Welcome to the House of Crouse. In “Maudie” Ethan Hawke plays a gruff Nova Scotian man who learns how to love. How brusque is he? “You walk funny,” he says when he first meets her. “You a cripple? You sick?” Not exactly a charmer. We talk about the film and his love of Nova Scotia. Then we go long with Ann-Margret, talking about her life, career–including a twenty-two foot on-stage tumble that almost ended her career–and her new movie, Going in Style. It’s all good stuff so c’mon in and sit a spell!
A new feature from from ctvnews.ca! The Crouse Review is a quick, hot take on the weekend’s biggest movies! This week Richard looks at “Smurfs: The Lost Village,” “Going in Style” and “Song top Song.”
Richard and CP24 anchor Jamie Gutfreund have a look at the weekend’s new movies, “Smurfs: The Lost Village,” “Going in Style,” “Song to Song” and the documentary “Giants of Africa.”
Richard sits in with CTV NewsChannel anchor Marcia MacMillan to have a look at the big weekend movies, the “Smurfs: The Lost Village,” “Going in Style,” “Song to Song” and the documentary “Giants of Africa.”
“Going in Style” is a blistering social commentary disguised as an old coot caper comedy. Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman and Alan Arkin play factory workers who did all the right things only to have the system give them the middle finger in old age.
A remake from the 1979 George Burns, Art Carney, and Lee Strasberg adventure “Going in Style,” the movie begins with Joe (Caine) confronting his condescending bank manager (John Pais). The older man’s mortgage has tripled and he will soon be evicted from his home. As they argue, outside the manager’s office armed masked men invade the bank, scooping handfuls of cash from the tellers. Joe is unharmed in the heist—one of the thieves tells him, “It is a culture’s duty to take care of the elderly.”—and later excitedly tells his family and friends Willie (Freeman) and Al (Arkin) about the robbery.
The afternoon’s excitement aside, Joe’s financial situation is still dire. His old company, now in the midst of a takeover, has frozen all pension cheques. He needs to come up with a way to get his hands on some cash. Ditto for Willie, who needs a new kidney and Al who can barely afford to feed himself.
When their favourite waitress gives them a free piece of pie with the truism, “Everybody deserves pie,” it dawns on Joe that she’s right. “We should be having our pie and eating it too,” he says, hatching a plan to steal back their pensions. “These banks practically destroyed this country and nothing ever happened to them,” he says. “If we get caught we get a bed, three meals a day and free healthcare.”
“Going in Style” then drops the social commentary and becomes a heist flick. Think “The Italian Job” with electric wheelchairs and you’ll get the idea.
Much of the charm of “Going in Style” comes from watching Caine, Freeman and Arkin glide—OK, it’s more like shuffle—through this material. There’s nothing particularly new here, we’ve seen loads of elderly men take back their lives on film in recent years, but subtext and actor goodwill elevate this slight story.
Caine, Freeman and Arkin are formidable actors but expertly portray the invisibility that can come with old age. As eighty-somethings they are unseen—banks take advantage of them, the police ignore them—until they take their future into their own hands. The story is implausible but by the time the heist happens you want the best for these grandpas, no matter how silly the story gets.
“Going in Style” is part knockabout comedy, part rage against the machine. Director Zach Braff adds in just enough sentimentality and slapstick to frame the film’s message of “having a pie of pie whenever the hell I want to!”
In a recent interview Mel Gibson said he’s out of the business of financing his own films because, “I’m not a fool.”
Neither is Zach Braff.
Both must be worth big bucks—Gibson from the movies, Braff from starring on 175 episodes of “Scrubs”—and could likely use some of their own capital to make their own movies but Gibson says he’s out of the game completely while Braff used the popular crowd sourcing site Kickstarter to raise money for his latest.
“Wish I Was Here” is part of the small—but growing—trend of celebrity driven films paid for by contributions from the general public. The almost-mid-life crisis story raised $2 million in just forty eight hours (ultimately procuring $3.1 million of a reported $5.5 million budget), attracted an all-star cast—Kate Hudson, “Frozen’s” Josh Gad, Mandy Patinkin and “The Big Bang Theory’s” Jim Parson—and some backlash from critics who felt that crowdsourcing should be left for artists who aren’t also starring in giant Disney movies.
Fact is, “Wish I Was Here’s” backstory is a bit more interesting than the story on the screen.
Braff plays Aidan, an underemployed actor whose life is unraveling. His kids are about to be kicked out of Hebrew school because his father (Patinkin), who has been paying the bills, has been diagnosed with cancer and can no longer afford the monthly payment. His wife Sarah (Hudson) is supportive of his acting dream but nearing the end of her tether. Brother Noah (Gadd) prefers cos play over actual emotions and his two kids (Joey King and Pierce Gagnon) are maturing faster than he is.
“Wish I Was Here” plays like two movies. The first forty-five minutes is a cleverly written comedic look at Aidan as a manboy with far more responsibility than he can handle. It’s ripe with gentle character based laughs that emerge from the situations and don’t feel forced.
It’s only in the second half when Braff (who co-wrote the script with his brother Adam) allows sentiment to get in the way of the movie’s momentum. Despite Patinkin’s line, “Eventually when things get tragic enough they circle back to comedy,” the final forty-five minutes, which deal with the loss of Aidan’s father, takes a darker tone. That’s OK, life sometimes changes on a dime, but the cleverness of the set-up is replaced with mawkishness.
Sometimes it works. Hudson’s heartfelt “tell your sons you love them” speech to her-father-in-law is shot simply with lingering close-ups on the actor’s faces. The scene has an intimate in-the-moment feel and is very moving.
Less so is Gadd’s big moment, (VERY MILD SPOILER ALERT), a Comic Con sequence that is a bit too quirky to fit the tone of the film that surrounds it.
By the end credits the movie worked for me more often than not, but I wished that there were fewer clunky moments. For every scene that rings emotionally true—and there are quite a few of them—there is another that feels forced. The beauty of “Wish I Was Here” lies in the former, and certainly not in the passages that feel left over from another, lesser quirky indie comedy.
Debuting at the 2010 Toronto International Film Festival, “The High Cost of Living” details the unimaginable torment of its two main characters, the victim of a hit-and-run and the man who ran her down.
Set in Montreal the movie casts former “Scrubs” funnyman Zach Braff as drug dealer Henry Welles. Driving drunk, he hits a Nathalie (Isabelle Blais) a pregnant woman who lives in his neighborhood. He flees the scene, but overcome by guilt he seeks out Natalie. The relief he feels when he discovers she survived is short lived when he learns her child was killed in the accident and she will now give birth to a stillborn daughter. Without confessing his crime Henry befriends Nathalie, hoping to find some redemption, but the situation only becomes more complicated.
“The High Cost of Living” is a performance driven film. Braff and Blais carry the weightiness of the story, handing in well modulated performances that stop the story from veering into melodrama. Their relationship isn’t always believable but their performances are.
Braff brings as much charm as possible to Henry, a low life drug dealer, and almost makes us sympathize for him. But not quite. If anyone sees this movie it could be a career changer for him, breaking him out of the sitcom mold.
Blais brings a raw edge to Nathalie, playing her as a woman whose life has literally come crashing down all around her. Roles like this ride a fine line. Go too far and you swerve into Victorian stage melodrama, hold back and discover that silent suffering isn’t effective on film. Blais finds the right balance and is devastating as a haunted woman with a heavy heart.
Despite the presence of Braff “The High Cost of Living” isn’t a barrel of laughs. It’s a heavy, but not heavy-handed drama that isn’t exactly enjoyable—that would be the wrong word—but it is effective.
Years ago I asked one of the original Wizard of Oz munchkins to explain the movie’s enduring appeal.
“Everybody can enjoy it,” said Karl Slover who was just two feet tall when he played the first trumpeter. “There’s no filthy language in it. I don’t see no bikinis! No nudist colonies! Kids can watch it and parents don’t have to worry because there’s nothing bad in there.”
I recently asked Zach Braff the same question in an interview to promote Oz the Great and Powerful, a prequel to the most beloved movie of all time.
“It reminds us of our childhood,” says the former Scrubs star, “and it reminds us of this magical place where crazy things happen. It is innocent and it is pure and it is amazing that it holds up. It was made in 1939, most kids don’t see other movies made in 1939.”
The new flick, co-staring James Franco, Mila Kunis, Rachel Weisz and Michelle Wiliams, is a state-of-the-art film, but it’s something that has been gestating for some time.
“I heard that Walt Disney always wanted to make an Oz movie,” he says. “There’s 13 books, so why not go back to that world and tell it from a 2013 perspective.”
The new film echoes the original, starting with black and white scenes shot in Kansas before moving to the eye-popping fantasy world of Oz. The movie’s modern twist is the addition of high tech tricks to make your eyes and ears dance. Braff calls the film’s visual and audio tweaks — increasing the depth of the 3D and adding in surround sound for the Oz scenes, for example — “Sam Raimi at his finest.”
Raimi, the director behind the Evil Dead movies and a little franchise called Spider-Man, was the big reason Braff signed on to the project.
“I heard Sam wanted to meet me in his office. That’s a good call to get.”
Braff, who made his directorial debut on the 2004 indie film Garden State, calls Raimi a “wonderful mentor who let me watch this whole process.” Even on his days off the actor would go to the set to learn about big budget filmmaking from watching the old pro work on Oz’s enormous sets.
“Sam’s the biggest mensch on earth. The guy’s a saint. He’s too good to be true.”
When I see a Disney movie like Chicken Little two things go through my mind. Firstly I’m hoping that the kid behind me doesn’t spit up on my shirt and secondly I always find myself comparing these computer-generated films to Finding Nemo. It’s not really fair because the story of the little fish who loses his mother is the Gone With the Wind of the genre and everything pales by comparison. Chicken Little, the story of the Petite Poulet who is just trying to restore his reputation after the infamous acorn-on-the-head-sky-is-falling debacle that sent his whole town into a panic, doesn’t suffer too much from the comparison with Nemo but it’s like weighing Gone With the Wind against Cold Mountain—they’re both good, but one is a classic movie while the other is just a movie.
At best, this is a sweet and funny movie which features one of the most expressive faces I’ve seen on film in a long time—animated or not. Chicken Little’s emotive eyes and furrowed feathered brow are very winning, as is the voice work by Scrubs’ star Zach Braff.
I think, however, that some of the action scenes—I don’t want to give anything away here, but there are aliens—might be a bit intense for very young viewers and I would have liked better music. I found the original tunes—with the exception of the title track by the Barenaked Ladies—quite dull, none of them had the oomph of Under the Sea from The Little Mermaid and the inclusion of tired old tunes like REM’s The End of the World As We Know It and Wannabe by the Spice Girls felt unoriginal and unimaginative.
Welcome to the House of Crouse. In “Maudie” Ethan Hawke plays a gruff Nova Scotian man who learns how to love. How brusque is he? “You walk funny,” he says when he first meets her. “You a cripple? You sick?” Not exactly a charmer. We talk about the film and his love of Nova Scotia. Then we go long with Ann-Margret, talking about her life, career–including a twenty-two foot on-stage tumble that almost ended her career–and her new movie, Going in Style. It’s all good stuff so c’mon in and sit a spell!
