RICHARD’S REVIEWS FOR AUG 22, 2014 W “CANADA AM” HOST MARCI IEN.
Canada AM’s film critic Richard Crouse shares his reviews for ‘Sin City’, ‘The F Word’, ‘If I Stay’ and ‘When the Game Stands Tall’.
Watch the whole thing HERE!
Posts Tagged ‘Zoe Kazan’
THE F WORD: 4 STARS. “Enchanting, whimsical and sweet… and much more.”
A few years ago the romantic comedy seemed like it was on life support, suffering from a bad case of the Katherine Heigls. The once proud genre had succumbed to predictability with witless stories and characters direct from Central Casting. The term rom com became an anti-selling point to audiences tired of the same old Barrymore Method© rom com design—unlikely couple meets, falls in love, overcomes obstacles, breaks up and… well, I’m not going to give away the ending but if you don’t know it already then either you don’t have a romantic bone in your body or you’ve never seen a Drew Barrymore (or Kristen Bell or Kate Hudson or Jennifer Aniston) movie.
Then, little by little, filmmakers began to chip away at the formula, making rom coms with a twist. There was a “Warm Bodies,” a zombie rom com and Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s one-two punch “500 Days of Summer” and “Don Jon,” among others. Now there’s “The F Word,” a fresh and funny take on romance and the nature of love.
Called “What If” in the United States where the “F Word” title was seen as too salacious, (in the movie the “F” stands for friend), it’s the story of Wallace (Daniel Radcliffe), a loser in love who meets Chandry (Zoe Kazan), the girl of his dreams, at a party. She’s charming, pretty, funny and has a live-in boyfriend. Like Harry and Sally before them, they must discover if men and women can just be friends.
Enchanting, whimsical and sweet are words I could use to describe “The F Word,” and the film earns each and every one, but it is also more than that.
Director Michael Dowse doesn’t allow the tone to get sugary and slip into saccharine mode. He’s aided by a smart and funny script by Elan Mastai, but it’s Radcliffe and Kazan that draw us in. The pair has chemistry to burn and their conversations have a ring of truth that doesn’t feel contrived or rom commy.
They’re supported by an able cast, including Megan Park in a star-making turn as Chantry’s promiscuous sister and “Girl’s” alum Adam Driver as Wallace’s best friend Allan.
“The F Word” is a persuasive attempt to reclaim the rom com from the Barrymore Method© and bring back the golden years when Harry could still meet Sally without all the annoying Heiglisms in between.
Metro Reel Guys love both the F Word and Daniel Radcliffe
By Richard Crouse & Mark Breslin – Metro Reel Guys
SYNOPSIS: Called What If in the United States where the F Word title was seen as too salacious, (in the movie the “F” stands for friend), this is the story of Wallace (Daniel Radcliffe), a loser in love who meets Chandry (Zoe Kazan), the girl of his dreams, at a party. She’s charming, pretty, funny and has a live-in boyfriend. Like Harry and Sally before them, they must discover if men and women can just be friends.
STAR RATINGS:
Richard: 4 Stars
Mark: 4 Stars
Richard: Mark, enchanting, whimsical and sweet are words I could use to describe The F Word, and the film earns each and every one, but it is also more than that. Director Michael Dowse doesn’t allow the tone to get sugary and slip into saccharine mode. He’s aided by a smart and funny script by Elan Mastai, but it’s Radcliffe and Kazan that drew me in. The pair has chemistry to burn and their conversations have a ring of truth that don’t feel contrived or rom commy.
Mark: Richard. This is an incredibly sweet-hearted movie that will do nothing to alleviate the problems in the Middle East. Nevertheless the movie is about 25% more realistic than most rom-coms and I was so grateful for that. But I’ve never seen a movie where the characters were so polite to one another; no wonder they set it in Toronto.
RC: It’s more realistic than most rom coms, with some real romance and some actual laughs. The once proud romantic comedy genre had been suffering form a bad case of the Katherine Heigls, but movies like this and 500 Days of Summer and Warm Bodies are persuasive attempts to reclaim the rom com from the Barrymore Method© and bring back the golden years when Harry could still meet Sally without all the annoying Heiglisms in between. That it makes Toronto and Canada look sexy and romantic is just an added bonus.
MB: I was also grateful for the indie score and the way the characters looked a little mussed, with some visible pores and an occasional zit, even if they all sported impossibly cute and expensive eyewear. Toronto does look sexy—although not dangerously sexy—but for a city that trumpets its multiculturalism, the cast and tone were lily-white. The lead was actually British! Speaking of the lead, I liked Radcliffe in the role. You, Richard
RC: I did. I thought he and Kazan made a cute couple. There’s more to Radcliffe than wizardry and battling “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.” Breaking free of Harry Potter must have seemed daunting for the young actor, but he proven in movies like this and Kill Your Darlings and The Woman in Black that he is versatile and won’t be typecast. I’m curious to see what he does next.
MB: I heard he was doing Vladimir in Waiting for Godot on Broadway, dressed as Osama Bin Laden. Personally, I think he’s too short for the role.
What you didn’t Daniel Radcliffe: He’s on time, hard working and polite
By Richard Crouse – Metro Canada
There are things about Daniel Radcliffe that you probably already know.
Thanks to the Harry Potter series he’s one of the most recognizable actors on earth. He is 5’5” tall, a published poet and is the youngest person, other than royalty, to be honoured with a portrait in the National Portrait Gallery.
Here’s what you don’t know. He’s also remarkably reliable. In 10 years of shooting the Potter pictures, he only missed two days — and he’s polite.
For this interview he turned up early (when was the last time an international superstar was on time?) and greets your reporter with a hearty, “What a lovely surprise.”
He offers to help with my crossword — “I’m one of those people in life who probably really annoys serious crossword doers. I’m one of those people who comes up behind and goes, ‘That one you’re about to get? I’ve got it’” — and apologizes when he almost lets a curse slip.
He is not your typical superstar and his new romance, The F Word, is not a typical rom-com.
The 25-year-old actor says the story of a young man hopelessly in love with his best friend (Zoe Kazan) “has things a lot of films want, that combination of being sarcastic and quick and funny without being negative or cynical.”
“Zoe says a great thing,” he says of co-star Kazan.
“She talks about how in most romantic comedies the people meet and then there’s a getting-to-know-you montage, then they do whatever they’re going to do for the rest of the film. Our movie is basically that montage expanded to feature length, and that is what is so joyous about it. Those moments when you are getting to know someone and flirting with them, making them laugh, are so intimate and so exciting and so charged that as an audience it is wonderful to be allowed in to watch that and live through it again.”
Playing the lovesick romantic lead is something different for Radcliffe, who says he wants “to try my hand at as many things as possible.”
Since the final Potter film in 2011, he has appeared in everything from the beatnik drama Kill Your Darlings to the fantasy film Horns and will soon be seen as Igor in a new version of Frankenstein.
“Having played one character for a very long time,” he says, “that builds up in you a desire to play a number of different characters and do as much different work as you can. I want to show as many different sides of my ability as I can. Also I like that you can’t predict what my next thing is going to be.”
Unpredictable, yes, but still polite.
HAPPYTHANKYOUMOREPLEASE DVD: 2 ½ STARS
“Happythankyoumoreplease” is the kind of movie Woody Allen might have made if he wasn’t a genius. Set in New York City it’s a look at the lives of a series of interconnected late-twenty-somethings as they navigate their way from hipsterhood to adulthood.
Writer-director Josh Radnor (who also stars on TV’s “How I Met Your Mother”) is Sam, a freelance writer who “adopts” Rasheen (Michael Algieri), a boy he finds on the subway. The youngster, separated from his foster family, becomes entwined in the lives of Sam’s friends, bartender and singer (and love interest) Mississippi (Kate Mara), Mary Catherine and Charlie a painter and filmmaker played by Zoe Kazan and Pablo Schreiber and Annie (Malin Akerman), a friend with alopecia and her suitor Sam # 2 (Tony Hale). Together and separately they traverse the gap between where they are, and where they’re going.
“Happythankyoumoreplease” is a likeable but slight movie, the kind of indie flick you probably didn’t go see when it played for a week at your local theatre. It starts off strong as we get to know the characters but by the time Sam and friends, by sheer repetition, have burned the hipster mantra “awesome” into your deepest consciousness, the movie wears a little thin.
But what it lacks in real depth it makes up for in charisma. Radnor (who proves himself a capable director) makes for an interesting central character, funny and self-depreciating and Malin Akerman, as the hairless girl with self esteem issues, shines.
In the end if you scratch “Happythankyoumoreplease’s” cooler-than-cooler veneer there is an under coating of heart. It’s no Woody Allen, but worth a look.
RUBY SPARKS: 3 ½ STARS
“Ruby Sparks,” a new fantasy from indie darlings Paul Dano and Zoe Kazan uses an ancient story—the Greek myth of Pygmalion who fell in love with one of his creations, only to have her to come to life—as inspiration to explore an the even older issue of how men and women relate to one another.
How would you react if you could create the perfect woman? That’s a question Calvin (Paul Dano) must debate in this gentle romantic comedy. He is a blocked writer who peaked with his first book, a novel he wrote at the age of nineteen. Socially awkward and uncomfortable with his fame he creates a relationship with one of his characters, Ruby Sparks (Zoe Kazan). He falls in love with his quirky character–“It’s almost like I’m writing to spend time with her,” he says—spending days writing about her until slowly fiction becomes reality. “You manifested a woman in your mind?” his brother (Chris Messina) says incredulously, “Mom’s gonna freak!”
Written by star Zoe Kazan and directed by “Little Miss Sunshine” directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, “Ruby Sparks” is a refreshing wisp of fantasy that grounds itself in reality as much as possible. It asks questions—how do you react when you can control every move your creation makes?—and builds a real relationship between a lonely writer and his “creation.”
Dano and Kazan, a couple in real life, bring great chemistry along with acting chops, and elevate a story that might have become a grungy male fantasy in the hands of Judd Apatow or the like, into a sweetly observed look at the nature of loneness and love.
Filmmaking couple talks about baby Ruby Sparks By Richard Crouse Metro Canada Friday July 26, 2012
“I keep saying, ‘We have a baby,’” says Zoe Kazan. “Her name is Ruby Sparks.”
But don’t send over hand-me-down baby clothes just yet. Ruby Sparks is the name of the movie Kazan wrote, stars in and produced with her co-star and real-life partner Paul Dano.
The romantic fantasy about a lonely writer who creates a character, only to have her come to life, is the result of years of work for the couple who met on the set of another movie, Meek’s Cutoff.
“I think it is not unlike that,” she says, continuing her baby metaphor. “You’re doing something incredible stressful. You’re not sleeping. The things matters so much to you and you love it but your relationship is suffering a little for it. You’re not having as much sex as you used to.”
Dano says, “We went through something together. Something very intimate, challenging, something we really cared about. Certainly we learned something about each other going through it and after it. When we were at work we both care so much about what we do we were focused on the job. I wasn’t thinking about us. It was very easy to go to work together. Driving home from work wasn’t always easy.”
Kazan, a Yale graduate whose grandfather was legendary filmmaker Elia Kazan, disagrees, “I actually think the preproduction time was harder in some ways.
“We were both pushing the rock up the hill. It’s really hard to get an independent film made these days and we were doing a lot of collaborative effort long before the movie started shooting.
“We’re actually used to not spending that much time together,” she continues, “and missing each other a lot so to have that concentrated period of time where all our energy was going into the same thing, and that same thing wasn’t the relationship, I think that was more difficult than I had anticipated.
“But on the other hand I love Paul’s work ethic and the way he thinks about his work. Those are the things I find really attractive about him. So I was also interfacing with a person I love at a level I really enjoy.”
Dano adds that making the movie with Zoe revealed the script had “more depth than even I anticipated. The scenes took on a life that I didn’t fully anticipate. Probably personal feelings came to it as well.”
