Watch as I review three movies in less time than it takes to buy a train ticket! Have a look as I race against the clock to tell you about the man vs. nature thriller “Beast,” the creepy kid movie “Orphan: First Kill” and the coming-of-age story “Carmen.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
Richard joins CP24 to have a look at new movies coming to VOD, streaming services and theatres. Today we talk about the Idris Elba vs. angry lion thriller “Beast,” the creepy kid movie “Orphan: First Kill” and the coming-of-age story “Sharp Stick.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
I sit in on the CFRA Ottawa morning show with host Bill Carroll to talk the new movies coming to theatres including the Idris Elba vs. angry lion thriller “Beast,” “Sharp Stick,” the latest from Lena Dunham, the creepy kid movie “Orphan: First Kill” and the coming-of-age story “Carmen.”
Listen to the whole thing HERE!
I join NewsTalk 1010 host David Cooper on the coast-to-coast-to-coast late night “Showgram” to play the game “Did Richard Crouse Like This?” This week we talk about the man vs. nature thriller “Beast,” the creepy kid movie “Orphan: First Kill” and the coming-of-age story “Carmen.”
Listen to the whole thing HERE!
“Beast,” a new nature-gone-wild flick starring Idris Elba and a big, angry CGI lion, and now playing in theatres, is a throwback to man vs. beast movies like “Jaws” and “Anaconda.” “I’ve never seen anything like this,” says wildlife biologist Martin Battles (Sharlto Copely). “Multiple attacks, without eating its prey. Lions don’t do that. At least no lion I’ve ever seen.”
Elba is Dr. Nate Samuels, a recently widowed father of two teenage daughters, Meredith (Iyana Halley) and Norah (Leah Jeffries). In an attempt to reconnect with his kids, he arranges a holiday to a South African wildlife reserve, run by Battles, a childhood friend of his late wife.
Daniels met his wife in South Africa, and, although he was separated from her when she passed, he wants his daughters to connect to their mother’s homeland.
The trip is idyllic until they arrive at a village that has been devastated by a gruesome lion attack. Soon, they meet the culprit, a wrathful male lion who regards all humans as enemies after his pride was wiped out by poachers. The lion is now fighting back.
“It’s the law of the jungle,” says Battles. “It’s the only law that matters.”
Elba hasn’t had great luck with felines on screen (see “Cats”), and faster than you can say, “Old Deuteronomy,” Samuels and family are engaged in a horrifying fight for their lives.
“It’s you against him,” says Battles, “and that is not a fight you are designed to win.”
As a thriller “Beast” is so predictable the subtitle could have been “Maul’s Well that Ends Well.” Nonetheless, Icelandic director Kormákur does stage a few straightforward action scenes in long takes that will make your blood pressure rise. The fight sequences in and around the jeep the main cast spends most of the film in, are claustrophobic and primal, with a real sense of danger.
Screenwriter Ryan Engle attempts to weave some father-daughter dynamics into the story, but we’re not here for the dysfunctional family stuff. We’re paying top dollar to see Idris Elba punch a lion in the face (before you @ me, these are CGI creations, no animal’s pride was harmed in the making of this movie) and so he does in fine b-movie style.
“The Ghost and the Darkness” this ain’t.
Between lion attacks, the silence is filled with a variety of dialogue that ranges from, “You stay right here,” to “We’ve gotta get out of here.” Elba does bring some emotive qualities to this action character, while Copely lends the story some grit. As the sisters, Halley and Jeffries bring a mix of steeliness and empathy. There is more to them than being scream queens on the Savannah.
“Beast” is not an ambitious film. It doesn’t have to be. It has Elba and enough angry animal action to make its 90 minutes fly by in the swipe of a lion’s paw.
A weekly feature from from ctvnews.ca! The Crouse Review is a quick, hot take on the weekend’s biggest movies! This week Richard looks at“A Wrinkle in Time,” “The Strangers: Prey At Night” and “Meditation Park.”
Watch the whole thing HERE !
Richard and CP24 anchor Nick Dixon have a look at the weekend’s new movies including “A Wrinkle in Time” starring Oprah Winfrey, the horror film “The Strangers: Prey At Night” and the dark comedy “Gringo” featuring break-out comedic work from David Oyelowo.
Watch the whole thing HERE!
Richard sits in with CTV NewsChannel anchor Marcia MacMillan to have a look at the weekend’s big releases, the highly anticipated “A Wrinkle in Time” starring Oprah Winfrey, the horror film “The Strangers: Prey At Night” and the dark comedy “Gringo” featuring break-out comedic work from David Oyelowo.
Watch the whole thing HERE!
By Richard Crouse – Metro In Focus
We can all agree that serial killers, teenage suicide, alcoholism and unemployment are not laughing matters and yet films like Serial Mom, Heathers and Withnail & I mine those topics for giggles. They’re called dark comedies and unspool jokes about taboo subjects.
Slaughterhouse Five novelist Kurt Vonnegut, who knows a thing or two about finding the cheer in gloom, says dark comedy is about “small people being pushed this way and that way, enormous armies and plagues and so forth, and still hanging on in the face of hopelessness.”
To a certain extent his definition describes the plot of this weekend’s Gringo. David Oyelowo plays Harold, a hapless man who finds himself kidnapped, then on the run from everyone from drug lords to the DEA after a quick business trip to Mexico.
“I am somewhere in Mexico with a gun to my head!” Harold screams into the phone. “What a crybaby,” scoffs his hard-as-nails boss, played by Charlize Theron.
From slapstick to verbal humour, Gringo misses no opportunity to take a dire situation and wring out the laughs. It’s trickier than it seems. “Dark comedy is very difficult,” said Pierce Brosnan, who played up the gallows humour in the hitman farce The Matador. “You have to bring the audience in and push them away at the same time.”
You might imagine that audiences drawn to grim humour are very specific, that they’re angry or perhaps have negative attitudes — but a recent study from the Medical University of Vienna suggests otherwise. They found people who laughed at dark jokes scored highest on verbal and non-verbal IQ tests, were more educated, scored lower on aggression and had better moods.
If that sounds like you, here are some films that successfully navigate the light side of the dark side:
A Serious Man, involves two very bad weeks in the life of physics professor Larry Gopnick, played by Michael Stuhlbarg. In an escalating series of events, his life is turned upside down.
Though billed as a comedy, this may be the bleakest movie the Coen Brothers have ever made. And remember these are the guys who once stuffed someone in a wood chipper on film. The story of a man who thought he did everything right, only to be jabbed in the eye by the fickle finger of fate is a tragiomedy that shows how ruthless real life can be.
Delicatessen is a high-voltage variation on Sweeney Todd, set in post-apocalyptic France where there is very little food and no meat; when people will eat almost anything — or anyone. It’s a dark and moody world worthy of any serious science-fiction movie that stylistically owes more to music videos and animator Tex Avery’s feverishly wild Bugs Bunny cartoons than to other post apocalyptic films.
At the same time it’s filled with belly laughs — especially for vegetarians.
What could be funnier than world annihilation? Coming just a couple years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, Stanley Kubrick’s comedy Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb’s story of an almost nuclear holocaust works so well because it is an exaggerated look at something that could actually happen. It’s a masterwork of dark comedy featuring one of the best lines in movie history: “Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here! This is the War Room!”
