Flags of our Fathers (2006)

Genre: War/Action/Drama/History/Biography

Starring: Ryan Phillippe, Jesse Bradford, Adam Beach, John Benjamin Hickey, John Slattery, Barry Pepper, Paul Walker, Neal McDonough, Thomas McCarthy

Can a single photograph change the course of world events? Not likely, but for US Marines Ira Hayes (Beach), Rene Gagnon (Bradford) and John Bradley (Phillepe) it certainly did. Set in WWII, USA is launching an attack on Japan and needs to capture the island of Iwo Jima. Most of the movie narrates the occurrences on the island and gradual advancement of the troops. The marines planted the US flag atop a mountain on the island and a photograph taken at the correct time reached the mainland and the press in no time. Three marines who survived from those that planted the flag were recalled back to USA to market war bonds in the effort to fund the countries war efforts. The US treasury was empty and dollar had lost any value it ever had. The country cannot borrow anymore and hence is trying to sell bonds to the citizens and hopes that the photograph along with the presence of the three marine officers would aid the sale. The movie comes from Clint Eastwood and anyone familiar with his recent movies would quickly identify the style to be very similar to its other movies. The movie is a directors delight and has a lot of appeal and insight. It smartly weaves multiple plot lines together without making a mess and keeping audience attention intact. One of the better war movies of this age and a superb watch.

Thumbs up: Phenomenal direction and acting

Thumbs down: The story lacks variation and seems to show the same thing over and over again

Rating: 7.6/10

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Black Sheep interviews Paddy Considine

WHAT MAKES A MONSTER
An interview with TYRANNOSAUR writer/director, Paddy Considine.

When Paddy Considine decided to write and direct his first film, TYRANNOSAUR, he had no intention of making one of the most bleak films in history. And, depending on how you read it, he may very well have not, but the surface of the film itself might make it difficult for some to see the hope buried beneath the heartache.

“Some of it, I’m still uncomfortable with,” Considine begins to explain when we meet at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2011. “I wanted to make a film about redemption, about how souls are pushed to the limit. I just hope there is something in there that people can identify with.”

TYRANNOSAUR is the unlikely love story between Joseph (Peter Mullan) and Hannah (Olivia Colman). Joseph is a lower class brute, who has just realized that his violent nature is holding him back from any sense of peace. Hannah, a middle class shop owner, has violence in her life as well, in the form of her husband’s (Eddie Marsan) fist. Neither can understand it nor explain it but they each come to know a newfound calm inside after they meet.

“To me they’re heroic because they’re just bearing their soul to you. I couldn’t help but care for them.” Considine says of his own creations. “There were times on the set where I had to take myself to the corner because I was quite upset. I didn’t realize how much I loved them.” Considine, a stoic man in person, is clearly enamored with the process itself and seemingly surprised still by just how much so.

Considine in action

North American audiences will likely best know the 37-year-old Considine for his acting parts in films like THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM or the Oscar-nominated, IN AMERICA. While directing is something he knew he wanted to do, it is not something he ever thought he would just pick up naturally. In fact, it wasn’t until he was on set with Mullan and Colman that he knew he had made the right choice. “They confirmed a couple of things to me. One, that my intuition about casting them was right and two, that I actually could direct.” Considine confides. “It wasn’t just a sort of a notion I had, ‘I fancy directing a movie now.’ No, I had this burning desire and they just grasped the tone of the film.”

That tone, as troubling as it is at times, still came from Considine’s mind, so I cannot help but wonder what inspired this story to be the first he would tell. “It’s just a build up of everything, my life growing up, the people I was around,” Considine admits freely and then quickly denounces any notion of autobiography. “To be honest with you, I suppose a lot of it is me just trying to make sense of a lot of things and a lot of people.”

Colman and Mullan in Tyrannosaur

If you can stomach the pain in TYRANNOSAUR, then you can see the light hiding underneath that pain. It is clear to me that Paddy Considine sees that light quite brightly. “These people, after these wars, are still soul mates. They’re like soldiers who have shared an experience. Their understanding of each other is far beyond attraction; it’s not about that. It’s a higher love that they share.”

This would be the opposite of bleak.

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BOARDWALK EMPIRE

HBO has a reputation for producing quality, cinematic television and BOARDWALK EMPIRE is a perfect example of this. Set in Atlantic City during the prohibition era, the show focuses around the city treasurer, one Enoch "Nucky" Thompson, played with great weight and resolve by Steve Buscemi. Often relegated to showy, albeit still mere, character roles, it is incredible to see Buscemi take the lead in this series and to see him do so with such impressive strength. He leads an ensemble made up of actors who are often not given their due, from Michael Pitt and Michael Shannon to Kelly McDonald and Michael Stuhlbarg. Altogether, they make up one of the most dynamic and effective ensembles on television today.

The first season, now available to rent or own on either DVD or Blu-ray, consists of twelve addictive installments. The series itself was created by Terence Winter, one of the main writers on another HBO gem, THE SOPRANOS, but the pilot episode itself, which reportedly cost $18 million to make, was directed by none other than Martin Scorsese. Scorsese, who also serves alongside Mark Wahlberg as an executive producer, is the Godfather of gangster cinema (sorry, Francis) and his gravitas anchors the series from the very beginning, allowing it to go to places that are often shocking and moving. The first season, based on the Nelson Johnson novel, Boardwalk Empire: The Birth, High Times and Corruption of Atlantic City, follows Nucky as he gets his bootlegging business off the ground, falls for a recent widow (McDonald) and struggles to ensure the Republican party, the one he controls from behind the scenes, remains in power. It is at times uncanny how some of the issues people wrestled with then are still prominent today.

BOARDWALK EMPIRE presents the golden age of gangstering and it does so with such class and subtlety that it burns directly into your mind, leaving you wanting to get back to that boardwalk as often as possible. If more television series took as much care with their stories and characters as this one does, I think its fair to say I would have a lot less free time on my hands.

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Black Sheep interviews Daniel Radcliffe

THE BOY WIZARD GROWS UP
An interview with THE WOMAN IN BLACK star, Daniel Radcliffe

At this point in my career, I’ve interviewed a fair amount of famous filmmaker types. Still, there was something, dare I say magical, about meeting Daniel Radcliffe - the man, now 22, who played the most famous young wizard the movies have ever seen and spearheaded the biggest film franchise in history. And what did I say to him first thing after congratulating him on his first post HARRY POTTER outing?

“I have to be honest with you; I probably wouldn’t have seen THE WOMAN IN BLACK if I weren’t interviewing you. I just tend to avoid horror films whenever possible really.” I couldn’t believe these words had just come out of my mouth.

Radcliffe’s response: “Honestly, if I weren’t in this film, I’m not sure I would have seen it either.”

Don’t take that out of context. Like me, Radcliffe tries to avoid horror films whenever possible because they “terrify” him. (He cites Stanley Kubrick’s THE SHINING as a personal favourite though.) In fact, it only takes a few moments with him to absorb just how excited he is about THE WOMAN IN BLACK, directed by James Watkins, even though he does not believe in ghosts himself.

“I have never seen a ghost nor do I expect to,” Radcliffe states. “There always seems to be a co-relation between those who have seen ghosts and those who believe in them. As I don’t believe in them, I find it highly unlikely that I will ever see one.” The young man’s sharp sense of sarcasm is unexpected but welcome.

As Arthur Kipps in The Woman in Black

Of course, there is another reason Radcliffe wants to share this new film with his fans. It is an opportunity for the world to see him like they never have before, without the spectacles and sans scar.

“I am under no illusion that people are going to see this film and think, ‘Oh my God, he isn’t Harry Potter anymore. This is a total fucking transformation!’” he says, rather astutely. This is when I lose my train of thought though because suddenly I can’t seem to focus on anything other than how "Harry Potter" just said “fuck”. He does elaborate on his point though. “I can’t focus too much on how I am being perceived at any one time. It’s not constructive for me to think that way. Once people are used to me popping up in other things, it won’t be so much of a difficult stretch.”

Smiling for the cameras at The Woman in Black premiere

One might also think it something of a stretch to go from working on a huge franchise like HARRY POTTER to a film that reportedly cost under $20 million to produce. “People always say to me, if I do a smaller film, ‘Bet it wasn’t like this on Potter!’ and my reaction is ‘No, it was worse.’ People assume that because we had so much money and time, that it must have been a really smooth operation. It wasn’t; it was chaos. All film sets are chaos. Organized chaos, but chaos.”

Still, it was his first time away from the film home he had spent years growing up in. Fortunately, there was a fair amount of familiarity for Radcliffe to draw from. “It’s very hard to work on Potter and then do another British film without knowing anybody.”

On The Woman in Black set

Radcliffe read the script for THE WOMAN IN BLACK on the last day of shooting HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS PART 2 and started work on the film six weeks later, with four weeks of intense dance training in between for his successful Broadway run in HOW TO SUCCEED IN BUSINESS WITHOUT REALLY TRYING. I would’ve taken a year off personally but Radcliffe is clearly not the kind of guy who likes to sit still for too long. He could barely even sit still during the fifteen minutes we spoke.

“My thing is rather than getting back on the horse, why not just stay on it?” he quips like the cheeky, little Brit he is. Having met him now, I can see Radcliffe eventually riding that metaphorical horse right into the ground. That is, unless he doesn’t get the sudden urge to get off the horse and stand next to it naked first.

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The Descendants (2011)

Genre: Drama/Comedy

Starring: George Clooney, Shailene Woodley, Amara Miller, Nick Krause, Patricia Hastie

The life of an average American man who suddenly seems to have too much on his hand to control. Matt King (Clooney) is a lawyer based in Hawaii and lives with his wife and two daughters. His relationship with his wife, Elizabeth (Hastie) is strained and friends and family inform him its because there was a lack of excitement. Elizabeth suffers a jet ski accident and goes into a coma. Its only then that Matt's elder daughter Alexandra (Woodley) informs him of her extra-marital affair with an unknown man. Matt is the sole trustee of a family trust that owns a huge chunk of virgin land on one of the islands. Due to a law his trust would expire in seven years and he has no choice but to sell it. Managing his daughters, his wife's accident, strained marriage and the island deal coming together to one average man makes life hard, very hard. Clooney has done a phenomenal piece of acting and rightfully earns the numerous awards he has received for it. The light comedy sprinkled in the first half of the movie and the dramatic second half is the perfect structure for a movie of its kind and is spot-on. The movie is pretty much flawless but suffers from the drawbacks of the genre of the movie. A movie of its kind can get heavy and is slow, attributes that naturally occur and are unavoidable. A definite watch and gives the viewer a lot to reflect upon.

Thumbs up: Fabulous acting, especially Clooney

Thumbs down: Slow and heavy

Rating: 7.7/10

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Best of Black Sheep: BLACK SHEEP INTERVIEWS RYAN GOSLING

THE DRIVER
An interview with DRIVE star, Ryan Gosling

Ryan Gosling has a dream but its not what you would expect. It isn’t riches or success or notoriety; he has already achieved those lofty goals. No, Gosling has something much more specific in mind. “My dream is to create a character that people go out as on Halloween,” Gosling tells me when we meet at the Toronto International Film Festival. He says this with full sincerity and not a single trace of sarcasm on his beautiful face.

Gosling may have found that character in his new film, DRIVE. Known only as The Driver, his character sports a shiny bomber jacket with a giant scorpion on the back, is constantly fiddling with a toothpick in his mouth and he barely speaks a word most of the time. Aside from his inherent coolness, he is also one of the biggest badasses I’ve seen on screen all year. “He’s got issues,” Gosling quips of The Driver. “He’s a psychopath. He’s gotta get control of that, I guess.”

It was Gosling who pushed for DRIVE to be made and also for Danish director, Nicolas Winding Refn to helm. And once those two got started, there was no stopping them. “Nicolas and I creatively copulated and this movie baby was born and then we had to raise it,” explains Gosling. When he says things like this, he looks straight at you and doesn’t even flinch. It’s impressive.

The buzz behind DRIVE is as loud as the film itself and if it connects with audiences, which I assure you, it most certainly should, Gosling has the chance to continue solidifying his status as one of the most intriguing and marketable stars working today. Not too bad for a boy from London, Ontario. His work in this summer’s CRAZY, STUPID, LOVE was the best of the bunch and he also stars in next month’s THE IDES OF MARCH, directed by none other than George Clooney. Oscar is abuzz.

People are calling Gosling the next De Niro but he’s having none of it. “There is no difference between me and anyone else,” Gosling says both firmly and humbly, clearly somewhat irked by the notion itself. “I hate when that stuff happens,” he says of comparisons. “There’s no where to go after. It just sets you up to fail.”

Comparisons aside, the kind of intensity Gosling gives in DRIVE could not as easily be achieved by too many other young actors today. He is extremely intimidating and all he has to do is stand there and stare at you to accomplish this. When I ask him where he has to go in his head to be that menacing, he answers with three words, “Not too far.”

Gosling would simply prefer that his work speak for itself and his work in DRIVE is some of the best I’ve seen from him. This is likely, at least in part, due to his strong understanding of the material itself, which is based on a James Sallis novel. “Driving can be something of an existential experience,” he explains. “You aren’t being watched; you are just the watcher. It’s similar to watching a movie.”

And if that movie happens to have Gosling in the driver’s seat, all the better.


RYAN AND NICOLAS: A LOVE STORY

If it weren’t for REO Speedwagon’s most memorable hit, “Can’t Fight This Feeling”, Nicolas Winding Refn’s DRIVE may not exist today. The film’s star, Ryan Gosling, brought the idea of a stunt car driver who moonlights as a getaway car driver to Refn as his first pick to direct. The only problem was that Refn was sick with the flu at the time and hopped up on meds so he couldn’t quite get his head around it. When the Speedwagon song came on the radio on their drive home though, suddenly Refn got it and he just started to cry.

Gosling and Winding Refn on set

Ever since then, Gosling and Refn have been almost inseparable. “Ryan and I have become one person,” Refn tells me when we meet at the Toronto International Film Festival. In fact, Refn, a Danish filmmaker who has never worked in Hollywood, only agreed to make the picture because he knew Gosling would protect him from the studio system. “He was the star. He had the power to make this movie happen or not.”

Gosling and Winding Refn locking lips on the festival circuit

The love and admiration is certainly mutual. “There is nobody like him,” Gosling shares with me shortly after I speak with Refn. “For him, filmmaking is a fetish. He only shoots what he wants to see.” The twosome are already scheduled to shoot two more movies together and they even shared living quarters while shooting this one, staying up late pitching around ideas for the next day. Says Gosling, “We were always chasing that moment in the car when the movie was born.”

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Best of Black Sheep: DRIVE

DRIVE
Written by Hossein Amini
Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn
Starring Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan, Bryan Cranston, Christina Hendricks and Albert Brooks


Irene: What do you do?
Driver: I drive.

Every now and again, a movie comes along and takes you for a ride you don’t soon forget. It straps you in with its fresh cinematic voice and doesn’t let you go until it has raced through your mind, taken some crazy turns and pulled back into the garage again.  When you step out, your legs might even feel a little weak from the constant barrage of thrills and brilliance. DRIVE is that movie. This year’s breakout director, and the winner of the Best Director prize at Cannes, Nicolas Winding Refn, delivers a smooth ride that will catch you off guard at almost every turn and announces the arrival of a new force to be reckoned with on the road.

While Refn may be the man behind the wheel off-screen, the man in the driver’s seat on screen is none other than Ryan Gosling. Known only throughout the film as the driver, Gosling exudes an eerie calm no matter how fast his life is moving. There are cars everywhere he turns. He works for a mechanic (Bryan Cranston) and drives stunt cars for the movies. He even moonlights as a getaway car driver for petty robberies and might soon start actually racing his own ride on an actual track. Gosling’s driver needs to be in that seat and subsequently in control of his own destiny. He lives a modest life and never gives anything away on his face, that is until he meets his neighbour, Irene (the always understated, Carey Mulligan). Once their hands touch, on the stick shift of his car no less, his engine starts making noises he’s never heard before.

DRIVE is an intense trip and once Refn kicks it into high gear, you can practically feel the rev of the engine emanating from the screen and reverberating through your entire core. It embodies a modern sense of extreme cool, from its pounding soundtrack to its excellent cast (including a deliciously funny, Albert Brooks and a just plain delicious, Christina Hendricks). DRIVE is a rebellious film, a night creature, a total badass of a movie. When it gets rough, it goes places I’ve never even imagined, let alone seen on film. And even though Refn pushes the movie into skids of reckless abandon, he is always clearly and confidently in control of the vehicle. By the time DRIVE screeches to a complete halt, you will instantly want to take it for another spin.

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