RICHARD’S WEEKEND MOVIE REVIEWS FROM CP24! FRIDAY MARCH 27, 2015.
Richard’s CP24 reviews for “Get Hard,” “Home” “Boychoir” and “October Gale.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
Posts Tagged ‘Scott Speedman’
RICHARD’S “CANADA AM” REVIEWS FOR MARCH 27 WITH BEVERLY THOMSON.
Richard’s “Canada AM” reviews for “Get Hard,” “Home” “Boychoir” and “October Gale.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
Metro Canada: Patricia Clarkson, So many men, so much talent
By Richard Crouse – Metro Canada
Patricia Clarkson’s new thriller, October Gale, sees her working with frequent collaborator Ruba Nadda and starring opposite Callum Keith Rennie, Tim Roth and Scott Speedman.
“Can you imagine I got to be in a film with those men?” she says. “I arrived on the set and said, ‘Oh my God Ruba I have died and gone to heaven.’ Not only are they beautiful men, physically, but if you threw all their handsomeness out the window, they’re gorgeous actors. First class, top of their game, singular actors.”
The New Orleans native, an Academy Award nominee for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in Pieces of April, plays a doctor mourning the loss of her husband. For solace she retreats to a remote cottage in Georgian Bay. Her time of quiet reflection and healing is disrupted, however, by the appearance of a mysterious and seriously injured young man, played by Speedman.
October Gale is the second collaboration between Clarkson and director Ruba Nadda.
“Ruba and I are very similar gals,” Clarkson says. “We like our hair and our lipstick and our high heels. I have four older sisters and Rubba is truly like the little sister I never had. We are like family. We have a second language now. It’s kismet. I think I’m just the luckiest gal to know her and to have her so deeply in my life; in my professional life, in my personal life. I know her family now. I know her sisters. I know her parents. She knows all my friends in New York City and Los Angeles. We’re just family and yet we are able to separate all of that when we enter the workplace. We’re both workhorses. We’re very high energy, we don’t take no for an answer, we’ll fight to the death. She’s Syrian-Palestinian and I’m Southern, so watch out.”
Their first film together, Cairo Time, was the Best Reviewed Romance on Rotten Tomatoes for 2010 and soon they will begin work on a series for HBO. Clarkson says her on-set relationship with Nadda is based on respect and the director’s unique vision.
“Ruba has the courage to make films that people want to make,” she says, “the kind of movies auteurs think they’re making but she actually has the courage to do it.”
October Gale, for instance, Clarkson says, doesn’t have “a traditional thriller pace. It’s Ruba Nada pace.”
OCTOBER GALE: 3 STARS. “Ruba Nadda’s thriller follows her heart.”
“October Gale,” a new film from “Cairo Time” director Ruba Nadda, is a hybrid of romance and thriller that cares about it’s characters more than it does about moving the audience to the edge of their collective seats.
Patricia Clarkson is Helen Matthews, a Toronto doctor grieving the loss of her husband (Callum Keith Rennie). For solace she retreats to a remote, picturesque cottage in Georgian Bay. Her time of quiet reflection and healing is disrupted, however, by the appearance of Will, a mysterious and seriously injured young man, played by Scott Speedman. She plays nurse, they talk and flirt and soon Helen finds herself drawn to the stranger. Trouble is, Tom (Tim Roth), the man who wounded Will to begin with, has every intention of dropping by to finish the job.
“October Gale” has all the elements of a thriller—people with mysterious pasts meet in a remote location on a dark and stormy night—but Nadda subverts the conventions of the genre by taking her time getting to the thrills. Instead she builds the tension carefully, walking through Helen’s grief in a beautifully played first act. Clarkson is at her best here, subtly and beautifully showing not only her loss but also her resiliency in the face of sorrow. Once we get to know Helen, William appears adding another layer to the story. By the time we get to the thriller aspect of “October Gale” Nadda makes sure we care for and are invested in the characters.
“October Gale” isn’t a typical thriller. It’s a thriller without many thrills, but lots of soul. Nadda does not slavishly try and ape Hitchcock or the other masters of the genre, but follows her heart instead.
The Captive’s Bruce Greenwood and Atom Egoyan make a dynamic movie duo
By Richard Crouse – Metro In Focus
Bruce Greenwood first met director Atom Egoyan in a singles bar. “Atom was alone in the corner and I felt sorry for him,” says Greenwood. “We were introduced by a mutual friend.”
That was in the early 1990s, when Egoyan was on the brink of international acclaim as a director and Greenwood was a film and television star with a handful of movies and recurring roles on St. Elsewhere and Knots Landing under his belt. That chance meeting led to their first film together, Exotica, a study of loneliness and desire in a lap-dancing club that Roger Ebert called “a deep, painful film” in his four-star review. “We became good friends during that process,” said Greenwood, “and in the ensuing years.”
Three years later the pair collaborated on The Sweet Hereafter, an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Russell Banks about the effects of a tragic bus accident on the population of a small town. Greenwood earned a Genie Award nomination playing a grieving father and in 2002 readers of Playback voted it the greatest Canadian film ever made.
Next was a small role in Ararat, Egoyan’s story of a young man whose life is changed during the making of a film about the Armenian genocide, and then, in 2013, a cameo in Devil’s Knot. Greenwood played a judge in Egoyan’s retelling of the events leading up to the West Memphis Three murders and the “Satanic panic” that fuelled the hysteria surrounding the subsequent trial of teenagers Jessie Misskelley Jr., Damien Echols and Jason Baldwin.
These days Greenwood is best known for his work as Capt. Christopher Pike in the 2009 Star Trek film and its sequel, Star Trek Into Darkness, but he’s not too busy in Hollywood — the Quebec-born actor has lived in Los Angeles since the late 1980s — to reteam with his Canadian cohort. In Egoyan’s new psychological thriller, The Captive, Greenwood joins stars Ryan Reynolds, Scott Speedman, Rosario Dawson and Mireille Enos in a story of a child kidnapping. Egoyan says he and Greenwood share a shorthand that makes for easy work on set. As for Greenwood, he says he trusts the director, “more than anyone I’ve ever worked with. He can ask me to do anything and if my initial instinct is ‘Oh no,’ it ends up being the right idea. He’s a tremendous guy.”
GOOD NEIGHBOURS: 3 ½ STARS
A thriller about friendship, serial killers and lies set against the backdrop of the 1995 referendum on the separation of Quebec, Good Neighbors has a Twin Peaks feel. That is, if that show had been directed by Dario Argento. The lives of three neighbors in a Notre-Dame-de-Grace neighbourhood walk-up become entwined, leading to murder—dead cats and tenants—suspicion and double and triple crosses. The undeniable sweetness director Jacob Tierney brought to his last film The Trotsky is out the window, replaced by a delicious sense of mischief and mayhem. Also showing their dark sides are stars Jay Baruchel, Scottt Speedman and Emily Hampshire.
EDWIN BOYD: CITIZEN GANGSTER: 3 STARS
“Edwin Boyd: Citizen Gangster” is so steeped in Canadiana even Lorne Greene makes an appearance. Viewers of a certain age will remember Greene as the Voice of Doom during World War II CBC broadcasts, and Torontonians might remember his acting school on Jarvis Street. Both aspects of Greene’s career are represented in this crime drama, and they are just two of the details that help this period piece establish a convincing sense of time and place.
Scott Speedman plays Edwin Boyd, a disillusioned World War II veteran and legendary bank robber who, along with his gang—the muscle bound Lenny (Kevin Durand), and Val (Joseph Cross) and Willie the Clown (Brendan Fletcher)—became the Canadian equivalent of Public Enemy Number One after pulling off a series of brazen bank robberies and daring jail breaks.
“Edwin Boyd: Citizen Gangster” does a good job of showing how Boyd went from respectable veteran/bus driver/son of a cop to a fixture on the most wanted charts. It’s not the romp “Public Enemy” was, instead it’s a contemplative movie more about why Boyd robbed banks than the robberies themselves.
It nicely details how the combat fatigue and disappointment Boyd felt after coming home from war was alleviated by the adrenaline rush of robbing banks and how his need for acknowledgement—this is a man who wanted to be a Hollywood star—was fanned by newspaper reports of a “dashing” robber. He enjoyed his notoriety, as shown in one nicely written scene in the back of a police car.
“You’ve made my wife a happy woman,” says the arresting detective.
“Is she a fan?” Boyd replies.
“No, I’ll get home early for a change.”
Director and writer Nathan Morlando effectively paints a picture of Boyd as more a desperate man than folk hero and Speedman does good work exploring the troubled soul of a man forced by ego and circumstance into becoming a criminal.
“Edwin Boyd: Citizen Gangster” also does a nice job of recreating mid-century Toronto—complete with footage of Lorne Greene!—although modern telephone light poles are, apparently, the bane of low budget period pictures.
As a character study “Edwin Boyd: Citizen Gangster” succeeds—painting a vivid picture of desperation and determination-despite a few overwrought moments and a droopy midsection.
Gory neighbours RICHARD CROUSE METRO CANADA Published: September 17, 2010
Take one part Twin Peaks, mix with one part Roman Polanski and you have Good Neighbours. It’s a dark comedy set in an apartment building in Montreal’s Notre-Dame-de-Grâce that features a murder, which star Jay Baruchel calls “if not the goriest, then the most uncomfortable death scene in any movie this year.”
The events leading up to the grisly, but darkly amusing incident involve three young Montrealers, the wheelchair bound Spencer (Scott Speedman), cat lover Louise (Emily Hampshire) and Victor, an earnest school teacher played by Baruchel. As their lives become entwined it becomes difficult for them — and the audience — to know who to trust.
“It will be polarizing,” says Baruchel, who was last seen starring opposite Nicolas Cage in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, “but I think this movie really gets under your skin.”
It’s also the kind of movie that probably wouldn’t easily find funding in Hollywood.
“The main reason this would never get made stateside is that it leaves too much up to the audience,” says Baruchel. “The studios don’t like that. They like to kind of give you a road map and let you know when you are supposed to be sad or happy and who you are meant to root for. Director Jacob Tierney says his favourite thing when talking to people after screenings is what they project on it. Some people will say that my character is so lovely and sympathetic and others think he’s really creepy. Your life will inform how you see our movie, I think.
“If I was to sum up the whole movie, and specifically my character it would be ‘Good depends on context.’ I really think this movie is nothing if not a grey area. It’s still going to be rewarding but there is this really uncomfortable sense of humour that permeates the whole thing. Jacob wants people to be on edge from beginning to end.”
One person, however, that Baruchel doesn’t want the movie to rattle is his mother. “There is a reason my mother is not coming to the movie (premier) tonight. I said ‘You can watch the movie just not beside me.’”
Canuck pride sidebar
“I’m very grateful for the career I’ve had in the states. It has afforded my mother, my sister and I lives we otherwise never would have had,” says Baruchel. “That being said … by and large the things I have been most proud of have all been here.”
