Posts Tagged ‘Tom Hanks’

CTV ATLANTIC: RICHARD AND TODD BATTIS ON NEW MOVIES IN THEATRES!

I join CTV Atlantic anchor to talk about the family drama “Here,” the odd couple “A Real Pain” and the courtroom drama “Juror #2.”

Watch the whole thing HERE!

YOU TUBE: THREE MOVIES/THIRTY SECONDS! FAST REVIEWS FOR BUSY PEOPLE!

Fast reviews for busy people! Watch as I review three movies in less time than it takes to tie a bowtie! Have a look as I race against the clock to tell you about the family drama “Here,” the odd couple “A Real Pain” and the courtroom drama “Juror #2.”

Watch the whole thing HERE!

HERE: 1 ½ STARS. “technical prowess overwhelms the heart embedded in the story.”

SYNOPSIS: In “Here,” a new, experimental intergenerational family drama starring Tom Hanks and Robin Wright, and now playing in theatres, director Robert Zemeckis sets a century of love, loss and life in the living room of a one-hundred-year-old American home.

CAST: Tom Hanks, Robin Wright, Paul Bettany, and Kelly Reilly. Directed by Robert Zemeckis.

REVIEW: At one point near the end of “Here,” Richard Young (Tom Hanks) says, “Time flies,” as he reflects on his daughter’s progress in life. In reply, his increasingly exasperated wife Margaret (Robin Wright) snaps, “You always say things that are kind of obvious.”

Richard is not alone in the expression of easy platitudes. Director Robert Zemeckis may be daring in his use of “Here’s” technology, but the story takes no chances.

Based on the 2014 graphic novel by Richard McGuire, the film chronicles thousands of years, on one piece of land, from rampaging dinosaurs to the building of a house in 1900 whose front room provides the location for 99.9% of the action. With the camera locked into position, Zemeckis ping pongs through history, focusing on three generations of the Young family in the one setting.

Major historical events are seen on television, or heard on the radio, but this isn’t a history lesson, it’s an “if these walls could talk” look at the lives lived in the cozy home. It’s a clever idea, but you can’t help but wish “Here” would narrow its focus. The constant transition from one era to the next prevents any one of the stories to work up a head of steam or make us care about the characters.

From a technical point of view, Zemeckis’s transition from one time frame to the next are sometimes clever—a Halloween party, with Richard dressed as Benjamin Franklin, that morphs into a colonial era scene works—and sometimes silly, as in the scene where a leaking roof, dripping puddles on the floor, transitions into Maragret’s water breaking on the same spot. It’s in those moments, and there are many of them, that the movie feels trapped, unable to cast off the restraints of its concept and truly come to life.

Most of the families on display are given a short shrift. The Harter’s (Michelle Dockery and Gwilym Lee) turn of the century story, for example, is meant to provide some emotional heft but falls short because of the film’s inability to make us care much about characters we hardly know. I would have liked more time with Leo and Stella Beekman (David Fynn and Ophelia Lovibond), the inventor and pin-up model who make the most of their vignettes, but the brief glimpses of their free-spirited time in the house are short lived.

It is nice to see Hanks and Wright together, but for much of the runtime they are rendered digitally de-aged and dead-eyed, which takes some of the fun out of the “Forrest Gump” reunion.

“Here” is ambitious, but its technical prowess overwhelms whatever heart is embedded in the story.

ASTEROID CITY: 3 STARS. “whimsy has finally replaced storytelling.”

For better and for worse, there is nothing quite like a Wes Anderson film. The director’s unique production design is all over his new sci fi comedy “Asteroid City,” but with this film it is clear that whimsy has finally replaced storytelling on his to do list.

This is a twisty-turny one. Like a set of nesting dolls, it’s a film, within a play, within a show hosted by a Rod Sterling-esque talking head (Bryan Cranston), within a teleplay written by playwright Conrad Earp (Edward Norton).

The bulk of the “action” takes place in Asteroid City, a remote New Mexico desert town—population 87—where Steve Carell’s motel manager hosts a Junior Stargazer convention. Gifted kids and their parents from all over the state convene to showcase their incredible, and often outlandish, inventions.

It’s an interesting group that includes recently widowed war photographer Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman), father to “brainiac” Woodrow (Jake Ryan) and son-in-law to Stanley (Tom Hanks), movie star Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson) and the rough-n-tumble J.J. Kellogg (Liev Schreiber). Along for the ride are singing cowboy Montana (Rupert Friend), teacher June (Maya Hawke), Dr. Hickenlooper (Tilda Swinton) a scientist from the local observatory and the fast-talking Junior Stargazer awards judge, General Grif Gibson (Jeffrey Wright).

When the convention is interrupted by a visiting alien, the whole thing is locked down for a mandatory government quarantine.

Despite the quirky tone and Anderson’s trademarked stylistic choices, “Asteroid City” is a serious film, albeit one laced with a healthy dose of absurdism. A study in how people deal with grief, and the true nature of love, Anderson’s characters experience existential dilemmas, angst born of loss and dissatisfaction. Threats are posed by nuclear bombs and life from other planets unexpectedly dropping by to say hello and children wonder aloud what happens when we die. A shroud of melancholic anxiety hangs over the film, like a shroud, but Anderson’s staging of the film, the meta story within a story structure, obscures the movie’s deeper meanings under layers of style.

The cast, particularly Johansson and Hanks, bring focus to Anderson’s unfocussed story, and Carell, Cranston and briefly Goldblum are having fun, but it sometimes feels the surfeit of characters are there more to decorate the screen than to forward the story.

“Asteroid City” may delight long-time fans, but casual moviegoers or newcomers to the director’s oeuvre may find the film’s mannered obtuseness off kilter and off putting.

OSCARS 2023: IN DEPTH WITH AUSTIN BUTLER + BAZ LURHMANN + NYLA INNUKSUK + CIAN CRUISE

On this week’s Richard Crouse Show we tell you aboutElvis,” the new film about the King of Rock and Roll from Moulin Rouge director Baz Lurhmann. The movie covers the twenty-ish years in the lives of Elvis and his manager Colonel Tim Parker. Through the birth of rock ‘n roll of the late 1950s and the cheesy Hollywood years to the legendary 1968 Comeback Special and the Las Vegas rise and fall, Elvis and the Colonel shimmied and shook their way to the top of the charts and into the history books.

I caught up with director Baz Lurhmann and his stars Austin Butler, who hands in a terrific performance as Elvis and Olivia DeJonge who plays Elvis’ wife, Priscilla. We talked about what the story of Elvis’s life can tell us about America, Priscilla’s role in the singer’s life and mushc more.

Then, Nyla Innuksuk, director of “Slash/Back,” a cool new coming of age story with an Indigenous and sci fiction twist, and a message about friendship and what it means to fight for community, stops by to tell us about the challenges of taking a crew of 50 people to Baffin Island in the summer of 2019, to make this film.

Finally meet writer Cian Cruise. He has a degree in film studies and philosophy and is a new dad. He combines all those avenues from his life in his new book, “Dad Bod: Portraits of Pop Culture Papas.”

A clever collection of essays about father figures in popular culture, he has a look at everyone from Gandalf to Homer Simpson, to unpack the qualities that inform our collective image of fatherhood. Stick around and find out what he says Rambo, as seen in First Blood, can teach us about the behaviour of toddlers.

Listen to the whole thing HERE!

Here’s some info on The Richard Crouse Show!

Each week on the nationally syndicated Richard Crouse Show, Canada’s most recognized movie critic brings together some of the most interesting and opinionated people from the movies, television and music to put a fresh spin on news from the world of lifestyle and pop-culture. Tune into this show to hear in-depth interviews with actors and directors, to find out what’s going on behind the scenes of your favourite shows and movies and get a new take on current trends. Recent guests include Chris Pratt, Elvis Costello, Baz Luhrmann, Martin Freeman, David Cronenberg, Mayim Bialik, The Kids in the Hall and many more!

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A MAN CALLED OTTO: 3 STARS. “Hanks goes full-grump, with a hint of humanity.”

No one can play unlikable-with-a-hidden-heart-of-gold like Tom Hanks. Now in theatres, “A Man Called Otto,” is a sentimental Mean Old Man redemption movie that showcases the actor’s ability to transcend even the most predictable material.

When we first meet Otto Anderson (Hanks) he is the epitome of a grumpy old man. Recently retired, he spends his days making sure his neighbours in their suburban Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania cul de sac obey community rules. According to Otto, his neighbours are idiots who don’t recycle properly and never display their parking passes. “The whole neighbourhood is falling apart these days,” he grumbles.

The recent passing of his life-long love, wife Sonya (Rachel Keller), has made him bitter, angry at the world. “Nothing works,” he says at her grave site, “now that you’re gone.”

Lost and despondent, he makes several attempts to take his own life and join Sonya in the after world, but is interrupted by circumstance or the loud knocking on his front door by his new neighbours, a young, vivacious Mexican-American family, parents Marisol (Mariana Treviño) and Tommy (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) and their adorable kids.

With new life on the street, Otto slowly lets his guard down, opening up to the possibility of living life without Sonya.

A mix of sadness and hope, of tears tempered by laughs, “A Man Called Otto’s” path is predictable, but elevated by its two central performances.

As Otto, Hanks is a man damaged by life. Hard knocks have dented him, tamping down his true nature. What is left is a hard shell, dinged by circumstance, but rather than go full-grump, Hanks allows his softer side to seep through. That’s the thing that makes Otto human and not a caricature, and Hanks’s well-established nice-guy reputation goes a long way to keeping us on Otto’s side.

The film’s beating heart, however, is Treviño as Marisol. As a counterbalance to Ottos’s curmudgeonly behaviour, she is empathy and kindness personified. She radiates warmth, and eventually melts Otto’s icy façade.

“A Man Called Otto,” a remake of the Swedish film “A Man Called Ove” from director Hannes Holm, is a tearjerking story of redemption that tries a bit too hard to strum the heartstrings, but, thanks to the performances, still manages to find resonate, emotional moments.

PINOCCHIO: 3 STARS. “adds new technology to the story, but no new ideas. “

Following the introduction of the indeterminate intonations of his Col Tom Parker character in “Elvis,” Tom Hanks now goes Tuscan, continuing his exploration of world accents with “Pinocchio,” a live-action CGI hybrid musical, now streaming on Disney+.

Hanks is Geppetto, an Italian woodworker who carves a puppet named Pinocchio out of a block of white pine. The elderly, lonely man treats the marionette like a son, and lo-and-behold, after he wishes on a star, Pinocchio (voice of Benjamin Evan Ainsworth), with a little help from The Blue Fairy (Cynthia Erivo), comes to life.

But is he a real boy? Nope. “To be really real,” says the Fairy, “he must pass an ordeal. He must prove that he is brave, truthful and unselfish.

To point the puppet in the right direction, the Fairy appoints the wisecracking Jiminy Cricket (voice of Joseph Gordon-Levitt) to be his moral guide. It’s his job to teach the newbie right and wrong, to be his conscience. “Conscience,” he says, “is that little voice that most people choose not to listen to… and that’s what wrong with today.”

With good intentions and endless curiosity, the pair set off but are sidelined when Jiminy is imprisoned in a glass jar. Left to fend for himself, Pinocchio experiences the ups-and-downs of life as a puppet cut loose in the world. He first falls under the control of a cruel puppeteer named Stromboli (Giuseppe Battiston), meets Lampwick (Lewin Lloyd), a mischievous boy with an eye for trouble, and even gets eaten by a sea monster called Monstro the Whale.

Pinocchio is getting loads of life lessons, but is he learning life’s most important lesson? “The most important part of being real, isn’t what you’re made of,” said the Blue Fairy. “It’s about what’s in your heart.”

“Pinocchio,” directed by Robert Zemeckis, is a respectful retelling of Disney’s 1940 animated classic. The edgy details from that movie and the 1883 book by Carlo Collodi have been smoothed over—Pinocchio does not, for instance, smoke a cigar in this version—but visually, Zemeckis takes his lead from the classic Walt Disney Animation style. From the puppet’s yellow hat, blue tie and red lederhosen, this Pinocchio is strictly traditional.

It’s a vibrantly colored romp, an action adventure that, despite the up-to-the-minute technology involved, feels old fashioned, dare I say wooden, in its approach. Good messages about the importance of family and learning from your mistakes abound, the peril is kept to a family-friendly minimum and, like its main character, the movie is just a little naïve.

Following in the footsteps of other Disney live-action remakes like “Beauty and the Beast,” “The Lion King” and “The Jungle Book,” the latest version of “Pinocchio” adds new technology to the story, but no new ideas.

ELVIS: 3 ½ STARS. “an idealized look at the boy from Tupelo who became the King.”

“Elvis,” the new King of Rock ‘n Roll biopic from maximalist director Baz Luhrmann, begins with a sparkling, bedazzled Warner Bros logo and gets flashier and gaudier from there.

The movie is told from the point of view of Elvis’s (Austin Butler) manager Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks under an inch or two of makeup), a huckster with a flair for spotting talent and a gift for manipulation.

Working on the carnival circuit taught Parker that a great act “gave the audience feelings they weren’t sure if they should enjoy,” a standard the early, hip-shaking Elvis met and exceeded.

Their partnership is one of the best known, and well documented success stories of the twentieth century. For twenty years, through the birth of rock ‘n roll of the late 1950s and the cheesy Hollywood years to the legendary 1968 Comeback Special and the Las Vegas rise and fall, Elvis and the Colonel shimmied and shook their way to the top of the charts and into the history books.

“Elvis” covers a lot of ground. From young Elvis (Chaydon Jay) discovering his love of music from the Black rhythm and blues artists and Mississippi church music he absorbed as a kid to his final white jumpsuit days in Vegas, Luhrmann shakes, rattles and rolls throughout in a blur of images and spectacular sound design.

It entertains the eye but feels akin to skipping a stone on a lake. If you hold the stone just right and throw it across the still water at the correct angle, it will skim along for what seems like forever without ever piercing the surface.

“Elvis” is a great looking movie. A pop art explosion that vividly essays the story’s various time frames and styles, it makes an impact visually and sonically. Unfortunately, Luhrmann is content to make your eyeballs dance, your gold TCB chains rattle and simply skim across the surface.

We do learn that Elvis was the sum of his country music and R’n’B experiences and influences, was fueled by the adoration of his audience and aware of the social change of the 1960s, but there is no excavation, no real exploration of what made the singer or his manager actually tick. It may seem fitting that a movie about a man who drove pink Cadillacs and wore phoenix embroidered jumpsuits and capes is over-the-top, but those images are so woven into the fabric of popular culture already that this feels clichéd, more like greatest hits album than a biography.

Butler is a charismatic performer, playing Elvis through several stages of his life, and despite the superficiality of the storytelling hands in a rounded performance that transcends impersonation of a man who spawned a generation (or two) of impersonators.

It’s rare to see Hanks play a character with no redeeming qualities. “I am the man who gave the world Elvis Presley,” he says, “and yet there are some who would make me out to be the villain of this story.” His take on Colonel Parker grates, with the theatrical Dutch accent and imperious, manipulative manner, he is certainly the villain of the piece. He’s a pantomime of the big, bad music manager, one who saw his client as a musical ATM machine and little more.

By the time the end credits roll “Elvis” emerges as an idealized look at the boy from Tupelo who became the King by paying tribute to the power of the music that made a legend.

FINCH: 3 ½ STARS. “Hanks made us care about a volleyball & does it again with a robot.”

“Finch,” the new Tom Hanks dystopian drama now streaming on Apple TV+, feels like a mix of “Castaway” and “Short Circuit.”

Set in the near future, the movie takes place in a world where a catastrophic solar flare devastated the planet. 140° Fahrenheit temperatures are commonplace and most people are dead, burned to a crisp, leaving behind desiccated corpses. Those who are left, like Finch (Hanks) must scavenge for food and supplies. Finch, an engineer and inventor, lives in a bunker with his best (and only) friend, a cute dog named Goodyear.

When he isn’t driving around in his armored vehicle—a giant RV with solar panels—exploring the burned-out area around his home for any morsels that might have been left behind, he is working in the lab, building a robot.

Finch isn’t tinkering with the droid to pass the time. He’s sick, slowly dying of radiation poisoning and building a machine to care for Goodyear once he is unable.

Slapped together with spare parts, the robot (Caleb Landry Jones), with his elongated face and camera lens eyes, is a gangly contraption, childlike in his awareness of the strange new world to which he is introduced.

As Finch’s health worsens so does the situation outside his doors. As temperatures rise and the weather becomes more and more unstable, Finch, Goodyear and the robot, who goes by the name Jeff, hit the road headed toward San Francisco.

The trip is fraught with danger and made no less easy by Jeff’s learning curve. He’s not always the droid Finch is looking for. “I know you were born yesterday,” says an exasperated Finch, “but I need for you to grow up!”

Despite the high tech aspects of the story—the robotics and mysterious cause of the dystopia—“Finch” is an old fashioned movie. The action sequences are old school, man-against-nature style, as Finch and his rag tag team battle tornadoes, UV radiation and extreme weather in the hellish post-apocalyptic wasteland.

More than that, “Finch” is not really about the robot. It’s about making a connection, human or otherwise, determination and legacy.

Ensuring that the movie has some heart and soul is Hanks. He’s in virtually every frame of the film, and his empathic likability shines through. There’s not a lot of backstory—any background is told in the form of stories to teach Jeff a life lesson—but Hanks, through his expressive eyes provides all the details we need.

Landry Jones, in a motion capture performance, brings a great deal of heart and humour to the mechanical Jeff as he figures out the nuts-and-bolts of day-to-day life. The father and son bond between he and Finch brings both the joy and sorrow of relationships to the fore and goes beyond the usual buddy movie clichés into something deeper.

“Finch” is a different kind of post-apocalyptic movie. In fact, it may be the most jovial end of the world flick ever. Finch and Jeff lightheartedly joust back and forth, which leads to some sappy moments but at the end of the day it’s about their relationship. And let’s face it, if Hanks could make us care about a volleyball in “Castaway” he can make you fall for a CGI robot.