The Ben Affleck Batman Smackdown!
Superheroes: Who Makes the Best Batman?
Batman vs. Superman - Dawn of Justice may be getting all the attention, but Ben Affleck has already fought the first battle just by taking on the role of the truly human superhero beneath the cowl. By Chris Lackner
Holy happenstance Batman! Who could have predicted Ben Affleck would give us the best caped crusader yet? That’s not one of The Riddler’s tricky questions. The supporting evidence was there long before Affleck’s greying, embittered, flinty-eyed Bruce Wayne showed up in trailers for Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice. Affleck’s initial casting sent fans and pundits into an uproar. (Apparently, two Oscar wins doesn’t give you enough cred to don a cape). Ahead of the film’s March 23 debut, we examine why the actor’s critics were blind as a bat:
Hollywood’s Dynamic Duo:
Affleck was tailor-made for this part. He’s been playing Batman to Matt Damon’s Superman ever since Good Will Hunting. Damon has always ...
The Ex-Press Oscar Predictions 2016
Movies: Oscars 2016
Our expert guide -- and some good guesses -- about who will win the little man with the gold complexion come curtain time
By Katherine Monk
Chris Rock is in a hard place. Hosting this year’s Oscars isn’t a task for amateurs who get by on dimples, he’ll need to do an entirely different song and dance and address, and hopefully undress, the diversity issue that continues to ripple through every corner of the industry, putting legendary stars in embarrassing situations. Poor Meryl Streep. You know she’s going to get some zinger about about how “we all come from Africa.” And poor Sylvester Stallone, having to represent Creed as the white guy, and poor Bryan Cranston and Michael Fassbender who handed in spectacular performances as two different brands of genius in Trumbo and Steve Jobs but will not take home the big prize. It was a year of great performances in so-so movies, or at least movies that never fully connected with audiences in the ...
Gods of Egypt in need of burial
Movie review: Gods of Egypt
Director Alex Proyas brings a shallow and distracted superhero style to a story about ancient Egyptian gods in a sibling power struggle -30-
Luke Kirby takes another waltz with romance
People: Luke Kirby
He played a problematic brand of Prince Charming in Sarah Polley's Take This Waltz and now Canadian-born Luke Kirby is walking a tightrope of sanity as a bipolar Romeo in Paul Dalio's Touched With Fire
By Katherine Monk
He played a pedicab-driving Romeo opposite Michelle Williams in Sarah Polley’s Take This Waltz, and now he plays a bipolar brand of Percy Bysshe Shelley in Paul Dalio’s Touched With Fire, but if you think Luke Kirby has a thing for playing the problematic prince charming, it’s just optics. The Guelph-raised Kirby is also a regular on the Sundance Channel crime drama Rectify, did several seasons of the Astronaut Wives Club and recently appeared in The Good Wife. And for those who weren’t paying attention to Canadian cinema at the turn of the present century, Kirby starred as the gay son of traditional Italian parents in Emile Gaudrealt’s Mambo Italiano. “Right now, I’d like to work on my tan if I could find the ...
Race runs a familiar circuit
Movie review: Race
Complete with slow-motion shots of spent athletes crossing the finish line and sepia-tinted digital recreations of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Stephen Hopkins's Race lives up to sports-movie expectation as it tells the Jesse Owens story without upsetting white people
Ryan Reynolds: swimming in Deadpool success
People: Ryan Reynolds Interview
Ryan Reynolds wears his love of Vancouver on his fleshy sleeve with a tattoo of the Nine O'Clock Gun, but thanks to the skyrocketing success of Deadpool, the sexiest dad alive is making a big noise of his own.
By Katherine Monk
VANCOUVER, BC – He’s officially the hottest star in Hollywood now that Deadpool has racked up a quarter-billion $US in its first week of release and launched an on-line fan frenzy demanding he host SNL, get his own statue in the prairie province of Saskatchewan, and get on with spawning a series of Deadpool sequels. Vancouver’s Ryan Reynolds has come a long way since his so-called “breakout year” back in ’02-’03, when he made the leap from recurring roles on TV shows such as Fifteen, The Odyssey and The Outer Limits to being the star of features films. He played a party hound Van Wilder, and a master thief in Foolproof, Canada’s first full-size experiment with the action genre. The whole movie was geared ...
How to Be Single a stab in the back
Movie review: How to Be Single
The screen adaptation of Liz Truccillo's novel coulda, woulda, shoulda been a feminist contender about transcending fairy tale expectation
Snowtime! animates a Canadian classic
Movies: Snowtime!
The creators behind Snowtime! talk about the challenges of tinkering with an emotional strand of the Quebec's cultural DNA, and getting Celine Dion onboard to sing about loss
By Katherine Monk
PARK CITY, UT — The footsteps they chose to follow were Yeti-sized craters, but that didn’t stop the filmmakers behind Snowtime! from recreating one of the most popular films in Canadian history. Originally released as a live action feature in 1984, La guerre des tuques went on to become the highest-grossing film of the year in both English and French Canada with well over a $1.2 million in domestic receipts, not to mention several more million in ancillary merchandize in the years that would follow as the film became the go-to Christmas season broadcast — the Rudolph or Frosty for French-Canada. “What you have to understand is this is part of the DNA of the quebec people,” said producer Marie-Claude Beauchamp, who sat down with The Ex-Press during the ...
Southside With You takes rom-com in new direction
Film: Sundance Film Festival
Movie about Barack and Michelle Obama's first date takes the frame off the official portrait to paint a tender picture of two people falling in love
By Katherine Monk
PARK CITY, UT — There’s a good chance this year’s Sundance Film Festival will be defined by a larger, and perhaps more honest, discussion about race in America. And if it is, we can look at Richard Tanne’s debut feature Southside With You as a beautiful example of a paradigm shift. It’s not just an accessible romance starring two rising African-American stars in Tika Sumpter and Parker Sawyers, it’s a fictionalized take on the first date between would-be First Lady Michelle Robinson and a young Harvard law student named Barack Obama. We knew the two met at a corporate law firm. We knew she was his advisor. And we knew she wasn’t eager to get involved with a junior, fearing it would erode her professional edge and play into white expectation. The rest became the ...
Redford defends Sundance’s record on diversity
Film: Sundance Film Festival 2016
Sundance Film Festival founder Robert Redford says the whole reason he started programming films in Utah's Wasatch Mountains was to broaden the world of mainstream filmmaking to include other voices.
By Katherine Monk
PARK CITY, UTAH - It used to be called an “Oscar race.” Now it’s all about race and the Oscars. It’s an issue that’s settled into the tissue of the film industry like a bad infection, threatening to throw the whole system into sepsis, and prompting a wholesale change to the way the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences functions as an organization. Academy president Cheryl Boone Isaacs announced new initiatives Friday, hoping to stop the growing momentum behind a celebrity boycott, assuring the public the Academy membership would look a lot different by the year 2020, with more representation from non-white males, and more women. Even here at the Sundance Film Festival, where the mountain air and a host of ...
