Listen to the whole thing HERE! (Starts at 25:23)
Watch the whole thing HERE!
Watch the whole thing HERE!
CAST: Ryan Reynolds, Kenneth Branagh, Marcin Dorociński, Maria Bakalova, David Morse. Written and directed by Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley.
REVIEW: “Mayday” is a throwback to odd couple flicks like “Red Heat” that mixed big stars with Cold War concerns and comedy.
Set in 1987, the movie stars Ryan Reynolds as U.S. pilot Lieutenant Troy “Assassin” Kelly sent on a top-secret SR-71 mission over Soviet Russia. When a midair collision forces him to pull the ejection cord, he lands, alone and injured, in the Russian wilderness.
He wakes up in the cabin of Nikolai Ustinov (Kenneth Branagh), an ex-KGB agent whose home is decorated with American flags, Coors posters and a well-worn VHS copy of “Top Gun.”
“This may shock you,” he tells Kelly. “I admire your country very much. Your democracy, your culture, and your films, and your food. I have never had McDonald’s, but I suspect I would love it.”
With the Kelly’s promise of American citizenship for Ustinov and his daughter (Maria Bakalova), the unlikely duo find a way to work together to find a way to thaw the Cold War.
“Mayday” may have two above-the-title stars, but make no mistake, this is Kenneth Branagh’s movie. Dusting off his “Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit”/”Tenet” Russian accent, his lovable but lethal Nikolai steals every scene.
There are lots of action scenes—from the high-flying ejection scene and a chase through Moscow in an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile launcher to a zero-gravity airplane cabin fight scene and a wild train jump—that feel reminiscent of the 1980s movies that clearly inspired directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein.
But despite all the action, “Mayday” wouldn’t be nearly as entertaining if not for Branagh’s comedic performance. He makes up for Reynolds’s one note, same-old performance and the film’s lack of an interesting villain. Even when he has to mouth some gag worthy dialogue—”You have found so many ways to fight us, but you never take the time to get to know us.”—he still dominates.
SYNOPSIS: A likeable documentary about a likeable subject, “John Candy: I Like Me” is a straightforward look at a comedian whose work is still entertaining audiences three decades after his passing.
CAST: John Candy, Dan Aykroyd, Catherine O’Hara, Steve Martin, Tom Hanks, Martin Short, Eugene Levy, and Macaulay Culkin. Directed by Colin Hanks.
REVIEW: Martin Short told “John Candy: I Like Me” documentary producer Ryan Reynolds and director Colin Hanks (whose famous father co-starred with Candy in “Splash”), they would not be able to find anyone with anything bad to say about John Candy. Short was right. Everyone in the doc speaks glowingly of Candy, his generosity of spirit and luminous talent, but this isn’t a straight up hagiography.
Those nearest and dearest to the late comic actor, like his children Jennifer and Chris, widow Rose, Steve Martin, Tom Hanks, Martin Short, Eugene Levy, Macaulay Culkin, Dan Aykroyd and Catherine O’Hara, paint a colorful portrait of a larger-than-life character who battled weight issues and an anxiety disorder.
Thirty years after his passing on a film shoot in Durango, Mexico, Candy’s work remains as funny and endearing as it was when first released. Hanks’s film offers up copious evidence in the form of clips from “SCTV,” “Uncle Buck,” “Splash,” “Spaceballs,” “Home Alone,” “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” (it’s a line in the latter that gives this movie its name: “I like me,” Candy says as Del Griffith. “My wife likes me.”) and many others, and while it’s lovey to revisit those moments, it’s the picture of Candy off screen that compels.
New interviews with school friends, family and colleagues like Dan Aykroyd, Catherine O’Hara, Martin Short and Steve Martin tell the tale. From growing up in a working-class Toronto family, to his father’s passing of heart disease at age 35 when John was four years old, to putting his dreams of football stardom aside after a knee injury to discovering acting in college, we learn how each of these events shaped the trajectory of his life and career from the people who were there with him.
Everyone describes him as a charismatic character, the first one to pick up the tab in the early days, even though they were all making the same money. He was a people pleaser, but as Conan O’Brien points out, “The hazard of this business is that it’s very unhealthy for people pleasers.”
More up-close-and-personal are the remembrances of his Chris, Jennifer and Rose. They provide an intimate, behind-the-scenes glimpse of a man who, as his daughter says, “took care of people” but didn’t necessarily take care of himself. He liked a drink, a cigarette and, as anxiety entered his life, became convinced he would die early, just as his father had.
Ultimately, “John Candy: I Like Me” is a straightforward, heartfelt documentary with a bittersweet ending. Candy passed at age 43, but the wealth of material he left behind, the TV shows and movies, still entertains, three decades after his passing.
SYNOPSIS: A likeable documentary about a likeable subject, “John Candy: I Like Me” is a straightforward look at a comedian whose work is still entertaining audiences three decades after his passing.
CAST: John Candy, Dan Aykroyd, Catherine O’Hara, Steve Martin, Tom Hanks, Martin Short, Eugene Levy, and Macaulay Culkin. Directed by Colin Hanks.
REVIEW: Martin Short told “John Candy: I Like Me” documentary producer Ryan Reynolds and director Colin Hanks (whose famous father co-starred with Candy in “Splash”), they would not be able to find anyone with anything bad to say about John Candy. Short was right. Everyone in the doc speaks glowingly of Candy, his generosity of spirit and luminous talent, but this isn’t a straight up hagiography.
Those nearest and dearest to the late comic actor, like his children Jennifer and Chris, widow Rose, Steve Martin, Tom Hanks, Martin Short, Eugene Levy, Macaulay Culkin, Dan Aykroyd and Catherine O’Hara, paint a colorful portrait of a larger-than-life character who battled weight issues and an anxiety disorder.
Thirty years after his passing on a film shoot in Durango, Mexico, Candy’s work remains as funny and endearing as it was when first released. Hanks’s film offers up copious evidence in the form of clips from “SCTV,” “Uncle Buck,” “Splash,” “Spaceballs,” “Home Alone,” “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” (it’s a line in the latter that gives this movie its name: “I like me,” Candy says as Del Griffith. “My wife likes me.”) and many others, and while it’s lovey to revisit those moments, it’s the picture of Candy off screen that compels.
New interviews with school friends, family and colleagues like Dan Aykroyd, Catherine O’Hara, Martin Short and Steve Martin tell the tale. From growing up in a working-class Toronto family, to his father’s passing of heart disease at age 35 when John was four years old, to putting his dreams of football stardom aside after a knee injury to discovering acting in college, we learn how each of these events shaped the trajectory of his life and career from the people who were there with him.
Everyone describes him as a charismatic character, the first one to pick up the tab in the early days, even though they were all making the same money. He was a people pleaser, but as Conan O’Brien points out, “The hazard of this business is that it’s very unhealthy for people pleasers.”
More up-close-and-personal are the remembrances of his Chris, Jennifer and Rose. They provide an intimate, behind-the-scenes glimpse of a man who, as his daughter says, “took care of people” but didn’t necessarily take care of himself. He liked a drink, a cigarette and, as anxiety entered his life, became convinced he would die early, just as his father had.
Ultimately, “John Candy: I Like Me” is a straightforward, heartfelt documentary with a bittersweet ending. Candy passed at age 43, but the wealth of material he left behind, the TV shows and movies, still entertains, three decades after his passing.
I go to the vault to unearth a vintage interview I did with Wolverine himself, Hugh Jackman. We don’t talk superheroes, instead, the actor gets personal, talking about the projects that worked, the ones that didn’t and what drives him. “When I started acting I was the dunce of the class,” he says.
Listen to the whole thing HERE!
SYNOPSIS: Six years after the events of “Deadpool 2” comes “Deadpool & Wolverine,” a new superhero movie starring Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman, and now playing in theatres.
Now working as a used car salesman, Wade Wilson (Reynolds) has retired his wisecracking mercenary Deadpool persona. His life is up-ended when the Time Variance Authority (TVA) enlists him to undertake a new mission with another reluctant superhero Wolverine (Jackman).
“Wade, you are special,” says TVA agent Mr. Paradox (Macfadyen). “This is your chance to be a hero among heroes.”
CAST: Ryan Reynolds, Hugh Jackman, Rhett Reese, Emma Corrin, Matthew Macfadyen, Paul Wernick, Zeb Wells. Directed by Shawn Levy.
REVIEW: If the word bombastic took steroids it might come close to describing the R-rated “Deadpool & Wolverine.” Vulgar, gory with a “whiff of necrophilia” and irreverence to burn, it’s a showcase for the bromance stylings of its stars, who pull out all the stops to lovingly put a cap on Fox’s Marvel movies. “Disney bought Fox,” Deadpool explains, “[so there’s] that whole boring rights issue.”
At the film’s start, it takes some doing to explain Wolverine/Logan’s return from the dead—“Nothing will bring you back to life faster than a big bag of Marvel cash,” Deadpool says to Wolverine’s remains.—but once that convoluted (but action-packed) set-up is out of the way, the film barrels through plot with both fists flailing.
Before, during and after the big, bloody action sequences the movie cheekily blurs the line between on-screen and off-screen life. Deadpool obnoxiously calls Logan “Hugh,” and even takes a jab at jackman’s recent divorce. Later he leeringly mentions “Gossip Girl,” the show that made Reynolds’s wife, Blake Lively, famous.
That fourth-wall-breaking riffing suits Reynolds’s trademark delivery, and sets the self-aware “Deadpool” movies apart from other superhero films. ““Fox killed him,” Deadpool says of Wolverine. “Disney brought him back. They’re gonna make him do this till he’s 90!”
Humor has a place in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), in Tony Stark’s one-liners, in Taika Waititi era “Thor” movies and “Guardians of the Galaxy” to name a handful of examples, but none of those subversively poke fun at superhero movies and themselves in the way “Deadpool & Wolverine” does. What other MCU movie would self-deprecatingly admit that the characters are entering the multiverse “at a bit of a low point”?
Jackman mostly plays it straight, acting as a soundboard for “the Merc with the Mouth’s” one liners. Filled with regret over past events, the self-loathing Wolverine is a hard drinking mutant, in full comic book costume, who reluctantly embraces heroism.
Wolverine provides the story’s heart as a counterpoint to Deadpool’s constant quipping.
Both characters may be physically indestructible, but their psyches aren’t. Both are tortured, and when the movie isn’t gushing blood or cracking wise, it’s about lost souls and their search for redemption. That story chord is a grace note that often gets lost amid the film’s cacophonic action, but is a welcome relief from the constant clatter.
A love letter to the now by-gone Fox era of superhero films, “Deadpool & Wolverine” ushers in a new epoch overstuffed with overkill, cameos, Easter eggs, juvenile humour and a villain who reads minds by thrusting their fingers into their victim’s heads. It’s fun fan service, and a good time at the movies, even if the experience of watching it sometimes feels like being on the inside of a blender set to puree.
LOGLINE: In the live-action/animated fantasy comedy “IF,” a tragedy gives teenager Bea (Cailey Fleming) the power to see the imaginary friends—“IFs” for short—left behind as their real life friends age and mature. When she discovers her adult neighbor Cal (Ryan Reynolds) has the same gift, they work together to reconnect adults with their childhood Ifs.
CAST: John Krasinski (who also directs), Cailey Fleming, Ryan Reynolds, Fiona Shaw, Alan Kim, Liza Colón-Zayas, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Louis Gossett Jr., Steve Carell,
REVIEW: “IF” is a contemplative story about the importance of friends, imaginary or not, experiencing grief and loss and the power of imagination. Although told from a twelve-year-old point of view, it is more an exercise in wistful nostalgia than kid’s adventure. Writer and director John Krasinski has a lot on his mind, and infuses the story with an unexpectedly healthy dose of melancholy.
The storytelling is a little bumpy, and the pace a bit slow, but it packs an emotional punch as Bea comes to understand her life through interactions with the IFs and their humans. Fleming’s performance cuts through, standing apart from the flashier IF characters (voiced by a-listers like Steve Carell, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Louis Gossett Jr., Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Awkwafina and Bradley Cooper) and even the perennial scene-stealer Reynolds, who hands in his least Ryan Reynoldsy performance in years.
Part “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” part Spielbergian childhood drama, “IF” is a tad darker than the trailers suggest, and tries a little too hard to strum the heartstrings but as it leans into sentimentality it pays off with a message of the importance connection.
