Richard speaks to “CTV News at Six” anchor Andria Case about the best movies and television to watch this weekend. This week we have a look at “And Just Like That…,” the “Sex and the City” reboot on Crave, the Apple TV+ Christmas documentary “‘Twas the Fight Before Christmas” and the Woody Harrelson drama “The Glass Castle” on Crave.
Watch the whole thing HERE! (Starts at 19:32)
Richard joins Jim Richards and guest host Tamara Cherry of the NewsTalk 1010 afternoon show The Rush for Booze and Reviews! Today they play a round of Did Richard Crouse Like These Movies? We review Steven Spielberg’s finger-snapping remake of “West Side Story,” the Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence satire “Don’t Look Up” and the story of one very bad week in the lives of Lucy and Desi in “Being the Ricardos.” For the boozy portion of the show we talk about the drink “Sex and the City” made famous.
Listen to the whole thing HERE!
Welcome to the House of Crouse. Five years after being offered the role of Emily Dickenson in “A Quiet Passion” Cynthia Nixon said, “I never thought it would come together. I thought, ‘Thank you for thinking of me, it is a good part for me but I don’t see how you are going to get this made.’” Find out how she and Terence Davies brought the film to the screen. Then sit back and let “First Blood” director Ted Kotcheff regale you with stories from his very entertaining life. It’s all good stuff so c’mon in and sit a spell.
By Richard Crouse – Metro Canada
Years before Kim Cattrall found international stardom as Samantha Jones, the brash best friend of Carrie, Miranda and Charlotte on Sex and the City, she learned a valuable lesson from a Hollywood legend. The 24-year-old actress was starring opposite Jack Lemmon in Tribute, a film version of the Broadway show that earned Lemmon a Tony nomination.
Lemmon had dozens of credits, including classics like Some like It Hot and The Apartment under his belt and two Oscars on his mantelpiece at home.
“How do you have longevity?” she asked the veteran actor.
“Take things that scare the pants off you,” he replied.
It’s advice she took to heart, particularly when approaching her new project, Sensitive Skin for HBO Canada.
“I think for me to bring this story to North America was the scariest thing,” she says. “Hanging in there and really trusting my instincts because I doubted them sometimes. I put it on the shelf and I walked away but I kept coming back and I think the thing that kept me coming back was the fear of it.
“I could go on playing Samantha for the rest of my life but I wouldn’t be very happy. I wouldn’t be advancing in any way. This was really hard sometimes and it did scare me daily on the set. I never had children but I can imagine it’s like having a child, or going through the gestation period. Instead of nine months it was almost nine years and you go through periods of real doubt and self-doubt.”
Returning to television for the first time since Sex and the City, Cattrall plays Davina, a woman on the verge of a mid-life crisis who, along with her husband Al (Don McKellar), shakes the cobwebs off her suburban life by moving downtown.
“It’s the change of the guard, isn’t it? I’m starting to play characters who are of a certain age and it is a feeling of, ‘Am I really ready for this?’ Holding onto yesterday instead of embracing whatever this is,” she says.
The show not only focuses on Davina and Al — “One of the things I’m most proud of is that you really believe Don and I are a couple,” she says. — but also Toronto, the city they call home. She credits McKellar, who also directed the series, with capturing the look and feel of Hogtown.
“He’s made Toronto look like the city it is,” she says. “Which is very difficult to capture. Because he has lived there his whole life, we were shooting in neighbourhoods the crew didn’t even know about. It’s so diverse. The city is almost a character as well. We’ve really given Toronto a midlife crisis too.”
Sensitive Skin premieres Sunday on HBO Canada at 8 p.m. ET/MT.
In “I Don’t Know How She Does It,” a working mom comedy based on a popular book of the same name, Sarah Jessica Parker plays Carrie Bradshaw in a different time and dimension. This time out she’s traded New York for Boston, her Manolo Blahniks for children, Mr. Big for Mr. Joe Average and all that sex in the city she used to have for bake sales and kid’s birthday parties.
Fans of “Sex and the City” will recognize some of the style of “I Don’t Know How She Does It.” if you’ve missed SJP typing on her laptop or doing ocassionally witty voice over, then you may find something here to like. Otherwise it’s a tedious fourth-wall breaking exercise in female empowerment.
Where “Sex and the City” broke ground in its portrayal of female relationships, “I Don’t Know How She Does It” settles for rehashing truisms we’ve heard ad nauseum. “Trying to be a man is a waste of a woman,” may sound like a Carie Bradshaw line, but its minus the freshness that made Carrie’s quips so memorable.
What it lacks in substance it tries to make up for style. Graphics adorn the screen and characters address the audience. So is it a documentary? Nope, it’s an underwritten comedy where the acors break the fourth wall to make up for the story’s shortcomings.
“I Don’t Know How She Does It” tries to play off SJP’s previous successes, but only manges to be even more forgettable than “Sex and the City 2.”
The world’s population is split divided like this: 60% women, 40% men. That means 60% of the world’s population will likely squeal with delight at the mention of the names Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte, while 40% will likely scratch their heads, wondering what all the fuss is about.
If the names don’t ring a bell they are the Sex and the City mainstays; the four women who navigated New York City’s treacherous relationship waters for six seasons on HBO. Four years after wrapping up their small screen adventures the foursome is back with a feature length, (and then some), movie that sees them older, but not necessarily wiser.
As the movie plays catch-up with the Fab Four best-selling author Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker), a fashionista so fabulous she even wears a pearl necklace to bed, is still with her longtime paramour Mr. Big (Chris Noth), the kind of businessman who instead of sending a love letter to his girlfriend would be more likely to have his secretary send a love fax.
Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), the no nonsense lawyer, has settled into a comfortable but boring relationship with Steve (David Eigenberg), the father of her child.
Charlotte’s (Kristin Davis) perfect life has gotten even more perfect with the addition of an adopted daughter and the notoriously self-centered Samantha (Kim Cattrall) has relocated to Los Angeles to manage the career of her hunky boytoy Smith (Jason Lewis).
The players firmly in place, the characters then spend the next two hours and twenty minutes changing in-and-out of designer clothes, sitting in expensive Eames chairs while pondering whether marriage ruins everything in a relationship. The interpersonal questions and glamorous style are vintage Sex and the City, but somewhere in the years since the show went off the air whatever edge the writing once had became blunted.
The wisecracks are still there—Candace Bergen as Vogue editor Enid Frick has the movie’s best line when she says, “Forty is the last age a woman can be photographed in a wedding dress without the unintended Diane Arbus subtext”—and there is certainly more than enough talk of relationships but the rebellious spirit of friendship that guided the girls through a mountain of men has evaporated.
Where these women had once been sexual suffragettes who thumbed their noses at traditional morality, they now seem much more conventional, looking to men as the fonts of all happiness. I’m afraid that the relationship gladiators Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte of the edgy television series would barely recognize their namby-pamby big-screen counterparts.
On other counts though, the movie, which is as review proof as any to be released this year, continues the traditions of the television show. The lifestyle porn—prominent designer labels on everything, a walk-in closet that could only exist in Manolo Blahnik’s wildest dreams and enough expensive shoes to shod and entire army of Vivienne Westwood wannabes—is lovingly photographed and should please audiences more concerned with couture than story.
Despite its turn toward a more conservative tone, the Sex and the City movie will please fans, who will likely find the experience somewhat akin to watching an entire season of the show on DVD. Others—that 40% I mentioned earlier—may be put off by the improbable “Oh Puleeze!” ending and left wondering what all the fuss was about to begin with.
