Have a look at Richard’s “Canada AM” interview with “The Big Short” director Adam McKay!
“We wanted to be the first Wall Street movie that took you behind the curtain, that really said, All these confusing terms you hear, all the ways the banks make you feel stupid or bored… it’s actually not that hard. If the guy who did Step Brothers can understand it you can too.”
Watch the whole interview HERE!
Richard’s “Canada AM” reviews for “The Intern” with Robert De Niro and Anne Hathaway, Adam’s Sandler’s “Hotel Transylvania 2” and “Sicario,” starring Emily Blunt, Benicio Del Toro and Josh Brolin.
Watch the whole thing HERE!
Richard’s “Canada AM” reviews for “The Intern” with Robert De Niro and Anne Hathaway, Adam’s Sandler’s “Hotel Transylvania 2” and “Sicario,” starring Emily Blunt, Benicio Del Toro and Josh Brolin.
Watch the whole thing HERE!
“We don’t have time for zingers!” says Count Dracula (Adam Sandler) midway through “Hotel Transylvania 2.” No time for zingers, indeed. The sequel to the 2012 kid friendly animated horror comedy is short on laughs but long on sentiment.
Like all of Sandler’s movies—no matter how outrageous the characters—the new one is all about family. It picks up after Drac’s daughter, vampiress Mavis (voice of Selena Gomez) married human Jonathan (Andy Samberg). In a twist on “Twilight,” the vampire mother and human father soon have a child, Dennis (Asher Blinkoff). The question is, which side of the family will it take after, the monster or human?
“Human. Monster. Unicorn. As long as you’re happy,” Drac says to his daughter, while secretly hoping the child will inherit the vampire genes. On the eve of the child’s fifth birthday the boy still hasn’t shoed any signs of vampiric behaviour—“He’s not human,” says the Prince of Darkness, “he’s just a late fanger!”—so Drac and friends—Frankenstein (Kevin James), Wayne the Werewolf (Steve Buscemi), the Invisible Man (David Spade) and Murray the Mummy (Keegan-Michael Key)—take Dennis to their old haunts to teach him their scary skills.
“Hotel Transylvania 2” features great kid friendly monsters designs (that will make equally cool toys) like zombie bellhops and Blobby, a gelatine creature that looks like Grandma’s Gazpacho Aspic come to life but the creativity that went into the creatures didn’t extend to the script.
It’s a sweet enough, amiable story about acceptance and family, but the jokes barely rise to the level of the “101 Halloween Jokes for Kids” book I had when I was ten-years-old. If calling Murray the Mummy “talking toilet paper” makes you giggle, then perhaps this is for you, but by the time they have explained why Drac is called “Vampa” for the second time, you get the idea that Sandler and co-writer Robert Smigel know they should have driven a stake through the heart of this script.
The appearance of Mel Brooks as Great Vampa Vlad simply brings to mind “Young Frankenstein,” one of the funniest horror comedies of all time.
The biggest laughs come from the background, the sight gags that keep things visually frenetic in the first hour.
“Hotel Transylvania 2’s” family friendly scares won’t give kids any nightmares, but it won’t make them laugh either.
By Richard Crouse & Mark Breslin Reel Guys – Metro Canada
Synopsis: The Reel Guys are hardy Canadians, but with the sub-zero weather we’ve been having lately even the most robust Canuck deserves a snow day. With that in mind, the Reel Guys have put away their long underwear, ear muffs and dignity and decided to stay home. At the risk of earning ridicule from our friends in Saskatchewan and other places where it regularly gets frigid, here are our ideas for movies to take your mind off the deep freeze. Close the drapes, turn up the heat and enjoy…
Richard: Spring Breakers was shot in St. Petersburg, Florida, so expect lots of beach shots, beautiful sunsets and a young cast — featuring Selena Gomez, Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Benson and Rachel Korine—stripped down to clothing that would cause instant frost bite for those us of living in the Great White North these days. The story of the illegal way they try to make money for spring break plays more like a wild music video than traditional film, but there’s no denying the heat that comes off the screen.
MB: Summer camp? I’m with you on the Canadian classic Meatballs, with the great Bill Murray. But there’s another counter-intuitive way to go here, Richard. And that is to watch movies that depict a world so hot, you’ll be wishing for some refreshing snowflakes. Just put on the great Lawrence of Arabia. You’ll want to make a snowman by the second hour. Or Gus Van Sant’s Gerry or Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point, both of which take place in literal and existential deserts. Dune would probably work too, although I’ve never met anyone who could watch it all the way through.
RC: Talk about flipping from one extreme to the other. I’ll stick with a more moderate climate for my last pick. Under the Tuscan Sun is a hot love story starring Diane Lane set in moderate, but enjoyable temperatures.
MB: A lovely movie. But let’s not forget the old standby: The Yule Log, burning brightly on DVD. Not much of a cast, the acting is wooden, but the dialogue crackles!
TOP THIRTEEN HITS (click on the title to see trailer)
1. 12 Years a Slave. There’s a key line near the beginning of “12 Years a Slave, “ the new drama from “Shame” director Steve McQueen. Shortly after being shanghaied from his comfortable life as a freeman into a life of slavery Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) declares, “I don’t want to survive. I want to live.” Based on Northup’s 1853 memoir the movie is an uncompromising story about will, suffering and injustice.
2. American Hustle. “American Hustle” is one of the year’s best. It’s an entertainingly audacious movie that will doubtless be compared to “The Wolf of Wall Street” because of the similarity in tone and themes, but this time around David O. Russell has almost out-Scorsese’d Scorsese.
3. Before Midnight. “Before Midnight” is beautifully real stuff that fully explores the doubts and regrets that characterize Jesse and Celine’s (Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy) love affair. Done with humor, heart and pathos, often in the same scene, it is a poignant farewell to two characters who grew up in front of us.
4. Blue Jasmine. Darker than most of Woody Allen’s recent output, “Blue Jasmine” doesn’t go for laughs—very often anyway—but is an astutely crafted psychological character study. Jasmine is a modern day Blanche Du Bois, a faded bright light now forced to depend on the kindness of strangers. Getting in her way are delusions of grandeur and a continued sense of denial—likely the same sense that kept her guilt free during the years the illegal cash was flowing—that eventually conspire to fracture her psyche. “There’s only so many traumas one can take,” she says, “ before you end up in the street, screaming.”
5. Captain Phillips. I don’t think it’s fair to charge audiences full price for screenings of “Captain Phillips.” While watching this exciting new Tom Hanks thriller I was reminded of the old Monster Trucks ads that bellowed, “You Pay for the Whole Seat but You’ll Only Need the Edge!”It a film about piracy and I don’t mean the sleazy guys who bootleg movies but the real pirates who were responsible for the first hijacking of an American cargo ship in two hundred years.
6. Dallas Buyer’s Club. In “Dallas Buyer’s Club” Canadian director Jean-Marc Vallée has made an emotional drama that never stoops to melodrama. Instead it’s an inspirational film about standing up for what you believe in.
7. Frances Ha. The seventh film from “Greenberg” director Noah Baumbach isn’t so much a traditional narrative as it is a character study of Frances (Greta Gerwig), an underemployed dancer struggling to find herself in New York City. It plays like a cleaned up black-and-white version of “Girls”; an emotionally rich and funny portrait of twenty-something ennui. “Frances Ha” is a collection of details. There is an engaging story, but it’s not exactly laid out in three acts. It feels more intimate and raw than the usual twenty-ish crisis flick and with each detail we get another piece of the puzzle that makes up Frances’ life.
8. Fruitvale Station. It’s important to remember that “Fruitvale Station” isn’t a documentary. Director Ryan Coogler has shaped the movie for maximum heartrending effect, and by the time the devastating last half hour plays out it’s hard to imagine any other movie this year packing such a emotional wallop.
9. Gravity. “Gravity” isn’t an epic like “2001: A Space Odyssey” or an outright horror film like “Alien.” There are no monsters or face hugging ETs. It’s not even a movie about life or death. Instead it is a life-affirming movie about the will to survive.
10. Her. “Her” is an oddball story, but it’s not an oddball film. It is ripe with real human emotion and commentary on a generation’s reliance on technology at the cost of social interaction.
11. Inside Llewyn Davis. “Inside Llewyn Davis” is a fictional look at the vibrant Greenwich Village folk scene. Imagine the cover of “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan” come to life. Sharp-eyed folkies will note not-so-coincidental similarities between the people Llewyn meets and real-life types like Tom Paxton, Alert Grossman and Mary Travers, but this isn’t a history, it’s a feel. It gives us an under-the-covers look at struggles and naked ambition it takes to get noticed.
12. Nebraska. The humour doesn’t come in the set-up-punch-line format but arises out of the situations. A scene of Woody’s gathered family—his elderly brothers and grown sons—watching a football game redefines the word taciturn but the subject of the sparse conversation, a 1974 Buick, is bang on, hilarious and will likely sound familiar to anyone with a large family.
13. Wolf of Wall Street. “Wolf of Wall Street” makes for entertaining viewing, mostly because DiCaprio and Jonah Hill are able to ride the line between the outrageous comedy on display and the human drama that takes over the movie’s final minutes. Both are terrific, buoyed by the throbbing pulse of Scorsese’s camera. With its fourth wall breaking narration, scandalous set pieces and absurd antics “The Wolf of Wall Street” is an experience. At three hours it’s almost as excessive as Balfort’s $26,000 dinners. It feels a bit long, but like the spoiled brats it portrays, it will not, and cannot, be ignored.
TOP FIVE MISSES
TREND: Big stars don’t guarantee box office!
1. The Fifth Estate – Budget: $28 million, Global box office: $6 million, Return: 21% Late into “The Fifth Estate” Guardian investigative journalist Nick Davies (David Thewlis) says, “most good stories start at the beginning.” I argue that he’s right– about 99% of the time. Unfortunately this look at WikiLeaks and hacker-turned-whistleblower Julian Assange falls into the 1%.
2. Bullet to the Head – Budget: $25 million, Global box office: $9 million, Return: 36% With a name like Bullet to the Head you know the new Sylvester Stallone movie isn’t a romantic comedy. Although he paraphrases the most famous rom com line of all time, “You had be at BLEEP BLEEP!” the movie is nothing but an ode to testosterone.
3. Getaway – Budget: R180-million, Global box office: R105-million, Return: 58 percent. On a scale of zero to stupid, ”Getaway” ranks an eleven. It is what we call in the film criticism business a S.D.M. (Silly Damn Movie). OK, I made that last part up, but I couldn’t really think of any other category to place this movie under. Maybe E.S.D.M. (Extremely Silly Damn Movie).
Dishonorable Mentions:
Paranoia – Budget: $35 million, Global box office: $13.5 million, Return: 39%.
R.I.P.D. – Budget: $130 million, Global box office: $78 million
Not to be confused with “The Getaway,” a vastly superior film starring Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw, or even the so-so remake of that movie with Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger, “Getaway,” is not only reductive in its title, but also in its story.
The movie starts promisingly with a five-minute sequence. It effectively sets up the story in true cinematic fashion—show me, don’t tell me. Brent Magna (Ethan Hawke) comes home to find his apartment trashed and his wife gone. As he tries to wrap his head around what happened, a cell phone rings. A mysterious voice directs him to a car park where he is to steal a souped-up Shelby Supersnake car and perform a number of duties or his wife will be killed.
It’s simple and effective. Unfortunately when the movie gets up to speed—pun intended—it’s all downhill. Some of the jobs are silly—smash into a water truck!—others are impossibly dangerous, and all are given by a nefarious bad man (Jon Voight) who directs the game as though he is playing chess with a race car and dozens of police instead of rooks and pawns.
Things do not improve when The Kid (Selena Gomez) shows up. She’s a rich kid who claims that Brent has stolen her car.
On a scale of zero to stupid, ”Getaway” ranks an eleven. It is what we call in the film criticism business a S.D.M. (Silly Damn Movie). OK, I made that last part up, but I couldn’t really think of any other category to place this movie under. Maybe E.S.D.M. (Extremely Silly Damn Movie).
Some of the chase scenes are quite good. They seem organic, as if there might actually be real people driving the cars as they careen off bridges and explode into bits. There’s too many of them, but the fact that the crashes looks real and not like CGI-A-Ramas increases the stakes.
But just barely.
There is no amount of drama that could make us care about The Kid. Let’s just say that it’s quite possible that Gomez is even more annoying as an actress than she is as a singer. Her “performance” consists of pouting, grimacing and saying things like, “I’m totally screwed.” If you want to know what she’s like without paying to see the movie, go to any mall on a Saturday and eavesdrop at any American Apparel store.
Hawke is having a good year. “Before Midnight” is his awards bait and “The Purge” made a bunch of money. I doubt he’ll look back at 2013 as the year “Getaway” came out. In fact, I doubt he’ll ever think about this movie again once the cheque clears.
“Getaway” is a groaner, an S.D.M. that could have been a fun ride but runs out of gas after the first five minutes.
When I was a kid I had a Halloween joke book packed with gems like, “What do skeletons say before they begin dining? Bone appetite!” I pulled that book out every October for years, but hadn’t thought about it in years. For years, that is, until I saw “Hotel Transylvania,” the new animated kid’s movie starring the voice of Adam Sandler as Dracula. It seems I wasn’t the only one with a well-loved Halloween joke book. A bagel with scream-cheese, anyone?
In the world of “Hotel Transylvania” Dracula is a single father—he’s a bat-chelor—so desperate to keep his daughter Mavis (Selena Gomez) away from the human world he builds a hotel for monsters far away from living, breathing people. With the slogan, “Human Free Since 1898,” he caters to guests right out of Universal Pictures’s heyday— Murray the Mummy (voice of CeeLo Green), Frankenstein (Kevin James) and Griffin, the Invisible Man (David Spade). Every year on Mavis’s birthday they all gather to throw a fang-dango of a party, but on her 118th b’day she’s behaving like a spoiled bat (see what I did there?). She wants to leave the hotel and see the world, but her dad won’t allow it. However, when a young traveller brings some life to the hotel of the undead she gets a glimpse into the lives of humans.
Like my joke book, (here’s another sample: “What type of coffee do vampires prefer? Decoffinated!”) “Hotel Transylvania” leans toward the silly rather than scary. Unlike “ParaNorman,” another recent horror themed movie for kids, this one won’t give the little ones nightmares. In fact the only people it might make a little batty are parents who’ll have to listen to jokes like, “Invisible Man! Nice to see you!” me, I thought those lines were funny… but then you already know how I feel about jokes like, “Who is a vampire likely to fall in love with? The girl necks door!”
The animation is top notch, stylized and colorful, with cute creatures that should catch kid’s eyes.
“Hotel Transylvania” is ghoul movie for kids that’s family friendly and, like Baron Frankenstein will have you in stitches.
“Monte Carlo” sees three small town girls thrust into a world of Polo, fancy balls and good looking princes with exotic accents. It’s a buddy comedy plus one, (3 is the new 2 in comedy duos!) showcasing the talents of Disney star (and Bieber BFF) Selena Gomez, and Gossip Girls’ Leighton Meester and Katie Cassidy.
Gomez is Cinderella… er… Grace, a recent high school grad who saved four years worth of tips from her waitressing job to pay for her dream—a trip to Paris. Along for the ride are her free-spirited best friend Emma (Cassidy) and evil step sister Meg (Meester). Instead of finding the new life she was expecting in France she finds nothing but pushy tour guides and fat men in berets until she is mistaken for heiress Cordelia Winthrop-Scott. For a few days she lives Winthrop-Scott’s glamorous life—it’s not stealing, she says, “it’s seizing the moment”—with her two American ladies-in-waiting before real life brings her crashing back to earth. But, because this is based on a fairy tale you know that by the end all three will wind up with the Prince Charmings they deserve.
Try as it might “Monte Carlo” doesn’t have the joie de vivre it should have to go along with its screwball premise. Mistaken identity is one of the cornerstones of the screwball genre, yet this movie is not screwy enough by half to be really entertaining. There’s some slapstick and attempts at comedy, but the pace is so s-l-o-w it sucks the funny out of what could have been an amusing little tween romp.
The Lisa Kudrow-esque Katie Cassidy gives it a go, bringing some spunk to the proceedings and Leighton Meester can do earnest rather well, but the film’s heavy lifting is left to Gomez who, as a lead actor, proves she’s charismatic, but not quite ready to headline a film.
For Gomez’s fans the setting, romance and clothes may be enough to sell the movie but anyone old enough to not know what “Wizards of Waverly Place” is may have a harder time finding enjoyment here.
“Monte Carlo” doesn’t fall down because of the predictable story—if you can’t figure it out on your own the trailer pretty much spells it out for you—or because of Gomez’s appalling English accent. No, it’s the film’s blandness that brings it down. If you’re in the mood for rags-to-princesses stories this weekend better off to rent either “The Princess Diaries” or “What a Girl Wants” instead.
