Is Ricky turning into the Globes’ Billy Crystal?

By Brian D. Johnson - Monday, January 16, 2012 at 12:07 PM - 0 Comments

There’s a fine line between mean-spirited and warm ‘n’ fuzzy. Ricky Gervais swung from one extreme to the other in a twinkling last night, morphing from the hostile host who would never get invited back to the man who looks poised to become the Golden Globes’ Billy Crystal. And the Globes themselves—always the ‘fun’ party compared to the quasi religious ritual of the Academy Awards—even seems to have usurped some of Oscar’s dignity and gravitas. Where were the drunken gaffes? The sloppy acceptance speeches. Aside from Meryl Streep forgetting her reading glasses and stumbling through a speech before being played off by the band, everything went like clockwork. And was Gervais even drinking that beer on the podium?

Gervais, of course, had promised he wasn’t going to soften his act to appease critics, but there was a definite spoonful of sugar surrounding the satirical barbs this year.  He actually said some nice things about people. And it helped that he arrived at 69th annual Golden Globes riding a huge wave of hype. The audience was primed, the stars were ready to be roasted, and that made all the difference. Even Gervais seemed surprised by the tone of goodwill in the room, as he noted midway through the show, “It’s going well, isn’t it? You’re so much better than last year’s audience. They had a right stick up their ass.” Continue…

Golden Globes shine on ‘The Artist,’ Gosling and Clooney

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, December 15, 2011 at 12:02 PM - 0 Comments

Ryan Gosling (in a scene from 'The Ides of March') will compete with 'Ides' director George Clooney, nominated for 'The Descendants'

The Golden Globes nominations were unveiled this morning, and The Artist—France’s silent black-and-white valentine to retro Hollywood—continues to charm its way down the long road to the Oscars by topping the Globes with six nominations. The Descendants and The Help are tied for second place with four nominations apiece. Both George Clooney and Canada’s Ryan Gosling are golden. Clooney snagged three nominations, as best dramatic actor for Alexander Payne’s The Descendants, plus best director and screenplay for The Ides of March.  Gosling was nominated in the comic acting category for Crazy, Stupid Love, and in the dramatic acting category for  Ides, which has him going head to head against with Clooney. Unlike the Oscars, the Globes break down the best picture and acting categories into dramas and comedies-or-musicals, which allows the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA) to better spread the wealth. But the rationale is often wonky. The Descendants, a quirky mix of comedy and drama, is classified as drama, presumably because someone dies; My Life With Marilyn was considered a comedy-or-musical, but though it’s got a couple of tunes, it’s not a musical, and despite some laughs, it’s much less of a comedy than The Descendants. Go figure.

The Globes gave a boost both to The Ides of March and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, which have been ignored by most of the critics’ awards. Tattoo‘s cyberpunk heroine, Rooney Mara, hacked her way into a heavyweight actress slate,  competing with Meryl Streep (The Iron Lady), Viola Davis (The Help), Tilda Swinton (We Need to Talk About Kevin) and Glenn Close (Albert Nobbs).

The most notable snub was ignoring Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, which won the Palme D’Or in Cannes and has been honoured by several critics’ groups, including the Toronto Film Critics Association. However, its star, Brad Pitt, was nominated for Moneyball in the dramatic acting category, along with Clooney, Gosling, Michael Fassbender (Shame) and Leonardo DiCaprio (J. Edgar). Honouring DiCaprio instead of Take Shelter‘s Michael Shannon underscores the HFPA’s tacky pedigree as a gang of junket whores who never saw a superstar they didn’t like. (If you think that’s too harsh, Ricky Gervais has said much worse things about the HFPA, yet they’ve hired him back to host the Globes, which adds a curious S&M kink to the junket whore role.) Continue…

Breakups: Sayonara!

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, December 8, 2011 at 9:31 AM - 0 Comments

Farewell, goodbye: Dorais and Harper; Berry and Aubry; Lopez and Anthony; Clooney and Canalis

GORDON CAMPBELL AND B.C.

He ran B.C. during the triumphant Olympic Games, but a year later was nothing but the butt of jokes. The premier stepped down amid controversy over his support of a 12 per cent harmonized sales tax, which divided the province. When he was announced as one of the recipients of the Order of British Columbia, resentment ran so high that an online petition opposing it was launched.

MICHEL DORAIS AND THE TORIES

The bilingual Dorais toiled at various government jobs starting in 1976, and nothing could make him stop loving public service—until the Harper government came along. The former deputy minister told the Ottawa Citizen that Conservatives “lack respect for civil servants,” but the final straw came when the Tories appointed a unilingual auditor general. “For all my professional life I worked at ensuring bilingualism would take hold in the Canadian public service,” he lamented as he resigned.

CLICK HERE TO READ ABOUT MACLEANS’ OTHER NEWSMAKERS OF 2011

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Taking George Clooney sideways in ‘The Descendants’

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, November 18, 2011 at 8:32 AM - 0 Comments

(from left) Shailene Woodley, George Clooney, Amara Miller, and Nick Krause in 'The Descendants'

George Clooney is his generation’s Cary Grant. The smoothest man alive. Whether he’s leading a heist in Oceans 11 or playing a slick presidential candidate in The Ides of March,  he has built his career on a debonair image of manly prowess, dry wit and impeccable charm. Which is not enough for an actor of note. So it’s interesting to see Clooney struggle to subvert his image. What’s curious is that Hollywood’s most eligible, and durable, bachelor remains as unattached onscreen as in life: unlike, say, Ryan Gosling, he hardly ever ends up cast as a romantic lead. This guy’s screen kisses can almost be counted on the fingers of one hand. His emotions have also remained largely off limits—until Up In the Air director Jason Reitman finally pried open a crack in his armour and located some vulnerability. Now with The Descendants, Clooney goes further, and finally takes a plunge into the emotional deep end. It’s the first film in seven years from Sideways writer-director Alexander Payne, who casts George sharply against type as an awkward, ineffectual father blundering around Hawaii looking for his balls. (And no, it’s not a golf movie.) The result is one of the year’s most original and affecting films, a bittersweet comic drama that steers clear of Hollywood formula and comes at us sideways, surprising us at every turn. Continue…

Backroom brains: first ‘Moneyball,’ now hardball in ‘Ides of March’

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, October 6, 2011 at 10:37 PM - 0 Comments

Ryan Gosling (left) as the press secretary; George Clooney as the candidate

George Clooney, who directed The Ides of March, likes to call it a political thriller. Which may be putting too fine a point on it. Insofar as politics is a game, as opposed to a mission, it can be seen as a sports movie, a less sentimental Moneyball, with the backroom boys trying to win the White House rather than the World Series. In his finest directing effort to date, Clooney casts himself as a left-wing Democrat in a presidential primary race. But he’s not the star, just the supporting player. The movie belongs to Ryan Gosling, who portrays Clooney’s hotshot press secretary, a golden boy whose tender ideals hit the wall in a game of hardball involving sex, lies and interns. This, in fact, is so much of a backroom story that Clooney’s character did not even appear onstage in the 2008 play on which the movie is based. The play, which bore the decidedly less sexy title of Farragut North, comes from Beau Willimon, who was a young writer on presidential hopeful Howard Dean’s 2004 Iowa campaign. Presumably he knows whereof he speaks.

The Ides of March burns along with a shrewd, whip-smart script, and when I first saw it, just before TIFF, I instantly hailed it as this year’s The Social Network. The analogy seemed obvious: it’s another brainy backstage intrigue about diabolical ambition, dirty tricks and betrayed loyalty. Well, since then I saw Moneyball, which was co-scripted by Aaron Sorkin, and now of course everyone is comparing that movie to The Social Network, which Sorkin wrote. Continue…

The real festival stars

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, September 23, 2011 at 3:35 PM - 0 Comments

George Pimentel/WireImage/Getty Images; Courtesy of TIFF

It was celebrity gridlock. Each year the juggernaut of the Toronto International Film Festival seems bigger than ever, but with its 36th edition (Sept. 8-18), it turned a corner. Anchored by its grand new headquarters, the TIFF Bell Lightbox, the festival finally moved fully downtown. As black SUV limos lined the streets, disgorging stars into the red-carpet blaze of cameras, the city’s entertainment district turned into a glass-and-concrete answer to Cannes—with some surreal moments worthy of Fellini.

Counter-spinning tabloid gossip, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie wrapped their arms around each other in a regal show of marital bliss at the premiere of Moneyball—for which Pitt earned up to $15 million as a hero who reinvents baseball by casting low-rent players instead of high-priced stars. Fresh from her hydrangea-bashing faux pas with a fan in Venice, Madonna ran a gauntlet of critical scorn for W.E., her risible take on Wallis Simpson and King Edward VIII, then denied reports that her goons told festival volunteers to avert their eyes when the Queen Mother of Pop came into view. Impresario Garth Drabinsky, on the eve of going to prison for fraud, took a hubris-heavy perp walk down the red carpet with Christopher Plummer for the premiere of Barrymore. Bono introduced a U2 documentary by comparing songwriting to sausage-making. And Neil Young did a double take when a grey-haired lady introduced herself at the premiere of his concert film—he confessed he had a crush on her in the fourth grade.

Now that the stardust has settled, and the circus has left town, all that remains of the festival are the movies. Some of them we’ll still be talking about in February. Each year TIFF launches the fall season of Oscar-pedigree films, and as the buzz merchants tried to sniff out the next King’s Speech or Slumdog Millionaire from 268 feature titles, there was no obvious champ. But some clear contenders stood out. It was above all a festival of stellar male performances—Clooney, Pitt, Gosling, Fassbender, Harrelson—even if the audience prize went to Nadine Labaki’s Where Do We Go Now?, a feel-good fable of female liberation from Lebanon.

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Juliette Lewis liked my purse!

By Jessica Allen - Friday, September 16, 2011 at 10:30 AM - 0 Comments

Jeff Vespa/Getty Images

A novice navigating Toronto International Film Festival nightlife on the opening Friday and Saturday eves of the festival—the only nights, the pros will tell you, that guarantee spotting gaggles of A-list celebrities—is a comedy of errors. Mistakes are inevitable, like leaving George Strombolopolous’s party at ONE restaurant uptown on Friday night in order to get downtown to Soho House—a pop-up club sponsored by Grey Goose in an old brick building—because Twitter, the all-knowing oracle of TIFF, which was difficult to consult earlier (because there was dinner with Harvey Weinstein to report on), says that the cast of Ides of March, including George Clooney, Ryan Reynolds and Philip Seymour Hoffman, are there, not to mention Mark Wahlberg, who has got behind the bar to make cocktails for himself and his entourage, and Tilda Swinton, who is at this very moment eating dinner. Of course, upon arrival, the stars have left and Swinton is out of sight.

And then at 2:30 a.m., after getting home empty-handed from Goodnight, a back-alley bar that was last year’s hot spot for Toronto elites and Hollywood A-listers, Twitter professes that Jon Hamm, Gerard Butler, Bono and others ended up at ONE, where the night began.

Still, even novices have some successes: at the Vanity Fair-Belvedere-Fox Searchlight party at Scarpetta on Saturday night, where Clooney and Bono enjoyed dinner, Kirsten Dunst sits in a corner, fresh-faced and pretty in a polka-dot blouse and floor-length breezy skirt, sipping on a cocktail and attending to her BlackBerry. A tall, fair-haired, blue-eyed gent in a sharp suit tries to get her attention. But Dunst acknowledges his presence only after finishing her cellular task. “Oh, hey Alex,” she smiles coyly. That would be Alexander Skarsgård, who stars with Dunst in Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia. Tonight he’s all smiles and happily obliges fans who politely ask for cellphone photo ops. As a woman passes her BlackBerry to her husband, the Swedish True Blood star grins, wraps one arm around her waist while holding a pint of beer behind his back and contorts his face into a smouldering frown replete with puckered lips and a singular raised eyebrow. He’s become his vampire character, Eric. And then it’s the novice’s turn: Juliette Lewis, who is far less severe-looking in person than she is in photos, grabs hold of her vintage sparkly purse and turns it over for inspection. “I like this.”

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TIFF gridlock and Norman Jewison’s next act

By Brian D. Johnson - Sunday, September 11, 2011 at 8:25 PM - 1 Comment

I ran into Norman Jewison at a rooftop cocktail atop the TIFF Bell Lightbox Friday evening. The 85-year-old Canadian director, looking nowhere near his age, showed up along with such luminaries as Robert Lantos, Atom Egoyan and Sony CEO Howard Stringer to pay tribute to Tom Bernard and Michael Barker, the exemplary indie distributors who being feted on their 20th anniversary at the helm of Sony Pictures Classics. Eventually I got around to asking Norman what he was up to these days, and he said he had a couple of movies in development—one with Moonstruck writer John Patrick Shanley and another pitched to him by a pair of Saturday Night Live writers—a farce called The Iranians Are Coming, which would update Jewison’s satirical hit, The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming (1966). That Norman would even consider making more movies at 85 is inspiring, but hey, Tony Bennett is the same age and he’s still performing. And last time I checked, Jewison was still taking ski vacations. He’s fond of quoting William Wyler, who once told him he’d direct “until the legs give out.”

But before I steered Jewison onto the subject of film, all he wanted to talk about was the insane downtown traffic, the city’s crumbling infrastructure, and his nightmarish ordeal in trying to get to the Lightbox. He’s not alone. Everyone at TIFF is apoplectic about the traffic, both inside and outside the building. (If you don’t frequent downtown Toronto, or live in a less stupid part of the country, you may want to tune out at this point.) Swollen by unchecked growth of condos, the downtown gridlock is bad at the best of times— Mayor Rob Ford can forget about defending drivers from the alleged “war against the car”; the car is at war with itself. But during the 11 days of  TIFF, a bad situation becomes untenable. Continue…

Muscling into the ‘Ides of March’ press conference

By Jessica Allen - Sunday, September 11, 2011 at 12:04 PM - 0 Comments

Scenes from the red carpet at the ‘Ides of March’ premiere

By Tom Henheffer - Saturday, September 10, 2011 at 10:13 AM - 0 Comments

Let’s get this party started

By Jessica Allen - Friday, September 9, 2011 at 1:09 PM - 0 Comments

On Wednesday morning, the eve before the TIFF storm, I rode my bike past Roy Thompson Hall–the site of all the festival’s galas–and saw several metal stands lined up like soldiers in the lobby.

By tonight they’ll have strands of rope attached to them (golden? velvet?) to separate the common folk and media types from the stars walking down red carpets, which, by the by, I also saw—stuffed unceremoniously into big clear plastic bags. They’ll be rolled out any hour now and the first people to walk down them will be some of Hollywood’s heaviest hitters, including Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill, the stars of Moneyball (6:30 pm), and George Clooney, the director, writer and star of Ides of March (9:30 pm). Clooney will be accompanied by some of his co-stars, including Ryan Gosling, Evan Rachel Wood, Marisa Tomei, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Paul Giamatti.  And it’ll be just as exciting Saturday night, when two homegrown Canadian directors debut their films to Toronto: Sarah Polley’s Take This Waltz (9:30pm), starring Michelle Williams, Seth Rogan and Sarah Silverman, plus David Cronenberg’s fictional film about Carl Yung (Michael Fassbinder) and Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen), A Dangerous Method (6:30 pm).

It’s going to be mayhem. And Maclean’s will be there.

Red hot Ryan Gosling

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, September 8, 2011 at 9:30 AM - 1 Comment

Richard Saker/Rex Features/CP

It must have been the glasses. As Ryan Gosling sat down for an interview at a beachfront bar in Cannes one afternoon last May, it took a moment to connect the man with the movie star. Behind a pair of thick horn-rims, his cautious gaze had none of the laser intensity that makes his blue eyes so electrifying onscreen. It was like talking to the Clark Kent version of the Hollywood heartthrob. And despite the fake American twang that he adopted as a young actor—because he “thought guys should sound like Marlon Brando”—in the way he parried questions with polite, self-deprecating charm, you could still see the Canadian in him.

Gosling wanted to be an American action hero ever since he was a kid, a scrawny working-class child born in London, Ont., and raised in Cornwall by Mormon parents. Rambo was an early role model. “When I was in first grade I watched First Blood and I filled my Fisher-Price Houdini kit with steak knives and brought them to school and started throwing them at kids at recess,” he recalls. “I got suspended and my parents nixed R-rated movies. The writing was on the wall when I saw Rocky for the first time. I went and picked a fight right afterwards and got my ass kicked. The movies took me into their dream.”

Now he’s living it. This week, as the juggernaut of the Toronto International Film Festival (Sept. 8-18) launches the fall season of Oscar-pedigree movies, Gosling’s career is on fire. With sensational lead roles in two films at the festival—as a smouldering action hero in Drive and a ruthless election strategist in The Ides of March—he has emerged as TIFF’s It Boy. His talent has never been in question. At 26, as a drug-addicted teacher in Half Nelson, he became the first Canadian in six decades to be nominated for Best Actor. And ever since he romanced Canadian sweetheart Rachel McAdams in The Notebook (2004), he has been an unlikely and enduring heartthrob. This is a ladies’ man with range, able to carry on a credible love affair with a blow-up doll in Lars and the Real Girl (2007), and coax an Oscar-nominated performance from Michelle Williams as her alcoholic husband in Blue Valentine (2010).

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What’s hot at TIFF

By Brian D. Johnson - Wednesday, September 7, 2011 at 11:25 PM - 0 Comments

Here are mini-reviews of 21 films I like so far at TIFF. (Some I love.) Ten were screened in Cannes. The others I saw more recently, in advance media previews. As the festival unfolds, more favorites will be added, and the list will appear as a fixture of our dedicated TIFF page. Click on each title to read the TIFF program note and screening times:

The Artist Finally a French movie that needs no subtitles. This silent black-and-white rom-com was the biggest crowd-pleaser in Cannes.  Set in Hollywood, it’s tale of star-crossed stars: a Valentino-like silent film idol sees his career sink with the advent of talkies, while an extra flirts her way into his heart, and to stardom. A wonder dog steals the show. It’s a movie you can imagine Woody Allen wishing he had made.

Café de flore After his restrained fling with British royalty (2009′s) The Young Victoria), Quebec director Jean-Marc Vallée re-embraces the French language, and the lyrical virtuosity that made C.R.A.Z.Y (2005) such an intoxicating triumph. His daredevil drama of shattered love dances a tightrope between two far-flung and seemingly unrelated storylines—a single mother (Vanessa Paradis) struggles to raise a Down Syndrome boy in 1969 Paris; a celebrated DJ (Kevin Parent) navigates a painful divorce in present-day Montreal. Emotional dynamite. Continue…

Newsmakers

By macleans.ca - Friday, July 23, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

If they had a million dollars
Montreal rockers Arcade Fire will match donations up to $1 million to Kanpe, a charity rebuilding family life after the Haitian earthquake. “We’re all family in times like this,” said Régine Chassagne, whose parents were born in Haiti. “Please,” her husband Win Butler urged fans, “take our money.”

For better and worse, check
In 1984, Steve Fonyo ran across Canada, raising $13 million for cancer research, an epic achievement for a 19-year-old with a prosthetic leg. His life since, always in the shadow of the late Terry Fox who attempted a similar feat in 1981, has been a train wreck. He was stripped of the Order of Canada last year after a long battle with addictions and multiple criminal convictions. He’d hoped a planned Aug. 28 wedding would signal a turnaround, but that, too, went off the rails when it was revealed last week that his fiancée, Lisa Greenwood, is serving a jail sentence for theft and assault. Victoria-area business people, who had planned to underwrite the ceremony at the city’s Fonyo Beach, where he’d ended his run, rescinded their offer. John Vickers, executive director of the Victoria Truth Centre, who helped arrange the event, said the couple’s “lives are too complicated at this time for a supported wedding to occur.”

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The party’s started

By Anne Kingston - Thursday, February 25, 2010 at 3:00 PM - 0 Comments

Photograph by George Pimentel

Fashion branding is an international gold-medal sport, so it’s fitting that the big first parties of the Games combined the two themes. On Saturday night, Dsquared2’s Dan and Dean Caten, the identical twins who designed the fantastical opening ceremony costumes, were feted by MAC Cosmetics. The crowd that crushed into a hotel lobby included opera singer Measha Brueggergosman, rapper k-os, former Olympian Nancy Kerrigan, Jeanne Beker and Ben Mulroney.

Then there was the much-coveted invite to Omega’s Valentine’s night party “hosted” by Cindy Crawford, one of the brand’s celebrity “ambassadors,” which drew a stylish crowd wearing fabulous shoes despite the rain. Also on hand were Vancouver restaurateur Umberto Menghi and a few former Olympic gold medallists busy with future Games: former British MP Sebastian Coe, who fronted London’s 2012 bid, and Alexander Popov, who worked the crowd talking up Russia’s 2014 Games. The American dynastic pair David Lauren, son of Ralph, and model Lauren Bush, niece of George W., also swanned through, both in Ralph Lauren, the official designer for the 2010 U.S. team.

Until Crawford’s half-time entrance, speculation swirled (ill-founded, alas) that Omega ambassador George Clooney would be with her. The lineup for photo-ops included B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell, who ended up being late for his own opening-night bash at B.C. House in the Vancouver Art Gallery, hosted by Vicki Gabereau.

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Look, I’m a sexy straight shooter

By Scott Feschuk - Thursday, December 3, 2009 at 10:10 AM - 3 Comments

Please enjoy this excerpt from my tell-all memoirs, Going Vogue: An American Life, about my recent failed attempt to win a certain prestigious position in the public eye.

I’m a straight shooter from up north. I’d lived a simple life dedicated to faith, family values and eradicatin’ the g’s from verbs. But my world changed forever when I was approached to run for People magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive.

What followed is a blur. Within days, I found myself caught up in the whirlwind of a national campaign. I was in pursuit of an office that had been held by George Clooney (twice), Jude Law (once) and Nick Nolte (an accounting error). I was standing before thousands of people—and, doggone it, I was wearing short shorts.

But from the start, forces conspired to undermine my candidacy. Some claimed that I wasn’t “qualified” to be Sexiest Man Alive. They pointed to my lack of a cohesive policy agenda and my 30 lb. of belly fat. But these were elites caught up in the conventional idea of what made someone sexy enough to serve. Neither I nor my thick, thick unibrow had any intention of playing by their rules.

Thankfully, I was supported in my candidacy by my spouse and our 17 children, each of them named after a Batman sound effect. I’ll never forget when we took a family vote over whether I should run. “Do it,” Biff said. “Go for it,” agreed the twins, Pow and Oof. (The moment was spoiled when our oldest daughter revealed she was pregnant by the town halfwit. How could you be so careless, Thwack?)

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Newsmakers

By macleans.ca - Friday, November 27, 2009 at 9:30 AM - 1 Comment

So a blond walks into a courtroom

Mississauga, Ont., native Jordan Wimmer cleared more than $1 million last year working for Nomos Capital, a London-based hedge fund. But all was not a bed of roses for the attractive, 29-year-old blond financier. Indeed, her blondness is at the heart of her $7-million wrongful dismissal suit against her multi-millionaire boss Mark Lowe. Sexist jokes, piggish behaviour and even an attempt to run her down on the street were part of a campaign of harassment, Wimmer testified last week. She told a London employment tribunal that Lowe made cutting personal remarks, emailed sexist “dumb blond” jokes throughout the office and cavorted in front of her with a stripper, causing her to suffer depression and an eating disorder. Lowe accused Wimmer of “gross distortions,” though he admits “entirely as a joke” to calling her “decorative” and a “dumb blond.” As for his emailed gag about a blond confusing a Corn Flakes box with a jigsaw puzzle, he says that “feeble joke” wasn’t told at her expense. Depending on the tribunal’s sense of humour, the joke may be on Lowe. Continue…

Loving 'The Road' and the plastic fantastic 21st century 'Fox'

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, November 26, 2009 at 11:01 PM - 5 Comments

The sky is falling at the multiplex this weekend, with two new movies about indomitable dads trying to survive the end of the world as they know it.  Take your choice between grim and giddy, and between a bunker and a foxhole. The Road is a gruelling post-apocalyptic odyssey based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy, with Viggo Mortensen starring as a widowed survivor dragging his son through the barbaric ruins of America. The Fantastic Mr. Fox is a stop-motion animated feature directed by Wes Anderson (Rushmore), with George Clooney voicing the role of Mr. Fox, whose compulsive banditry turns his family into homeless outlaws.  I can heartily recommend both movies, although they offer utterly different experiences. Featuring superb performance from Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee, who plays his son, The Road is one of the year’s strongest dramas. But it’s no picnic, to say the least. The Fantastic Mr. Fox, on the other hand is a tonic, a painless treat, and although we have yet to see Disney’s The Princess and the Frog, it stands out as the year’s wittiest animated feature. And in an era of computer generated spectacle, both films have a rare physical realism.

The Road

Like No Country for Old Men, another Cormac McCarthy adaptation, The Road should make a significant dent at the Oscars, although it’s not as much fun: unlike the Coen brothers’ movie, John Hillcoat’s sombre epic is painted in shades of grey, not noir. It’s set in a world where there’s nothing left of civilization, including its sense of humour. And there’s no villain to speak of, just zombie-like hordes of cannibal vigilantes who roam a barren, burnt-out landscape under a permanently leaden sky. This is no 2012: it’s about an America where the havoc has already been wreaked, without explanation, and no one’s in Kansas anymore. Whether from a nuclear blast or a cosmic collision, this scorched Earth is a dirty, barren mess. There’s no power, no vegetation and virtually no food. Everyone’s a refugee and some of them want to eat you. Continue…

Opening Weekend: Tripping with Carrey, Clooney and Hana

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, November 6, 2009 at 5:14 PM - 4 Comments

Now that the November winds are blowing and the nights are getting longer, it’s time to fly away. To go anywhere, as long as it’s elsewhere and there’s a glow of magic to warm the heart. Magic—in Hollywood, they like to think they can manufacture the stuff. But it’s not that simple. This week I’m looking at three very different films that deal in magic. But only one of them really makes me believe it. It’s also the smallest of the three and, believe it or not,  it’s a documentary—Inside Hana’s Suitcase, which is beautifully directed by Canadian filmmaker Larry Weinstein, is a real-life fable about lost child of the Holocaust, a miraculous film that draws  hope and inspiration from horrific tragedy. The other two movies are the A Christmas Carol, a 3D opus starring Jim Carrey as virtually every character in the cast, and The Men Who Stare at Goats, an off-kilter comedy starring George Clooney as a U.S. solider trained in para-normal powers.  A Christmas Carol, directed by Robert Zemeckis is the weekend’s designated blockbuster, and although it has some of my colleagues dancing an early Xmas jig, it left me cold. But then I wasn’t especially fond of Forrest Gump either. My humbug response to A Christmas Carol appears in this week’s magazine, and you can read it by clicking on: Everybody wants a piece of Scrooge.

George Clooney meets his match in 'The Men Who Stare at Goats'

The Men Who Stare at Goats

This may be a George Clooney movie. But it’s not the George Clooney movie. Because this fall there are two, both having premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. The other is Jason Reitman’s Up in the Air, which is not out until December. And there are also two George Clooneys, at least. There’s Serious George, the shrewd professional who doesn’t suffer fools gladly. You find him movies like  The Good German and Michael Clayton. Then there’s Uncurious George,  the know-it-all goofball who pops up in Coen brothers pictures like O Brother Where Art Thou and Burn After Reading—an idiot who thinks he’s a rocket surgeon.  Both of Clooney’s new movies are comedies, up to a point, and both are based on books. The Goats picture is an outlandish zany farce about guy trying to walk through walls, although it’s inspired by a true story;  Up in the Air is a serious comedy about the world we live in, although it’s fiction.

And here’s the thing. If you’re going to see just one George Clooney movie this fall, you should wait for Up in the Air. It’s by far the better film; and it’s the one for which he’s guaranteed to get an  Oscar nomination. Which doesn’t mean Men Who Stare at Goats isn’t worth a look, if you’ve some free time, and free money, and you don’t want to wait for the video. Hmmm. Talk about damning with faint praise. Continue…

Women fight back against Berlusconi

By Katie Engelhart - Thursday, November 5, 2009 at 5:20 PM - 2 Comments

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has never been terribly discreet about his penchant for extra-marital amore. But here’s some sound advice from one of his colleagues, Italian senator Patrizia Bugnano, after the PM’s latest misstep: “Someone tell Berlusconi he is no George Clooney.”

The row began when Rosy Bindi, a member of the opposition Democratic party, appeared with Berlusconi on the late-night television show Porta a Porta to discuss an Italian court’s decision to revoke his executive immunity from prosecution—a move that could reopen a number of criminal cases against the PM, including alleged tax fraud. During the show, Berlusconi told the matronly Bindi, “You are more beautiful than intelligent,” apparently taking a swipe at both her looks and smarts. (On the show, Bindi fired back: “I’m not one of the women at your disposal.”) Continue…

Men who stare at movies

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, October 30, 2009 at 11:17 AM - 2 Comments

If you’ve come here looking for George Clooney, I owe you an apology. In this week’s issue of the magazine, a page promoting highlights on Macleans.ca promised an Opening Weekend review of The Men Who Stare at Goats, which stars  Clooney as a whacked-out U.S soldier trained in paranormal powers. But we were jumping the gun. The movie doesn’t open until Nov. 6, so you’ll have to wait a week. Mea culpa. But I’d like to blame this scheduling dyslexia on the screwy way the film critic racket works. What happens is we’re force-fed All The Important Fall Movies in first few days of the September binge called the Toronto International Film Festival. Crazy. Then we wait for them to come out so we can tell you what we think of them. That can take weeks, months, or in some cases, years. Sometimes we toss off mini-reviews during the festival, but we’re generally too busy gorging on movies to stop and think about them, or even keep them straight. Also, distributor etiquette requires us to hold our fire until the film’s commercial release.  I guess I was so keen to review The Men Who Stare at Goats that my mind was playing tricks on me. Like the soldiers in the film who try to train themselves to walk thorough walls and move objects with their minds, this trigger-happy critic was trying to will George Clooney’s goat movie to come out a week early. Or at least that’s my story. So check in next week for the review, and in the meantime if you want a hit of the real George, sharing the red carpet with real goats at a swanky TIFF party, go to a previous blog in which I ask Mr. Clooney, politely, to stop stalking me and messing with my head: Men who Stare at George Clooney.

It was crazy, even without the goats

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, September 24, 2009 at 3:40 PM - 0 Comments

The party for the Men Who Stare at Goats premiere was in a modernist glass mansion on Toronto’s exclusive Bridle Path. And the guests, trying not to stare at the movie’s star, George Clooney, were acting strange. When I ran into a friend who refused to shake my hand, I thought she was paranoid about spreading the swine flu virus. No, she said, it was because her hands were “goaty.” She had been petting some goats that were huddled in a pen on the red carpet; they were clad in promo T-shirts that read “Stop staring at me”—the same T-shirts worn by hostesses serving Vitaminwater and vodka cocktails inside.

The Toronto International Film Festival is a kind of marathon staring contest. You gaze at the screen, and the stars, until it makes you crazy. And at the 34th annual edition of TIFF (Sept. 10-19), there was a lot to look at—335 films from 64 countries, and enough celebrities to choke downtown traffic with limo gridlock. Continue…

Top 10 Best Moments at TIFF

By Tom Henheffer - Saturday, September 19, 2009 at 12:46 AM - 0 Comments

Click here for the Top 10 Worst Moments at TIFF

Masters of the universe in free fall

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, September 17, 2009 at 3:20 PM - 0 Comments

You forget you’re watching Matt Damon. He’s playing a spy. But with a dorky moustache, a toupée and an extra 20 lb. puffing out his features, there’s no trace of the dynamic secret agent from the Bourne franchise. In Steven Soderbergh’s The Informant!, an off-kilter comedy based on a true story of corporate corruption, Damon plays Mark Whitacre, an agri-biz honcho who became the highest-ranking whistle-blower in U.S. history during the late ’90s. But unlike most whistle-blowers—such as the one in The Insider or Soderbergh’s own Erin Brockovich—he is no straight-arrow hero. Far from it. While spending years wearing a wire to help the FBI expose a price-fixing conspiracy, Whitacre spins an elaborate web of lies, and embezzles millions from the company he was ratting on.

Premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival (Sept. 10-19) and opening commercially next week, The Informant! is one of a new breed of movies about men of influence in dire straits who invent their own cracked ethical code. Each year, TIFF showcases the fall line of serious films that vie for Oscar glory, pictures that presume to tell us something about the human condition. And whether by accident or design, many of this year’s most prominent titles reflect a new fashion in heroism that seems tailor-made for the recession: moral bankruptcy.

The new Hollywood hero is a high-flying master of the universe who’s losing altitude as fast as the ground vanishes beneath his feet. He’s a liar, a fraud, a womanizer, a drug addict, a nutcase, or all of the above. He’s Michael Douglas as a disgraced car magnate with a wrecked marriage and a runaway libido in Solitary Man. He’s David Duchovny as the head of a model family that turns out to be an utter sham in The Joneses. He’s Nicolas Cage as a crack-smoking cop who hallucinates reptiles in Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. Or Peter Sarsgaard as a smooth con artist who seduces a 16-year-old English schoolgirl in An Education, soliciting her father as a gullible accomplice. Or Ricky Gervais as a screenwriter who discovers the marvel of dishonesty in The Invention of Lying—a comedy set in a world where everyone tells the truth.

Continue…