SpongeBob SquarePants (voiced by Tom Kenny) is an unlikely pop culture hero. A peppy and optimistic sea sponge, he should be a one-joke wonder but for more than two decades the character, who looks like a bright yellow kitchen sponge with googly eyes and little brown shorts, has soaked up love from kids and adults alike.
His new CGI adventure, “The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on The Run,” playing in theatres now, sees the animated invertebrate living in the underwater city of Bikini Bottom where he is a fry cook at Krusty Krab, the most successful restaurant in the sea. Life is good for SpongeBob and his friends like the dimwitted but funny starfish Patrick (Bill Fagerbakke) and restauranteur Mr. Krabs (Clancy Brown) until SpongeBob’s beloved pet Gary the Snail (also voiced by Kenny) is kidnapped by the wicked and vain ruler of The Lost City of Atlantic City, King Poseidon. With the help of Patrick and a wise tumbleweed played by Keanu Reeves, SpongeBob sets off on a perilous rescue mission.
“The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on The Run” brings with it the usual anarchy, inside jokes and unexpected celebrity cameos, but at its little osmotic heart is SpongeBob, a character who belongs to the same genus of entertainers as Soupy Sales, Stan Laurel and Pee Wee Herman. He, like his predecessors is sweet and unpredictable with a surreal streak that transcends silly and borders on high art. I think that’s why SpongeBob has survived and thrived as other characters of his vintage have faded. He’s silly enough for kids but surreal enough for the parents and underneath it all is a current of decency that transcends age.
In his television show and in the movies, including this new one, the rules of physics and storytelling may not apply, which is usually fun, but the things that make SpongeBob human (you know what I mean) are always on display. He’s loyal, caring, values his friends and is always optimistic. Those qualities are baked into “The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on The Run” and that, along with the absurd situations make it enjoyable for fans old and young.
Richard speaks to Tom Kenny and Bill Fagerbakke, the stars of “The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run.” For more than twenty years Kenny and Fagerbakke have voiced two of pop culture’s favorite animated characters, SpongeBob SquarePants and his pal Patrick Star. In the new film, playing in theatres in Canada, SpongeBob and Patrick go on a rescue mission to save SpongeBob’s pet snail Gary, who has been “snailnapped” by King Poseidon. In this interview e talk about the new movie, the popularity of SpongeBob memes and why these characters have endured for more than two decades.
After twelves years of regular “Canada AM” movie reviews, Richard and host Beverly Thomson get together one last time to talk about the weekend’s four big releases, “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows,” “Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping,” “Me Before You,” and “Into the Forest.”
Richard andCP24 anchor Nneka Elliot talk about the weekend’s four big releases, “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows,” “Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping,” “Me Before You,” and “Into the Forest.”
Justin Bieber is a teen ream for many teen girls. He gets a decidedly more adult treatment in “Pop star: Never Stop Never Stopping,” the new parody from Andy Samberg, Kiva Schaffer and Norma Tacoma a.k.a. the Lonely Island. Rated 14A for coarse language, nudity and substance abuse it may be a nightmare for hard-core Bielbers.
Samberg stars as Conner4Real, a Bieber-esque performer and former singer for boy band Style Boyz (Schaffer and Tacoma, who also co-direct). Despite the title of his big hit, “I’m So Humble,” (“I’m number one on the humble list!”) he’s a pampered pop star with an entourage—including a turtle wrangler, a weed roller, a short guy who hangs around to make Connor look taller and a movie star girlfriend (Imogen Poots)—that makes Elvis’s Memphis Mafia look restrained. When we first meet him, he’s at the top of the pops but when his sophomore album—hilariously titled Connquest—stiffs he learns who his real friends are as he struggles to stay popular.
A loving, and sublimely silly look at concert films like “Katy Perry: Part of Me” and “Justin Bieber: Never Say Never,” “Popstar” features real-life musicians, Nas, Akon, 50 Cent, Seal, Pink, Snoop Dogg, Usher, Questlove, DJ Khaled as talking-heads as it skewers the more ridiculous aspects of its (mostly) fictional lead character. It’s a millennial “Spinal Tap” that takes aim at the excesses of pop life—clueless social commentary, absurd catchphrases, gratuitous nudity to cultural appropriation, it’s all here—but at its poppy heart its really about friendship and family.
The scenes of satire are often ripped from the TMZ’s headlines—there’s an incident at the Anne Frank House and a costume malfunction that derails Connor’s public reputation—which feel familiar while still drawing a laugh. Better than those are the sly comments on how fame works in the Age of Kardashian. “There is no such thing as selling out,” Connor coos. “These days if you don’t sell out people think nobody’s interested.” Much of the film is as deep as one of Bieber’s teen love laments, but occasionally it hits a little harder and the laughs get a little deeper. But make no mistake this is R-rated stuff that revels in its idiotically smart humour.
The targets in “Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping’s” crosshairs are obvious and, frankly, easy pickings, but the film’s combination of catchy-if-ridiculous songs, appealing performances and fast-paced parody make it a chart topper.
“It’s impossible to talk about N.W.A without talking about South Central LA in the late 1980s.”
Straight Outta Compton is the legendary album by gangsta rap group N.W.A, released Aug. 8, 1988. It’s a sonic blast that plays, as Rolling Stone said, like a “bombastic, cacophonous car ride through Los Angeles’ burnt-out and ignored hoods.” It became the first platinum album to reach that status with no airplay or major tours and now it’s also the title of a biopic that documents the group’s beginnings and turbulent history.
Writing for theverge.com, Lizzie Plaugic observed, “It’s impossible to talk about N.W.A without talking about South Central LA in the late 1980s.” Infected by crack and gang violence, the area was so rough the LAPD created a special unit known as CRASH — Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums — and it was these surroundings that helped birth the ferocious beats of Straight Outta Compton and a genre known as gangsta rap.
Music is unavoidably influenced by the surroundings of those who make it and music biopics have always been quick to use location as a shorthand to help the audience understand how and why musicians produced the music they did.
Just as South Central sets the scene for Straight Outta Compton, Manchester’s drug-fuelled “Madchester” club scene of the late 1980s and early ’90s informs 24 Hour Party People and the mean streets of Brooklyn set the stage for the meteoric rise of rapper Notorious B.I.G. in the 2009 film Notorious.
There is no shortage of John Lennon or his birthplace on celluloid. There are five official Beatles movies, documentaries like The U.S. vs. John Lennon, a 2006 movie that focuses on Lennon’s transformation from musician into antiwar activist, and even experimental short films like the John and Yoko shorts Two Virgins and Apotheosis.
Portrayed by everyone from Paul Rudd (in Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story) to Monty Python’s Eric Idle, rarely has any actor captured both Lennon’s rebelliousness and vulnerability as Aaron Taylor-Johnson does in Nowhere Boy, the story of the musician’s formative years.
Taylor-Johnson, recently seen in blockbusters like Avengers: Age of Ultron and Godzilla, is aided in his performance by a gritty portrait of Lennon’s lower-working-class neighbourhood in Liverpool, England. You can almost smell the bangers and mash coming off the screen and the vivid Merseyside backdrop provides subtle clues about the man Lennon would become.
Set back when you could still drink a bottle of stolen booze in the shade of the Hollywood sign without being arrested for trespassing, The Runaways focuses on two glue-sniffing, glam-rock obsessed tough girls named Joan Jett (Kristen Stewart) and Cherie Currie (Dakota Fanning). Disaffected SoCal teens, they see an exit from their mundane suburban lives through rock ’n’ roll.
Unfortunately their ticket out comes in the form of impresario Kim Fowley, a record producer and self proclaimed “King Hysteria.” He cobbles together the band, trains them to be rock stars, convinced that they will “be bigger than the Beatles.” Before they can play Shea Stadium, however, the band breaks up — knee deep in ego, drug abuse and bad management. Set in and around the Sunset Strip’s late 1970s seedy underbelly, the movie perfectly captures the sun-dappled decadence that illuminated the time.
In the movies, like real life, it’s about Location! Location! Location!
“Straight Outta Compton,” the new biopic of original gangster rap band N.W.A. and their turbulent rise and fall, is at once a very specific look at the birth of a musical genre and a universal music industry story about how money, ego and bad management will break a band a part faster than you can say, “Boyz-N-The Hood.”
We first meet MC Ren (Aldis Hodge), Dr. Dre (Corey Hawkins), Eazy-E (Jason Mitchell), DJ Yella (Neil Brown, Jr.) and Ice Cube (O’Shea Jackson, Jr) as young men growing up in Compton, the most notorious neighbourhood of South Central Los Angeles. Dre and Cube are music obsessed teens, trying to avoid getting “locked up or laid down.” Dre is a genius DJ, a master of beats, while Cube is a journalist of sorts, writing rhymes that report on life in the hood. Their reality is near constant police harassment, casual violence and intimidation by gangs.
Eazy-E, a local drug dealer looking or a way out of the life, puts up the seed money to start a record label and soon he moves from banker to frontman and NWA is born. A couple local hits later they’re approached by Jerry Heller (Paul Giamatti in another role, following this year’s “Love and Mercy” that sees him exploiting a Californian musician) an old school manager with a plan to make them famous and himself rich. They become a sensation, birth gangsta rap and fall to pieces under the weight of their success. Heller, Eazy-E and the shards of NWA on one side, Dr. Dre and Suge Knight (R. Marcos Taylor) on another with Ice Cube completing the triangle. Bad blood and bad business deals blow apart their once tight relationships and it isn’t until they consider getting back to basics that old wounds begin to heal.
“Straight Outta Compton” plays like dozens of music bios that came before but despite featuring music industry clichés—sometimes the clichés of cheating managers, ego and excess are clichés because they’re true—it spends more time on the characters than the situation. It’s funnier and warmer than you might anticipate a movie about the ferocious and profane beginnings of gangster rap, a music born out of frustration and a need to be heard, but the emotional truth of the film is based in the relationship between the leads, particularly Dre, Eazy and Cube. A palpable sense of camaraderie is present throughout, and it grounds the film during its more excessive moments.
Mitchell’s Eazy-E has the widest emotional arc and he pulls it off, bring a steely vulnerability to the character that humanizes him and makes his (SPOILER ONLY IF YOU KNOW NOTHING ABOUT N.W.A.!!) early demise all the more devastating.
Jackson Jr., Ice Cube’s real life son, dispels any talk of nepotism, handing in a performance that captures the familiar mannerisms and essence of his father.
Also strong are Hawkins as the budding megaproducer Dre and Keith Stanfield as the young Snoop Dogg.
On the downside the movie doesn’t have much use for its female characters unless they are playing stern mothers, compliant groupies or supportive wives. We may have to wait for the Salt-N-Pepa biography for a look at the female side of hip hop.
At two-and-a-half hours “Straight Outta Compton” is a detailed look at the band that, although it takes liberties with the facts in favour of drama, grabs the rhythm of the time by the throat and doesn’t let go. Echoes of the Rodney King trial reverberate throughout the film giving the movie, in light of Black Lives Matter, a timely feel that showcases the prescient nature of Ice Cube’s rhymes.
SpongeBob SquarePants (voiced by Tom Kenny) is an unlikely pop culture hero. A peppy and optimistic sea sponge, he should be a one-joke wonder but for more than two decades the character, who looks like a bright yellow kitchen sponge with googly eyes and little brown shorts, has soaked up love from kids and adults alike.
