The Stunt Driver is a movie that rides or dies on conveying a certain charmed veneration of its subject, Canadian stuntman Ken Carter. His personality and his ambitions, ridiculous and frankly idiotic though they may have been, are coloured by the film with gusto even if his motivations don’t entirely hold water. It is also impossible to separate this tone of the movie and its subject with star Jay Baruchel’s intense patriotism for anything Canadian. Baruchel really has come home in a way that few other Canadian celebrity expats have, dedicating much of his work to uplifting the Canadian film industry (he hasn’t appeared in an American movie since the last How to Train Your Dragon film in 2019). And even though he isn’t a producer, writer, or director her e, it feels entirely of that Canadiana spirit he’s been folding into his brand. The story of this plucky Canadian daredevil -known by the moniker “the Mad Canadian”- always in the shadow of Evel Knieval down south is right up his al...
In The Asphalt Jungle , everybody is corrupt except for the criminals. They are at least honest about what they are and what they want, and have a nobility to them that the cops and seemingly upstanding figures in their orbit don’t. John Huston began his career with The Maltese Falcon , one of the essential film noirs -but it is not until this movie nearly a decade later that he carves out a more complex image of the cops and robbers dynamic that made film noir an interesting genre to contend with. These are not shifty, unsettling figures like Sidney Greenstreet or Edward G. Robinson. They are more nuanced and motivated and in their way more moral. They are the ones with families -or in the case of Sterling Hayden’s Dix, a committed girlfriend. While the indebted, incompetent lawyer weaseling in on their scheme ignores his ill wife for a creepy affair with a much younger woman. It was a touch contentious in 1950. Louis B. Mayer, whose studio produced the picture, vehemently disliked it...