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!”
Everyone loves an underdog. From Rocky defying the odds to go from zero to hero to Billy Elliot chasing after his dream of being a dancer, tales of people beating the odds have been a Hollywood staple for years. “Gringo,” a new film starring Charlize Theron and David Oyelowo, features a character with the steepest climb to success that we’ll see this year.
Oyelowo, who earned a Golden Globe nomination for playing Martin Luther King in “Selma,” stars as the mild-mannered Harold Soyinka, a middle manager at a start up pharmaceutical company. Personally and professionally his life is a dumpster fire. In debt and on the verge of bankruptcy, his wife Bonnie (Thandie Newton) is having an affair with his boss Richard Rusk (Joel Edgerton), who plans on selling the company and firing Harold.
As his life swirls out of control Harold accompanies Richard and business partner Elaine Markinson (Charlize Theron) on a trip to their manufacturing facility in Mexico. Here things really start to unravel when it’s revealed that Richard and Elaine made a deal with a drug cartel to sell their product off the books for a quick infusion of cash. Now, trying to go completely legit, the devious pair wants out of that deal. Trouble is, the cartel isn’t ready to end the deal and poor old Harold is in the middle. “The world is upside down,” Harold moans. “It doesn’t play to pay by the rules.”
There is loads more like a kidnapping plot, a wide-eyed American (Amanda Seyfried), double-dealings, a mercenary with a heart-of-gold (Sharlto Copley) sent to find Harold and a deadly Beatles fan, but there will be no spoilers here.
It’s stuffed-to-the-gills with intrigue, which makes for a chaotic final third, but for all the huggermuggery, the big surprise here is Oyelowo’s light touch. Best known for his dramatic turns in movies like “A Most Violent Year” and “A United Kingdom,” here he finds a pleasing balance between Harold’s desperation and exasperation, mining the character’s situation for maximum humour. Most importantly for this underdog story, you want him to succeed.
Copley’s mercenary is fun but the same can’t be said for the rest of the generic characters populating the story. Theron is one note as a trash-talking executive who doesn’t hesitate to tell a man she just fired to “stop crying and go down to unemployment.” Edgerton, whose brother Nash directed the film, is all alpha-male bluster and not much else.
Aside from showcasing Oyelowo’s comedic side “Gringo” feels old fashioned, like it has been sitting around on a shelf somewhere, hidden from view since the 1990s. It was the heyday of indie crime dramas like “8 Heads in a Duffel Bag,” a time when writers looked to Tarantino for inspiration only to fall short. “Gringo” wears those fingerprints all over it. It’s a good but derivative effort that feels more like a Netflix film than a big screen experience.
Tyler Perry is a wildly successful actor, director, producer and all round mogul whose movies make oodles of money but so far have received very little love from the award gods. His latest film, “For Colored Girls”—an adaptation of the Tony Award nominated Broadway play “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf”—is his most ambitious film to date but will it be enough to elevate Perry from the ranks of money maker to award winner?
Directing a sprawling ensemble cast Perry (who adapted Ntozake Shange’s original script) weaves together the stories of eight African-American women as they deal with personal issues like the search for love, rape, emotional abandonment, infidelity, sexual repression and abortion. Perry retains the play’s poetic approach, mixing naturalistic dialogue and stark real-life drama with free, impressionistic verse.
“For Colored Girls” is Perry’s most accomplished and ambitious movie to date. It’s risky material, from the dire situations most of these women find themselves in (may I suggest group therapy for the cast?) to the style of language, which is likely to confound and confuse many viewers, and while he has stayed true to the tone of the play, I couldn’t help but think that this type of material would work better on stage. Much of the poetic language is beautiful or evocative—a car is described as “smelling of alcohol and ladies in heat”—but despite good performances from the cast the writing often seems too delicate to be blown up for the big screen.
Couple that with Perry’s melodramatic touch and “For Colored Girls” loses much of its importance of message to overwrought scenes and clichés. The play was a series of monologues and the movie does not improve on the form by intertwining them or creating worlds for the characters to exist in. The choppy segues from character to character feel contrived and as a result, so do the situations that frame the monologues. Individually the stories may have power but as hard as it may be to believe after a while the viewer gets immune to the endless and continuous misery inflicted on these characters.
“For Colored Girls” earns points for ambition and good performances from the cast, particularly Thandie Newton as a troubled sex addict, Macy Gray as the movie’s Acid Queen and Phylicia Rashad as the wise Gilda, but as bold a step as this may be in Perry’s career it isn’t nuanced or interesting enough to gather much steam come awards time.
“Good Deeds” will make you laugh, but you’ll be laughing at it rather than with it as this movie plays out. It may also make you cry, but they will be tears of frustration at a story so predictable that it makes the “See Spot Run” books seem complex by comparison.
Director Tyler Perry is not doing audiences a good deed by releasing his latest film in general release.
In the opening minutes we are introduced to Wesley Deeds (Tyler Perry) and his perfect life. He has a hip apartment, a beautiful fiancée (Gabrielle Union) and is the CEO of a major software company. Trouble is he isn’t sure if he is living his own life or the life he was raised to have. He’s a child of privilege, unlike Lindsey Wakefield (Thandie Newton), a single mom on the verge of eviction and possibly losing her little girl to Child Welfare Services. A chance meeting between the two — she works as a night janitor at the company he runs — leads him to slowly begin unbuttoning his buttoned-down life. It also leads this young woman to see her life in new terms, beyond living out of her car.
The script is filled with the kind of banal chatter people engage in every day. In fact, a drinking game could be built around the amount of times Wesley says, “Are you serious?”
What banal here is ridiculous. Check out this exchange: “How much is a gallon of milk?” asks Wesley. “I don’t know…you’re lactose intolerant.” Don’t expect Noel Coward from this mess.
The story claims to examine the gap between rich and poor, but it fails to make any social commentary worth noting. Instead, “Good Deeds” is a bland transformational fairy tale filled with clichés.
Phylicia Rashad is so cold in her role that when she cries in one scene I half expected crystals of ice to form on her cheeks.
Newton slides by on her looks. She’s given nothing else to do except mouth poorly-written dialogue. Brother Wayne also has one of the most unintentionally funny breakdowns in the history of cinema.
Only Perry as Wesley escapes with his dignity somewhat intact. His banal dialogue is just as painful to endure, but his gentle giant approach is appealing. Less appealing, however, is his carefully manicured bear and Tom of Finland motorcycle outfit, but those are the least of this movie’s problems.
Ultimately, “Good Deeds” is what I call a “Seatbelt Movie.” This film so bad you’ll need a seatbelt to keep you from walking out halfway through it.
“Return to form” is an overused film critic cliché which usually means that a director has gone back to his roots after a few flops. Such is the case with Guy Ritchie’s new British geezer gangster film RocknRolla. His last two films, Swept Away (starring his wife Madonna) and Revolver, were pummeled by the press and ignored by audiences but his new story of London’s underworld should lure some of his core audience back to the theater.
Ritchie, also acting as screenwriter, has crafted a story that breathes the same air as his earlier scripts Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch. Set in London’s down and dirty criminal underworld, the story revolves around powerful old-school gangster Lenny Cole (Tom Wilkinson) who opens up a can of worms when he makes a shady real estate deal with Russian billionaire Uri Obomavich (Karel Roden). When the Russian’s accountant, “a posh bird who likes a bit of the rough life” (Thandie Newton), orchestrates the robbery of a substantial amount of money in transit to Lenny she brings small time crook One-Two (Gerard Butler) his crew the Wild Bunch and two hapless concert promoters (Jeremy Piven and Chris ‘Ludacris’ Bridges) into the fray, all of whom want a piece of the action.
The script makes use of Ritchie’s ear for the cadences of London’s criminal world. The dialogue sparkles with quirky cockney one-liners delivered with a smirk by a cast who seems to have born with plastic spoons in their mouths.
The action, set against a killer pulsating soundtrack featuring a mix of new and old indie rock and punk songs, is as frenetic as ever, all canted camera angles, icy cool slo mo and rock and roll lighting. It’s a testosterone-soaked two hours that owes much to Tarantino both is style and content. Stylish and bursting with camera trickery—a deconstructed sex scene broken into six or seven well chosen shots culminating with the snap of a cigarette lighter is funny and sexy– RocknRolla apes the American director’s energy and way with parallel storylines.
What Ritchie lacks though, is Tarantino’s way with female characters. RocknRolla positively reeks of testosterone, lacking anything resembling a strong female presence. Thandie Newton has some good moments, but is underwritten and not nearly as interesting as the male characters who have, for a start, better characters names like One-Two, Handsome Bob and Mumbles and better fleshed out back stories. Even two Russian thugs who do little more than compare scars and chase Butler through a London neighborhood have a bigger screen presence than Newton. Ritchie may be a poster boy for the new British “ladism” but next time out it would be nice to have a strong feminine role—and please, don’t cast Madonna.
RocknRolla will be called a “return to form” for Ritchie, which is good news for fans of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch but bad news for actresses looking for interesting roles.
