For many of us Queen Elizabeth is a face on a stamp, someone we see every day on our money. For Sarah Gadon, the Canadian actress who plays H.R.H. in A Royal Night Out, the figurehead is “an icon and it is really always kind of difficult to humanize someone who is embalmed in icon status.”
The Dracula Untold star plays the Queen before she took the throne, when she was a 20-year-old headstrong woman known to friends as Lillibet. It’s May 8, 1945, VE Day in England, the biggest party London has ever seen and Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret (Bel Powley), or P1 and P2 as the princess sisters are called, want in on the action.
“For six years we’ve been cloistered,” says Princess Elizabeth. “Like nuns,” adds Princess Margaret.
“I fell in love so much with this script,” says Gadon. “I was charmed by the story and its portrayal of her at that point in her life. It was this beautiful coming of age story about this woman faced with her future. That is something I really related to. That feeling of when you are growing up and you have all these ideas about the world, all these ideologies you are associated with and then you are confronted with reality and you have to decide for yourself what you want. I thought that was an interesting entry point.”
The slick talking Liz manages to convince Mom (Emily Watson as the Queen Mum) and Dad (Rupert Everett as King George) to let them mingle with the real people, listen to the King’s victory speech and report back.
Royal Night Out is part royal romcom, part urban adventure, and only loosely based on real events. In truth the princesses went out, accompanied by an entourage of 16 people and were home by curfew.
“Julian Jarrold, the director, was so conscious of what he wanted the tone of this film to be,” says Gadon. “We all knew it wasn’t a biopic, and none of us wanted to make that film. It is very much a fantasy, very much an adventure chase film. Being more North American in my approach to the part, my tendencies were to indulge the humour and indulge in the slapstick moments. Julian held the reins tight and really captured the reserve of Elizabeth. He really walked that line between going off too far in either direction. The film has very real feelings but a lot of tongue-in-cheek.”
To capture Queen Elizabeth’s posh accent Gadon studied footage of the princess at that age, the movies Roman Holiday and Brief Encounter and worked with dialect coach Brett Tyne. “Brett worked with all of us,” she says. “It wasn’t just me. She worked with Bel, Emily and Rupert because even though they’re British they certainly don’t walk around talking like that.”
The dialogue coaching worked. A Royal Night Out is already open in England and Gadon notes, “The reviews were great, very generous. And most people had no idea I was Canadian! It was exciting for me.
“I was really, really nervous. To have it received so warmly was such a relief. Now, with the North American release, I’m like, ‘I’m good! I got the stamp of approval from the Brits!’”
“For six years we’ve been cloistered,” says Princess Elizabeth (Sarah Gadon).
“Like nuns,” adds Princess Margaret (Bel Powley).
Its May 8, 1945, VE Day in England, the biggest party London has ever seen and P1 and P2, as the princess sisters are called, want in on the action.
The slick talking Liz manages to convince Mom (Emily Watson as the Queen Mum) and Dad (Rupert Everett as King George) to let them mingle with the real people, listen to the King’s victory speech and report back. Early on they manager to dodge their chaperones, embarking on what Lizzie would later call “the most extraordinary night of my life.” The princesses get separated early on with the naïve Margaret on the prowl for fun, stumbling through an east London boozecan, a wild celebration in Trafalgar Square and a fistfight on a dance floor. “It’s all getting a bit fraught,” she says. Elizabeth, the responsible sister, spends her night trying to catch up with Margaret, aided by Jack (Jack Reynor), a cockney airman who has no idea he’s escorting royalty.
In this case truth is duller than fiction. “A Royal Night Out” is VERY loosely based on real events. In truth the princesses went out, accompanied by an entourage of 16 people and were home by curfew. The movie livens things up with a healthy dose of slapstick and gentle humour. It’s part royal rom com, part urban adventure. Imagine an English “After Hours” without the suicide, murder or treachery. Instead it’s a good-natured romp with some laughs and a splash of romantic tension. There’s no real drama—I was always quite sure Mags and Liz would be OK by the time the end credits rolled—in this slight story but Powley’s hilariously deadpan take on the clueless Margaret coupled with the charisma that pokes through Gadon’s posh demeanour makes for an enjoyable footnote of a movie about a historical footnote.
Read Richard quoted in a recent Canadian Press article by Victoria Ahearn!
“As film critic Richard Crouse puts it, the definition of what it is to be a movie star has changed in the social media age. Some major celebrities are no longer the big box-office draws they used to be and they’ve had to put more effort into the promotional circuit, such as late-night TV appearances.
“It used to be that you’d announce a Tom Cruise movie and people would be lined up around the block to see it, and that no longer holds true unless the movie happens to be called ‘Mission: Impossible’ and then people will go see it with him in it,” says Crouse, a journalist and author who has two syndicated weekly columns in the Metro newspaper and a syndicated Saturday afternoon radio show on Newstalk 1010 in Toronto…” Read the whole thing HERE!
Popular culture has not been kind to bloodsuckers. No, I don’t mean agents. I mean vampires. For more than a century Dracula and his undead brothers and sisters were viewed with equal parts fear and loathing. Only seen under the cloak of night they were the greatest villains of Horrorwood. But lately liberties have been taken with Bram Stoker’s myth. Now they dazzle in the daylight and drink synthetic blood. There’s even a new movie, “Dracula Untold,” that casts fangface as a romantic action hero.
It’s enough to make a vampire purist go batty.
In the new film Transylvanian Prince Vlad Tepes (Luke Evans), a man so fond of stakes and staking he earned the nickname Vlad the Impaler. has turned a new leaf. He’s now a family man who dropped “The Impaler” part off his resume and lives a quiet life with his wife Mirena (Sarah Gadon) and son (Art Parkinson).
Eastern Europe is under siege, however, and Vlad is forced to do almost anything to save his family and his kingdom from the invading Turkish mobs. Anything and everything, and since this is the 15th century in a Peter Jackson-esque world where supernatural creatures (Charles Dance) live in caves, he makes a Faustian deal with an ancient master vampire in exchange for the awesome power to command bats and vanquish his enemies. “Men do not fear swords,” Vlad says, “they fear monsters.”
The old jagged-tooth ghoul gives him “dominion over the night and all its creatures” along with self-healing—“That’s useful,” Vlad says.—and other vampiric attributes that will help him annihilate the interlopers. Best of all after three days he’ll turn back into a human… that is if he can resist the overwhelming urge to drink human blood.
“Dracula Untold” is a stylish reimagining of… something. It’s not the Dracula myth, despite what the title says. Let’s just call it “Vampire Untold” or “Dracula Nah-uh” and dismiss the idea that its in anyway Bela Lugosi approved.
“Dracula Untold” is bigger and louder than any Dracula movie to come before it—Vlad doesn’t just turn into a bat, he turns into a colony of bats—and contains an arch melodramatic feel that wouldn’t be out of place in a Hammer horror, but it’s not particularly scary. The real horror here is the muddy visuals in the action scenes that often make it difficult to see who is impaling who. Dracula may live in a world of darkness but apparently so does director Gary Shore. It’s too bad because there are some nice visual flourishes. For instance a fight scene shot through the reflection of a sword’s blade is inventive and eye catching.
“Dracula Untold” doesn’t totally suck despite playing like the set-up to the inevitable modern day sequel they pitch in the film’s coda. Luke Evan (he of “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug” and “Fast & Furious 6”) gives Dracula something new—vulnerability—and Sarah Gadon makes Bella’s love for Edward look like the high school crush it really was. Vampire fans might not find it bloodsuckery enough, but fans of the high style action of “300” may enjoy.
“Enemy,” an art house thriller from director Denis Villeneuve and actor Jake Gyllenhaal, is an intriguing head scratcher that plays more like an existential puzzle than a traditional narrative.
When we first meet him the “Brokeback Mountain” star plays a history professor named Adam Bell. When not lecturing in class, he leads a normal, if somewhat repetitive life with his girlfriend Mary (Mélanie Laurent). One night while watching a rented movie he is astonished to see someone who looks exactly like him on screen.
After some research he discovers the actor’s name is Anthony St. Claire (Gyllenhaal) and that he lives in Toronto’s west end. Spooky similarities arise. Both have beautiful blonde significant others—Sarah Gadon plays Helen, Anthony’s six-months pregnant wife—but there’s more. Both even have a scar on their chests.
Adam and his doppelganger have completely opposite personalities, but their lives become intertwined when Anthony becomes interested in Mary and duo struggles to discover what connection they have.
“Enemy” is the kind of movie that, if it grabs you, you’ll want to see it twice to try and make sense of some of the more narratively opaque sections. If the slow build of existential dread doesn’t grab you, however, one viewing will be more than enough.
But, as Hunter S. Thompson used to say, “Buy the ticket, take the ride.” In other words “Enemy” is a challenge, a film that revels in its confounding story. Like Polanski on downers, it’s willfully difficult, taking the audience down a rabbit hole deep into the psyche of these unrelated twins. It’s a long strange journey with many rewards for the attentive viewer.
One of those rewards is Gyllenhaal’s interesting and varied work. He plays two parts of one person’s personality, but creates fully formed individual characters that, even though they are identical looking, are much different in the way they tick.
“Enemy” is stylish and sinister (with a big tasty dollop of mystery on the side) that will keep audiences guessing long after they’ve left the theatre.
“The Nut Job” is chock full of the standard animated fare. There’s cute furry animals, a not-so-scary-villain, some slapstick and messages for kids about sharing and teamwork.
Unfortunately there’s also a noisy, nutty story that left me feeling like an assaulted peanut.
Think that was a bad peanut pun? Wait till you see this movie. Or not.
“The Nut Job” begins on a downer note. The animals of Liberty Park don’t have enough food for the winter and the selfish actions of Surly Squirrel (voiced by Will Arnett) has pretty much guaranteed they’ll starve once the weather turns cold.
Raccoon (Liam Neeson), the park patriarch banishes Surly but soon the mischievous rodent involves the park’s citizens—wannabe hero Greyson (Brendan Fraser) and sexy squirrel Andie (Katherine Heigl)—in a dangerous scheme that will either save them or kill them—robbing a nut store owned by some Damon Runyonesque mobsters.
“The Nut Job” is an original story that feels Frankensteined together from other, better kid’s movies. Echoes of “Ice Age” style slapstick and “Ratatouille” situations and even “Animal Farm” ethos reverberate throughout. I’ll give the filmmakers credit for adding in the gangster twist and some jazzy music but it’s the characters themselves that really disappoint.
To give you an idea of the amount of thought put into the characters, let’s start with their names. Neeson’s raccoon character is inventively named Raccoon, the rat sidekick is Buddy (Robert Tinkler) and the surly squirrel is, of course, called Surly.
Different names wouldn’t have made this a better movie, but the literal names display a lack of inventiveness that permeates the entire film. The animation is fine, but the rest—the story, the voice work, the action—feels as uninspired as peanut butter without jam.
There is very little joy, almond or otherwise, in “The Nut Job.”
From top to bottom, left to right, Richard on carpet, Paul Gross, Rick Mercer and The Dirties director Matt Johnson. Richard’s other red carpet guests included Jian Ghomeshi, Sarah Gadon, Kim Cattrall, Don McKellar, Katie Bolan, Bruce McDonald, Jennifer Baichwal, Edward Burtynsky, Nicholas de Pencier, Noah co-directors Patrick Cederberg and Walter Woodman, the F-Word writer Elan Mastai and Dr. Cabbie star Vinay Virmani.
Last year Robert Pattinson, Paul Giamatti and homegrown stars Emily Hampshire, Sarah Gadon and Kevin Durand gathered in Toronto to shoot Cosmopolis, a dark drama for director David Cronenberg.
On Monday the cast reunited with their director for a press conference I hosted at a downtown Toronto hotel in advance of the movie opening in theatres on Friday.
The tone of the conference was light, and the camaraderie of the cast obvious. Here are some of the highlights:
“I don’t know what I was more excited about,” said Hampshire, “having David bend over me and show Robert how to get a prostate exam, or Rob bending over me and getting one.”
“You don’t have to choose,” quipped Cronenberg.
Cronenberg also offered up some tongue-in-cheek advice for filmmakers. “I use a little Apple program called iDirector. A little green light goes on if it is OK, or a red light if you need to do another take. It’s pretty straightforward. You can all use it.”
Later the director commented on why he wanted his actors to speak the lines of the script exactly as written. “I don’t want the actors to be screenwriters,” he said, “they’re not designed for that.”
“There were no rewrites,” Pattinson chimes in.
“Normally that is the first thing you think about as an actor. And you are so used to just changing it the whole time, on every single movie, that with this, once you suddenly got to the idea that you are not changing anything, the script is fine, it’s you that are the problem, at least you knew one thing.”
Pattinson has a tour-de-force scene at the end of the film, a 22-page two-hander opposite Oscar nominee Paul Giamatti. The Sideways star took a quick break from shooting Rock of Ages in Miami to appear in Cosmopolis.
“Fortunately the other movie wasn’t terribly demanding on me,” Giamatti joked. “It was a musical that I was doing and I didn’t have to sing or dance. I just had to show up and crack jokes.”
“I was panicked about it,” he says of his quick turnaround in Toronto.
“This thing was intimidating. The length and the language. So I bothered everyone on the other movie to read this thing with me. Fortunately Malin Ackerman made a great Rob Pattinson.
“She was fantastic. I was very disappointed when actually I got here and it was Rob.”
Brandon Cronenberg is a new filmmaker with a famous last name. While he may have taken the celebrated Cronenberg family fascination with body horror to a genetic level in “Antiviral,” he also proves himself to be an exciting new voice in dark cinema.
“Antiviral” is the story of Syd March (Caleb Landry Jones), a technician at Lucas Clinic, a lab that sells celebrity diseases to obsessed fans. For a price devotees of Hannah Geist (Sarah Gadon) and others can become infected with actual cells from their idols. Herpes, skin flaps, the flu. You name it. Syd also supplies an underground market by smuggling copyrighted viruses out of the clinic in his own body. Soon, however, his bug bootlegging catches up with him when he ingests a deadly disease.
“Antiviral” works both as speculative fiction and satire.
Cronenberg creates a strange world that looks much like ours, but exists only in his imagination… for now. It’s a fame-obsessed world where celebrity operations are top news stories and people know the intimate details of their favorite star’s lives. It’s taken to extremes, but just to the other side of extreme. “Celebrities are not people,” the movie tells us, “they are mass hallucinations.” Tellingly we’re never told why the movie’s celebrities are famous, we’re just meant to accept that they are; that the hallucination of fame is enough. Rings true today. Just ask Kim Kardashian.
Satire blends with horror to create some of the film’s lasting images. There’s a butcher shop that literally feeds the public’s need to consume their favorite stars. The Sweeney Todd-esque butcher even has a celebrity cell garden where he grows “celebrity cell steaks.” Imagine a New and Improved Soylent Green with 50% More Celebrity! There are some grotesque images blended into these sequences, but the most horrifying is its plausibility; that this reflects our increasingly rabid celebrity culture, just tilted 180 degrees.
There is a cold, clinical feel to “Antiviral,” that recalls Cronenberg senior. It is, I guess, Brandon’s birthright, but it occasionally obscures the more humorous aspects of the story—celebrity ringworm for your dog, anyone?
“Antiviral” is strange speculative fiction, but it proves one thing—the apple doesn’t fall far form the tree, in either subject matter or filmmaking talent.
