It Was Only a Car (And a Dog): Keanu Reeves in John Wick

I like surprises. I recognize this isn’t a universally-shared sentiment, but I think that a pleasant, well-executed surprise can lift the fog of a dreary day, and that’s enough reason to like them right there. Of course, if they’re also vehicles for the comeback of one of my favourite action stars, then they’re that much more enjoyable.

The diametric opposite to the origin story, John Wick portrays the seasoned killer character forced to come out of retirement. The film opens at the end, with a dying, post-rampage Wick (the seemingly-ageless Keanu Reeves, wearing patchy stubble and the same “whoa dude” haircut he did in 1989, except when it’s slicked back hitman-style) stumbling out of a bullet-riddled Escalade and replaying a rose-tinted memory of his wife on his iPhone.Then we run backwards in time and see his blossoming relationship, before his wife is overcome by an unnamed illness. There’s a brief funeral scene, Wick looking like a gaunt and grieving lizard all in black, and then he’s barely home again before a pet carrier is delivered to his door, with a note from his dead wife and an adorable puppy inside. Her posthumous gift is meant to allow him to grieve through the focus and love he would devote to this helpless creature, and they form an immediate bond as they shop for kibble and do therapeutic donuts in an airfield. But covetous eyes are watching, and soon, Wick’s car, dog, and peace of mind are under attack. As plots go, it’s stupid – but delightfully so. The film never lets a flimsy premise get in the way of fun or excitement. If I’m honest, I actually love the plot. This kind of film doesn’t need any more substance than “Bad guys kill Keanu’s dog; Keanu goes on murderous rampage,” and I’ll argue until I’m hoarse that a baby beagle is a much more plainly sympathetic character than some underdeveloped family-member-in-danger. If someone murdered my dog, I might feel the need for a little rampagin’ too.

Off the Shelf: The Deep End (2001)

The Deep End gives off a sweet malevolence; it softly seduces you even as it fills you with dread. Unlike some popular thrillers, The Deep End doesn't nudge you with mechanical scare tactics to provide tension. The picture is both intelligently suspenseful and an incongruously witty chamber drama. Scott McGehee and David Siegel, the co-writers and co-directors, quietly and shrewdly build our apprehension by having us slowly come to empathize with a main character who paves her road to hell with the best of intentions.

Tilda Swinton (I Am Love, The Grand Budapest Hotel) plays Margaret Hall, a lonely housewife in Lake Tahoe, who spends her days dutifully carrying out all those mundane domestic chores of motherhood. Her husband, meanwhile, is a naval officer who spends his days carrying out his duties at sea. In short time, though, Margaret finds herself at sea emotionally when she discovers that her eldest son, Beau (Jonathan Tucker), is gay. She also comes to see that his lover, Darby (Josh Lucas), is a rather disreputable character who might bring harm to her son. Margaret initially pleads with Darby to stay away from Beau, but he ignores her, and later makes a midnight creep from Reno to Lake Tahoe. When Beau gets into a skirmish with his lover on the family dock, Darby is accidently killed. In the morning, Margaret finds the body and assumes that her son has committed murder. While Beau has no knowledge of of what happened, Margaret does what any loving mother might do; she tries to clean up the mess and protect her family. Based on the little-known 1940s novel, The Blank Wall, by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding (which was also the source for Max Ophuls 1949 film noir, The Reckless Moment), The Deep End is largely anchored by Swinton's complexly layered performance.

A Manner of Style and a Style of Manners: Remembering Oscar de la Renta

Fashion designer Oscar de la Renta (1932-2014) 

Manners never go out of style, and for that reason Oscar de la Renta, a great fashion designer who was also big on manners, will forever be remembered as a style icon. I came to witness first-hand the man’s elegance, reflected in both his demeanour and his drop-dead gorgeous dresses, on more than one occasion. As The Globe and Mail’s fashion reporter, I interviewed him in Toronto in 2002 at Canadian launch of his fruity-floral perfume, Intrusion by Oscar de la Renta. He autographed the modernist bottle for me. I also travelled to New York several times to attend his fashion shows, writing about them for my paper’s Style section. I remember one of the them vividly, both for what went down the runway and for what was happening behind the scenes. The gossip first.

The Dominican-born designer who became an American citizen in the 1969, dressed Hollywood stars (Nicole Kidman, Penelope Cruz, Sarah Jessica Parker), American first ladies (Jackie Kennedy, Nancy Reagan, Laura Bush, Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama) and wealthy socialites (Nancy Kissinger and Lady Lynn de Rothschild). He was the Oscar who owned the Oscars; his gowns dominated the red carpet. Just before his death on October 20 at age 82, he had designed the wedding dress worn by Amal Alamuddin at her September wedding to heartthrob George Clooney. Oscar de la Renta was always relevant, always au courant. Which would explain why his shows were standing-room only affairs. Even to be seen at an Oscar de la Renta show was enough to make the participant seem a part of fashion. A-listers wanted to be seen in the front row to make their own stylish selves be known through association. Not that C.Z. Guest needed to have tried so hard.

Soul Mates: The Skeleton Twins

Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig in The Skeleton Twins

In director Craig Johnson’s The Skeleton Twins, Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig play twins who’ve grown apart as adults after life’s taken them in different directions. But after a suicide attempt at the film’s outset lands Milo (Hader) in a L.A. hospital, the pair find themselves under the same roof again. Maggie (Wiig) insists that he recuperate with her back at their childhood hometown in upstate New York. She’s returned there upon marrying, and the movie charts the ways in which our place and family origin serve as both a haven from the wider world’s chaos and the ongoing cause of a different, deeper turbulence. Casting Hader and Wiig—two crack comedians—proves a stroke of genius. After seeing The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, I knew Wiig could make a comic-dramatic turn. But I had no idea she was capable of the range of expression she displays here, nor the kind of psychological character study she puts on. Even more so with Hader, who has the more complex role and riskier scenes. And with Johnson and Mark Heyman’s first-rate script at their disposal, the pair is by turns hilarious and affecting. The Skeleton Twins is a funny, poignant, deeply touching look at the complicated way our siblings can become our best friends in adulthood—those who uniquely understand our pain and help us sort through the mess we make of life.

No More Home Sweet Home: Waxing Apocalyptic with the Creators of Refuge

All Hallow’s Eve is upon us, and Toronto celebrated recently with the Toronto After Dark Film Festival, which fired a volley of low-budget horror cinema at eager film audiences across the city. There was something for everyone in that abyss of genre delights, from slasher flicks to end-of-the-world mood pieces like the thriller Refuge.

Refuge is set in a grim future in which most of humanity has been exterminated by an unnamed plague, and follows a small family in their daily struggle for food, water, and safety. Father Jack (Carter Roy) watches over wife Nell (Amy Rutberg) and eight-year-old daughter Birdie (Eva Grace Kellner, Boardwalk Empire), and their existence is peaceful, if mundane – until Jack takes a wounded man named Russell (Sebastian Beacon) into their care, whose friends soon come looking for him.

Justin Cummings sat down with husband and wife scream-team Andrew Robertson (Director, Screenwriter) and Lilly Kanso (Producer) for an exclusive interview for Critics at Large.

Skylight and Ether Dome: The Social and the Personal

Bill Nighy and Carey Mulligan in Skylight (Photo: Tristram Kenton)

Much as I value the literacy, intelligence and technical finesse of the English playwright David Hare, I often find his plays heavy going. The political apparatus at the heart of most of the ones I’ve encountered, from Plenty to Stuff Happens, swings like a censer, blanketing the stage with the whiff of importance; generally I find that he needs a more elastic movement, a lighter step. But Skylight, the 1995 drama that was revived in the West End last summer – in a production by Stephen Daldry, bound for Broadway, that the NT Live series has been transmitting in HD – is a fine piece of work. Bill Nighy (in the role he followed Michael Gambon in eighteen years ago) plays Tom Sergeant, a successful restauranteur whose wife and partner Alice has died of cancer. Carey Mulligan is Kyra Hollis, who came into the Sergeants’ lives as an eighteen-year-old girl, took over the management of one of their restaurants, and became virtually a member of the family. She also became Tom’s lover; they conducted an affair for six years before Alice found out, at which point Kyra, unable to face her, walked out on them both. When Tom finds her again, a year after Alice’s death, Kyra is living in a chilly flat she’s taken over from a friend and teaching high school to working-class kids. She isn’t expecting her old lover to come back into her life, though he’s certainly on her mind: unbeknownst to Tom, his eighteen-year-old son Edward (Matthew Beard) dropped by to see her just hours earlier to beg her to rescue his lonely, rootless father. By the end of the first act, Kyra and Tom seem to have reconciled. Act two explores the reasons the reconciliation comes too late to take hold.

The Best Book to Read to Your Child, or to Yourself: Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories

A hoopoe in flight

When I was about eight or nine years old, my father and I realized that our tradition of reading together had to change. We had long left behind picture books, and he had little patience for the transitional books that are suggested for children of that age – books written for children who are just learning to read for themselves, books usually remarkable for their recycled narratives and limited vocabulary. Perhaps he had came across Haroun and the Sea of Stories in the time he'd spent traveling in the Middle East, or because it was the height of the Rushdie affair, or perhaps it was because, as a parent who was often away overseas, he wanted to read me a book written by an author who was separated from his own children. Either way, that was when I met Haroun.

There was once, in the country of Alifbay, a sad city, the saddest of cities, a city so ruinously sad that it had forgotten its name.

A Rich Musical Journey: Celebrating 20 Years of Rough Guide CDs

A few years ago, I was browsing in one my favourite used CD shops in Toronto (now defunct, alas) and noticed a CD from Israel. Nothing special there necessarily, but I was struck by the fact that the disc was put out by the UK-based Rough Guide label. A British label releasing Israeli music, at a time and from a continent rife with so much anti-Israel, if not anti-Semitic, attitudes intrigued me – and even more so, when after purchasing the disc, I found out that the compiler of The Rough Guide to the Music of Israel was a well-travelled Torontonian by the name of Dan (or Daniel) Rosenberg. Not knowing much about how music compilers did their work and being aware that a piece on Rosenberg would be of interest to The Canadian Jewish News, a publication I wrote for at the time, I penned an article on how the disc came to be and on the man himself. And from that moment on, I continued to pick up, buy and listen to the music released the Rough Guide label. (Rough Guide is one of four labels that makes up the World Music Network record label, which also includes Introducing, Think Global, and Riverboat Records –the latter recently celebrating its 25th anniversary) Today marks exactly 20 years since the first Rough Guide CD was released on October 25, 1994, and, now, as the possessor of most of the Rough Guide discs – more than 200 of them, with many still in print – I salute a label that has introduced me not only to so much world music I would know nothing about otherwise but has also educated me on the myriad permutations of that complex genre. It has been a musical journey well worth taking.

When the Dust Bites Back: The Clash's "1977" & The Beatles Live! at the Star-Club in Hamburg, Germany (1962)

When Joe Strummer announced the arrival of The Clash in 1977, gleefully joining the Punk Revolution that was launched by The Sex Pistols a couple of years earlier, he did it in a song called, naturally enough, "1977." The purpose of punk was to clean house of the rock dinosaurs that no longer stood for the ideals they once claimed. For the British bands that came out of the rubble of the burst dreams of The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and other pretenders to the throne, they were worthy of a safety pin through the cheek. Punk proudly stood for nothing, no future, just the bare necessity of pedal-to-the-metal rock. But The Clash refused a claim towards rock nihilism in favour of a new political direction, a tabloid Marxism, to address how England's dreaming had been transformed into an expedient nightmare. To do that, "1977" set out to lay waste to the pioneers of the past who made the mistake of dreaming in the first place. "No Elvis, Beatles or The Rolling Stones," Strummer announces off the top like a Depression-era newsboy bellowing the headlines of all the papers he needs to sell. It's a bald claim, one he'd reiterate a few years later in the authoritative "London Calling," when he'd bring forth an apocalypse while telling us that "phoney Beatlemania has bitten the dust."

When in Greece: The Two Faces of January

Viggo Mortensen and Kirsten Dunst in The Two Faces of January

After seeing a high-concept, A-list thriller like Gone Girl, with its pushy smugness passing for sophistication and its cynical button-pushing that’s meant to make it seem like a provocative take on contemporary male-female relations—Gillian Flynn, who did the screenplay adaptation of her own novel, launched herself onto the bestseller lists after spending a decade writing for Entertainment Weekly, and it shows—the direct, elegant perversity of a trim, stylish thriller like Hossein Amini’s The Two Faces of January can feel like a walk in the fresh spring air after spending a week locked in the garage. This is Amini’s directing debut, but in the ‘90s he did the scripts for Iain Softley’s Henry James movie The Wings of the Dove and Michael Winterbottom’s Thomas Hardy adaptation Jude the Obscure.

More recently, he’s been credited with the scripts of such headbanging crime movies as Killshot, from an Elmore Leonard novel, and the Ryan Gosling vehicle Drive. The Two Faces of January has a best-of-both-worlds quality. It’s based on a Patricia Highsmith novel that was first published in 1964, and is set mostly in Greece at the same time. It’s a trim, cutthroat story, but the touristy period settings give it some of the luxurious visual appeal that go with certain classic-lit adaptations. And with Viggo Mortensen, with his intimidatingly sky-scraping frame and Arrow Shirt profile swanking around the Acropolis in a light-colored suit and hat, with Kirsten Dunst as his much younger blonde wife, the atmosphere can suggest an episode of Mad Men where there’s no guarantee anyone will make it out alive.

Serial and the New Podcast Revolution

Hae Min Lee and Adnan Syed (centre, top and bottom)

In radio and podcasting circles, the rather geeky milieu that I travel in, there is a bit of thing happening. It's a podcast called Serial, which follows the real-life case of the murder of Baltimore high school student Hae Min Lee in 1999, and the arrest and imprisonment of her alleged killer, ex-boyfriend Adnan Syed. Sarah Koenig, the host and executive producer of Serial, was approached by the family of the imprisoned man to look into the conviction. We follow Koenig as she picks apart the case. Koenig claims to not know where it will end. Is an innocent man in jail for a crime he didn't commit? Is the real killer still on the loose? Tune in, or rather, subscribe to Serial, and find out.

Glass Cannon: David Ayer’s Fury

Five men operate an M4 Sherman tank in the autumn of World War II, struggling to keep themselves and each other alive. Gordo (Michael Peña), Bible (Shia LaBoeuf), Coon-Ass (Jon Bernthal) and their commander Wardaddy (Brad Pitt) lose their front gunner, and he is replaced by the squeaky-clean Norman (Logan Lerman), who must abandon his naïve sense of morality if he is to survive with the others. This is the setup for Fury, directed by David Ayer, which doesn’t do much of anything other than make a great deal of noise, but it does so with expertise and intensity.

Double Stoppard: India Ink and The Real Thing

Rosemary Harris, Bhavesh Patel and Romola Garai in Indian Ink  (Photo by Joan Marcus)

Indian Ink is one of the few plays by the staggeringly prolific Tom Stoppard that never made it to New York in the aftermath of its West End run, so the Roundabout Theatre’s decision to mount it in its smallest (off-Broadway space), the Laura Pels Theatre, is a happy one for theatregoers. I can’t think why it didn’t open in Manhattan in the nineties (it was staged in London in 1995), especially since Arcadia, written two years earlier, was so successful there. Perhaps potential producers thought they were too similar – though that’s not generally a reason for withholding a new play that follows a well-received one. (Quite the opposite.) In Arcadia a pair of contemporary academics try to determine the events that occurred on an English country estate in 1809 where Lord Byron may or may not have been one of the house guests, while we see what really happened, the truth that the scholars can only guess at. In Indian Ink, an English professor named Eldon Pike annotates a new edition of the work of a poet, Flora Crewe, long dead, whose younger sister Eleanor – now an old woman – constitutes her only remaining family. Hopeful about following up with a biography, he searches for one of three paintings of his subject, two of them nudes, two of them done during the few months she spent in India, mostly in Jummapur. Among the people he contacts, aside from Eleanor, are the son of the Indian painter, Nirad Das, whom Flora befriended and posed for, and the son of the local Rajah who invited her to visit him in the course of her stay. Eleanor doesn’t approve of Pike’s long-term project and in her quiet way does what she can to quietly thwart his research. “Biography,” she argues, “is the worst possible excuse for getting people wrong.” And Stoppard confirms her analysis by – as in Arcadia – showing us what really happened to Flora in India, in a series of flashbacks that place one fragment of information on top of another until, gradually, we see it all. (We also discover chapters in Eleanor’s life that we hadn’t suspected, and that explain how she began as a Bohemian, like her sister, and metamorphosed into a conservative colonial.)

Opposition to Hitler

The compelling 1959 German film Die Brucke (The Bridge) tells the useless courage of seven German teenagers hastily conscripted into the Nazi army and assigned the responsibility of defending an old stone bridge in the last few days of the war. The High Command knew that the Americans would overrun it and the sergeant in charge of the boys was ordered to pull them back once the Americans arrived, but he was killed by the Gestapo and six of the boys died while the one survivor, who is able to tell the tale that became the basis for a novel and this film, is brutalized by the experience. The first part of this capsule summary is most people’s awareness of the final stages of the war: young men used as fodder to carry out Hitler’s maniacal order that everyone should be participate in the defence of the Volk or die. The second part, that members of the High Command only offered a token of resistance while trying to save lives, including their own, is not as familiar. Military opposition constitutes one subject of University of Toronto scholar, Randall Hansen’s new book, Disobeying Hitler: German Resistance after Operation Valkyrie (Oxford, 2014) even though its dense military chapters can be a daunting read. Its central argument is that opposition to the Fuhrer inside the Reich during the final year of the war, that included both military and civilian resistance, was much more pervasive than has previously been known.

Neglected Gem #64: In Dreams (1999)

In Dreams is sensuously creepy and compelling. Annette Bening plays Claire Cooper, an adaptor and illustrator of fairy tales, who suddenly finds her head filled with horrifying images she can neither prevent nor interpret, though she knows they’re linked up with the disappearance of a little girl. When the child’s body turns up, she realizes that she’s channeling a serial killer. And unlike the murderers whose crimes run like private movies in the brain of the character Antonio Banderas plays in Pedro Almodóvar’s Matador, this one is conscious of his psychic connection with Claire – his next target turns out to be her daughter, Rebecca. When she can’t stop Rebecca’s inevitable fate, Claire tries to kill herself in her car, but she survives and grows more and more removed from the people around her – her husband (Aidan Quinn), the detective (Paul Guilfoyle) in pursuit of the killer, the surgeon (Dennis Boutsikaris) and psychiatrist (Stephen Rea) who treat her – because they don’t believe her story. She becomes unmoored, stalked by a man who’s somehow managed to worm his way into her skull and is leaving her maddening hints about how he lost his own bearings and what he’s going to do next.

Some Good, Some Less So: A Look at the New Sitcoms of 2014

John Cho and Karen Gillan star in Selfie, on ABC

Amid the high profile dramas that are debuting on the small screen this season (Gotham and How to Get Away with Murder), comedies are flying a little under the radar. Last year saw well over a dozen new network comedies launched, and a year later we've had a few heartbreaking cancellations (Trophy Wife, The Crazy Ones, and Enlisted) and one break out, consistently deserving hit, Brooklyn Nine-Nine. (The Andy Samberg comedy premiered with such a strong comic voice and sense of itself that its eventual success was visible in the first 5 minutes of the pilot. So far, its sophomore season has continued in the same vein.) This fall the networks are offering only a handful of new sitcoms, and today I'll be taking a look five new comedies, in order of their relative promise: Black-ish (ABC), Selfie (ABC), A to Z (NBC), Marry Me (NBC), Mulaney (FOX).

The Dogs of Comedy: Revisiting Christopher Guest's Best in Show (2000)

When you're as sick as I was this past weekend, you find yourself craving comfort food of all sorts. For comfort comes not only from good hot soup, steamy liquids and plenty of sleep, but it also arrives in choices of films to watch. Rather than turn to the dramatically complex (though I did watch the extraordinary new Blu-ray restoration of the four hour and ten minute director's cut of Sergio Leone's gangster epic, Once Upon a Time in America, which I'll write about next week when I'm fully healthy), I look instead to comedy, the genre that helps us come to terms with pain and misery because we come to laugh at its absurdity. Christopher Guest's mock documentary Best in Show (2000) got the call this past weekend.

It's often been acknowledged – especially in ads – that dog owners not only have a lot in common with their pooches, they sometimes live their lives through them. You can usually size up a dog owner, too, just by watching the type of canine they have at the end of the leash. Dogs can either act out the most regal aspects of the owner's personality, or, as in the case of pit bulls, the owner's latent aggressions. In Best in Show, Christopher Guest satirizes this symbiotic and idiosyncratic alliance by casting it in the colourful arena of a dog show. Using the same spry ensemble of comic actors (Michael McKean, Parker Posey, Catherine O'Hara, Eugene Levy and Fred Willard) that he first worked with in his 1996 debut Waiting for Guffman, in Best in Show, they prove to be even more eccentric than their pets.

Bending Genres: Elizabeth Shepherd's Signal and Lily Frost's Motherless Child

Is it jazz or is it pop? In the case of Elizabeth Shepherd and Lily Frost, two gifted singers from Canada, one genre definitely informs the other. The challenge for listeners – and critics – is to dismiss the genre fencing and simply appreciate the music in and of itself. For Shepherd and Frost, whose recent releases cross-reference pop and jazz, the two have become very good at blending – and bending – the genres into music that is accessible and interesting.

The Signal (Linus) is Elizabeth Shepherd's fifth, full-length album. Originally cast as pseudo-chanteuse upon her debut, the McGill University graduate has constantly challenged everybody's notion of category. She's tread the line between straight up jazz (Start to Move, 2006) to her exceptional performance of "I Am The Walrus" on Michael Occhipini's Shine On tribute to the music of John Lennon. To some extent, her new release carries some of that musical buoyancy along with a large dose of mystery. Led by the percussive drive of John McLean, The Signal is Shepherd's funkiest release to date. The polyrhythms lead the way as Shepherd weaves her voice in between the beats. The overall sound of the album is occasionally too locked into a steady groove, but the title track breaks the pattern nicely. It's a sublime duet with vocalist Alex Samaras peppered with narration by CBC Radio host, Laurie Brown. It's the best-arranged song on the album, and arranging is a skill in itself – just consider the work of Rob McConnell or Gil Evans, two jazz legends.

Off The Shelf: Insidious (2010) and The Conjuring (2013)

Rose Byrne in James Wan's Insidious (2010)

Before this week I only knew James Wan as the director of Saw (and producer of almost every one of its sequels), which didn’t exactly bode well for the rest of his filmography. Though Saw (2004) functioned as a mostly-effective mystery-horror yarn, the sequels quickly descended into exploitative dreck, bringing the term “torture porn” into our pop culture lexicon. Is that really an achievement to celebrate? I can’t say – but it did leave me unprepared for the quality of two of his more recent directorial efforts, Insidious (2010) and The Conjuring (2013), films that veer away from serial-killer mind games into supernatural territory.

The Country House: Chekhov in the Berkshires

Blythe Danner in The Country House (Photo by Joan Marcus)

In Donald Margulies’s new play, The Country House, at the Manhattan Theatre Club’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, Blythe Danner plays Anna Patterson, the matriarch of a theatrical family. A famous actress, Anna has returned to the Williamstown Theatre Festival – and to her summer home in the Berkshires – a year after losing her daughter, also an actor, to cancer. The family assembles in this house of memories. Anna’s son Elliot Cooper (Eric Lange) is a difficult, obstreperous man who can’t get parts because no one wants to work with him and who has stumbled into middle age without finding a romantic partner. At this juncture he’s suddenly decided to become a playwright; he’s planning to ask his unsuspecting family to read his first effort aloud. His brother-in-law Walter Keegan (David Rasche), who parlayed a successful career as a stage director into an even more enviable one as a filmmaker, shows up with his new, younger fiancée, Nell McNally (Kate Jennings Grant) – also an actress – a beauty whom everyone is drawn to despite their discomfort with the way Walter has moved on so speedily after the death of his wife. Nell draws the admiration of both Elliot – who acted with her one summer, years earlier, and has romanticized that brief friendship into unrequited love – and another celebrity appearing that summer in Williamstown, Michael Astor (Daniel Sunjata), the star of a hit sci-fi TV series whom Anna, with motives that are not entirely pure, has invited to sleep on the living-room couch while his house is being fumigated. The only person in the house who isn’t charmed by Nell is Walter’s daughter Susie (Sarah Steele), a Yale student, the only character on stage without either a theatrical career or an interest in obtaining one. Susie is incensed at what she sees as her father’s disloyalty to her mother’s memory, and when Michael falls for Nell, she has even more reason to hate her stepmother-to-be, since she’s had a crush on the handsome actor since she was a little girl.