Movie review: The Intern doesn’t pay off
In Nancy Meyer's new film, Robert De Niro is a 70-year-old intern in the on-line company run by Anne Hathaway, where selling clothing is secondary to handing out familiar advice
Listen to Me Marlon filmmakers found heart of darkness
Brando narrates his own story in new documentary
Surviving a broken home with alcoholic parents, Marlon Brando found a way to heal using a tape recorder, isolation and a professional obsession with truth that made every performance vibrate with all the beauty, and ugliness, of the human condition
By Katherine Monk
PARK CITY, UT – When Marlon Brando was still alive, his face was scanned using what was, at the time, cutting-edge digital technology. Pulses of laser light crisscrossed his famous profile, swallowing each feature into an algorithm, resulting in an animated, glowing green grid: a Marlon matrix.
The footage lingered for years. Then the producers behind Restrepo, Waiting for Sugar Man and James Marsh’s Project Nim got a call from Brando’s estate.
“They approached us to do something and we said we’d be delighted, but only if we can make it in a way that is entirely original,” says John Battsek, one of the founders of London-based Passion Pictures – ...
Truth is stranger than TIFF
Real-life dramas make their appearance at the Toronto film festival, but sometimes in the movies, facts get in the way of a good story
By Jay Stone
TORONTO — Truth occasionally makes an appearance at a Toronto International Film Festival, although usually not in the presence of a movie star (“You were great, Kevin!”) It pops up in a few movies, more or less; not just in documentaries, its natural home, but in the Hollywood versions of real-life stories, usually twisted ever so slightly to make it more interesting, or cinematic, or sellable. Sure, truth is stranger than fiction, but the challenge is to make it more lucrative.
The biggest “true” story at TIFF is Spotlight, the Tom McCarthy version of the real-life expose by the Boston Globe of the scandal of sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests (the Globe won the 2003 Pulitzer prize for the story.)
Spotlight — the name of the four-person investigative team at the Globe that ...
#TIFF15 – LEGEND measures Hardy’s range
Tom Hardy sinks his incisors into the dual role of duelling siblings Reggie and Ronnie Kray in Brian Helgeland's stylish gangster drama that takes on classical and classist themes, then pummels them to pulp
LEGEND
Directed by Brian Helgeland. Starring: Tom Hardy, Emily Browning, David Thewlis, Christopher Eccleston, Chazz Palminteri, Tara Fitzgerald, Taron Egerton.
Thirty years ago, Tom Cruise made a fantasy movie with Tim Curry, a herd of unicorns and director Ridley Scott called Legend. This is not that movie. If there’s any connection to be made, Brian Helgeland’s LEGEND shares DNA with The Krays, Peter Medak’s 1990 movie about Reggie and Ronnie Kray, twin brothers who ruled the London underworld in the 1960s.
Violent, cocky, but entirely self-created criminal kingpins, Reggie and Ronnie Kray became guttersnipe folk heroes: Kids from the wrong side of London who cracked the upper crust with fists and a shiv.
Their story really is ...
Is Tom Hardy the best actor in the world?
The star of the new gangster drama Legend is a versatile actor whose roles range from the indomitable Mad Max the villainous Bane. Is there nothing he can't do?
By Jay Stone
TORONTO — Tom Hardy might be the best actor of his generation.
He can do anything. He was the scary buff gangster in Bronson and then he was the scary but doomed hit man Ricki Tarr in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy. Next thing you know, he’s Bane, the gigantic muscled villain in The Dark Knight Rises, growling through a leather mask. Hard to believe it was the same guy in Locke, a solo film about a man who’s responsible for the concrete in a British construction project, called away because a woman he once slept with is about to give birth to their child. Now he’s Bob, the compliant bartender in the gangster drama The Drop who turns out to be a guy you don’t want to screw around with. Then he’s the indomitable (but vulnerable!) hero in the post-apocalyptic desert in Mad Max: Fury ...
#TIFF15: Demolition deconstructs grief with heart
The Toronto International Film Festival opened with Jean-Marc Vallée's off-beat drama starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Naomi Watts
Demolition
Directed by Jean-Marc Vallée. Starring: Jake Gyllenhaal, Naomi Watts, Chris Cooper, Judah Lewis.
Jean-Marc Vallée’s opening night movie befuddled some critics here in Toronto, but I fell in love with this movie about an investment banker who unravels in the wake of a personal tragedy — if only because I had no idea how it would end. Anyone who reads the synopsis of Brian Sipe’s screenplay knows how it begins: Davis Mitchell (Jake Gyllenhaal) is in the car with his wife arguing over a leaky refrigerator when the random force of fate T-bones their vehicle. His wife is killed, but Davis escapes without so much as a scratch. On the surface he is whole, but beneath the shiny exterior, he is shattered — and it’s this dissonance that powers the whole off-beat drama.
How could an external reality and an internal truth be ...
TIFF report: So far, so exciting
It’s easy to find things to love at the Toronto film festival, especially if you let Alfred Hitchcock be your guide through the movie magic, writes Jay Stone
By Jay Stone
TORONTO — On the sidewalk of John Street, just around the corner from the theatre where most of the Toronto International Film Festival movies are screened, someone has stenciled the instruction, “Find out what you love and let it kill you.”
It’s a line from Charles Bukowski — who found out that he loved alcohol, then died of it, thus proving the authenticity of his advice, if not the wisdom — and it’s an ideal motto for TIFF, where, if you’re not done in by the pace of the films or the parties, you’re also tempted by the unlimited free doughnuts in the hospitality suite of EOne, the distributor that runs a must-visit salon on a high floor of the nearby Intercontinental Hotel.
Mmmm. Doughnuts. I mean, Movies.
It’s also ...
Can TIFF ride to box-office rescue?
With 2015 shaping up to be one of the worst box-office years on record, film industry types are desperately hoping this year's Toronto International Film Festival manifests a movie messiah. The Ex-Press takes a look at the top contenders.
By Katherine Monk
September 10, 2015 TORONTO — The truth fades quickly in the pop and hiss of paparazzi flashes, but it sits here nonetheless, a little lump lying under the red carpet: 2015 could turn out to be the worst year at the box-office in adjusted dollar-history.
Sure, J.J. Abrams will awaken the force, James Bond will rise with Spectre and the ever-hungry Katniss Everdeen will no doubt slaughter as the calendar year draws to a close, but as the Toronto International Film Festival kicks off today with the gala world premiere of Jean-Marc Vallée’s eerily titled Demolition, the big question is: Can TIFF ride to the rescue and resuscitate the public’s interest in “cinema” — movies that don’t have ...
Why I’m addicted to The Knick
Clive Owen and Steven Soderbergh create a volatile dramatic mix in The Knick, the HBO-Cinemax series about turn-of-the-century surgeons that broke viewing records last year
The Knick: Season One
4/5
Starring: Clive Owen, Juliet Rylance, André Holland, Eve Hewson, Michael Angarano, Eric Johnson
Directed by: Steven Soderbergh
Cinemax/ HBO Home Entertainment
Available now on VOD, DVD, Digital HD, Blu-ray
By Katherine Monk
September 3, 2015 -- It’s as addictive as the cocaine our lead character injects between his toes, and for that, we can thank the unsheathed thespian potency of Clive Owen. The 50-year-old English actor who emerged as a force in the wake of Croupier takes the gloves off for his portrayal of John Thackery, a turn-of-the-century surgeon trying to save lives at the Knickerbocker Hospital.
If he sounds like your standard soap opera doctor, you’re partly right. Dr. Thackery engages in all kinds of heroics, as well as sexual escapa...
Cameron Labine climbs mountain of manhood
Interview: Cameron Labine
The director and writer behind the new movie Mountain Men explores the nature of masculinity as he sets two brothers into the Canadian wilderness to cope with simmering sibling issues, and a medical emergency
By Katherine Monk
September 3, 2015, VANCOUVER – Like some of mankind’s most classic adventures, it all started with a great fall. Filmmaker Cam Labine was at a full moon party far up the Squamish River on B.C.’s South Coast. He wasn’t “in his right mind,” started wandering, and took a bad tumble in the dark.
“That was sort of a wake up call for me,” says Labine, sitting in a warm and decidedly cozy café in Vancouver’s Strathcona neighbourhood. “Growing up in BC, in Maple Ridge, you sort of spend a lot of time outdoors. At least, I spent a lot of time camping and snowboarding and hiking… and you end up feeling comfortable in the mountains, like I belong to them. But with the fall came an epiphany: That I am an urban kid ...
