I appear on “CTV News at 6” with anchor Andria Case to talk about the weekend’s best movies, on streaming and in theatres. We have a look at the epic “One Battle After Another,” the quirky romance “The Baltimorons” and the drama “Eleanor the Great.”
Watch the whole thing HERE! (Starts at 36:46)
I join CTV Atlantic anchor Todd Battis to talk about the epic “One Battle After Another,” the quirky romance “The Baltimorons” and the horror film “The Strangers: Chapter 2.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
I join CP24 to talk about the epic “One Battle After Another,” the quirky romance “The Baltimorons,” the drama “Eleanor the Great” and the horror film “The Strangers: Chapter 2.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
I sit in on the CFRA Ottawa morning show with host Bill Carroll to talk about the new movies coming to theatres including the epic “One Battle After Another,” the quirky romance “The Baltimorons,” the drama “Eleanor the Great” and the horror film “The Strangers: Chapter 2.”
Listen to the whole thing HERE!
Fast reviews for busy people! Watch as I review three movies in less time than it takes to make the bed! Have a look as I race against the clock to tell you about the epic “One Battle After Another,” the quirky romance “The Baltimorons” and the horror film “The Strangers: Chapter 2.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
SYNOPSIS: Loosely based on Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel “Vineland,” “One Battle After Another” is a story of rebellion and what happens when the tentacles of the past reach out to touch a new generation.
CAST: Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Benicio del Toro, Regina Hall, Teyana Taylor, Chase Infiniti. Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson.
REVIEW: “One Battle After Another” begins as a story of The French 75, a revolutionary group on a mission to free hundreds of detainees at the US-Mexico border. Explosives expert Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio) and co-conspirator Perfidia (Teyana Taylor) are freedom fighters and lovers who stage daring raids that attract the attention of the aptly named Colonel Lockjaw (Sean Penn).
Cut to sixteen years later. With Perfidia no longer in the picture, Bob, now stoned and drunk much of the time, lives off the grid with their daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti). Fearful his past will catch up to them, Willa isn’t allowed to have a cell phone and never leaves the house unless she has a special pager undetectable by everyone except French 75 members.
When Lockjaw reemerges, now working with a group of white supremacists, Bob is forced back into his old life, trouble is, all that lingers from his revolutionary days is a deep paranoia, the result of massive drug use. When Willa disappears, he must clear his addled brain long enough to track her down.
At almost three hours in length, “One Battle After Another” is an epic story that mixes and matches the political and the personal. A satirical look at the extremes of the left and right, and the resulting tribalism and polarization, when the film settles in after its first action packed hour it focusses on Bob, a revolutionary well past his best by date.
DiCaprio channels “The Big Lebowski’s” shambolic Dude. From his ever-present bathrobe and slightly bewildered facial expressions to his loyalty to friends and family and resilience the star’s take on Bob is a fun and funny homage to Jeff Bridges’s iconic performance. It allows DiCaprio the opportunity to display his comedic chops but also show emotional depth.
He’s at the center of a sprawling film, a movie about the ever-growing chasm between opposing political sides, but the movie succeeds because, at its heart, it’s a thrilling, redemptive family drama about what bonds us, not what divides us. Bob is a hot mess, a deeply flawed guy, but he steps up when his past actions put his daughter’s life in danger, and in the process finds reconciliation in that fractured relationship amid chaos he helped create.
Director Paul Thomas Anderson, who also wrote the script, has a lot on his mind. With its take on radical politics and domestic terrorism, the movie feels timely, while its portrayal of the connection between father and daughter is timeless.
LOGLINE: In “Daddio,” a new drama starring Sean Penn and Dakota Johnson, and now playing in theatres, a woman taking a late-night cab ride from JFK strikes up a revealing and soul-searching conversation with the cab driver as they head toward Manhattan.
CAST: Dakota Johnson and Sean Penn. Directed by Christy Hall.
REVIEW: A two-hander between passenger and driver, with no supplementary characters, “Daddio” has a stage-bound feel. From front seat to back seat with the meter running, the two strangers speak in monologues, detailing their lives, revealing deeply hidden secrets. It is, if nothing else, a showcase for Penn and Johnson’s ability to hold the screen. Each are in top form, subtly and sincerely inhabiting their characters as they reflect on their lives.
It is an intimate, simple film that focusses on the connection between the actors. Do I think this is a realistic exploration of the way complete strangers converse? I do not, it’s over-share central in this cab, but I do think it is an interesting look at the way people can find a rapport with someone they’ll likely never see again.
The characters, Clark and “Girlie,” lay themselves bare, and it is both tragic and tender. Life advice is offered and absorbed, and power dynamics shift, as their journey through the streets of Manhattan, and their personal histories, takes some unexpected turns.
Penn plays Clark as a hard-edged, old-school Hell’s Kitchen New Yorker. He’s opinionated, a know-it-all, unafraid to use his personal experiences to make sweeping generalizations on the dynamics between men and women. He hasn’t always been a great guy, but Penn gives Clark the world-weariness of someone who has actually learned from his mistakes. There is compassion in his eyes, even if many of his ideas about gender politics and relationships are old-fashioned. Still, when “Girlie” asks if he ever misses his ex-wife, the bravado fades and his one-word answer packs an emotional punch.
Johnson makes the confines of the cab her stage. Shot, by necessity, in close-up, the subtleties of her performance fill the screen. Like her work in “The Lost Daughter,” “Cha Cha Real Smooth” and “A Bigger Splash,” she allows the internal work to tell the tale. “Girlie” is strong, but without emotionally firm ground to anchor the character, Johnson allows a deep, ever present hurt to seep through.
“Daddio” was apparently partially inspired by the reality show “Taxicab Confessions,” but writer/director Christy Hall uses the genre to strip away the tawdry aspects of that series to reveal more about humanity than any backseat sex or nudity could.
Richard joins CTV NewsChannel and anchor Lois Lee to have a look at new movies coming to VOD, streaming services and theatres including the virtual reality of “The Martrix Resurrection,” the coming of age dramedy “Licorice Pizza” and Denzel Washington in “The Tragedy of Macbeth” and the jukebox musical “Sing 2.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
“Licorice Pizza,” the new slice-of-life drama from director Paul Thomas Anderson, and now playing in theatres, is a very specific movie. It transports us back in time to Los Angeles circa the 1970s. Nixon is president. In Hollywood the Tail o’ the Cock restaurant is the place to see and be seen and gas stations face country wide fuel shortages. But against that specific backdrop comes a story ripe with freewheeling charm, nostalgia and universal themes.
Cooper Hoffman, son of the late, great Philip Seymour Hoffman, is Gary Valentine, a cocky fifteen-year-old actor with a blossoming career and a back pocket filled with get rich quick schemes. At picture day at his high school he spots photographer’s assistant Alana (Alana Haim). She is ten years older than him, but he’s feeling lucky and asks her out on a date. She agrees, but says it isn’t a date, just dinner. He takes her to hotspot Tail o’ the Cock and at the end of the night tells her, “I’m not going to forget you. Just like you’re not going to forget me.”
It is the beginning of a mostly platonic relationship that sees them drift in and out of one another’s lives, start a water bed business and navigate maturity. “Maybe fate brought us together,” Gary says to her. “Our roads brought us here.”
“Licorice Pizza” (the name refers to a defunct Californian record store chain) isn’t a movie overly concerned with plot. Instead, it relies on the characters to keep things interesting.
Newcomers Hoffman and Haim, (she plays guitars and keyboards in the pop rock band Haim), do just that. Each are magnetic performers on their own, she is all glowering intensity, he’s got teenage swagger down to a tee—“I’m a showman,” he says, “it’s what I’m meant to do.”—but put them together and sparks fly. From their first exchange in the high school gym to the film’s closing moments they win us over. In the movie the characters experience the first blush of friendship and love. In the audience we get to experience another first, the debut of two new, very promising actors.
Later, after the film, I found myself daydreaming that perhaps we could revisit them every ten years or so à la the relationship trilogy “Before Sunrise,” “Before Sunset” and “Before Midnight.”
Some old-timers get to strut their stuff as well. Sean Penn plays a riff on hard drinking actor William Holden with equal parts smarm and charm and Bradley Cooper pulls out all the stops to bring Hollywood hairdresser-turned-movie mogul Jon Peters to vivid, excessive life.
It is an evocative rendering of a specific time and place, but it doesn’t all sit right. In his recreation of the 1970s, director Paul Thomas Anderson includes two scenes featuring John Michael Higgins as Jerry Frick, owner of the San Fernando Valley’s first Japanese restaurant, The Mikado. In his two scenes he is seen speaking with an over-the-top, buffoonish Japanese accent in conversation with his Japanese wives, played by Yumi Mizui and Megumi Anjo. Both scenes stick out like sore thumbs. I imagine that they are meant to represent the causal racism of the time but they break the movie’s magical spell with cultural insensitivity that adds nothing, save for a cheap laugh, to the story.
“Licorice Pizza” is kind of flipping through a diary. Some details are intense, some glossed over, but everything is relevant to the experience being written about. Like diary entries, the movie is episodic. Each passing episode allows us to get to know Gary and Alana a bit better, and just as importantly, remind us what it means to be young and in love.
