“Sting,” a new creature feature from director Kiah “Nekrotronic” Roache-Turner, is about a young girl named Charlotte and a spider, but “Charlotte’s Web” this ain’t.
Alyla Browne is precocious 12-year-old Charlotte. Ignored by her parents, saddled with an annoying baby brother and a cruel aunt, she escapes the tedium of everyday life by shimmying through the duct work of her Brooklyn apartment complex.
Her exploration of the creaky old building brings her to a locked room, where she finds a tiny spider living in a dollhouse. As she adopts the creature, names him Sting but what she doesn’t know is that the arachnid is no ordinary spider. Brought to earth inside a meteor fragment, the eight-legged alien grows rapidly, spinning a web of terror as it preys on the residents of Charlotte’s apartment building.
“I always say, ‘Never make friends with anything with more than four legs,’” says exterminator Frank (Jermaine Fowler). “A spider only knows two things, that’s eat and kill.”
As Sting wreaks havoc on her neighbors, Charlotte takes it upon herself, with some unlikely help, to squash the bug.
Arachnophobes beware! “Sting” contains enough eight-legged horror to make your skin crawl. Much of the action happens in the shadows, but the spider attacks are graphic and have an “Alien” vibe. A spider crawling into a person’s mouth will never not be terrifying.
The focus on pure horror is blurred somewhat by the introduction of characters like Erik (Danny Kim), the monotone, awkward guy Charlotte turns to for help, who dilute the story, distracting from the horror and Charlotte’s fractured family.
The family dynamics provide the film’s anchor, supplying the high stakes that keep the audience invested in the action. The oddball characters are fun, but it is the emotion of Charlotte’s reclaimed relationship with her family, forged in the fire of a full-blown spider attack, that gives the movie its heart.
“Sting” has a few laughs and some spidery scares, but it works best when it allows the two-legged stars to shine.
Watch an encore presentation of “Pop Life” with rock superstar Sting about his new musical “The Last Ship” and the importance of remembering the community he came from. Then, the “Pop Life” the panel, artist Curt Montgomery, Chef Guy Rawlings and Dr. Sharon Cohen, talk about the influence and power of memories in art.
Tune in Saturday nights, 8:30 pm (ET) on the CTV NewsChannel and again at midnight on CTV or watch the whole thing HERE!
Film critic and pop culture historian Richard Crouse shares a toast with celebrity guests and entertainment pundits every week on CTV News Channel’s talk show POP LIFE.
Featuring in-depth discussion and debate on pop culture and modern life, POP LIFE features sit-down interviews with celebrities from across the entertainment world, including rock legends Sting and Meat Loaf, musicians Josh Groban and Sarah Brightman, comedian Ken Jeong, writer Fran Lebowitz, superstar jazz musician Diana Krall, stand-up comedian and CNN host W. Kamau Bell, actors Danny DeVito and Jay Baruchel, celebrity chefs Bobby Flay and Nigella Lawson, and many more.
On this encore presentation of “Pop Life” Richard spoke with rock superstar Sting about his new musical “The Last Ship” and the importance of remembering the community he came from.
“It was a gift in that I am a songwriter a storyteller and there was a story that hadn’t been told,” Sting says of The Last Ship, “that needed to be told by someone of community, but not in the community so there was some objectivity. I had a responsibility to honour the community that I came from, a community in crisis.”
Tune in Saturday nights, 8:30 pm (ET) on the CTV NewsChannel and again at midnight on CTV or watch the whole thing HERE!
Film critic and pop culture historian Richard Crouse shares a toast with celebrity guests and entertainment pundits every week on CTV News Channel’s talk show POP LIFE.
Featuring in-depth discussion and debate on pop culture and modern life, POP LIFE features sit-down interviews with celebrities from across the entertainment world, including rock legends Sting and Meat Loaf, musicians Josh Groban and Sarah Brightman, comedian Ken Jeong, writer Fran Lebowitz, superstar jazz musician Diana Krall, stand-up comedian and CNN host W. Kamau Bell, actors Danny DeVito and Jay Baruchel, celebrity chefs Bobby Flay and Nigella Lawson, and many more.
On this encore presentation of “Pop Life” the panel, artist Curt Montgomery, Chef Guy Rawlings and Dr. Sharon Cohen, talk about the influence and power of memories in art.
Tune in Saturday nights, 8:30 pm (ET) on the CTV NewsChannel and again at midnight on CTV or watch the whole thing HERE!
Film critic and pop culture historian Richard Crouse shares a toast with celebrity guests and entertainment pundits every week on CTV News Channel’s talk show POP LIFE.
Featuring in-depth discussion and debate on pop culture and modern life, POP LIFE features sit-down interviews with celebrities from across the entertainment world, including rock legends Sting and Meat Loaf, musicians Josh Groban and Sarah Brightman, comedian Ken Jeong, writer Fran Lebowitz, superstar jazz musician Diana Krall, stand-up comedian and CNN host W. Kamau Bell, actors Danny DeVito and Jay Baruchel, celebrity chefs Bobby Flay and Nigella Lawson, and many more.
On the season four opener of “Pop Life” Richard spoke with rock superstar Sting about his new musical “The Last Ship” and the importance of remembering the community he came from. “It was a gift in that I am a songwriter a storyteller and there was a story that hadn’t been told,” Sting says of The Last Ship, “that needed to be told by someone of community, but not in the community so there was some objectivity. I had a responsibility to honour the community that I came from, a community in crisis.”
Film critic and pop culture historian Richard Crouse shares a toast with celebrity guests and entertainment pundits every week on CTV News Channel’s talk show POP LIFE.
Featuring in-depth discussion and debate on pop culture and modern life, POP LIFE features sit-down interviews with celebrities from across the entertainment world, including rock superstar Sting, musician Josh Groban, comedian Ken Jeong, writer Fran Lebowitz, superstar jazz musician Diana Krall, legendary rock star Meatloaf, stand-up comedian and CNN host W. Kamau Bell, actor Jay Baruchel, celebrity chefs Bobby Flay and Nigella Lawson, and many more.
From ctvnews.ca: Film critic Richard Crouse is excited for the newest batch of interviews that will air when CTV’s “Pop Life” returns for its fourth season this Saturday. Since his show aired three years ago, Crouse said he’s set out to create a platform where people could share stories they hadn’t before. “Everybody has got a fascinating story … and we give them time to tell it,” he told CTVNews.ca over the phone… Read the whole thing HERE!
Richard swings by CP24 Breakfast to talk about the fourth season of “Pop Life,” premiering in Saturday February 23, 2019! On the first episode Sting stops by to talk about his musical “The Last Ship.” “It was a gift in that I am a songwriter a storyteller,” he says, “and there was a story that hadn’t been told, that needed to be told by someone of community, but not in the community so there was some objectivity. I had a responsibility to honour the community that I came from, a community in crisis.”
“Pop Life” comes back with all new shows on Saturday February 23 on CTV (midnight) and CTV NewsChannel (8:30 pm)! First up, Sting talks about his musical “The Last Ship” and the biggest compliment a songwriter can get. Tune in, you’ll like it!
For a few years in the 1980s Andy Summers was one third of the biggest band in the world. During the course of filming this documentary—based on his 2007 memoir “One Train Later”—he finds himself walking into a karaoke bar, unrecognized, to join a stranger on stage to sing one of his biggest hits, “Every Breath You Take.”
The former guitar player of The Police seems comfortable in his place in the rock and roll firmament, but nonetheless uses “Can’t Stand Losing You: Surviving The Police” as a way to get his side of the story of why the band called it quits at the peak of their fame out to the world. In some ways it plays like a musical cautionary tale, in other ways like a New Wave “Spinal Tap.”
The Police—Summers, Sting and Stuart Copeland—were birthed out of the punk rock movement. With their bleached blonde hair and tuneful ability, however, they quickly became a mainstream success, charting hits like “Roxanne,” “Walking on the Moon” and “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic,” filling stadiums while, at the same time, allowing their egos to become as inflated as their record sales.
Summers—the only new interview subject, all other interviews are archival—walks the viewer through his career from sixteen-year-old jazz player to guitarist in Eric Burdon’s New Animals to meeting his wife Kate—who left him at the height of his fame, only to return when things calmed down somewhat—as a broke and unemployed musician slumming it in Los Angeles.
The story picks up when he joins The Police, a then struggling trio playing London’s punk clubs, and quickly begins to detail the cracks that eventually widen to split the band apart. Arguments over credit, fights about whose songs would be recorded and included on their albums and Sting’s habit of referring to the band as a launching pad to a solo career, turned their working lives into a pressure cooker, one that finally boiled over in 1986.
There isn’t as much down-and-dirty info in “Can’t Stand Losing You: Surviving The Police” as you might expect from insiders tell-all documentary and Summers is an amiable host but the inclusion of fresh interviews with his former band mates—who appear in archival and some newly shot footage from their one-off 2008 reunion tour—might have broadened the story and added some grit to the tale.
