Guest: Rick Forchuk - TV Week Magazine Columnist and CKNW Contributor
In theaters:
- The Last Showgirl (2024): Rick was more than a little reluctant to watch this movie which stars Pamela Anderson as a Las Vegas showgirl in a review called Le Razzle Dazzle, representing the end of those kinds of girls-and-rhinestone productions. Nominated for a Golden Globe and for a Screen Actors Guild award, the Ladysmith, BC native who now tends chickens on her farm on the Island, came out of her self-imposed retirement to star in this story of what it's like to age out of your career and see that much of the world that you knew has passed you by
- Wolf Man (2025): Although it had a disappointing first couple of days at the box office, this horror-thriller from Blumhouse Productions (the "Paranormal Activity" films, the "Insidious" films, and "The Purge" films), Rick found it a very interesting experience in movie-making. From the title alone we know going in that there is going to be a wolf man, and that things are going to become very dicey for the film's characters
On Netflix:
- American Primeval (2025) six-part series): Rick's first thoughts on this series, set in the western U.S. at the time Brigham Young and his Mormon Militia were trying to block the Federal Government from interfering with their governance of the Wyoming Territory, and focusing on the Indian Wars, was to think first of Clint Eastwood's "Unforgiven" from 1992, and second, Leo DiCaprio's "Revenant" from 2015. Those two films came to mind because each portrayed the old west as a muddy, filthy, slimey place, populated by murderers and thieves with none of the romance that many westerns offered. An examination of the talent behind "Primeval" has an explanation - its writer is Mark L. Smith, who scripted "Revenant," and here he takes a page out of that movie showing the coarse brutality of the times. The story focuses on a woman and her young son, Sara Rowell and Devin (Betty Gilpin and Preston Mota) who have left the East, arriving at the end of the railroad line which has not yet pressed its way across the deserts of Wyoming and Utah, and has arranged for an escort to a two on the other side of Utah State where her husband apparently awaits.