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This weekend, he teams with Ryan Reynolds in what will certainly be the handsomest film of the month, Safe House. The story of a young CIA agent guarding a fugitive turns ugly when their safe house is attacked, is bound to break the box office, but not all of Denzel’s movies have been huge hits.

Though he’s had great success with films like Training Day, let’s have a look at some of his overlooked films.

The 1991 crime-thriller Ricochet starred Washington as a Los Angeles cop-turned-attorney going head-to-head with a bitter escaped criminal (John Lithgow) he put behind bars. Solid action and a great villain from Lithgow’s psycho period — before he did 3rd Rock from the Sun and went soft — it never found the audience it deserved.

Years later in Training Day, Washington’s character flashes a picture of himself as a young LAPD officer. The photo is a still from Ricochet.

Washington has played his share of attorneys and policemen over the years, but he has never been afraid to try new things, as he did in 1993’s Much Ado About Nothing. In this all-star adaptation of Shakespeare’s most famous romantic comedy, he plays the powerful Don Pedro of Aragon.

The movie took hits for its miscasting of Keanu Reeves and Michael Keaton in key roles, but Washington was praised for his work. He has performed Richard III and Julius Caesar on stage, but this movie remains his only filmed Shakespearean role.     

From the light comedy of the 17th century we next look at the post-apocalyptic The Book of Eli, set just a few years from today. It’s a strange movie. Denzel plays a coiled spring of righteous power in this timely movie about how religion can be used for both good and evil.

Finally, a movie that should have spawned an ongoing franchise but dried up after just one film was Devil in a Blue Dress. Rolling Stone called Washington’s take on private investigator Ezekiel ‘Easy’ Rawlins a “richly detailed portrayal,” adding that you leave the movie hoping the other books in the Rawlins series will be turned into films. Sadly, that didn’t happen.

]]> http://www.metronews.ca/Edmonton/comment/article/1091695 Wed, 08 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0400 Richard Crouse, Metro Canada http://www.metronews.ca/Edmonton/comment/article/1091695
What? No mention of capes or crazy gadgets? I guess because there are so many types of superheroes, Wiki decided to keep the definition vague.

Take, for instance, the lads in this weekend’s Chronicle. After uncovering a mysterious crater they develop telekinesis, flight and invulnerability all without the aid of butlers named Alfred, secret identities or spandex suits.

They’re just ordinary guys with extraordinary powers. Civilian superheroes, if you will.

But they’re not the first everyday movie characters to make the leap (sometimes over tall buildings) to become superheroes. The flickers are filled with stories of regular folks who become crusaders — some with extraordinary powers, and some without.

In Defendor, Woody Harrelson plays a man whose rich inner life spills out into his real life. By day he is dead-end-job Arthur, but by night he is Defendor, a masked superhero do-gooder. His task? To clean up the streets of Hamilton, Ont.    

Speaking in comic book clichés — “Look out termites,” he says, “it’s squishin’ time!”— and with a duct tape “D” on his chest, Defendor and his homemade arsenal of weapons patrols the streets looking for crime to prevent. He’s a bit delusional, but his heart is in the right place.

“Who writes your dialogue?” asks a bad guy, “Spiderman?”

“No, I do it myself,” he answers innocently, before teaching the guy a lesson he won’t soon forget.

Based on a wild indie comic of the same name by Mark Millar, Kick-Ass tells a couple of intertwining stories. First up is Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson), a fanboy who creates a superhero alter ego called Kick-Ass as a way to boost his self-esteem. In life he says his only superpower is being invisible to girls, but when he dons the suit he becomes… only marginally more super.

His exploits, however, grab the attention of Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage) and Hit Girl (Chloë Moretz), a slightly psychotic father-and-daughter team of masked (and in Hit Girl’s case, wigged) avengers who admire Ass’s style and moxie. Defendor and Kick-Ass don’t have superpowers, but they do have cool costumes and the right attitude. That places them alongside other characters that helped redefine what it takes to be a superhero, the better-known movie heroes Batman and Iron Man.

]]> http://www.metronews.ca/Edmonton/comment/article/1085714 Wed, 01 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0400 Richard Crouse, Metro Canada http://www.metronews.ca/Edmonton/comment/article/1085714
Contained within were tidbits of information on how to survive shark attack, a volcano eruption, even what to do when the pilot passes out leaving you to land the plane.

It’s an interesting read, but I am a visual person and have learned much more about survival from watching movies than from the pages of this book.

From this weekend’s The Grey, a man versus nature tale starring Liam Neeson, I learned that empty airplane booze bottles can be broken, wedged between your fingers and repurposed as Wolverine-style knuckles of death.  

Hopefully I’ll never have to use that trick, but it is just one of many lessons learned at the movies.

Alive, the story of Uruguay’s rugby team whose plane crashed in the middle of the Andes mountains, I learned that cannibalism is a good way to stave off hunger pangs.

A similar lesson was taught in the Robert Redford film Jeremiah Johnson, based on a real-life trapper named John Johnston, nicknamed “Liver Eater Johnston” for his habit for cutting out and eating the livers of men he killed.

From the true-to-life mountain climbing movies 127 Hours and Touching the Void, I learned perseverance.

In the former a man is wedged literally between a rock and a hard place. To get free he cuts off his own arm with a pocketknife. Now that’s stick-to-itive-ness!

The latter sees a man with a severely broken leg crawling his way out of a deep crevice to safety.

From Cast Away, Tom Hanks’s stranded-on-a-desert-isle movie, I learned how to build a raft from a portable toilet, and how, in lieu of friends, a soccer ball with a bloody handprint can be man’s best friend.

Should you find yourself stranded on a snowshoer mountain top think back to the Lance Henriksen movie Survival Quest; not only does it teach viewers to forage for food and raft raging waters, but also how to dig an ice cave to survive the bitter cold.

In case of a zombie attack the classic George A. Romero movies teach us all we need to know. Remember the rhyme: “Shoot the living dead in the head.”

Should you find yourself in mortal combat with a monster, another tip learned from dozens of other horror films suggests that once you’ve slain the creature, don’t double check to make sure its really dead.

]]> http://www.metronews.ca/Edmonton/comment/article/1079857 Wed, 25 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0400 Richard Crouse, Metro Canada http://www.metronews.ca/Edmonton/comment/article/1079857
Director William A. Wellman used his experience as a celebrated combat pilot during World War I to create the movie’s realistic and thrilling dogfights, which packed audiences into first-run theatres for 63 weeks straight.

George Lucas, the producer of this weekend’s Red Tails, must be hoping for similar success for his aviation movie. If Red Tails draws crowds, he says, he wants to expand the story of African American World War II pilots the Tuskegee Airmen into a trilogy.

Advance word suggests Red Tails’ air battles are amongst the best ever created on film. Perhaps so, but Lucas has 100 years of elaborate aerial photography to compete with.

The flying sequences in Battle of Britain, the 1969 recreation of the British RAF’s defeat of the Luftwaffe, are regarded as the gold standard of aviation footage. To shoot these spectacular scenes the filmmakers assembled such a large collection of vintage planes that the production briefly became the 35th largest air force in the world.

But not all the planes were authentic. Mock-ups of Spitfires and Hurricanes, powered by lawn mower engines, can be seen taxiing down runways.

Shooting complicated stunt scenes always involves risk, but rarely has a movie been as deadly as Howard Hughes’s aerial epic Hell’s Angels.

The eccentric Hughes shot the movie as a silent film in 1928, and then reshot the entire thing the following year when sound equipment became available. In the process, 70 WWI aces were used, and three were killed. Hughes himself was injured when he crashed after performing a tricky aerial stunt.  

The most famous aerial movie of recent years has to be Top Gun. Inspired by a California magazine story about the U.S. Navy’s Top Gun School, the movie used several real aircraft from F-14 fighter squadron VF-51 Screaming Eagles. The planes cost the production $7,800 per hour for fuel and other operating costs, and one shot cost three times that.

Legend has it that director Tony Scott wanted to film an aircraft landing on an aircraft carrier, backlit by the sun. The captain, however, changed course before Scott got his shot. When the director was informed it would cost $25,000 to turn the ship around Scott pulled out a chequebook, wrote the cheque and got his shot.

]]> http://www.metronews.ca/Edmonton/comment/article/1074111 Wed, 18 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0400 Richard Crouse, Metro Canada http://www.metronews.ca/Edmonton/comment/article/1074111
Wahlberg has proven himself to be one of the smart ones. In a career that dates back 20 years, he has moved from strength to strength.

His first taste of success came as the titular lead rapper of Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch. Their 1991 hit Good Vibrations was a highpoint, but just two years later, Wahlberg walked away, leaving the Funky Bunch to fend for themselves.

Streamlining the Marky Mark moniker to his birth name, he took on his first role in front of the camera (that is if you don’t count his short lived career as an underwear model for Calvin Klein). Roles in The Basketball Diaries (opposite his future The Departed star Leonardo DiCaprio) and Fear, where he played what one writer called “a teenaged Travis Bickle” got him notice, but it was Boogie Nights that made him a movie star.    

The role of Dirk Diggler, a naïve man with physical charms sucked into the dark underbelly of the 1970s Californian porn industry, showed his range (among other things) but he wasn’t the first choice for the role. DiCaprio was offered the part but turned it down because he was already committed to Titanic. He suggested his Basketball Diaries co-star Wahlberg.

The movie was a hit, but a certain prosthetic got almost as much attention as Wahlberg’s performance. He still has the 13-inch rubber prop, which he keeps in a safe at his mother’s home, otherwise, he says, “mom would… put it on the end of her Dustbuster thinking it came with the vacuum cleaner.”

Since then Three Kings, The Perfect Storm, The Italian Job, Shooter, We Own the Night, Planet of the Apes and Four Brothers have all been box office hits. His work in The Departed brought him the best notices of his career to date plus an Oscar nomination and The Fighter (which he also produced) was an artistic triumph.

Despite all the spot-on choices, like many actors he’s turned down some important roles. Can you imagine him as Linus in Ocean’s 11? Or how about Brokeback Mountain? That part went to Jake Gyllenhaal, who earned an Oscar nod for his work.

]]> http://www.metronews.ca/Edmonton/comment/article/1068568 Wed, 11 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0400 Richard Crouse, Metro Canada http://www.metronews.ca/Edmonton/comment/article/1068568
The Exorcist, the most famous fiendish film, created such a stir with audiences that in 1973 Newsweek ran a cover story entitled The Exorcism Frenzy. Complete with stories of queasy theatre-goers and their Exorcist barf bags, it helped create hysteria and make the movie one of the biggest hits of the year.

The impact The Exorcist had on audiences has yet to be duplicated by any of the dozens of possession movies released in its wake, but this weekend’s The Devil Inside is hoping to bring a little good old-fashioned hellfire back to theatres.

The devil, of course, is the star of any possession movie, even if you don’t actually see him. What’s more petrifying than the idea of Old Scratch taking over your body and making your head spin 360 degrees?

But what about the brave priests who battle Beelzebub? Here’s a few cinematic celebrants who have gone mano-a-mano with Mephistopheles.

Father Lankester Merrin, as portrayed by Max von Sydow in The Exorcist, presided over the most famous Satan skirmish.

The statuesque Swedish actor played Merrin twice — he’s seen in flashbacks in Exorcist II: The Heretic — while Stellan Skarsgård played him in two prequels.

The loopiest of devil hunters must be Father Pierre Barre (Michael Gothard) from the Ken Russell film The Devils. He is a corrupt and despicable holy man who convinces a group of terrified nuns to fake a mass possession with the words, “You will scream! You will blaspheme!” His other questionable methods include “forcible colonic irrigation” with holy water and torture.

Barre isn’t the only real life exorcist to be portrayed on film, however. Both The Rite, starring Anthony Hopkins as a real life exorcist tutor and The Exorcism of Emily Rose with Tom Wilkinson as a priest accused of murder when a young woman died during an exorcism, are based on true stories.

More fanciful is Leslie Nielsen as Father Mayii in Repossessed, an Exorcist parody co-starring Linda Blair, who played the possessee in the original film. When told she “has an ungodly voice and maniacal facial expressions” the skeptical Mayii replies,  “That doesn’t prove a thing! She could be related to Joe Cocker.”

And finally, Beetlejuice has a different kind of exorcist. Michael Keaton plays a supernatural character called in as a “bio-exorcist” to rid a house of its human inhabitants.

]]> http://www.metronews.ca/Edmonton/comment/article/1063019 Wed, 04 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0400 Richard Crouse, Metro Canada http://www.metronews.ca/Edmonton/comment/article/1063019
Headhunters, a Norwegian noir, was a big hit recently at the Toronto International Film Festival and Let the Right One In placed vampires against a snowy, stark white Swedish backdrop.

This weekend the Americanized version of Girl With the Dragon Tattoo opens, starring Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara in the roles Swedish superstars Michael Nyqvist and Noomi Repace made famous. Shot in Sweden, the movie promises open landscapes, the crunch of snow underfoot and even the odd fjord.

Suddenly, it seems people are hungry for movies from Sweden, Norway and Denmark, but there has always been a smorgasbord of cinema available from that part of the world.

No discussion of Scandinavian cinema can be complete without mentioning Ingmar Bergman. Woody Allen named him “the greatest film artist since the invention of the motion picture camera,” and Francis Ford Coppola called him “my all-time favourite.”

If you haven’t seen The Seventh Seal or Wild Strawberries, you should; they are both classics. But you have undoubtedly seen movies inspired by or parodying Bergman’s work.

His famous Seventh Seal scene of Death playing chess has been mimicked in everything from Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey to Woody Allen’s play Death Knocks, which features a man playing gin rummy with Death.

More recently a Norwegian mockumenary called Troll Hunter earned praise from critics all over the world. One writer said this Blair-Witch-style story of cave-dwelling trolls and the government-sponsored hunters who track them was “destined to be a classic of its kind.”

Another said, “You’ll want to catch this clever movie before Hollywood ruins everything with a dumb remake.”   

Denmark has a thriving film industry. Since 1956 they’ve entered 40 flicks for Best Foreign Film consideration at the Academy Awards.

At last year’s Oscars Susanne Bier’s drama In a Better World beat Canada’s entry Incendies to take home Best Foreign Film.

The best-known Danish films of recent years have been made by Lars von Trier, the distinctive and controversial director of Breaking the Waves and this year’s   Melancholia. As well known for his depressed behaviour as he is for his films, Von Trier once said, “Basically, I’m afraid of everything in life, except filmmaking.”

]]> http://www.metronews.ca/Edmonton/comment/article/1055556 Wed, 21 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0400 Richard Crouse, Metro Canada http://www.metronews.ca/Edmonton/comment/article/1055556
Alvin, Simon and Theodore have been well-known since they topped the music charts with the Witch Doctor’s crazy chorus, Oo-ee, oo-ah-ah, ting-tang, walla-walla, bing-bang in 1958 but their new movies, including this weekend’s The Chipmunks: Chip-wrecked, have turned them into the tiniest celebrities of the 20th century.

The three of them, along with furry actors like Despereaux Tilling, Fievel Mousekewitz and the gang from Once Upon a Forest have sold loads of tickets, but none would have made much of an impression if not for the pioneering work of the world’s most famous rodent, Mickey Mouse.

Created in 1928 by Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks, Mickey is one of the most recognizable movie stars in the world, rodent or otherwise. He’s an Oscar winner with 175 movies, shorts and video games on his CV; and was the first cartoon character to have a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Mickey’s fame endures, but why? “We felt that the public, and especially the children, like animals that are cute and little,” said Walt Disney. “When people laugh at Mickey Mouse, it’s because he’s so human.”

Mickey paved the way for generations of rodent actors.

G-Force is a sci-fi-spy film featuring a specially trained squad of guinea pigs who prevent an evil millionaire from taking over the world.    

Who could forget Mr. Gopher, the burrowing terror from Caddyshack? (Did you know the movie’s gopher “voice” is made up of the same dolphin sound effects used on Flipper?)

Or Rizzo the Rat, the streetwise New Jersey puppet from The Muppets Take Manhattan and possibly the only kid’s character named for Enrico (Ratso) Rizzo, a character in the X-rated Midnight Cowboy.

More sinister than Rizzo-despite his X-rated name--is Ben, the story of a boy and his rat. Best known for its Michael Jackson theme song — it’s possibly the only love song to a rat ever released — the movie plays like a Disney movie, if they made a killer rat flick.

In the movie Danny, a bullied boy, befriends Ben, the leader of a swarm of telepathic rats.

When the police use flamethrowers to exterminate the rat pack only Ben survives, saved by his human friend. “I love you Ben,” says Danny. “You’re the only friend I have.”

]]> http://www.metronews.ca/Edmonton/comment/article/1049923 Wed, 14 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0400 Richard Crouse, Metro Canada http://www.metronews.ca/Edmonton/comment/article/1049923
This weekend Jonah Hill plays an irresponsible college student who reluctantly looks after his neighbour’s wild kids.  How wild is it? Well, let’s put it this way; I don’t think Nanny McPhee had a “red band” trailer.

If it sounds familiar, it should. Twenty-four years ago babysitter Elisabeth Shue led her young charges through the streets of Chicago in Adventures in Babysitting. At one point they end up on a nightclub stage. The leader of the house band, played by blues legend Albert Collins, says, “Nobody leaves this place without singing the blues.”

After an awkward pause she improvises the Babysitting Blues.

“It’s so hard babysitting these guys,” she sings. “And they should be in bed,” replies the guitar player over a classic blues-rock riff.

It’s a fantasy, but then again, babysitters have often been the subjects of fantasy. Mary Poppins is a mythical character, a “practically perfect in every way” nanny who knows how to do the right thing in every situation. Kind of like a Victoria Age Super Nanny. In The Babysitter, however, Alicia Silverstone was a much different kind of fantasy child-minder.

This 1995 thriller about a babysitter who becomes the object of obsession for not only the young boys she looks after but for their father as well, is more chilling than titillating. The ads hinted at some nudity from star Silverstone, but in reality she refused to do the film unless the nude scenes where removed.

The most lovable movie minder has to be John Candy as Uncle Buck. Even though he pretends to be capable of mutilation with power tools, he’s less violent than Rebecca De Mornay in The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, manlier than Robin Williams in Mrs. Doubtfire and more alive than all the babysitters in Halloween.

In the movie’s most famous scene he answers a barrage of questions from his nephew, played by Macaulay Culkin.

On the day of filming the younger actor couldn’t remember all the questions, so Candy wrote them out and hid them where Culkin could read them. 

Now that’s something a great babysitter would do.

]]> http://www.metronews.ca/Edmonton/comment/article/1043682 Wed, 07 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0400 Richard Crouse, Metro Canada http://www.metronews.ca/Edmonton/comment/article/1043682
The Oscar winner became the first British actress to appear in the buff in a mainstream film in 1969, when she was just 24 years old.

On her revealing scene in Age of Consent she said, “Flesh sells. People don’t want to see pictures of churches. They want to see naked bodies.”

Since then Mirren has doffed her clothes several more times, and become one of the most acclaimed actresses of her age.

Appearing nude doesn’t appear to have hurt her career with the public or the Academy, which is probably makes Michael Fassbender, the very naked star of this weekend’s Oscar contender Shame, very happy.

In a performance that bares not only his body but his soul as well, Fassbender might become the most unclothed star to ever be nominated for Best Actor.

 But he wouldn’t be the first star to go naked as a jaybird for their craft and take home Oscar gold.

Kate Winslet says there was so much nudity in The Reader, which earned her an Oscar, because the story required it. But, she added in the same interview, she thinks people might be tired of looking at her body.

The first nude film scenes happened almost 100 years before Fassbender drop trou.

In 1915’s Inspiration an actress named Audrey Munson undressed and for the next 20 years stars regularly exposed their hidden talents.

Then came the Hays Code, which banned nudity from the major studios well into the 1960s.

 One of the first big stars to break the code was Jayne Mansfield, whose topless role in Promises! Promises! landed her on the Top 10 list of Box Office Attractions for 1963.

Since then many A-listers have taken it off for their art.

Recently both Amanda Seyfried and Julianne Moore stripped in Chloe. Anne Hathaway and Michelle Williams wore their birthday suits in Love and Other Drugs and Blue Valentine respectively.

But it’s not just women exposing themselves.

Gerard Butler let it all hang out in Mrs. Brown and Gamer and Daniel Craig is buck naked in Love is the Devil.

Producer Judd Apatow promises more male nudity in his films.

“It really makes me laugh in this day and age that anyone is troubled by seeing any part of the human body.”

]]> http://www.metronews.ca/Edmonton/comment/article/1037599 Wed, 30 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0400 Richard Crouse, Metro Canada http://www.metronews.ca/Edmonton/comment/article/1037599
There are all kinds of on-screen orphans, some lovable — The Jungle Book’s Mowgli, Harry Potter —some not — Hannibal Lecter, Darth Vader — but few have been as memorable as Oliver Twist.
The youngster first captured people’s imaginations 173 years ago as the title character in Charles Dickens’s second book and debuted on film in 1908.

Since then there have been at least eleven adaptations of the story of an urchin who famously asked his cruel workhouse foreman for more gruel with the words, “Please sir, I want some more.”

The most famous version of the story has to be Oliver!, a splashy 1968 all-singing all-dancing edition, which film critic Pauline Kael said was one of the few film adaptations of a stage musical superior to the original stage show.

Oliver had it rough. Much rougher than Little Orphan Annie, the perky red-haired waif adopted by the über-wealthy Daddy Warbucks, but for the actress who played her in the 1982 movie Annie there were some unpleasant moments.

The curly red wig Aileen Quinn wore was so itchy that a specially designed comb had to be created to give her some relief, and in order to get Annie’s dog Sandy to realistically kiss her the prop master rubbed Alpo all over her face.

Still, Quinn says, “I just remember having the best time.”

Unlike our next orphans, Oliver and Annie were decidedly earthbound ragamuffins, but the movies have seen lots of alien children abandoned on our planet.

In Escape to Witch Mountain, Tony and Tia Malone’s psychic abilities made them standouts at the orphanage and the moniker Clark Kent was the name his human adoptive parent’s gave to Kal-El. You know him best as Superman.

Superman wasn’t the only superhero orphan, however.

The death of Bruce Wayne’s parents at the hand of the Joker prompted him to become the Caped Crusader. “You made me,” he grumbles to the parent’s killer in Batman.

Finally, Peter Parker’s parents were Richard and Mary, CIA agents killed in the line of duty.

Rumour has it they will appear in the 2012 reboot, The Amazing Spider-Man, played by Campbell Scott and Embeth Davidtz.

]]> http://www.metronews.ca/Edmonton/comment/article/1031899 Tue, 22 Nov 2011 20:41:41 -0400 Richard Crouse, Metro Canada http://www.metronews.ca/Edmonton/comment/article/1031899
 Asked if he has any other skills besides surfing. Cody sarcastically says, “Like what? Singing and dancing?”

Of course, he’s referring to Happy Feet, the Oscar winning movie about an Emperor Penguin who can’t find his soul mate the usual way — through song — so he uses his other talent — tap dancing.

The musical penguins of Happy Feet shim shammed their way to huge box office in 2006, and will paddle and roll their way back into theatres again this weekend in Happy Feet Two.

For a while, it seemed like you couldn’t swing a herring without hitting a penguin at the movies.

March of the Penguins, a real-life look at the migration march of Emperor penguins to their traditional breeding ground, was a left field hit in 2005. The winner for Best Documentary not only out grossed all the nominees for Best Picture that year — it took in $77 million vs. $75 million for Brokeback Mountain — but also became the second highest grossing theatrical documentary after Fahrenheit 9/11.

It was such a huge hit it inspired an R-rated parody, Farce of the Penguins. Featuring the voices of Samuel L. Jackson, Jason Alexander and Christina Applegate, it’s an R-rated spoof that imagines what sex-starved penguins might talk about on the 70 mile walk to their mating grounds.

“I am tired of the club scene,” says one penguin. “So are the baby seals!” replies another.

More family friendly was Madagascar, the story of four Central Park Zoo animals who get stranded on the island of Madagascar. The movie featured a large menagerie of characters, but the zoo’s penguins, Skipper, Kowalski, Rico and Private, proved to be audience favourites.  They have most of the movie’s best lines — on landing in Africa one of the flightless birds says, “Africa? That ain't gonna fly!” — and were featured in a short film, The Madagascar Penguins in a Christmas Caper, a TV series and video games.      

Probably the most famous penguin character in the movies is Oswald Cobblepot a.k.a. The Penguin, as played by Danny DeVito in Batman Returns.

This super villain is human, but dresses like a penguin, eats raw fish and tries to conquer Gotham with an army of specially trained penguins.

]]> http://www.metronews.ca/Edmonton/comment/article/1025553 Tue, 15 Nov 2011 20:39:49 -0400 Richard Crouse, Metro Canada http://www.metronews.ca/Edmonton/comment/article/1025553
This weekend in Jack and Jill, Adam Sandler adds his name to the list of actors who have played multiple roles in the same film.

“In Jack and Jill I play me,” says Sandler, “and I play my twin sister. The man version of me is doing OK; he has a family out in L.A. The twin-sister version of me lives out in the Bronx and comes out to L.A. for Thanksgiving and then refuses to leave.”

The idea of playing more than one role in a movie dates back to the Mary Pickford 1918 weepy Stella Maris.

In it she plays the wealthy title character and the uneducated orphan Unity Blake. The studio balked at her insistence on playing both roles, but Pickford insisted.

As Stella she was photographed like a glamorous movie star, but as Unity she wore unflattering makeup and was shot from her right, less photogenic, side. Scenes where the two characters shared the screen were achieved through double exposure.

Since then everyone from Mel Brooks (he was President Skroob and Yogurt in Spaceballs), to David Carradine (remember him in Circle of Iron as The Blind Man, Monkeyman, Death, and Changsha?) to Peter Sellers (who played as Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, President Merkin Muffley, and Dr. Strangelove in Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb) have taken on multi-roles.

Perhaps because of their sketch comedy backgrounds, Eddie Murphy and Mike Myers often take on various roles in their films, but Alec Guinness, the actor best known in North America as Jedi knight Obi-Wan Kenobi, must hold the record for character changes in one feature-length movie. In Kind Hearts and Coronets he plays no less than eight characters. In an acting tour de force he’s easily recognizable in each part, but doesn’t repeat himself from character to character. Instead he carefully constructs each, from the happy-go-lucky young photographer to the window-smashing suffragette Lady Agatha. 

Rivaling Guinness’s achievement is Buster Keaton who played every part — including a stagehand, a dance troupe, a full band and every member in the audience — in the 1921 short film The Play House.
To top it off he also took credit for every crew job including editor, director, writer and cameraman.

]]> http://www.metronews.ca/Edmonton/comment/article/1019469 Tue, 08 Nov 2011 21:37:24 -0400 Richard Crouse, Metro Canada http://www.metronews.ca/Edmonton/comment/article/1019469
But if department stores can display Lady Gaga masks beside Christmas ornaments and Hollywood can release A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas while we’re still digesting our Halloween haul, I can write about some movies that put the tinsel in Tinsel Town.

Harold and Kumar isn’t your average Christmas movie.

I doubt Jimmy Stewart would have considered burning down the family Christmas tree part of his wonderful Yuletide life, but Harold and Kumar aren’t the first to put the X into Xmas.

Many movies are set at Christmastime — the Brat Packer flick Less Than Zero features an LA Yule, and Die Hard takes place on Christmas Eve — but I’m thinking of movies that use the holidays as a springboard for the action.

The raunchiest Christmas movie has to Bad Santa, starring Billy Bob Thornton as a boozed-up, thieving department store Kris Kringle.

Unsentimental and crude, Bad Santa is bound to make the elves choke on their eggnog.

Dan Aykroyd also played a less than cuddly Santa in Trading Places. Drunk, disorderly and waving a gun around, he even has a fish hidden in his fake beard.

Unwrap Mixed Nuts, the 1994 Nora Ephron black comedy, and you’ll find Christmas tree theft, lunatics and the worst Christmas gift ever: a dead body.

Staying up on Christmas Eve, waiting for Santa to come, will be easy after watching Black Christmas. You’ll be too scared to sleep!

The tinsel terror about a mysterious killer in the attic is considered to be the first modern slasher movie.

Gremlins mixes horror, humour and ho ho ho’s. Set at Christmas, the story of little creatures who turn nasty when wet features a gory story about a missing father, a chimney, an overstuffed Santa suit and the punchline, “And that’s how I found out there was no Santa Claus.”

A very merry Crime Christmas can be had in both The Ref and Reindeer Games.

In The Ref, cat burglar Dennis Leary soon regrets breaking into the home of squabbling couple Kevin Spacey and Judy Davis on Christmas Eve.

Reindeer Games sees Ben Affleck reluctantly rob a casino at Christmas.

The movie is such a lump of coal that one of its stars had this to say about it: “That was a bad, bad, bad movie,” said Charlize Theron.

]]> http://www.metronews.ca/Edmonton/comment/article/1012946 Tue, 01 Nov 2011 20:40:26 -0400 Richard Crouse, Metro Canada http://www.metronews.ca/Edmonton/comment/article/1012946
The film suggests it was Edward De Vere, Earl of Oxford (Rhys Ifans) who actually put pen to paper.

Then to hide his identity he hired a semi-employed actor named William Shakespeare (Rafe Spall) to act as his literary beard.
 
There is no evidence to support the movie’s theory but at least one detail is consistent with history — the likeness of Shakespeare. Even though no painting of the Bard was done during his lifetime, the 1632 Martin Droeshout portrait showing the writer with, “a huge head, placed against a starched ruff,” has become the accepted version of his appearance in art and on film.

Shakespeare and his ruffed collar has popped up in everything from The Simpsons’s 2007 videogame to the Bugs Bunny cartoon A Witch’s Tangled Hare.

Playing the Bard as a lusty poet in Shakespeare in Love made Joseph Fiennes a star, but he was far from the first actor considered for the role. Daniel Day-Lewis and Kenneth Branagh both turned it down before Ralph Fienne’s little brother snapped it up.

The movie, about how Shakespeare’s love affair with Viola De Lesseps (Gwyneth Paltrow) helped him overcome writer’s block and pen Romeo and Juliet in her honour, earned 13 Oscar nominations and won seven, including Best Picture and Best Actress for Gwyneth.   

One of the stranger depictions of Shakespeare on screen came in Jean-Luc Godard’s King Lear.

Called “Godard’s most insane, headache-inducing and inscrutable movie,” by one critic, it features Peter Sellars (not the Pink Panther actor, but an avant guard theatre director) as William Shakespeare Junior the Fifth.

In the movie’s post Chernobyl world, all of the world’s culture has been lost and it’s up to folks like Shaksper Junior to try recreate it. Searching for inspiration he scribbles familiar phrases in his notebook — “Love’s Labors Lost. As you wish. As you wish. As you wish. As you witch. As you which? As you watch. As you watch…” — as he tries to piece together the works of his long lost relative.

Best remembered as the Woody Allen movie you haven’t seen — the comedian plays Mr. Alien in an uncredited cameo — King Lear is a head scratcher, even for the often unfathomable Godard.

]]> http://www.metronews.ca/Edmonton/comment/article/1006680 Tue, 25 Oct 2011 20:31:47 -0400 Richard Crouse, Metro http://www.metronews.ca/Edmonton/comment/article/1006680
The Hollywood stars both were “all for one, one for all” in a Three Musketeers movie.

Kelly was the heroic D’Artagnan in the 1948 version of the Alexandre Dumas story, while Sheen was  — unsurprisingly — the arrogant womanizer Aramis in 1993. 

The swashbuckling exploits of D’Artagnan and his three friends first appeared in print in 1844. Sixty years later a French film detailed their exploits for the first time.

Since then they have swashbuckled though an all-girl version called Barbie and the Three Musketeers, an old west adaptation starring John Wayne and bow wowed in an all canine edition called Dogtanian and the Three Muskethounds. 

This weekend the all-new Three Musketeers brings their swashbuckling style to the big screen for the 30th time in the last century.

The Gene Kelly Three Musketeers is probably the most accurate adaptation from page to stage, but the most entertaining — and star studded — has to be The Three Musketeers: The Queen’s Diamonds.
The 1973-era movie is bawdy, outrageous and action packed, with lavish set design and an even more lavish cast, including Michael York, Oliver Reed, Charlton Heston, Christopher Lee, Raquel Welch and Faye Dunaway.

Highlights include a chess game played with trained dogs and monkeys and some of the best sword fighting this side of an Errol Flynn movie.

The Musketeer (2001)  features plenty of swordplay, but amps up the action with crouching tiger choreography by martial arts master Xin Xin Xiong.

Starring Justin Chambers as D’Artagnan, the story will ruffle the giant feather plumes worn by Dumas purists but as an action movie — Roger Ebert wrote, “Occasionally the action is interrupted by dialogue scenes” — it is the most exciting of the recent Musketeers movies. 

Occasionally the Musketeers have appeared as supporting characters.

In 1998’s The Man in the Iron Mask, the aging D’Artagnan and his posse — played by Gabriel Byrne, Jeremy Irons, John Malkovich and Gérard Depardieu — come out of retirement to rid France of an evil king, Louis XIV and replace him with his twin brother, both played by Leonardo DiCaprio.

Based on Dumas’s novel Count of Bragelonne the story was also the basis for The Fifth Musketeer, a 1979 movie with the unlikely cast of Beau Bridges as Louis XIV and Alan Hale Jr. (best known as The Skipper from Gilligan’s Island) as Musketeer Porthos.

]]> http://www.metronews.ca/Edmonton/comment/article/1000570 Tue, 18 Oct 2011 19:31:00 -0400 Richard Crouse, Metro Canada http://www.metronews.ca/Edmonton/comment/article/1000570
It seems Tinseltown never met an idea it couldn’t endlessly recycle.

This is particularly true in the horror genre. In the last 12 months, Colin Farrell clipped on Chris Sarandon’s used fangs in a remake of Fright Night, and this weekend, The Thing is, according to IMDB, “a prequel to a remake of an adaptation of the novella Who Goes There?” Whatever it is, original it’s not.

Not that all original horror films are better than their remakes. David Cronenberg’s dark vision enhanced the story of The Fly, delivering the real scares that the campy 1958 version lacked, and 1978’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers is far creepier than its cinematic predecessor.

The Blob, the tale of what happens when germ warfare goes awry, has been made a couple of times.

The original is an unintentionally funny flick with more giggles than gore, but it inspired a sequel, a remake and, if the rumours are true, a bloody revamp by horror maestro Rob Zombie.

I have a soft spot for the low-budget charm of the 1958 version, although the 1988 reboot has a smarter-than-it-needs-to-be script co-written by Frank Darabont and a cool tagline — “Scream now! while you can still breathe!”

Count Dracula is one of the most portrayed characters on the big screen, having appeared in more horror films than any other famous monster of filmland. Eighty years after he first portrayed the vampire in the 1931 film Dracula, Bela Lugosi is still the most famous blood sucker of them all, although for my money, two British actors — Gary Oldham in Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Christopher Lee in Horror of Dracula — are tip-top Transylvanians.

Unlike his work in Scream, Wes Craven’s early films didn’t have any of the self-depreciating humour to go along with the scares.

His first movies were brutal, bloody and grim, usually all at once. Recent remakes of The Last House on the Left — rated R for “sadistic violence”  — and The Hills Have Eyes — “The lucky ones die first!”— don’t have quite the impact of the Vietnam-era originals but still require a strong stomach. 

]]> http://www.metronews.ca/Edmonton/comment/article/994493 Wed, 12 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0400 Richard Crouse, Metro Canada http://www.metronews.ca/Edmonton/comment/article/994493
“The Twilight Zone episode called Steel with Lee Marvin, written by Richard Matheson, was in the ’60s,” says Real Steel director Shawn Levy.

“It was about a robot boxing promoter, a guy who owns robots and fights them for money. From there we beefed it up.”

In its original run the anthology series mixed and matched science fiction, comedy, supernatural and occult stories usually featuring ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances.

Hosted by Rod Serling, it was must see TV with a catchy theme song, which influenced thousands of writers and directors. 

Three series and a movie have officially claimed the Twilight Zone name but dozens of other films have been either directly — or indirectly — inspired by the show.

Submitted for your approval, here is a list of movies that owe a debt to one of the greatest television shows ever:

• The 1996 Kyle MacLachlan thriller The Trigger Effect was a reworking of a classic episode called The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street, which shows the effects of a power failure on a neighbourhood. Named the best Twilight Zone episode by Time Magazine, the show is still shown in classrooms to illustrate how lethal a mix intolerance and panic can be. The film pays tribute to its television roots by placing its main characters at the corner of Maple and Willoughby Streets, a reference to another famous episode, A Stop at Willoughby.

• The Cameron Diaz movie The Box was a remake of Button, Button, a story from the series’ 1980 reinvention and Child’s Play, the movie which introduced the murderous doll Chucky seems to have looked to a 1963 episode called Living Doll for inspiration.  

Two towering artists of modern horror can count the Twilight Zone as seminal to their work:

• The show perfected the use of the twist ending, which M. Night Shyamalan would later incorporate into his work. His most famous film, The Sixth Sense has echoes of Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, a 1964 episode about a man who is revealed to be dead.

• In Danse Macabre, Stephen King called the show “damn near immortal” and it’s been hinted that his novel Christine (later made into a movie) was inspired by the driverless car episode A Thing about Machines.

]]> http://www.metronews.ca/Edmonton/entertainment/article/987959 Tue, 04 Oct 2011 20:02:55 -0400 Richard Crouse, Metro Canada http://www.metronews.ca/Edmonton/entertainment/article/987959
50/50, based on the real life experiences of screenwriter Will Reiser, was written to show how he and his best friend Seth Rogen (who plays a character loosely based on himself in the film) dealt with the trauma of the diagnosis by trying “to find the humour in the situation [because] we were not good at talking about it at an emotional level.” 

The result, which hits screens just in time for Breast Cancer Awareness Month, is touching, poignant and funny. 

Here are some other inspirational films about cancer.

The Terry Fox Story, the 1983 HBO biopic of the cancer research activist and his Marathon of Hope, was shown in theatres in Canada and Britain, but was the first television film ever made for a cable network in the United States.

Starring Eric Fryer, an amputee who, like Fox, lost a leg to cancer, the movie details Fox’s goal to raise one dollar from every Canadian and create awareness of cancer issues.   

Also based on real life is The Doctor, a 1991 film starring William Hurt as a physician who becomes more compassionate after he is diagnosed with throat cancer. Based on the book A Taste of My Own Medicine: When the Doctor Becomes the Patient by Dr. Ed Rosenbaum, the movie co-stars Christine Lahti, Mandy Patinkin and Adam Arkin, all of whom also played doctors on Chicago Hope.

Other films show the different ways people react to a cancer diagnosis. In My Life Without Me, Sarah Polley plays a 23-year-old mother of two diagnosed with a terminal endometrial cancer.

Choosing to keep the news to herself, she makes a secret list of all the things she wants to do before she passes. From the sublime —“Tell my daughters I love them several times” — to the ridiculous — “Get false nails. And do something with my hair.” — the items on the list give her life purpose and meaning.

In Life as a House, Kevin Kline is George Monroe, an architect’s model builder with terminal cancer. The diagnosis forces him to look at his life — “Hindsight,” he says, “it’s like foresight without a future”— and rebuild his dilapidated house as well as his tattered relationships.

]]> http://www.metronews.ca/Edmonton/entertainment/article/981631 Tue, 27 Sep 2011 20:33:52 -0400 Richard Crouse, Metro Canada http://www.metronews.ca/Edmonton/entertainment/article/981631
This weekend she’s back on the big screen for the first time in a non-Sex and the City movie since the 2009 flop Did You Hear about the Morgans? In I Don’t Know How She Does It she plays a version of Carrie all grown up with kids and a job in the financial sector. It’s a far cry from her first big movie, Footloose.

She played Rusty, a role Parker called the “best friend of the pretty girl.” The movie and its fancy footwork earned her a Best Young Supporting Actress in a Motion Picture Musical, Comedy, Adventure or Drama nomination at the Sixth Annual Youth in Film Awards.

A few forgettable films followed like Firstborn —described as a “heavy-handed suburban sitcom”— Girls Just Want to Have Fun — called “a total wannabe in the realm of ‘80s teen flicks”— and Flight of the Navigator, which features the voice of Pee Wee Herman as a robot. 
   
It wasn’t until she teamed with Steve Martin in L.A. Story that things started looking up. In this surreal look at life and love in Los Angeles Parker plays SanDeE, a ditzy blonde who aspires to be a spokesmodel.

“Um, it’s just a model who speaks,” she explains. “You know, and she points at things like merchandise, you know, like a car or washer and dryer. Sometimes it’s something really small, you know, like, like a book or fine art print.”

The movie broke her out of the teen movie mode and displayed her deft comic timing, which was put to great use in Honeymoon in Vegas opposite Nic Cage. A few flops later she appeared in the critically acclaimed Ed Wood with Johnny Depp. Playing the much put-upon girlfriend of the world’s worst director, she calls the actors and crew of his film Bride of the Monster “the usual cast of misfits and dope addicts.”

Her most spectacular pre-Sex and the City role, however, is in Mars Attacks.

In it she plays a flighty talk show host, who literally becomes a talking head when she is beheaded by aliens.

]]> http://www.metronews.ca/Edmonton/entertainment/article/968269 Tue, 13 Sep 2011 18:42:14 -0400 Richard Crouse, Metro Canada http://www.metronews.ca/Edmonton/entertainment/article/968269
The average person touches their face upwards of 3,000 times a day, and in the world of Contagion everything that comes in contact with your skin — an elevator button, a glass at an airport, a handrail on a ferry — could be fatal.

In this world of big diseases with little names like SARS and H1N1, germs are the new Frankensteins.
The movies have used microscopic germs and viruses as bogeymen for years.

In Warning Signs an experimental virus turns people (including Law and Order’s Sam Waterston) into rage filled maniacs, a plot echoed in Resident Evil when a virus gets loose in a secret facility. “The T-virus is protean,” says the Red Queen, “changing from liquid to airborne to blood transmission, depending on its environment. It is almost impossible to kill.”

The Thaw sees Val Kilmer unleash a prehistoric plague when he discovers a diseased Woolly Mammoth carcass. Eli Roth gave new meaning to the term cabin fever in his virus movie of the same name and the movie Doomsday sees most of Scotland devastated by a deadly germ. 

Michael Crichton dreamt up the idea for The Andromeda Strain when he was still a medical student. The story of a deadly alien virus was inspired by a conversation with one of his teachers about the concept of crystal-based life-forms. His novel was a bestseller and the author — who would later go on to write the sci-fi classics Westworld and Jurassic Park — actually makes a cameo appearance in the hit 1971 film of the same name. He can be seen in the scene where the star of the movie, Dr. Hall (James Olson), is told to report to the government’s secret underground research facility.

Outbreak features germs of a more earthbound kind. Dustin Hoffman, Rene Russo, Morgan Freeman and Kevin Spacey star in this 1995 film about an outbreak of a fictional Ebola virus called Motaba spread in the States by a white-headed capuchin monkey. If the contagious simian looks familiar, no wonder. It’s Betsy who also appeared as Ross’s pet Marcel on Friends.

The sitcom spoofed Betsy’s work in the disaster film by showing the monkey on a poster for a fictional film called Outbreak 2: The Virus Takes Manhattan.

]]> http://www.metronews.ca/Edmonton/entertainment/article/961805 Tue, 06 Sep 2011 19:35:55 -0400 Richard Crouse, Metro Canada http://www.metronews.ca/Edmonton/entertainment/article/961805
Thus began the Blair Witch Project, a movie Roger Ebert called an "extraordinarily effective horror film." He also called it a "celebration of rock bottom production values" for its rough hewn camera style and effective no-budget scares.

Those are trademarks of found footage-style movies. The premise is almost always the same: someone has recovered film left behind by, as Wikipedia says, “missing or dead protagonists,” and pieced it together to tell a (usually) horrifying story. This weekend, Apollo 18 uses (fictional) found footage from NASA's abandoned Apollo 18 mission to reveal the reason the U.S. has never returned to the moon.

In the wake of Blair Witch, theatres were overflowing with found footage movies, partially because they’re cheap to make, and partially because audiences raised on reality television seemed to respond to them. Movies like The St. Francisville Experiment, The Last Horror Movie, September Tapes and The Curse tried, most unsuccessfully, to cash in on the box office bonanza of Blair Witch, but [Rec], a Spanish horror film about a haunted building was the most successful, artistically and financially. If you missed the Spanish version you can always check out the shot-for-shot remake, Quarantine, starring Dexter’s Jennifer Carpenter.  

Less successful but interesting is Redacted, a Brian De Palma war film shot through the lens of one of his characters. De Palma came up with the idea when he was asked by HDNet Films to make a movie for $5 million on HD. In creating the story of U.S. soldiers on a revenge rampage after one of their friends is killed by an IED, he earned the ire of many conservative groups who called for boycotts of the film and producer, Dallas Maverick's owner Mark Cuban.  

If the Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity are the commercially successful of the genre and Redacted the most contentious, the most controversial must be Cannibal Holocaust. The 1980 fake cannibal found footage doc that was so convincing the director was arrested and charged with murder. Police believed several actors had been killed on screen but charges were dropped when the actors showed up at the trial, safe and sound.

]]> http://www.metronews.ca/Edmonton/comment/article/956113 Wed, 31 Aug 2011 14:00:00 -0400 Richard Crouse, Metro Canada http://www.metronews.ca/Edmonton/comment/article/956113
What about the ladies? Beatrix Kiddo, Charlie Baltimore or Jane Smith?

Jean Luc Goddard said, “All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun,” and often these days filmmakers are placing that gun in the hands of female film assassins. Nikita is back on the tube and earlier this year Saoirse Ronan played a deadly 16-year-old in Hanna. This weekend, Avatar's Zoe Saldana is back as a stone-cold killer in Colombiana.

As Charlie Baltimore, Geena Davis created one of the screen’s most loved female assassins in The Long Kiss Goodnight. Suffering from amnesia, when her past catches up with her she flip flops from suburban mom to killer. Best Line? “They're gonna blow my head off, you know. This is the last time I'll ever be pretty.”

Angelina Jolie's deadly demeanour has pumped up several action movies. Lara Croft was a gun-slinging super-heroine, but she's also played assassins in two movies.

In Mr. and Mrs. Smith she's a hitlady assigned to kill her own on-screen (and future real life) partner, Brad Pitt. “Still alive, baby?” she purrs after trying to shoot him through a wall.

Also, as Fox in Wanted she was a member of the Fraternity, a deadly group of killers with the useful ability to shoot around corners. Best line? “We kill one, and maybe save a thousand. That's the code of the Fraternity.”

The highest body count must go to Beatrix Kiddo, played by Uma Thurman in Kill Bill. As a bride done wrong by her former Deadly Viper Assassination Squad colleagues, (including Vivica A. Fox who plays Vernita Green and Lucy Liu as O-Ren Ishii), Kiddo slices and dices her way through more than 100 opponents.

But the two most unlikely female assassins on film were found in Leon: The Professional and Kick-Ass. In the former, Natalie Portman was a 12-year-old who learns how to kill from her teacher, Léon (Jean Reno), a skillful but sensitive hitman.

In Kick-Ass, a 2010 action-comedy starring Nicolas Cage and Chloë Moretz, Hit Girl (Moretz) asks her father (and assassin mentor) for a Benchmade model 42 butterfly knife for her eleventh birthday.

]]> http://www.metronews.ca/Edmonton/comment/article/950311 Wed, 24 Aug 2011 14:00:00 -0400 Richard Crouse, Metro Canada http://www.metronews.ca/Edmonton/comment/article/950311
On film, the genre had its heyday with two 1980s cheese fondues starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Brigitte Nielsen (as the She-Devil with a Sword) respectively— Conan the Barbarian and Red Sonja.

This weekend, Hollywood hopes to breathe new life into the genre with a reimagining of the Schwarzenegger saga. Stepping in for Arnold, Jason "Game of Thrones" Momoa will battle monsters, evil henchmen and a powerful witch, played by Rose McGowan in Conan the Barbarian.     

Critics have always had an ambivalent relationship with sword and sorcery. The 1982 Conan the Barbarian was described as “both exciting AND unintentionally amusing,” while Red Sonja was dismissed as “pure silliness, but not silly enough to qualify as amusing.”

The Beastmaster, a 1982 film starring the Canadian-born Marc Singer as Dar, a warrior with a mystical control over all animals, only has a 50 per cent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, but has become a cult classic over the years due to near constant exposure on television. TBS played the movie so often it earned the nickname The Beastmaster Station. Ditto HBO, which one writer joked stood for “Hey, Beastmaster is On.”

Also dismissed by critics but worth a look is Atlas In the Land of the Cyclops, a 1961 film starring muscleman Gordon Mitchell, whose first showbiz gig was as a strongman in Mae West's beefcake revue, and sex symbol Chelo Alonso as the prerequisite beautiful but evil queen. Strangely, no character named Atlas actually appears in this Italian import—Mitchell plays Maciste, a hero made famous in silent Italian cinema, but unknown to American audiences—and Cyclops is only onscreen for about two minutes. Still, it’s good Saturday matinee fun.

No mention of sword and sorcery films could be complete without Hercules. There are dozens of films starring the Greek demigod but Hercules Against the Moon Men must be the silliest. This grade-Z flick is so bad, its director, Giacomo Gentilomo, who also made Slave Girls of Sheba and Goliath and the Island of Vampires, quit the film business shortly after the movie was completed. 

]]> http://www.metronews.ca/Edmonton/comment/article/943586 Wed, 17 Aug 2011 14:00:00 -0400 Richard Crouse, Metro http://www.metronews.ca/Edmonton/comment/article/943586
On film the genre had its heyday with two 1980s cheese fondues starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Brigitte Nielsen (as the She-Devil with a Sword) respectively — Conan the Barbarian and Red Sonja.

This weekend Hollywood hopes to breathe new life into the genre with a reimagining of the Schwarzenegger saga. Stepping in for Arnold Jason Game of Thrones Momoa will battle monsters, evil henchmen and a powerful witch, played by Rose McGowan in Conan the Barbarian.     

Critics have always had an ambivalent relationship with sword and sorcery. The 1982 Conan the Barbarian was described as “both exciting AND unintentionally amusing,” while Red Sonja was dismissed as “pure silliness, but not silly enough to qualify as amusing.”

The Beastmaster is a 1982 film starring the Canadian-born Marc Singer as Dar, a warrior with a mystical control over all animals, has only has a 50 per cent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, but has become a cult classic over the years due to near constant exposure on television. TBS played the movie so often it earned the nickname The Beastmaster Station. Ditto HBO which one writer joked stood for “Hey, Beastmaster is On.”

Also dismissed by critics but worth a look is Atlas In the Land of the Cyclops, a 1961 film starring muscleman Gordon Mitchell, whose first show biz gig was as a strongman in Mae West’s beefcake revue, and sex symbol Chelo Alonso as the prerequisite beautiful but evil queen. Strangely no character named Atlas actually appears in this Italian import —Mitchell plays Maciste, a hero made famous in silent Italian cinema, but unknown to American audiences—and Cyclops is only onscreen for about two minutes. Still, it’s good Saturday matinee fun.

No mention of sword and sorcery films could be complete without Hercules. There are dozens of films starring the Greek demigod but Hercules Against the Moon Men must be the silliest. This grade z flick is so bad its director, Giacomo Gentilomo, who also made Slave Girls of Sheba and Goliath and the Island of Vampires, quit the film business shortly after the movie was completed.

]]> http://www.metronews.ca/Edmonton/comment/article/944760 Tue, 16 Aug 2011 22:05:07 -0400 Richard Crouse, Metro http://www.metronews.ca/Edmonton/comment/article/944760
At the bloody heart of each of these gory horror movies is a character with premonitions of the future. Usually he or she has forewarning that all his/her good-looking friends will die in the most terrible way imaginable. When the vision comes true—usually preceded by the tell tale line, “Something’s wrong!”—whoever survives ends up dying anyway, in increasingly complicated ways. With Final Destination 5 opening this weekend it seemed like an appropriate time to look back at other movie characters that have had creepy visions.
 
In The Gift, the movie Sam Raimi directed just before spinning the web for his Spider-Man trilogy, Cate Blanchett plays a psychic who helps the police locate a missing girl.

Billy Bob Thornton, Blanchett’s co-star and the movie’s screenwriter, based the character on his mother, Virginia Thornton Faulkner. Like the character in the movie, the psychic Mrs. Faulkner was a widow who raised three boys and used her extra sensory ability to make extra money.

In the hauntingly surreal Don’t Look Now, John Baxter (Donald Sutherland in a curly wig) has a premonition that something awful is about to happen to his daughter. Sure enough, seconds later she falls in a pond and drowns. Later in Venice, John and his wife (Julie Christie) meet an elderly psychic who claims to see apparitions of the dead daughter which triggers John’s own otherworldly visions.  

Adapted from a short story by Daphne Du Maurier, the psychic thriller has become a cult classic since its release in 1973, inspiring filmmakers like Danny Boyle, who cites it as one of his favorite movies and E=MC2 a Top Twenty hit by Big Audio Dynamite.

Finally, some call these premonitions ESP, others, like author Stephen King, call them The Shining. In King’s novel, Stanley Kubrick’s film and the television movie of the same name, both Danny Torrance, the telepathic son of the winter caretakers of the remote Overlook Hotel and chef Dick Hallorann (Scatman Crothers) have visions and premonitions. King says the title was inspired by the Plastic Ono Band's song, Instant Karma which features the chorus, "We all shine on."  

]]> http://www.metronews.ca/Edmonton/comment/article/938844 Wed, 10 Aug 2011 14:00:00 -0400 Richard Crouse, Metro http://www.metronews.ca/Edmonton/comment/article/938844


Peggy the Chimp starred alongside future president Ronald Reagan in Bedtime for Bonzo and of course, the Tarzan movies made a superstar out of Cheeta the Chimp. But for me the best moving picture primates were actors dressed up in monkey masks.



Long before computer generated special effects made digital apes like the ones featured in this weekend’s The Rise of the Planet of the Apes possible, a makeup artist named John Chambers pioneered primate makeup. His work on the original Planet of the Apes was based on a technique he developed during World War II to give disfigured veterans a natural look.



Later, his makeup work earned him a special Academy Award (his statue was presented by a tuxedo-clad chimpanzee) but before the movie rolled he had to persuade the studio his techniques would look convincing. To do so he shot a test scene with actor Edward G Robinson, who found the makeup sessions too gruelling and left the movie as a result. Won over, the studio approved the makeup budget — an astronomical, for the time, $1 million -- almost one sixth of the entire budget.



Chambers put together a team of more than 80 people, delaying several other movies by causing a shortage of makeup artists in Hollywood.



On location in the Arizona desert, the lead actors spent three to four hours in the makeup chair every day. Because the applications took so long to apply the actors couldn’t take them off until the very end of the day. Since they were encased in makeup 12 to 18 hours at a stretch they had to “eat” liquefied meals through straws, and, as star Roddy McDowell found out, they couldn’t sneeze. He achoo-ed one day and blew half his chimp face off.  



The makeup process was so intense that Kim Hunter, who played chimpanzee psychologist and veterinarian Zira, had to be prescribed valium to keep her calm during the sessions. She spent so much time made up that when her co-star Charlton Heston saw her sans make-up for the first time he didn’t recognize her.



Some of the actors had fun with the makeup, however. McDowell liked driving home still made up just to see the surprised faces of the drivers on the freeway.



The following four Apes sequels featured actors in makeup, but for me, the original contains the best monkey business.  



]]> http://www.metronews.ca/Edmonton/comment/article/932682 Wed, 03 Aug 2011 16:27:18 -0400 Richard Crouse, Metro Canada http://www.metronews.ca/Edmonton/comment/article/932682
This weekend, Cowboys & Aliens adds spaceships, extraterrestrials and laser guns to the existing formula. To research the movie’s western half, director Jon Favreau watched classic movies like Stagecoach and Destry Rides Again. Then he spent time with Alien, Predator, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind to find the sci-fi feel he was after.

“If you do it right,” he said of the film, “it honours both, and it becomes interesting and clever and a reinvention of two things that people understand.”

So call it a spacetern or neo-western if you like, but it isn’t the first movie to mix and match sci-fi with horse opera.

Michael Crichton wrote and directed Westworld after a trip to Disneyland. The Pirates of the Caribbean ride inspired him to imagine an amusement park where vacationers pay $1,000 a day to interact with robots programmed to replicate life in different periods of history. When a computer malfunction sends Yul Brynner’s black-hatted cyborg gunslinger (the actor wears the same costume he wore in The Magnificent Seven) on an animatronic rampage through the western theme park the old west becomes a place of high tech terror.

Sci-fi westerns aren’t always set on Earth, however.  

The animated feature Bravestarr: The Legend sets the action on the planet of New Texas, located 1,956 light-years from Earth. Bashing together the best bits of Star Wars and traditional oater plots, the movie features cool western space toys like rocket scooters with fairings shaped like horses' heads and a villain named Tex Hex. When Hex invades New Texas the town must get a new lawman. Enter Galactic Marshall Bravestarr. “We needed a hundred lawmen to tame New Texas,” reads the film’s tagline. “We got one. You know something? He was enough.”

Outland, the 1981 Sean Connery space thriller isn’t exactly a sci-fi western, but it is based on one of the most famous cowboy movies of all time, High Noon. A critic for the Boston Globe wrote, “Outland marks the return of the classic western hero in a space helmet,” and noted that its themes of loyalty and betrayal echoed High Noon.   

]]> http://www.metronews.ca/Edmonton/comment/article/926752 Wed, 27 Jul 2011 16:27:18 -0400 Richard Crouse, Metro Canada http://www.metronews.ca/Edmonton/comment/article/926752
Astonishingly, six years later, the same holds true for the final installment of the series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2.

It’s not uncommon for movie franchises to span years and hang on to loyal fans. But to have the seven films in the series so far gross an average $909,906,449 each is astounding.

That kind of number speaks as much to the ferocity of the Potterheads as it does to the quality of the movies. The next highest grossing movie series is the James Bond franchise, which originated in 1962.
The super spy has shot and seduced his way through 22 official 007 releases for a worldwide box office total of $5,029,014,110.

Interestingly Harry Potter-player Daniel Radcliffe expressed interest in taking on the role of the teenaged James Bond in a planned film based on the Young Bond series of books.

Perhaps he can bring some of his magic to the part and create another successful franchise.
The Potter films are unique in the sense that the cast has stayed unchanged. Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint were all magically transformed into multi-millionaires playing Harry, Hermione and Ron.

Their presence in the films has provided a sense of continuity from one film to the next, but it’s not always necessary for actors to be yoked to characters in multiple sequels and spin-offs. There have been six James Bonds and Batman –  the highest grossing superhero series – and they’ve seen everyone from Michael Keaton to Christian Bale wear the crusader’s cape.

Even though George Clooney’s installment, Batman and Robin, was a critical and financial disaster — Clooney himself called the film “a waste of money” and volunteered to personally refund money to audience members — it didn’t stop the franchise. Eight years later Batman was reinvented by Christopher Nolan as The Dark Knight, which grossed $1,001,842,429 at the box office.

Not sure if recasting and reimaging Harry Potter would work, but, who knows? Maybe 10 years from now Hollywood will have a Potter new cast and new stories for a new generation.  

]]> http://www.metronews.ca/Edmonton/entertainment/article/915822 Tue, 12 Jul 2011 15:00:00 -0400 Richard Crouse, Metro Canada http://www.metronews.ca/Edmonton/entertainment/article/915822
Bob Dylan sang "I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more." But Johnny Paycheck said it best for all people with evil employers when he snarled, “Take this job and shove it.”

This weekend, a new movie takes hatred for bad bosses to a new level. The guys in Horrible Bosses, a new comedy starring Jason Bateman, Charlie Day and Jason Sudeikis, hate their supervisors, and try to solve their employment problems…permanently.

Not all movie bosses are in such danger. Often movie characters find more creative ways to get even with their bosses.

Remember Office Space’s Peter Gibbons (Ron Livingston)? He hated his nitpicking boss, Bill Lumbergh (Gary Cole), so much he created a computer virus to steal money from the company. Too bad he got the decimal point wrong.

Gibbons didn’t go to prison for his revenge scheme but another agitated employee did. In Wall Street, Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen) allows his boss, Mr. Gordon “Greed is Good” Gekko, to lead him down a moral and professional rabbit hole.

His revenge was simple: He recorded Gekko’s admission of guilt. Trouble was, to do so he had to implicate himself.
Going to jail was too good for Guy’s (Frank Whaley) boss in Swimming with Sharks. The up and coming writer thought he had it made when he got a job as the assistant to hot shot producer Buddy Ackerman (Kevin Spacey) but soon found out that being low on the food chain in Hollywood means putting up with a constant stream of abuse and humiliation.

Instead of quitting he does what any slightly psychotic Tinsel Town wannabe would do: he breaks into Buddy’s house, kidnaps him and tortures him. In a twist, the extreme behaviour earns Buddy’s respect and Guy gets a promotion.

Usually in the movies, it’s men who are the bad bosses but there are two glaring examples of distaff evil employers. In The Devil Wears Prada, Meryl Streep was Miranda, a boss who redefines the word demanding.

She’s bad, but the worst female boss ever is Working Girl’s Katharine Parker (Sigourney Weaver). Miranda was belittling and arrogant, but at least she was upfront about it. Parker, on the other hand, is two faced, passing off her trusted secretary Tess McGill’s (Melanie Griffith) ideas as her own. In the end, Tess teaches her a lesson about honesty…and gets her fired.

]]> http://www.metronews.ca/Edmonton/entertainment/article/909043 Wed, 06 Jul 2011 15:00:00 -0400 Richard Crouse, Metro Canada http://www.metronews.ca/Edmonton/entertainment/article/909043