Richard joins Ryan Doyle and Jay Michaels of the NewsTalk 1010 afternoon show The Rush for Booze and Reviews! Today he talks about the Death in the Afternoon, a drink that sprung from Ernest Hemingway’s legendary liver, the Death in the Afternoon, the new “Velvet Underground” documentary, the latest from Michael Myers “Halloween Kills” and the reason Andrew Lloyd Weber bought a comfort dog.
Listen to the whole thing HERE!
Richard and CTV NewsChannel morning show host Jennifer Burke chat up the weekend’s big releases including the relentless return of Michael Myers in “Halloween Kills,” the emotional family drama “Mass” and the rock ‘n’ roll documentary “The Velvet Underground.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
Keeping track of the storylines of the various “Halloween” movies and their sequels can be a mind-bending experience. Forty-three years ago the original John Carpenter-directed movie established many of the rules of the slasher genre, and spawned a prolific franchise that so far has churned out an additional 11 movies detailing unstoppable masked killer Michael Myers’ penchant for killing good looking teenagers.
There have been reboots, returns, prequels and sequel to remakes. Laurie Strode, the original film’s heroine played by Jamie Lee Curtis, has faked her own death, gone into hiding, decapitated, shot and stabbed Myers and yet, a new movie, “Halloween Kills,” featuring Strode and Myers, hit theatres this weekend.
Director David Gordon Green gets around the labyrinthine comings-and-goings of the mad masked killer by simply ignoring the movies made between 1981 and 2009. His 2018 film, “Halloween,” is a direct sequel to the 1978 film of the same name.
Confused? No need to be.
All you really need to know is that after an extended flashback to 1978, it’s Halloween night in Haddonfield, Illinois, and the action picks up minutes after the 2018 sequel. Michael Myers, the “essence of evil,” is in the basement of a burning house, trapped there by Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis), her daughter Karen (Judy Greer) and granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak). The nightmare should be over, but this a “Halloween” movie which means the nightmare will never be over. Myers manages to escape and, as he resumes his killing spree, Laurie, her family and some motivated townsfolk aim to end his reign of terror. “You and Allyson should not have to keep running,” Laurie tells Karen. “Evil dies tonight.”
The best horror movies are never about the monster or the killings. That’s the gooey, gory stuff that keeps us in our seats, ready to absorb the larger social messages woven into the script. “Halloween Kills” wants to make poignant, timely points about how anger divides us and fear keeps us apart, but, trouble is, “Halloween Kills” is not one of the better horror films.
Far from it.
It is brutal. Michael Myers is as unrelenting and remorseless as ever, maybe even more so. Green’s interesting POV shots of the victims coupled with nasty, squishy sound effects provide several memorable moments of gory glee that horror fans will enjoy. Slash, slash, squirt, squirt! Oh my! He’s got blood on his shirt!
The first half of the movie offers up rather inventive kills. It’s fun when Myers is onscreen, lumbering his way toward another victim. Unfortunately, it’s less fun when the vigilante mob endlessly chants “evil dies tonight.” We get it.
And everything else about the plot.
For such a simple story, they sure do waste time explaining the same points over and over. Add to that over baked dialogue—”Let him take my head,” Laurie sneers, “as I take his.”—and a too-long running time and you’ll be wishing it was already November 1.
A nomination for a Golden Globe Award as Best Foreign Language Film should help “Minari,” now on premium digital and on-demand, the boost it deserves to find a wide audience. Simultaneously intimate and emotional, it is an authentic coming-of-age story about the resilience of the human spirit.
Drawing on his own personal experiences director Lee Isaac Chung has crafted a story about the Yi family, the Korean born mother and father, Jacob (Steven Yeun) and Monica (Yeri Han), and their American born kids Anne (Noel Kate Cho) and David (Alan Kim). Dreaming of a better life, they relocate from California to start a food business in rural Arkansas. Buying a plot of land, he plans on growing Korean produce to sell in the tri-state area.
It’s a tough go. Water is scarce, particularly after Jacob declines the services of a local dowser in favor of trying to find his own source. To make ends meet Jacob and Monica take on jobs at a local hatchery, but the long hours, coupled with David’s heart condition, bring trouble at home. To ease the tension Monica’s mother Soonja (Yuh-Jung Youn) comes from Korea to lend a hand.
She’s a handful, not a “real grandma” says David. But her swearing, love of wrestling and life brings some much-needed spark to the Yi’s new trailer home. Best of all, her antics help David find his way from shy little boy, whose mother coddles him, to fun loving kid.
“Minari,” in English and Korean with subtitles, is a carefully observed movie. The look on Monica’s face when she sees her new home for the first time is a subtle but devastating. Grandma’s easy laugh is infectious and David’s reactions to his grandmother—“They don’t swear! They don’t wear men’s underwear!”—are funny in a wistful kind of way. Even farmhand Paul’s (Will Patton) eccentric religious beliefs are treated compassionately and never ridiculed, even when Jacob can’t understand why he would rather lug a giant cross down the road than accept a ride.
These moments build as the story unfolds, bringing empathy along with them. And while the film confronts the racism the Yi’s encounter in their new community, the story doesn’t look there for conflict. That comes from within the family and their struggles, not from external circumstances.
“Minari” is a true family drama, with a hint of “The Grapes of Wrath” thrown in for good measure.
“Hammer,” a new VOD thriller starring Will Patton, uses many of the genre’s puzzle pieces but rearranges them in a new and interesting way.
Chris (Mark O’Brien) is having a very bad day. Estranged from his parents and deep in debt to some very bad people, he arranges a deal with an old associate, Adams (Ben Cotton). They arrange to meet on a rural road to exchange $200,000 in cash in return for drugs. The deal goes wrong, bullets are fired. Adams (Ben Cotton) and his girlfriend Lori (Dayle McLeod) are wounded as Chris, covered in blood splatter, makes a getaway on a motorcycle with the drugs and money.
As he speeds through town his father Stephen (Will Patton), out doing errands, spots him and immediately knows something is wrong. The situation escalates as Adams, looking to find Chris and the stash, grabs Chris’ younger brother Jeremy (Connor Price) as a hostage. “You haven’t changed,” Stephen says as he and Chris drive toward an uncertain outcome. “You haven’t changed one bit.”
Just after everything goes sideways in Chris’ life director Christian Sparkes stages a scene in a cornfield that tells us everything we need to know about Chris in one potent image. Hidden among the plants is a snake devouring itself. It’s a quick shorthand for the cyclical nature of Chris’ self-destruction. He’s been in trouble before, and the imagery suggests the pattern will continue, even if he makes it out of this scrape alive. It’s details like this that elevate a standard crime drama, complete with crooked ex-colleagues, innocent family members and bad debts, from the same-old to something new.
But it is the father and son relationship that gives the movie its momentum. It asks, and mostly answers, big questions about unconditional love and how far a father will go to help his son. Sparkes builds tension all the way through the tight eighty-minute running time but never forgets to allow the relationship between the father and his ne’er do well son to slip from the forefront of the storytelling.
“Hammer” is an engaging and offbeat thriller that makes the most of its lead performances. O’Brien manages to make Chris almost likable despite his constant foul-ups and Patton, as a father caught up in a breathless situation, is all strength and goodwill, even when he’s doing terrible things. Why this wasn’t released on Father’s Day I’ll never know.
Did you love “Halloween III: Season of the Witch”? Wipe it from your memory. What about “Halloween H20: 20 Years Later”? Fuhgeddaboudit. How about “Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers” or any of the other masked killer films that came after John Carpenter’s 1978 slasher classic? They don’t exist. When you lay down money for a ticket to the new “Halloween” you are erasing four decades of slashing and dashing and seeing a direct follow-up to the original film.
Jamie Lee Curtis returns as Laurie Strode, the resourceful babysitter who, forty years ago, bravely stood up to masked killer Michael Myers (Nick Castle). The intervening years have seen her raise her now estranged daughter Karen (Judy Greer) and live in a home fortified with booby-traps in case Myers should reappear. “He’s waited for this night,” she says. “I’ve waited for him.”
At the beginning of the film Myers—known as ‘The Shape’ in the first movie—is still paying the price for killing his teenage sister Judith and the subsequent slaughter of four others. Tucked away in Smith’s Grove Sanatorium he is silent, a man who hasn’t spoken since committing his first murder at the age of six.
When Aaron Korey (Jefferson Hall) and Dana Haines (Rhian Rees), two British true crime podcasters, try to pry and interview out of Myers they arrive just before the Bogeyman escapes on October 31, 2018, put on the famous mask and reboot his killing career with an eye toward the one victim who got away all those years ago.
The 1978 and 2018 movies share more than a title and a leading lady. They share structural DNA and frights galore. The 2018 film feels fresh, timely and like a throwback to the moody low-fi scares of the original slasher flicks.
Castle is as eerie as always but it is Curtis who steals the show. Strode is grown up, suffers from PTSD and by her own words is “a basket case.” What she is not is broken. “I prayed every night for him to escape,” she says, “so I could kill him.” The trauma of 40 years ago has hardened her but she’s a warrior and a survivor who uses the great personal price Myers extracted from her as fuel to keep going. It’s tremendous stuff and in the #MeToo era the kind of heroine reclaiming her power that should make audiences cheer.
“Halloween” is both a reboot and a bloody love letter to the director who started it all, John Carpenter.
By Richard Crouse – Metro Canada
These days Sasha Lane is waiting for her next big film role but not so long ago the twenty-one-year-old American Honey star was waiting tables at a Mexican restaurant in Texas. After a talent scout told her, “You have a face for movies,” she left the eatery to embark on what she calls “the biggest blessing of my life.”
With acting on her mind she answered an ad looking for people who were “wild, physical, fearless and ready for adventure. No acting experience required.” Her natural charisma impressed British director Andrea Arnold, who cast her in the lead role of a two-hour-and-forty-minute faux cinema vérité road movie that sees her play Star, an eighteen-year-old from a troubled home. Her character’s ticket out of the dysfunction she has grown up with is a travelling band of magazine sellers led by the charismatic Jake (Shia LaBeouf) and Krystal (Riley Keough).
For two months Lane hit the highway, travelling the dusty back roads of the American Midwest shooting a movie that was part scripted, part improvisation.
“We got sides the day before and the day of,” Lane says. “The scenes between Krystal and me were more scripted. This is the word, these are the lines. Some of the scenes where I’m in the van with the kids were more like, ‘I need you to mention that. Get from point ‘a’ to point ‘b.’ Go with it. Fill it out a little bit.”
It was a process of discovery for the first time actress as she learned about her character as the shoot wove its way across country.
“I didn’t know much about my character or much about what was happening,” Lane says, “but Andrea would say to me stuff like, ‘Sasha, you’re representing all the girls who go through this.’
“I was thinking, don’t being scared. You get to do this and in a way it’s what you’ve always wanted to do. I was studying psychology and social work in college. This is an artistic way to do what I wanted to do. I was excited and very much nervous because I had never done it before and people were going to be watching it. I knew it was a movie but it didn’t really hit me until I saw the trailer.”
Life on the shoot was all encompassing—“You’re in this bubble,” she says. “I didn’t have outside thoughts.”—but not always exciting. “There was a lot of sitting in parking lots,” she laughs.
Nonetheless she threw herself at the role.
“I remember when there were times I would go to Andrea and be like, ‘I can’t [bleeping] tell what the difference is between my life in this movie and my real life.’ It was insane.”
All the work paid off—“A Star is born,” raved The Guardian—and she’s now weighing multiple offers. Rumours suggest she’ll either star in Hunting Lila, based on the popular YA books by Sarah Alderson or Shoplifters of the World, a true-life drama about the night The Smiths announced they were calling it quits.
Wherever she lands it’s certain the shoot will be much different from the singular American Honey shoot.
“I just did a short,” she told me in September, “and I was like, ‘Oh, I get to go back home?’ Nothing is like this experience.”
You might want to think about your definition of what a movie is before buying a ticket for “American Honey,” a new film from British director Andrea Arnold. If story is your thing, then perhaps look elsewhere. Arnold’s has made a rambling two-hour-and-forty-minute faux cinema vérité road movie that is all journey and no destination.
Newcomer Sasha Lane is Star, an eighteen-year-old from a troubled home. Her ticket out of the dysfunction she has grown up with is a travelling band of magazine sellers led by the charismatic Jake (Shia LaBeouf) and Krystal (Riley Keough). She joins after a short job interview—“Do you got anyone who’s going to miss you?”—jumping in the van as the team treks across the American Midwest, selling magazines door to door. “We do more than work,” says Jake. “We explore. We party.” Despite training from top seller Jake, who’ll say anything to move the magazines, she’s not the best sales person. “You don’t have to read them,” she says. “You can use them to wipe your ass.” When not selling copies of “Trout Aficionado” the team explores, parties, tries to make money while Star and Jake embark on a covert affair.
Some will find Arnold‘s free form filmmaking exhilarating; some will find it exasperating. At epic length there is an emphasis on naturalism with all that entails; the mundane and the pulse racing in equal measure. It’s not a traditional road flick, it’s part of a sub-genre of road movies, the American travelogues by British directors armed with shaky hand held cameras.
There are some sublime moments, mostly when Star and Jake inhabit the screen, but too often we’re just along for the ride, like kids banished to the backseat watching everyone else have fun while having none ourselves.
Lane is a charismatic presence and LaBeouf will forever wipe away any and all memories of his stint as a child star. The real star is Keough, a Fagin-like character, tough-as-nails with a glare that could peel the paint off the walls. She’s not just Elvis Presley’s granddaughter; she can act.
Set in a world where regular folks still open the door for rattily dressed kids selling magazines, “American Honey” is a road trip about families lost and families found, about poverty and disenfranchised youth. It’s also about three hours long, which will be too long a trip for many people.
