Richard sits in with CTV NewsChannel anchor Erin Paul to have a look at the big weekend movies, Matthew McConaughey in “Gold,” the Oscar nominated “The Red Turtle,” “Trespass Against Us” starring Michael Fassbender and Germany’s entry for Best Foreign Film, “Toni Erdmann.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
From BNN.ca: The film ‘Gold’ starring Matthew McConaughey hits the big screen. It tells the tale of a third-generation prospector who does everything to strike gold, literally buying a ticket to Indonesia to meet with a gold miner who has a lead on a mine. Richard Crouse, film critic, joins Commodities for a look at film.
Watch the whole thing HERE!
Matthew McConaughey must have a thing for bullion. “Gold,” a new film directed by Stephen Gaghan, is his third movie after “Sahara” and “Fool’s Gold” to use the search for the elusive ore as a story device. Who can blame him? The bright metal is the stuff of dreams, but remember, all that glitters is not gold.
McConaughey, with a receding hairline and carrying fifty extra pounds, is Kenny Wells a third generation prospector. His grandfather scratched the company out of the side of a Nevada mountain before his father (Craig T. Nelson) turned it into a multimillion-dollar concern. Kenny hasn’t been as lucky. Unable to strike gold—literally and figuratively—he is reduced to setting up office in a bar where the liquor and bad ideas flow freely.
Down to his last dollar, he pawns his wife’s last piece of decent jewellery to buy a plane ticket to Indonesia to meet gold miner Michael Acosta (Edgar Ramírez). Acosta has a lead on a mine located in the jungle but doesn’t have the capital to set up the operation. Kenny jumps in, raises the money and after a slow start they hit a vein. “It’s amazing how gold dust can change everything,” he says, “and for better and for worse the ride had begun.”
The “ride” isn’t just the riches to rags to riches story, but also a wild tale of avarice, hubris and dreams.
McConaughey is digging for gold and chewing the scenery in his latest movie. Wells is a larger-than-life character who leaves behind a larger-than-life mess and McConaughey wastes no opportunity to go big. He grins and grimaces throughout, filling the screen with Wellsian personality.
It’s a good thing too, because the by-the-book script doesn’t offer up much in the way of anything that feels real. It’s “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” without the exploration of human weakness or the conscience. It’s a potboiler on low simmer. It’s the kind of movie where people say things like, “You gotta plan?” while someone else (usually McConaughey) nods knowingly.
“Gold” looks pretty—the scenes in the Indonesian jungle are gorgeous—and does have a nice a nice subtext about the power of belief—What is a prospector? “Someone who believes it is out there.”—but has too much of a boiler plate plot to truly glitter.
Richard and CP24 anchor George Lagogianes have a look at the weekend’s new movies, “Silence” from director Martin Scorsese, Hidden Figures” starring Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monáe and “A Monster Calls” with Liam Neeson.
Watch the whole thing HERE!
Richard sits in with Marcia MacMillan to have a look at the big weekend movies, “Silence” from director Martin Scorsese, Hidden Figures” starring Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monáe and “A Monster Calls” with Liam Neeson.
Watch the whole thing HERE!
Conor O’Malley’s (Lewis MacDougall) needs a friend. A sensitive child with a troubled home life, he’s being forced to deal with adult problems even though he’s only twelve-years-old. He is, as one character says, “too old to be a kid, too young to be a man.”
The young British boy’s troubles are many. His mother (Felicity Jones) has terminal cancer so he’s forced to move in with his strict grandmother (Sigourney Weaver). “If you get hungry there’s spinach in the fridge,” she says on the way out the door. “Don’t touch anything!” If that wasn’t bad enough his father (Toby Kebbell) lives in California and he’s the favourite of local bully Harry (James Melville). “I’m sorry you have to face this,” says dad, “but you have to be brave.”
One night at 12:07 he meets the friend he so desperately needs, a monster yew tree (voiced Liam Neeson) with roots for legs and long branches for arms. “I know everything about you,” he rumbles. “The truth you hide. The truth you dream.” Speaking in parables the giant tree tells Conor three stories to help him cope with the trauma in his life.
“A Monster Calls” is a quiet family drama about growing up and learning to grieve. It’s an intense topic and one that places it just outside of the kid’s entertainment category. An off-kilter tale that packs an emotional wallop in its final third, it defies expectations by allowing the characters to react in real ways. This is not sentimental fluff. Conor is in turmoil, plagued by nightmares of his mother’s grave and, as a result, lashes out in anger. It’s powerful and upsetting to see a young boy struggle with situations that he can barely understand let alone control.
At the heart of the story is Lewis MacDougall as Conor. He’s a child with an adult face that imbues the character with an unactorly authenticity that feels utterly real, even when he is talking to a giant tree.
Neeson’s voice is a thunderous roar that comes on strong but hides an undercurrent of tenderness and compassion.
“A Monster Calls” is a heartbreaking tale with a nightmarish climax that will be too intense for kids who may get wrapped up in the story. For everyone else it’s a fractured fairy tale with real insight and pathos.
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.”
