage,” the touching drama “Indian Horse,” the Middle East thriller “Beirut” starring Jon Hamm and Joaquin Phoenix in “You Were Never Really Here.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
Here’s the overview: In the new thriller “Beirut” former “Mad Man” star Jon Hamm plays a world-weary but sharp-tongued man who has crawled inside a whiskey bottle to numb the pain of his existence.
Now here’s the six-word pitch: Don Draper does the Middle East.
The story begins in 1972 in the title city. US diplomat Mason Skiles (Hamm) has lived there on and off for much of his life. He understands the country’s delicate balance of religion and politics but more importantly, he loves the country. Tragedy strikes when Karim (Yoav Sadian Rosenberg), a thirteen-year-old orphan Skiles and wife Nadia (Leila Bekhti) treat as their own, turns out to have a terrorist brother.
Cut to a decade later. Skiles is now a whiskey-in-his-coffee kind of man living in Boston running a small labour-dispute consulting firm. “His career has gone from Kissinger to the crapper,” says a former colleague. When he accepts an offer (and thousands of dollars) from “the Agency” to return to Beirut he finds a city in ruins, torn apart by a decade of civil war. Escorted by handler Sandy Crowder (Rosamund Pike) he must delve into the murky world of CIA dirty tricks and political agendas to negotiate the release of his one time best friend, CIA agent Cal Riley (Mark Pellegrino).
Written by “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” scribe Tony Gilroy, “Beirut” allows Hamm’s now trademarked Damaged Man Routine™ to stay front and centre. It’s a spy story with intrigue and danger—although it should be said there is not much action—that relies on Hamm’s rugged charisma. His struggle is the motor that keeps things interesting, not the character’s ulterior motives or the intrigue. For instance a major a plot twist (NO SPOILERS HERE) is actually more of a straight line than a twist so it is up to Hamm and cast to provide the tension.
“Beirut” feels a tad long, as though some of the scenes of Skiles contemplating the bottom of a glass could have been replaced with something a bit more interesting, like trying to get a release for his old friend. Although Hamm is very good here, those lapses—and the typical pouring-of-the-booze-down-the-sink scene—separate “Beirut” from other, superior talky thrillers like “Munich” or “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.”
Richard joins CP24 to have a look at the weekend’s new movies including “Tomb Raider,” the dark comedy “The Death of Stalin,” the old folks road trip “The Leisure Seeker,” the crime thriller “7 Days in Entebbe” and the Cecil Beaton documentary “Love, Cecil.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
Richard sits in with CTV NewsChannel anchor Marcia MacMillan to have a look at the weekend’s big releases, “Tomb Raider,” the dark comedy “The Death of Stalin,” “7 Days in Entebbe” and the old folks road trip “The Leisure Seeker.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
An instance of art imitating life turned into life imitating art for the 7 Days In Entebbe filmmakers. They were recreating the famous 1976 hijacking of an Air France flight from Tel Aviv at the Malta airport when filming was interrupted by a real-life skyjacking.
“We’ve had five hijackings land here,” Lija mayor Magda Magri Naudi told BBC World TV, “and ironically today they were actually filming Entebbe on the airport grounds and that had to be stopped.”
The real hijackers, armed with replica hand grenades and pistols, called themselves “pro-Gaddafi” and demanded asylum in Malta, before being subdued. All 118 hostages were released as the culprits were taken into custody.
That situation was wrapped up peacefully in hours but, as the title 7 Days In Entebbe suggests, the 1976 terror attack didn’t resolve itself so easily.
On July 27, 1976, an Air France flight from Tel Aviv to Paris via Athens was hijacked and forced to land in Entebbe, Uganda. On the ground the Jewish passengers were singled out and held hostage. The hijackers, two members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and two Germans affiliated with the left-wing extremist group Revolutionary Cells, demanded a ransom of $5 million and the release of prisoners from Israeli jails. If their conditions weren’t met by the deadline of Sunday, July 5 the terrorists would start executing hostages one by one. In response the Israeli government ordered a daring counter-terrorist hostage rescue operation.
The film 7 Days In Entebbe stars an international cast, including Daniel Brühl and Rosamund Pike as the German reactionaries, and, according to The Wrap’s Ben Croll, is “a somewhat dispassionate view on the whole affair as a geopolitical event that encompassed a number of overlapping parties.”
In other words, the movie values political speechifying over action sequences.
Speaking at a press conference at the Berlin Film Festival director José Padilha talked about his take on the narrative. “This story started with (producers) Ron Halpern and Tim Bevan and I think it was a great idea because they thought there was a narrative in this story that was missing. Most of the other movies are told from a military perspective and they show you a history of heroism, a gigantic military feat and they ignored the interaction between the hijackers and hostages and also the political aspects in Israel.”
Over the years the story has been told from many different angles. There is Operation Thunderbolt, which fictionalized the raid in a 1988 arcade game, and a 2009 play called To Pay the Price based in part on the letters of Israeli hero Yonatan Netanyahu.
On screen the story has been told in Operation Thunderbolt: Entebbe, a documentary featuring interviews with the former hostages and Capt. Michel Bacos, the pilot who refused to abandon his passengers, and the 1976 television film Victory at Entebbe, starring Anthony Hopkins and Elizabeth Taylor, which went to air just five months after the original incident.
The most authentic adaptation must be Operation Thunderbolt, known in Israel as Mivtsa Yonatan. Produced with the co-operation of the Israeli Air Force and government, the Oscar-nominated film is the most accurate in terms of uniforms, weapons, aircraft and vehicles. It is so realistic that several documentaries have used the film’s footage to dramatize the hijacking.
