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 the missing daughter story of “Searching,” the adult rom com charms of “Juliet, Naked” and the slow burn of “Cardinals.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
Richard joins CP24 anchor Nathan Downer to have a look at the weekend’s new movies including the missing daughter story of “Searching,” the adult rom com charms of “Juliet, Naked” and the slow burn of “Cardinals.”
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 missing daughter thrills of “Searching,” the adult rom com charms of “Juliet, Naked” and the slow burn of “Cardinals.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
Richard has a look at the high tech Hitchcockian thrills of “Searching,” the adult rom com charms of “Juliet, Naked” and the slow burn of “Cardinals” with the CFRA Morning Rush host Bill Carroll.
Listen to the whole thing HERE!
We all do internet searches everyday but a new film ups the stakes. “Searching” is a high tech missing person’s story.
We first meet dad David (John Cho), mother Pam (Sara Sohn) and daughter Margot (Michelle La) through a cleverly edited montage of their on-line activity. From e-mails and YouTube videos to log-ins and Facebook pages, we learn about their lives including Pam’s cancer diagnosis. The tight family is torn apart by Pam’s illness, with 16-year-old Margot retreating pulling away from her father until one night when she disappears without a trace after a study group meeting. When she fails to answer any of David’s texts he calls the police. Working with Detective Vick (Debra Messing) he sifts through Margot’s online life in a desperate search for clues. The deeper his cyber investigation goes the more twists appear. “I didn’t know my daughter,” he says.
From Google Maps and app controlled surveillance cameras to FaceTime and Instagram, the story is told through a series of browser windows via laptops and iPhones, any device with a screen. It sounds like it will sterile, like an afternoon of web surfing with higher stakes, but director Aneesh Chaganty humanizes the story. Technology tells the tale but the beating heart of the narrative is David’s determination to find his daughter. The film’s style is very specific and very modern but the theme of connection between parents and children is universal.
“Searching” feels like high tech Hitchcock as David uncovers the details of his daughter’s life. The more browsers, the more suspense. Chaganty uses our familiarity with these sites—many of us go to them everyday—to ground the story in reality and underline the alienating quality of social media that fails to fill the hole left by loneliness and grief. Also, who would have thought a Norton antivirus reminder that Pam’s account hasn’t been scanned in 694 days could take on such poignancy?
We’ve seen these screen-shot movies before—2014’s “Unfriended” comes to mind—but none have had the emotional arc of “Searching.” It’s a little too conventional in its climax and conclusion but John Cho’s terrific performance and some genuine thrills elevate the story past its visual gimmick.
Richard sits in on the CJAD Montreal morning show with host Andrew Carter to talk about the high tech Hitchcock thrills of “Searching,” the adult rom com charms of “Juliet, Naked” and the slow burn of “Cardinals.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
Richard and CP24 anchor Karman Wong talk about the weekend’s big releases, including the remake of “Ben-Hur,” the neo-western with Chris Pine, Jeff Bridges and Ben Foster “Hell or High Water,” “War Dogs,” starring Jonah Hill and Miles Teller and the stop motion animated “Kubo and the Two Strings.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
Richard sits in with Todd van der Hayden to have a look Jonah Hill as a twenty-something arms dealer in “War Dogs,” the magical stop-motion animation of “Kubo and the Two Strings,” the neo-western “Hell or High Water” with Chris Pine, Ben Foster and Jeff Bridges and the pointless remake of “Ben-Hur.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
By Richard Crouse – Metro In Focus
Ben-Hur director Timur Bekmambetov compares the legend of a Jewish prince falsely accused of treason by his adopted Roman brother to Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet “and any story written by Chekhov.”
Ripe with betrayal, revenge and redemption but shaded with love and compassion, Bekmambetov says the story of Ben-Hur is “timeless.”
“The conflicts the characters experience are as relatable today as they were in Roman times or 1880, when Lew Wallace wrote the novel. It’s human nature and that doesn’t change,” says producer Sean Daniel.
The human story is the engine that propels the Ben-Hur narrative, but throughout film history it’s the tale’s chariot race that entertains the eye. In version after version the showdown between the hero and his duplicitous brother is the centerpiece of the action.
This weekend Bekmambetov’s big-budget version of the story stars Jack Huston as Judah Ben-Hur and yes, there is a chariot race. “It was very, very dangerous work,” the director says of the scene that took 45 days to shoot and featured 90 trained horses. Each chariot was attached to four horses and could reach speeds of 65 to 70 km/h.
“There’s no suspension,” says Bekmambetov. “It’s shaky, it’s vibrating. The horses are snorting around you, behind you. It’s absolutely unprotected. You feel like you’re in the hands of fate.”
No animals were harmed during the shooting of Bekmambetov’s chariot race and, remarkably, the only human injury was a broken arm. Historically, however, shooting the chariot scenes has been fraught with problems.
Toronto-born director Sidney Olcott’s 1907 silent version focused on the race. Shot on a beach in New Jersey with local firemen as the charioteers and firehouse horses pulling the chariots, the scene was lifted directly from the novel, which triggered the first major copyright infringement case in movie history. It wasn’t standard practice to ask the author’s permission before adapting their work, but after Ben-Hur the Supreme Court decreed film companies must obtain rights to previously published work.
According to an MGM memo 1925’s Ben-Hur A Tale of the Christ’s chariot sequence took 42 cameras and two months to shoot at a cost of $500,000. The result was 60,960 metres of film which was whittled down to 228.6 metres. The completed sequence was named the Most Edited Scene of all Time by The Guinness Book of World Records and was copied, almost shot-for-shot in the animated film The Prince of Egypt and in the pod race scene from Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace.
The spectacular scene featured thousands of extras, including William Wyler, who would go on to direct the most famous version of the story, the 1959 movie starring Charlton Heston.
Legend has it that a stuntman was killed during the shooting of the Wyler’s legendary sequence but according to Snopes.com the rumour is false. In fact it was 1925 shoot that claimed the life of a stuntman who was killed when his chariot wheel broke and he was thrown in the air.
On Wyler’s set a stuntman was injured when his chariot overturned and two other horse drawn carts crashed into a bank of cameras but no one was hurt. Later, when Heston, who did most of his own driving in the scene, was asked if he liked shooting the scene he said, “I didn’t enjoy any of it. It was hard work.”
