I join the Bell Media Radio Network national night time show “Shane Hewitt and the Night Shift” to talk about William Shatner and his heavy metal band The Fuckers playing at Riot Fest in Chicago, the poster that haunts Ryan Gosling, why Christopher Nolan hates Uggs and I review “The Outer Threat” and suggest some retro space age cocktails to go along with the movie.
Listen to the whole thing HERE!
I join the CTV NewsChanel to talk about Ryan Gosling’s sci fi adventure “Project Hail Mary,” the psychological thriller “The Things You Kill” and the horror sequel “Ready or Not 2: Here I Come.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
Fast reviews for busy people! Watch as I review three movies in less time than it takes to tune a violin. Have a look as I race against the clock to tell you about Ryan Gosling’s sci fi adventure “Project Hail Mary,” the psychological thriller “The Things You Kill” and the horror sequel “Ready or Not 2: Here I Come.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
I review the new Ryan Gosling sci fi adventure “Project Hail Mary” for ctvnews.ca!
“An intimate spectacle, it’s a huge, Spielbergian movie that’s also a moving, odd-couple story with curiosity and awe infused into every frame…” reaed the whole thing HERE!
SYNOPSIS: In “Project Hail Mary,” a new sci fi adventure starring Ryan Gosling and now playing in theatres, an astronaut wakes from a coma on a spaceship with no memory of his life or earth-saving mission. “11.9 light-years from home. 6th grade science teacher. 1 chance to save us all.”
CAST: Ryan Gosling, Sandra Hüller, Lionel Boyce, Ken Leung, Milana Vayntrub, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller.
REVIEW: Based on Andy Weir’s novel of the same name, “Project Hail Mary” is a contradiction. An intimate spectacle, it’s a huge, Spielbergian movie that’s also a moving odd couple story with curiosity and awe infused into every frame.
Told on a broken timeline, “Project Hail Mary” begins with molecular-biologist-turned-middle-school-science-teacher-turned-astronaut Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) awakening aboard a spaceship. Alone—the rest of the crew expired years ago in their pods—he can’t remember who he is or the nature of his mission.
As his memory slowly returns, the details of Project Hail Mary come into focus. Life on earth is threatened by a sun-eating microbe called Astrophage, and it is his job to figure out a way to stop it before Earth is plunged into an extinction level deep freeze.
As he pieces together the details of his life and task, he discovers he is not alone when he encounters a spaceship on the same mission. The lone passenger is Rocky (voice of James Ortiz), a faceless rock-like alien with five arms who comminates via musical chords through vents in his head.
With a shared sense of purpose, the unlikely duo form a friendship that just might save both their worlds.
The script by Drew Goddard, who also adapted Andy Weir’s “The Martian” for film, simplifies and streamlines the scientific source material, but never dumbs it down. Fans of Weir’s novel will get a dose of Grace’s scientific process, but it is the film’s approach to tried-and-true concepts of cooperation, cross cultural understanding and sacrifice that are at the forefront.
The back-and-forth between Grace and Rocky, often jocular but occasionally profound, lies at the film’s heart as an uplifting antidote for today’s polarized world.
“Fist my bump,” Rocky says. “Fist-bump,” Grace responds. “It’s just ‘fist-bump.’” It’s a funny back-and-forth, but their budding relationship is cemented with Rocky’s simple, Yoda-like pronouncement, “You are friend now.”
It’s a sci fi story rich in warmth that works, despite one of the main players resembling a rotisserie chicken made of stone.
As an everyman who has heroism thrust upon him, Gosling is the ideal leading man for co-directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller. He generates chemistry with the above-mentioned stone alien puppet and brings humor—plus a knack for physical comedy—and heart to keep things interesting even when the movie’s 156-minute runtime slows in the mid-section.
The last name “Grace” carries some symbolic heft in “Project Hail Mary,” stationing the character as a last chance for salvation but it is the movie itself that delivers grace in the form of uplift, compassion and a sense of wonder. It’s the kind of film will make you feel better when you leave the theatre than you felt on the way in.
A love letter to the folks who jeopardize their lives so actors can look cool taking risks on the silver screen, “The Fall Guy,” based on the Lee Majors’s TV show of the same name, is an action romance that is easy to like, but hard to love.
Ryan Gosling is Colt Seavers, stuntman for pompous Hollywood action star Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). He’s jumped out of tall buildings, crashed countless cars, been lit on fire and jumped through who knows how many breakaway windows in the name of making Ryderlook brave on screen and catching the eye if camera person Jody Moreno (Emily Blunt).
When a stunt goes horribly wrong, Seavers disappears, leaving the business and his relationship with Jody behind.
A year of isolation and recuperation later he goes back to work. But this time around the stunts aren’t the most dangerous part of the job. Moreno, now a director of a big budget action flick called “Metal Storm,” is pissed with him and to make matters worse, Ryder has gone missing mid shoot.
“The Fall Guy” delivers a crowd-pleasing mix of action, romance and high wattage performances from Gosling and Blunt. It is their chemistry that makes this as much fun as it is.
Set to a recurring musical motif of KISS’s “I Was Made for Loving You Baby,” their scenes provide good, old fashioned star power, with charisma to burn. The twinkle in Gosling’s eye, even as he is repeatedly brutalized on and off set, is a perfect foil for Blunt’s warmth and dead-on comic timing.
Together they help smooth over the film’s rough patches. A bit overlong, it gets unnecessarily convoluted in its last act, and loses some of its charm, but the whiz bang action and funny moments—like a fellow stuntman who helps Severs beat up the baddies as he calls out the various fighting styles from movies like “The Bourne Identity”—showcase what the movie does best, and that is deliver a sugar rush.
A cotton candy confection, light and airy, “The Fall Guy” is a bit of fun that leaves you with a sweet taste in your mouth, but not much else.
Those expecting “Barbie,” the new battle-of-the-sexes fantasy starring Margot Robbie as the titular doll, to be a two-hour advertisement for Mattel may be shocked to discover that it is actually an esoteric movie about what it means to be human. It’s Existential Crisis Barbie!
“Since the beginning of time,” intones narrator Helen Mirren, “since the first little girl ever existed, there have been dolls. But the dolls were always and forever baby dolls, until…” Barbie came along.
By design, the blonde plastic doll with arched feet and optimistic outlook, first introduced in 1959, could be and do anything. “Thanks to Barbie, all problems of inequity and feminism have been solved.”
At least that’s what “stereotypical” Barbie (Robbie) believes.
She lives in the fluorescent Barbieland, a feminine nirvana where “every day is the best day ever. So was yesterday, and so is tomorrow, and every day from now until forever.”
Barbies, like Robbie’s Barbie, and doctor Barbie (Hari Nef), Barbie with a Nobel Prize in physics (Emma Mackey), mermaid Barbie (Dua Lipa), Supreme Court Justice Barbie (Ana Cruz Kayne), president Barbie (Issa Rae), among many others, live in Dreamhouses, without a care in the world.
Along for the ride are Barbie’s platonic friends, the Kens (played by Kinglsey Ben-Adir, Scott Evans, Simu Liu, and Ncuti Gatwa). Barbie may have a great day every day, but lovesick Beach Ken (Ryan Gosling), only has a great day when Barbie looks at him.
It’s mostly all sunshine and dance parties in the candy-colored Barbieland, but lately Barbie is troubled. “Do you ever think about dying?” she wonders aloud.
Just as disturbing, after a fall, her arched feet, perfectly suited to the extra high heels she always wears, have gone flat. “Some things have happened that might be related,” she says. “Cold shower. Falling off my roof. And my heels are on the ground.”
Turns out, there is a rift in the time and space continuum between the doll and the real world. Barbieland’s elder, Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon), advises Barbie that the only way to resolve her creeping ennui is to visit to the real world and find the little girl who is playing with her. The two are inexplicably intertwined. If the girl is sad, it could be rubbing off on Barbie.
“I’ll be back in no time with perfect feet,” she says, “and it will be like nothing happened.”
Transported to Venice Beach, the real world isn’t exactly what Barbie, and Ken who eagerly tagged along, expected. “No one rests until that Barbie is back in the box,” orders the Mattel CEO (Will Ferrell).
Unlike the doll that inspired the movie, “Barbie” has a big, beating heart. A study in what it means to be alive, to be a woman, feminism, patriarchy and toxic masculinity, it is a hilarious and humanist social satire that may win a world record for the use of the word “patriarchy” on film.
Director Greta Gerwig, who co-wrote the script along with Noah “The Squid and the Whale” Baumbach, takes a maximalist approach in creating Barbie’s thermonuclearly pink world. It’s a perky and playful take on her life, like a Barbie Dreamhome brought to magical life. It leans heavily into Mattel lore and is sure to stoke feelings of nostalgia for Barbie-heads. “I’m the Barbie you think of when someone says ‘Barbie,’” she says.
But as Barbie leaves behind the superficial life she knew before, her head fills with something unfamiliar; a flood of feelings. Her exposure to subjugation and objectification in a world opposite of the feminist utopia of Barbieland—“Basically everything men do in your world,” she says, “women do in mine.”—has a profound effect on her self-identification. She may still dress like “Hot Skatin’ Barbie” but her outlook has changed, she now craves meaning in her life, to understand who she really is.
Robbie brings breathes life into Barbie’s journey in a fully committed performance that is often as hilarious as it heartfelt. In a more comedic role, Gosling steals the picture as Ken, a soppy, dim-witted guy whose exploration of misogyny takes up much of the film’s last half.
“Barbie” is not your typical summer blockbuster, or your regular toy-based movie. It is both those things, of course, but it somehow finds a way to push back and be its own plastic and political thing. It has both style and substance, and while its story may get overactive and muddled in its last reel, Gerwig’s point of view on gender roles and the way that women are treated in society pulls few punches.
“The Gray Man,” a new shoot ‘em up starring Ryan Gosling, and now streaming on Netflix after a quick trip to theatres, overwhelms the senses with an underwhelming story.
The story begins in 2003 with convicted murderer Court Gentry (Gosling) accepting a job offer from a CIA operative named Donald Fitzroy (Billy Bob Thornton) to live in the “gray zone” in return for a commuted sentence. He will be part of the top-secret Sierra program, trained to be a “ghost,” live in the margins and assassinate people who need killing. He’ll be the kind of guy you send in when you can’t send anyone else in. “Take all the pain that got you here,” says Fitzroy, “turn it around, and make it useful.”
Cut to 18 years later. Gentry, now known simply as Six, because “077 was taken,” he deadpans, is on assignment in Bangkok. On the orders of CIA honcho Denny Carmichael (Regé-Jean Page), he’s there to assassinate an asset and retrieve an encrypted drive. When Six refuses to pull the trigger because there is a child in the way—he’s not all bad!—things quickly spiral out of control.
With the help of CIA agent Dani Miranda (Ana de Armas), Six gets the disc, but, in doing so, becomes a target himself. Turns out the disc contains info proof of unsanctioned bombings and assassinations ordered by Carmichael, in his bid to turn the CIA into his own personal army. Carmichael wants the disc destroyed and to eliminate any traces of the only people skilled enough to expose him, the Sierra program.
But how do you kill the CIA’s most deadly assassin? You hire morally compromised independent contractor Lloyd Hansen (Chris Evans) to “put a Grade A hit” on Six. To lure Six into his web, Lloyd kidnaps the closest thing Six has to family, Fitzroy and his young niece (Julia Butters). “You want to make an omelet,” says Lloyd, “you gotta kill some people.”
“The Gray Man” is a big-budget, globe-trotting adventure that makes up in exotic locations and gunplay what it lacks in intrigue and interesting characters. Filtered through the endlessly restless camera of Anthony and Joe Russo, the movie has all the elements normally associated with high end action movies. Fists fly. By times it is a bullet ballet. Things explode. There are tough guy one liners (“Are you OK?” Miranda asks after one city-block destroying action sequence. “My ego is a little bruised,” Six snorts.), double-dealing and death around every corner.
So why isn’t it more exciting?
The story is fairly simple. It’s the kind of superkiller on-the-run we’ve seen before in everything from “John Wick” and “Nobody” to almost any Jason Statham movie, but it isn’t the simplicity or familiarity that sinks “The Gray Man.” It’s the overkill. And I don’t just mean the unusually high body count. It’s the more-is-more Michael Bay by-way-of-the-“Bourne”-franchise approach that overwhelms. The story is constantly on the move, jumping from country to country, from time frame to time frame, never pausing long enough to allow us to get to know, or care, about the characters.
Six is meant to be an enigma, and while Gosling can convincingly pull off the action and deliver a line, but he’s basically unknowable, a stoic man with a number for a name. His relationship with Fitzroy’s niece gives him some humanity, but he remains a dour presence in the center of the film.
At least Evans, as the “trash ‘stached” sociopath, appears to be having a good time. Nobody else does. That could be because there are so many characters, most of which are underused or underdeveloped. No amount of fancy camerawork could make Carmichael interesting. As the big bad meanie at the heart of all the trouble, he’s a pantomime character with only one gear.
More interesting are Indian superstar Dhanush playing a killer who values honor over cash, in his striking debut in a Hollywood film, and de Armas who does what she can with an underwritten part.
“The Gray Man” is big, loud popcorn summer entertainment that spends much time setting itself up for a sequel, time that would have been better spent creating suspense.
We all know how “First Man” will end. No surprises there. What may be surprising is the portrayal of its titular character, American astronaut and hero Neil Armstrong. It’s a small story about a giant leap.
Focussing on the years 1961 to 1968 “First Man” introduces us to Armstrong (Ryan Gosling) as an engineer and envelope-pushing pilot. When an X-15 test flight gives him a glimpse of space he becomes obsessed with going further. When his three-year-old daughter dies of a brain tumour he turns his grief inward, throwing himself at work. Becoming a NASA Gemini Project astronaut over the next seven years he fulfils the dream of President Kennedy 1962, “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth,” speech. Alongside Buzz Aldrin (Corey Stoll) and Jim Lovell (Pablo Schreiber), he begins a journey that will take him to the moon and back.
“First Man” is based on one of mankind’s greatest achievements and yet feels muted on the big screen. Deliberately paced, it nails the bone-rattling intensity of the early flights, the anxiety felt by the loved ones left behind as the astronauts risk everything to beat the Russians to the moon, and yet it never exactly takes flight.
Part history lesson, part simulator experience, it doesn’t deliver the characters necessary to feel like a complete experience.
Gosling is at his most restrained here as an analytical man who loves his family but is so stoic he answers his son’s question, “Do you think you’re coming back from the moon,” with an answer better suited to the boardroom than the dinner table. “We have every confidence in the mission,” he says. “There are risks but we have every reason to believe we’ll be coming back.” He is buttoned-down and yet not completely detached. His daughter’s memory never strays from his mind, even if he never discusses her death with his wife, played by an underused Claire Foy. Gosling embraces Armstrong’s fortitude but has stripped the character down to the point where he is little more than a distant man of few words.
“First Man” contains some thrilling moments but for the most part is like the man himself, stoic and understated.
