For the first time ever, Pixar is releasing two movies in a single year. You’ve already seen Inside Out (I hope) and today The Good Dinosaur is roaring into a theatre near you.
To celebrate, we want to send someone a prize pack including a copy of Inside Out on DVD.
To enter: pick an emotion – ANGER \ JOY \ FEAR \ SADNESS \ DISGUST – and leave us a comment telling us which one you’re feeling today.
The great think about being an insomniac – the only good thing, in fact – is that it gives plenty of time to pursue my heart’s true passion: reading. If I had to pick between movies and books, it wouldn’t even be a contest. No hesitation: give me books or give me death (and actually, losing the ability to read is the thing I fear most about aging).
Some of my favourite books inevitably get turned into movies. Sometimes it’s a good thing (The Martian was great!) and sometimes it’s a goddamned travesty (The Golden Compass – ugh). This month you can see two movies based on books that for once, I can actually get behind.
Room, starring Brie Larson, is a revelation. It was deemed “unadaptable” but director Lenny Abrahamson delivers a unique cinematic event with a powerhouse performance by its star. The novel, by Emma Donoghue, is smart, taut, and emotional without sentimentalizing. It’s told from the perspective of 5 year old Jack, held captive in the room where his kidnapped mother conceived and gave birth to him, who has no knowledge of the outside world.
Brooklyn, written by Colm Toibin, is simply beautiful. I fell in love with Eilis, the young Irish immigrant, and her voice – so truly and honestly written. She is brought to life on the big screen by Saoirse Ronan in a feature directed by John Crowley. It debuted at Sundance to such appreciation that it sparked a bidding war that landed the biggest Sundance deal ever. I think it’s worth checking out.
When the cool weather arrives, there’s nothing I like better than curling up by the fire with a glass of wine and a good book…except maybe relaxing in the hot tub with a cigar and a good book. In any case, you need a good book. So here’s your chance to win a book and maybe get inspired to see the movie. Enter the contest and let us know which one you’d rather win – Room or Brooklyn – either way, you can’t lose.
Contest closes at midnight EST November 24 2015. Winner will be announced and notified by email November 25 2015. Anyone can enter in the following ways:
On the one hand, rain makes you feel a little less guilty about spending the last few days of summer sequestered in movie theatres. On the other hand, there’s the standing in long lineups outside the movie theatres getting icy cold rain down your back, and the dampness in your shirt never dries in the movie theatre air conditioning. So you spend the whole day with a case of the shivers. But you also get to meet really cool people – a gentleman outside the Scotiabank theatre who sheltered me with his umbrella (while occasionally sending a big dump of sub-zero rain down my cleavage, but the intentions were good), an older woman I dubbed the blue angel for her raincoat who insisted I take her umbrella while waiting outside Bloor Hot Docs in the very early morning.Toronto festival goers are nothing if not courteous.
Miss You Already: This was the earliest I’ve ever been up for a movie, so if it was anything less than I was hoping, I would have been pissed. And the thing is, my expectations were tempered. It was directed by Catherine Hardwicke, who did Thirteen, but also Twilight. It stars Drew Barrymore, one of my favourite celebrities, and Toni Collette, one of my favourite actresses. Note the difference. Drew Barrymore does best when just allowed to do her bubbly self, and in this case she’s well-cast and well-used. She and Collette play lifelong BFFs who have their friendship tested when Barrymore finally gets her innermost wishes granted with a long-awaited pregnancy and Collette has her innermost fears realized with a cancer diagnosis that means she is possibly dying, her children soon to be motherless. Collette is an amazing actor, capable of anything, and she handles this material with exactly the aplomb you’d expect. But this isn’t a movie likely to make the Oscar circuit. It’s meant to be crowd-pleasing, in a ten-pack of tissues sort of way. And it is. It’s a solid commentary on women and friendship, and what it means to be there for someone through thick and thin.
Maggie’s Plan: Greta Gerwig is the Diane Keaton of her generation. She’s kind of amazing in this neurotic, bohemian way. In this, she plays a young woman who is ready to have a baby, no matter what her best friend (and former lover) Bill Hader thinks. Of course, the minute she makes her move, she meets a man and falls in love. He’s married? So what! You can’t let a stale marriage come between you and your true love – so the marriage between Ethan Hawke and Julianne Moore must crumble. Julianne Moore, by the way, is pretty much my favourite in everything lately. I will see her in two movies on this day at TIFF and can’t imagine two more different roles if I tried. Here she’s playing this European shrew with a wildly entertaining accent and immeasurable emotional peaks and valleys. I obviously hoped that this would be a good movie but was still pleased at how funny it was. And clever-funny too, which is always a relief. Kudos to another capable female director, Rebecca Miller. So thrilled to have seen so many talented women at this festival!
Closet Monster: Matt saw a talented young Canadian actor at TIFF several years ago in a movie called Blackbird. He knew that Connor Jessup was someone to watch out for, and he has. When he was announced to be starring in Stephen Dunn’s feature debut, Closet Monster, he was sold, and he sold us on it too. Thank you, Matt, for that. Stephen Dunn directs a highly personal film about a young man “coming of age” (good lord I hate that expression) in small and small-minded Maritime town. As a kid, Oscar witnesses a brutal hate crime that leads to internatlized homophobia. His teenaged coming out, and coming to terms, are therefore traumatic. Dunn creates a stylized world of escape for his protagonist, with just a hint of “magical surrealism” to help the bitter medicine go down. It’s a beautiful debut and we were all glad to have been part of it.
Freeheld: An embarrassingly short time ago, as in earlier this century, two women met and fell in love, and when one got sick, the other was going to be left holding an empty bag because domestic partnerships still weren’t really respected in their backwards-thinking country, and her partner’s benefits couldn’t legally be inherited by her. This true story, belonging to Laurel Hester and her widow Stacie Andree, is brought to the big screen with heaping sensitivity. You couldn’t ask for more from Julianne Moore or Ellen Page, who play the two lovers. Michael Shannon, as Hester’s partner, does a bang up job as the guy with a lot to learn. He’s a placeholder for the audience: we experience their story through his eyes. Sean and I saw Michael Shannon on Broadway a few years back (in an intense play along with Paul Rudd and Ed Asner, believe it or not) and we’ve watched him with greater interest ever since. Steve Carrell pops up in the movie too – you may have noticed him in the trailers for this movie, as he’s the clown through which we achieve some catharsis. He plays a “big gay Jew” who basically manipulates a sick woman into stumping for his cause – gay marriage. And causes like that do need a face to make them real to people, but I couldn’t help but sympathize with Andree, who must have just wanted to spend that time with her dying spouse. It’s of course an emotional movie (Kleenex sponsored the premiere, and handed out tissues as we went in). It’s a good but not great movie – but it IS a great story, and I’m so glad it’s been respectfully told. And seeing it with real-life counterparts, including Stacie Andree herself in attendance was something that I will never forget.
Wow, Julianne Moore and cancer both featured heavily in this day’s viewings!
Finally, Matt took on Missing Girl, which you may be intrigued to know, or mystified to learn, that Matt describes as a “charming comedy about a missing persons case.” It’s not every day you hear that one.
Matt wrote last week about the choices he made for his viewing pleasure (and hopefully your reading one) at the Toronto International Film Festival, slated to open with a bang (or rather, a star-studded screening of Demolition) on September 10.
I held mine back because the truth is, the TIFF selection process was not a fun one for me. TIFF has weird rules where it takes your money and then weeks later gives you a “randomly” selected window of just 60 minutes for making your choices – I’m seeing maybe 20 movies out of over 430, by my count, so that’s an awful lot of frantic sifting, choosing, replacing, and scheduling to do in just 60 minutes. It goes without saying that I was “randomly” selected to choose more than 24 hours later than Matt, which meant that a lot of my first, second, and third choices were “off-sale”. Off-sale doesn’t mean sold out, it means that they’re holding some tickets back for when they go on sale to the general public. And nothing against the general public, but I paid my oodles of money, I’m travelling in from out of town, and I don’t think it’s very nice or very fair to force me (since I’ve prepaid for tickets) to see movies that aren’t selling as well, when someone who pays a nominal $25 on the day of will have better luck than me.
I’ll stop my belly-aching now. We’re still pretty lucky to be going at all and I know that. So, without further whining about first world problems, my TIFF picks:
Demolition: I’m actually going to see this one with both Matt and Sean, so it’s a rarity, and I’m not only looking forward to seeing what director Jean-Marc Vallée can squeeze out of Jake Gyllenhaal, I also can’t wait to discuss it with my favourite movie-going friends.
The Lobster: This one is quirky as hell and right up my alley, and I never thought I’d be saying that about a Colin Farrell movie. Newly heartbroken, he checks into a hotel where he’s under the gun to find a mate within a super tight time period – or risk being turned into an animal and put out to pasture? It sounds more like a child’s drawing than a movie, but there you have it.
Eye in the Sky: We ‘re doing the red-carpet treatment of this one on Friday night, and Dame Helen Mirren is confirmed to attend. She’s looking less glamorous in the still from this movie, playing a Colonel who’s spent a long time tracking down a radicalized citizen who must be stopped. But when drone operator Aaron Paul reports that a small child has wandered into the kill zone, the team has to decide whether the casualty of this little girl is acceptable collateral damage. Yowza!
The Martian: You may know that I have been frothing about this movie for months now. I luuuurved the book and passed it along to all of my literate friends but then waved a flag of skepticism when I heard that a) it’s directed by Ridley Scott b) it’s a reteaming of Matt Damon and Jessica Chastain, lately seen together in Interstellar. But I hope hope HOPE that they “science the hell” out of this thing and blow my fucking socks off.
The Danish Girl: Eddie Redmayne is almost certainly in the running for a second Oscar for his portrayal of Lili Elbe, the 1920s Danish artist who was one of the first known recipients of sexual reassignment surgery. The trailer alone looks so lush that I’m drooping to see it – which is fortunate, because TIFF stuck me with TWO pairs of tickets to this. Woops! Anyone know someone who’s looking for a pair?
Freeheld: We’re seeing this one on flashy premiere night as well and will see both Julianne Moore and Ellen Page walk the red carpet. They star as a real-life couple from New Jersey who just want Moore’s pension to go to Page when Moore passes away. It was a huge case for LGBT rights and I’m betting that both of these ladies really bring it.
The Dressmaker: Funny story. I read this book recently, in anticipation of this movie. And I really, really liked it. Only: it’s about a young dressmaker who survives the sinking of the Titanic thanks to her wealthy employer. Knowing that Kate Winslet was set to star, I was shocked that she’d choose to go back to Titanic in this way. I mean, if anyone can put it off, it’s Winslet, but still. The more I read, the more I thought maybe she’s not playing the dressmaker, maybe she’s playing the plucky journalist. I still couldn’t believe the press wasn’t making a bigger deal out of this, but it wasn’t until I finished the book that I realized that I’d read the wrong Dressmaker. Same title, different author. Oopsie daisy again. But I’m confident this one’s good too, and it’s Kate Winslet, so we’re almost guaranteed to see boob.
Into the Forest: Here’s a movie that looks so familiar to me in the trailer that I believe I have read the book. I do not know for sure that it’s based on a book and I’m not looking it up. This way even I’ll be surprised (or, REALLY surprised!). Evan Rachel Wood and Ellen Page star as sisters who live in a remote cabin in the woods. The world is on the verge of the apocalypse and their location keeps them safe, but also leaves them vulnerable…
Anomalisa: This is the Charlie Kaufman-directed stop-motion animated ode to a motivational speaker and his bleak existence. I have no idea what to expect from it and that’s why I’m so crazy excited. It could go a lot of ways but no matter what, I do believe I’ll be seeing something special.
About Ray: Have you ever attended a red carpet event in the middle of the afternoon? Me neither! TIFF is so jam-packed with gliterry premieres that it starts packing them in at odd times just to get through them all. I’m tickled we got tickets to this (hard won, believe me) and I’m anxious to see if it’s as good as it looks, and if this and The Danish Girl will cancel each other out (though this one is also about a gender transition, it’s set in modern day, with Elle Fanning as the young woman who wants to be a young man, Naomi Watts as her mother, and Susan Sarandon as her mother.
Miss You Already: This might be a little too chick-flicky to be regular festival fare, but it’s Toni Collette so say what you want, but my ass will be in that seat at the ungodly hour of 8:45 in the goddamned morning. Toni and Drew Barrymore play lifelong friends whose friendship hits a bit of a roadbump when one discovers she’s pregnant just as the other gets a cancer diagnosis. Note to Sean: bring tissues, or an extra-absorbent shirt.
Maggie’s Plan: Starring the delightful Greta Gerwig, Maggie’s plan to have a baby on her own is derailed when she falls in love with a married man (Ethan Hawke) and destroys his relationship with his brilliant wife (Julianne Moore). I like Gerwig a whole lot but to be honest, I’m really wondering how this dynamic is going to work – and I’m super intrigued to find out how Bill Hader fits into the mix. Julianne Moore is going to be one busy lady at this festival!
The Family Fang: Directed by and starring Jason Bateman, he plays a brother to Nicole Kidman, both returning to the family home in search of their super-famous parents who seem to have disappeared. Jason Bateman is a little hit or miss for me but I committed on the off chance that the man playing his father – legendary Christopher MotherFucking Walken – might be in attendance. He’s not slated as far as I can tell, but I’d kick myself right in the sitter if he was and I wasn’t.
Legend: Tom Hardy plays real-life English gangsters. Yes, plural: the Kray twins. This dual role is getting a lot of buzz and since I seem to be mesmerized by Hardy in nearly everything he does, I’m super excited to check this one out.
Biggest TIFF regret: Missing Room. We’ll be back and forth between Ottawa and Toronto, but this particular movie only plays twice during the whole festival, and neither screening is on a day I’m there. I loved this book and am anxious to see the movie treatment. Good or bad, I want to pass judgement. I want to feast my little eyes. I am heartbroken to miss this one.
Two questions:
We still have some tickets to alocate. Any suggestions?
If you were in The Lobster hotel and failed to find a mate – what animal would you be turned into. Me? An otter. Definitely an otter.
We’ll be posting updates as we go, and be sure to check out our Twitter @assholemovies for photos of the red carpet premieres!
Courtney over at Cinema Axis wrote an interesting article recently about Universal’s surprising temerity and box office success despite the fact that they are one of few studios without a superhero franchise. They do, however, have thriving franchises in The Fast and The Furious, Jurassic Park, and The Minions (of Despicable Me fame), which all, not coincidentally, are featured heavily throughout the park.
And if you tour the backlot, so are some of their older hits, like Jaws, E.T., and Back to the Future. They’ve got props and costumes and even set pieces, like a plane crash from War of the Worlds and the house from Psycho (where Jim Carrey once spent the day doing his best Norman Bates impression between shooting scenes for Man on the Moon). It is, after all, still a working film lot. You can see the cul-de-sac where The Burbs was shot and some rides are housed in old sound stages; the Transformers ride inhabits one used for Hitchcock’s The Birds. The tour also takes you through current productions – you may have seen a segment on the Conan O’Brien show back in the day where he and Andy would stage events specifically for the tour as it passed.
I’m kind of a chicken when it comes to rides, so I’ll let Matt and Sean cover those. I have a feeling I’ll be found wandering around Springfield – yup, the very one housing Homer and Marge. I might just find myself a Krusty Burger and put my tired feet up for a while. No, scratch that. Make it Moe’s. Oh my god, do you think they’ll have Duff beer???
Check out our Twitter for shots of the day ( @assholemovies ) and previous posts for the rest of our California adventure.
Today we’re exploring the big beautiful city of Los Angeles, and to prepare I’ve cycled through several films that have given me invaluable insight on what we might encounter:
Boyz N The Hood: Luckily our hotel is on Hollywood & Vine rather than in the ghetto. Ice Cube and Cuba Gooding Jr play boyhood friends who are just barely surviving the gunfire in their neighbourhood. Bullets and helicopters are the film’s soundtrack. John Singleton paints a pretty bleak outlook for these kids without the benefit of options, futures, or even fathers. Lessons learned: watch out for rival gangs and street racing, and eat your french fries indoors.
Fletch: Chevy Chase plays an investigative journalist a little too comfortable going undercover as a bum\new age guru. Fletch is looking into the booming drug trade on the beach when approached one day by a wealthy man who asks him to be the homeless man who shoots him dead, bypassing cancer and netting his wife the insurance. But Fletch isn’t really a bum and the guy isn’t really dying of cancer. Lessons learned: watch out for rollerskaters on the boardwalk, bums and new age gurus are practically indistinguishable, the people are rude to waiters, LAPD is useless.
L.A. Story: Steve Martin is a weather guy in sunny and 72-degrees Los Angeles. He resorts to hijinks just to make his broadcasts interesting. Then he meets a girl, and that’s when this satirization of the big city really starts to zing. A freeway signpost starts to talk to him, and he begins to listen. Lots of celebrity cameos ensue. Lessons learned: the traffic is so bad you may as well take love advice from it
Less Than Zero: Andrew McCarthy is back from college for the holidays and finds his girlfriend hooking up with his best friend, the drug addict (Robert Downey Jr – kinda tough to watch him like this all things considered). It’s a real testament to crazy L.A. decadence. Then James Spader makes RDJ become a whore, and things really get interesting. Lessons learned: the girls are loose and the drugs are abundant – just my kind of town!
Collateral: Jamie Foxx has cabbie good luck (hot lady fare, Jada Pinkett Smith, gives him respect AND her number) and cabbie bad luck (hit man, Tom Cruise, takes him hostage); just a typical day driving around L.A. I guess! He’s forced to drive around while Cruise assassinates various names on a list of witnesses – the last of which of course turns out to be previously mentioned hot lady. Lessons learned: watch your bags at the airport, doormen are for shit, maybe take the bus? Although Lesson learned in Speed: DO NOT take the bus!
If you’d like to find out whether we’ve taken the bus or a taxi, follow us @assholemovies – we’re updating our California adventure daily!
Today we’re leaving San Francisco to explore wine country. Does it make us sound like lushes to admit this was the whole reason we planned this trip?
Before they were Spiderman villains, Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church were wine loving assholes just like us. The pair are not very likeable men in the movie Sideways, but they sure do bond over bottles of fine wine. Sales of Pinot Noir surged after this movie hit theatres and of course sales of Merlot plunged. It was a little film that could, showing that life can be both funny and tragic at the same time. Alexander Payne (along with Jim Taylor) took home the Oscar for its stellar screenplay and it, along with its four leads, had plenty of acclaim. I liked it the minute I first saw it but after “cellaring” it for a bit, I find that it has matured, and I suppose so have I. It’s a thoughtful movie that pairs well with stuffed olives and\or brie. 😉
We three Assholes don’t need wine to get us going and we don’t drink to get happy – we drink to get EVEN MORE happy! And we’ll be sloppily happifying all over California wine country today (don’t worry, we’ve engaged a chauffeur), and steadfastly keeping each other’s hair out of the spit bucket (I never spit anyway, I’m definitely a swallower).
We’ll be sure to be updating our twitter account with drunken trip highlights all week long – join us @assholemovies .
Sean and I got to see Inside Out again this past weekend (it was playing at the drive-in and yup, just as good the second time around). Pixar’s latest offers us a sweet and clever insight into the emotions ruling 11-year-old Riley’s brain – Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear, and Disgust. These emotions are personified by colourful characters and truly wonderful voice talent (Amy Pohler, Phyllis Smith, Lewis Black, Bill Hader, Mindy Kaling). It was a real treat to see these emotions come to life, but between the laughter and tears, I also had some follow-up questions:
1. Why is Joy Caucasian?
Anger is a squat red guy, with matching red eyes and fire shooting out of his head. Disgust is green, naturally, with green hair and eyes. Sadness: blue, of course, with blue hair and eyes. Fear is purple, with – guess what! – purple hair and eyes. But for some reason Joy is a race, not a colour. Think she’s yellow? Look again. She’s a glowing peachy colour, and her eyes are big and blue and she’s got a cute little pixie cut. Joy is a white girl. This makes me vaguely uncomfortable.
2. Why is Sadness fat?
They made Sadness into a chubster in a turtleneck. They may as well have given her cats too, just to give her the complete Depressed Lady makeover. Her glasses cover almost her entire face and though we never see the emotions eating, we can imagine that she must eat the heck out of hers. Mint chocolate chip? No. Ben & Jerry’s cookie dough.
3. What gender are YOUR emotions?
Riley’s emotions are mixed-gender. Anxiety is a dude, Disgust is a dudette. But her father’s emotions are all mustachioed men while her mother’s are all bespectacled ladies. Now, why might this be? Sean thought it might just be for simplicity’s sake. Her mother’s brain is instantly identifiable since all her emotions have the same drab haircut. Her father’s brain is even worse shape: it’s being run by a bunch of hockey-obsessed jerks (or soccer-obsessed, for international audiences). This felt uncomfortably stereotypical but got a big laugh from the jam-packed theatre because – haha – men never listen!
4. Why is Joy lone-wolfing it?
As a counsellor, I often find myself telling people that no emotion is necessarily good or bad because all might be helpful or have purpose. Certainly this movie does a good job of justifying Sadness, but I still feel like the balance is a little off-kilter. Sadness, Anger, Fear, Disgust: all could be said to be on one side of the positive-negative spectrum of emotions, while Joy is lonely on the other. It may be true that Amy Pohler is worth at least 3 Bill Haders but I still felt a little sad that she was representing positivity and light all by her lonesome. And when Joy went missing, everything went to hell, so it would seem that a little Hope or Excitement might have been a good pack up plan (though admittedly I understand why 5 characters were a manageable number from an engaging, story-telling point of view). Still, there are many emotions left out – which would you have liked to see?
5. What is your primary emotion?
It is clear from birth that Joy is running the show. She leads the other emotions and guides Riley’s experience, always striving for the perfect, happy day. Not so for Riley’s parents. Anger seems to helm the control console in her father’s brain. He does not seem to be an outwardly angry person, but maybe we’re once again short-hand stereotyping anger as somehow masculine. Worse still, Riley’s mom’s primary emotion appears to be Sadness. She doesn’t seem depressed to us, but it made me feel blue to think of her every move being tinged by a pall of unhappiness. Who do you think is the captain of your ship? I think I might have Joy and Anger as co-pilots; I’m at my best when I’m in full-on snarky bitch mode.
Anyway, today my primary emotion is Anticipation! Just like Riley and her family, we’re about to embark on a San Francisco adventure (well, it’s our first stop, anyway) and I can’t wait to land there and be filled with Joy and Excitement and Wonder and Dread of Eventually Going Back to Work, which is too a legit emotion as I have it ALL THE TIME. While the Assholes are in California we’ll be posting about our favourite movies as they relate to our sight-seeing adventures, so please keep checking in to see what we’re up to next – and if you’re feeling brave, follow us on Twitter ( @assholemovies ) to see things like Jay’s contemptuous travel face, Sean’s hungry frown, an orange blur that might be the Golden Gate Bridge, 13 pictures of Jack Nicholson’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame obscured by half of Jay’s fat finger, Matt riding a train off into the sunset like he’s in some kind of goddamned movie. It’ll be good times, I promise!
It’s Thursday again and you know what that means – this week we’re being asked to list our favourite live-action fairy tale adaptations. Not such an easy feat for some of the Assholes, but we’re giving it a go! Thanks, Wanderer, for your inspired themes.
Jay
It’s probably telling that though we owned copies of Cinderella and The Little Mermaid, I was never a very Princess-oriented little girl. Even as a kid, I preferred darker stories, and so my go-to fairy tale was always and still is Labyrinth.
I’m sure you know it: it’s about a teenaged girl (Jennifer Connolly) who makes a stupid wish that actually makes her baby brother disappear. Realizing her mistake, she has to win her brother back from the Goblin King by solving his labyrinth in just 15 hours. This movie combines two things that are so awesome I might call them otherworldly, and putting them together just multiplies their effect. First, David Bowie as the Goblin King: absolute perfection. To this day you couldn’t cast it better. The hair, the pants, the eyebrows! Second, Jim Henson. He brings some fairly complex puppets into the mix, some inspired by the genius work of Maurice Sendak’s Where The Wild Things Are. Henson surrounds Bowie with a cast of Goth Muppets that create this hyper-real fever dream. The story’s fairytale roots stoke the fires of Jim Henson’s imagination beautifully, and we’re absorbed and suspended into a world where anything can happen.
For my second pick, I’m going with Penelope. Penelope is lovely girl (Christina Ricci) from a wealthy family who was born with the face of a pig. The pig-face is the result of a curse put on her family by a witch in retaliation for their rejection of a house maid turned away when a member of the house impregnates her. Generations later, Penelope bears the brunt of her family’s indiscretion. To break the curse, Penelope must find “one of her own” to love her. Her suitors (including a roguish James McAvoy), however, may be more interested in her money than in true love. The movie gives life to the other side of the tale, a modern girl born only to be hidden away in shame, and what that has meant in terms of self-worth. I think it’s also an interesting example of how, with a little suspension of disbelief, we can invest in a fairy tale without a lot of big-budget effects and other trappings familiar to the genre. The fairy tale is made much more accessible and relatable on this plane.
I’ve been waffling over this third pick for a while. I felt like maybe I should go with a more classic adaptation, but damn it to hell, I’m going with a Cinderella story because it’s one that’s been told more than 700 times, in many different ways, all around the world. We just saw Disney’s live-action effort last night (quite good), but the one that will still stands out to me is Pretty Woman. It’s actually a pretty faithful adaptation, if a little modernized: a young woman with no family is forced into a life of hard work (prostitution, if you will). She meets a handsome prince (or millionaire businessman) and they start to fall in love, but she’s not from his world, so neither of them thinks the love with last. However, with the help of a fairy godmother (called Visa) she is magically transformed. But the prince must love her for who she really is, so she feels, and he follows, searching her out on her turf, his heart (and possibly other organs) swollen with love. And because this is a fairy tale, the ho and the ethically-questionable businessman live happily ever after. We assume.
Matt
If you joined us last Thursday, you might have noticed that I gave Luc a bit of a hard time about his lack of interest in black and white movies made after (or even before) 1970. Well, I’m hoping he loves live-action fairy tale adaptations because I can’t seem to find the same level of enthusiasm this week. It’s not that I object on principle. I don’t see any reason why stories that have so often inspired such great animated films can’t be reimagined as great live-action ones, especially with less pressure to conform their content to a G rating. Maybe because we can’t bring ourselves to set aside our cynicism for even two hours without the obviously manufactured world of animation but it’s a lot harder to believe in magic when it is Elle Fanning- not Sleeping Beauty- who can only be woken by True Love’s Kiss and almost every recent film in this sub-genre is almost embarrassing to watch. Still, after thinking about it all week, I have managed to come up with 3 worthy exceptions especially when allowing myself a little leeway with the rules.
Babe- When I say that Babe is one of my favourite films of the 90’s, I don’t mean “favourite family movies”. I don’t know if it can be called a fairy tale under the strictest definition but it seems to think of itself as one. There may not be any fairy godmothers, pixie dust, or spells, but there are singing mice, scheming cats, an unlikely hero with the most innocent of hearts, and one of the most genuinely magical experiences of its decade.
Hook- Steven Spielberg makes my list two weeks in a row. Technically more a Peter Pan sequel than a peter Pan adaptation, Spielberg’s 1991 film is one of his most underappreciated. Now a cynical corporate lawyer who hates flying, Peter Pan (Robin Williams) is all grown up and has literally forgotten about Neverland. With the help of Tinker Bell (Julia Roberts), he must learn to fly again to save his young kids who have kidnapped by Captain Hook (Dustin Hoffman) who is still holding a grudge. Hook makes great use of almost every one of Williams’ many talents and Hoffman is brilliantly cast and will likely put Garrett Hedlund to shame in this summer’s Pan.
Into the Woods– Some of the most memorable fairy tale characters of all time meet in the woods in last year’s extremely entertaining adaptation of the Broadway musical. The stories take on a darker tone than we might be used to but the spirit of the stories survive.
Sean:
The Princess Bride: the best of the best. This is a fairy tale that a teenage boy could not only enjoy and relate to, but could talk about with other teenage boys. The Princess Bride is endlessly quotable, sincere but not serious, and effortlessly original while remaining true to the essence of a fairy tale. I still love this movie and I expect it will be one that continues to be discovered and enjoyed for as long as we watch movies.
The Wizard of Oz – this is a timeless movie that still holds up. Even the changing technical limits of the day add something to the movie, being in black and white initially, with colour then appearing once Dorothy gets to Oz. It’s so well done, the songs are catchy, the characters are memorable, and the big reveal at the end is one of the best twists ever. One of my favourite parts about the movie is that even after the curtain is pulled back, everyone still gets to live happily ever after, the very definition of a fairy tale.
Cinderella (2015) – we just saw this last night and I liked it a lot more than I thought I would. No surprises, no changes, no updates to the classic Disney tale, and that’s probably for the best. It was the definition of a fairy tale made into a live action movie, line for line, shot for shot, and mouse/horse for mouse/horse. At our screening, all the little (and some not-so-little) girls in their princess costumes clearly loved this movie and I could see exactly why they did. I would have said Cinderella is this year’s Frozen except that this year’s Frozen is going to be Frozen Fever, the short accompanying Cinderella, which made a little girl in the theatre gleefully exclaim, “Look at those dresses!”
It’s fairy-tale week here at Assholes Watching Movies. Tomorrow night we’re taking our grumpy butts over to the Coliseum to watch Cinderella, live-action in all her glory.
Our friend Wanderer challenged us this week to name our favourite live-action fairy tale adaptations. As usual, we Assholes like to do our homework, so this weekend Matt, Sean, and myself made several pitchers of martinis and settled in for some “classics.” For those of you with strong stomachs, we live-tweeted the experience @assholemovies . For the rest, here were our thoughts:
The NeverEnding Story (1984): Turns out, Matt and I have not seen this one; we were thinking of the sequel the whole time. We had to pause the movie 4 minutes in to have a lengthy discussion about Jonathan Brandis. Anyway, the first one is about a little boy who hides from the world (and his bullies!) and reads the day away, becoming involved in this magical book. The story follows Atreyu, another little boy, but also the brave warrior who must save The Childlike Empress of fictional Fantasia and gets to ride a dragon who looks like a dog named Falkor while doing (fair trade though, he did lose his horse, who Matt felt was a better actor than the kid). Sean, who is much, much older than Matt and I, still considers this a beloved film from his childhood (he probably watched it on a projector while eating the lead paint chips from his crib) and can still sing the theme song (rather badly, no many how many martinis he’s had, or we’ve had). There were big stone boobs in it though, so you can’t really blame the guy: it’s probably where his little fixation started.
LadyHawke (1985): I still have no idea why it’s called Ladyhawke and not Manwolf, because this tale is about both. Michelle Pfeiffer stars as the eponymous lady who turns into a hawk, cursed by an angry bishop to be forever separated from her lover, who happens to turn into a wolf just as she takes human form. But don’t worry, bumbling, baby-faced Matthew Broderick doing a terrible Middle Ages accent to the rescue! In this movie, Matt was more critical of the animals’ performances. He really felt that the birds all seemed downtrodden and perhaps just too starstruck to turn in good work – and it turns out, he was right! An animal handler said they actually had to replace one hawk because he was so chuffed about sitting on Blade Runner’s arm, he ruffled his feathers and looked more like a chicken. So: score one, Matt.
Freeway (1996): The movie Reese Witherspoon is trying to get expunged from IMDB. It’s supposedly a retelling of Little Red Riding Hood, where Red belongs in juvy, her mama’s a whore, her grandma lives in a trailer park, and “Mr. Wolverton” (Keifer Sutherland) is a serial killer with a preference for spilling white trash blood. It’s so crude and crass it carried an NC-17 rating – and really fouled up our Twitter feed! Still debating who had the better line. Reese: “My ex-husband’s parole officer hasn’t even been born yet” or Keifer: “Don’t be offended by my next question, but did your stepfather ever molest you?” You can’t make this stuff up!
rom Psycho (where Jim Carrey once spent the day doing his best Norman Bates impression between shooting scenes for Man on the Moon). It is, after all, still a working film lot. You can see the cul-de-sac where 
ith, gives him respect AND her number) and cabbie bad luck (hit man, Tom Cruise, takes him hostage); just a typical day driving around L.A. I guess! He’s forced to drive around while Cruise assassinates various names on a list of witnesses – the last of which of course turns out to be previously mentioned hot lady. Lessons learned: watch your bags at the airport, doormen are for shit, maybe take the bus? Although Lesson learned in Speed: DO NOT take the bus!
ns?
ASSHOLES WATCHING MOVIES 