Does a country that already has a Hockey Hall of Fame and a ubiquitous coffee chain named after a defenceman really need a singing and dancing tribute to the sport? Director Michael McGowan thought so and the result is Score: A Hockey Musical, a parody of hockey violence set to a soundtrack that rhymes baloney with Zamboni.
“We do hockey well and we do music well in this country, and the fact that a hockey musical hadn’t been done seemed to me like a great opportunity,” he said. “It’s such a ridiculous idea on one hand, but it is instantly memorable as a film idea. In a crowded marketplace you’re always trying to stand out.”
Helping the film to stand out is a berth as the opening night film at TIFF and a host of stars on ice in leading roles and cameos. Headlining a musical for the first time in thirty years is Olivia Newton John, playing an overprotective hockey mom. “She’s funny and she doesn’t take herself seriously,” says McGowan, “but for her to say, ‘This is the film, a hockey musical shot in Toronto in February seemed virtually impossible.”
Joining John is Promiscuous singer Nelly Furtato, who plays Kelly, the “ardent hockey fan.”
“I had written in the script, ‘She licks the fat bellied man’s stomach,’” says McGowan. “There is not a hope in hell that I’m going to say, ‘OK Nelly, now you lick the fat bellied man’s stomach.’ But she completely embraced it. It was like, ‘If you’re going to play in this world of the hockey musical you have to embrace it fully.’”
Rounding out the cast are newcomers Noah Reid and Allie MacDonald, along with George Stroumboulopoulos, Evan Solomon, sports anchor Steve Kouleas, the world’s most famous hockey dad Walter Gretzky and former NHL star Theo Fleury.
“At the end I was shaking my head about who was actually in the film,” he says.
McGowan hopes that his mix of sports and song will score with audiences. “There are so few opportunities as Canadians for us to express our patriotism,” he says adding that the mix of “hockey and music, in a story that works, will hopefully be a communal experience.”
Batmans come and go. For a time Michael Keaton wore the caped suit. Then in rapid succession Val Kilmer and George Clooney donned the cowl. In recent years Christian Bale has been fitted for the Bat-Suit, but of all the actors to have played the Dark Knight, one stands head and shoulders above the rest in our imaginations. For two-and-a-half heady years—and 120 episodes—from 1966 to 1968 Adam West was Batman on the most popular show on television.
“We never stopped,” he says. “I know a lot of TV series people complain about hours and pressure but we really had them. We worked fifteen, sixteen hours a day! We were on twice a week so you really had to run.”
The worst part for West wasn’t the hours or the pressure, it was the blue, purple and gray Batsuit. “It was a time when they didn’t have the materials they have today and it was just plain hot and itchy.”
Driving the Batmobile, the show’s sleek signature car—it’s stylish lines are said to have been inspired by the mako shark and the manta ray—however, was one of the job’s great pleasures, but not without its challenges. “Getting behind the wheel of the Batmobile was like driving a broken down old 37 Ford wheat truck. I gotta be honest. But you know what? I didn’t mind because it was so tricky and fun and funny and perfect on film and the kids loved it. It’s the most famous car in the world and everybody today that I meet still prefers that car to any other.”
The “any other” he refers to are the movie Batmobiles used in the Tim Burton and Christopher Nolan Batman films. His intonation begs the question, how does he feel about the recent movies?
“I don’t feel,” he says. “I really have no feeling because they are good for what they are. I can’t be a critic. They do their thing. They have The Dark Knight. We did our thing and I’m The Bright Knight.”
For all the memorable elements of the show—the crazy pop art KAPOWs! And BOFFs! that punctuated the fight scenes or the cliffhanger endings, “Tune in tomorrow—same Bat-time, same Bat-channel!”—West says, for him, two moments stands out above the rest—one professional, one personal.
“The defining moment of the character might be when he [Batman] sat at the disco bar and they slipped him a drug, or a Mickey in his orange juice. So with great abandonment he stood up and created The Batusi (The go-go dance later done by John Travolta in Pulp Fiction). That moment to me kind of summed up everything that it was. That it could be really funny, absurd, fun and yet serious,” he says, “and the kids would really take it seriously.”
“The other defining moment was when I first put on the costume for real and was about to leave my trailer on the stage and walk out in front of the crew and the press, and into the light. I thought, ‘Oh Lord! Are they going to laugh? What’s going to happen here?’ Well, I walked across the stage as dignified as I could and there wasn’t a sound. People stood there in awe and I thought, ‘Yes, this will work.’”
And more than forty years later it is still working. West hung up the itchy Batsuit years ago, but for a generation of fans he’ll always be the Bright Knight.
Fans in Toronto can get a chance to meet and mingle with Adam West this weekend when he makes special appearances at The Toronto Underground Theatre and Fan Expo.
You might imagine that horror maestro George A. Romero’s favorite film is The Exorcist. Or maybe Cannibal Holocaust. Or even The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It’s easy to picture the twisted mind behind Night of the Living Dead curled up in his Toronto home with the Saw marathon unspooling on his blood splattered DVD player. Easy to imagine, but far from the reality. Most nights you’ll find him rewatching a classic. Maybe The Brothers Karamazov, Casablanca or Dr. Strangelove. Nary a decapitated head or disembowelment in the bunch! He also loves The Quiet Man, High Noon and King Solomon’s Mines but his all time favorite is an obscure 1951 Michael Powell film called The Tales of Hoffman.
“It’s the movie that made me want to make movies,” he says.
“I was dragged kicking and screaming by an aunt and uncle. I wanted to go see the new Tarzan; the new Lex Barker movie to see how he stacked up against Weissmuller and they said, ‘No! We’re going to see this,’ and I fell in love with it. It’s just beautiful. Completley captivating. It’s all sung. It’s all opera. It’s not like The Red Shoes where there is a story running through it and then Léonide Massine does a ballet at the end. I just fell in love with it from the pop.
“He did it on a low budget. You could see the techniques he was using; he was reversing action, doing overprints, double exposures and it seemed accessible. I think at that age if I had seen Jurassic Park I would have said ‘Forget about it, I don’t know how to do this dinosaur thing’ but I could see how Powell made the film and it was accessible to me. It made me think that maybe someday I could do something like this.”
All these years later Hoffman and other films of that vintage still move him—“I’m a sucker for the old movies I loved as a kid,” he says. “I put them on and I get a tear in my eye when the overture starts.”—but don’t think he’s getting soft. The man known to fans as the “Grandfather of the Zombie” has a new gut wrenching (literally) movie called Survival of the Dead in theatres this weekend.
Like his previous movies it works on a couple of levels. “Goremets” will appreciate his signature style with the blood and guts but wipe away some of the red stuff and the social commentary of his work becomes clear. “I bring the zombies out of the closet when I have something I want to talk about,” he says.
His classic Night of the Living Dead touches on Cold War politics and domestic racism, while others in the Living Dead series shine a light on consumerism, the conflict between science and the military and class conflict. The new one, the sixth in the series, is a lesson in the futility of war. Inserting these ideas into the films is very important to Romero whether audiences get it or not. He says he knows most people are “there either to just take the ride or watch the gore, chuckle at the gore, and don’t care about the other stuff,” but his work has had a profound effect on a couple of generations of filmmakers.
Quentin Tarantino, who says the “A” in George A. Romero stands for “A f**king genius,” cites the director’s fierce independent style as an influence and Romero’s blend of speculative fiction and social comment is particularly apparent in the work of Guillermo del Toro.
When I mention this to Romero he says, “Guillermo is my man! He runs a close second to Michael Powell in my mind.”
Considering what happened after the last time they appeared on screen together it’s a wonder Sylvester Stallone would consider working with Dolph Lundgren again. While shooting the boxing scenes for Rocky IV, the movie that made the 6′ 5″ Lundgren a household name, the Swedish actor hit Stallone so hard the Italian Stallion’s heart slammed up against his breastbone and began to swell, limiting the oxygen flow throughout his body.
An eight day stay in intensive care cured the problem, but may also explain why Stallone waited twenty-five years to invite Dolph back into the ring. The pair, along with action movie legends Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jason Statham (and that’s just the Ss!), star in The Expendables, an all star all action movie opening on August 13.
When asked why he’s reteamed with Stallone after so many years Lundgren says, “Well, first of all Mr. Sly Stallone. Anything he writes and directs is something I’d be interested in doing.”
He was cautious, however, of keeping up with some of the younger members of the cast. “All my roles are tough physically, but this one was different because I knew I was up against people like [former NFL footballer] Terry Crews and [wrestler] Stone Cold Steve Austin. Not small guys and pretty rough and developed so I thought I gotta do more weights. So I did a lot of weights for my upper body to get a little beefier. My arms were still smaller than Terry Crews, but I think I was somewhere up there.
“Physically, I do a lot of martial arts fighting, and that is pretty much what I did for this film although I can pretty much handle the fighting at any time.”
Lundgren has been practicing Kyokushinkai Karate (a Japanese style of martial arts) since age fourteen, has a third degree black belt and next year, at age 54, plans on getting his fourth degree and will do a demonstration at the world championships in Tokyo.
As a child he says the study of karate helped him to develop self confidence, discipline and a sense of who he was. Today he finds the practice aids him in keeping grounded and is “an antidote to Hollywood and the trappings of that lifestyle. It takes discipline, etiquette and you have to have a certain outlook on life that is simple and elegant. It’s not a self centered or egocentric type of sport.”
Lundgren still works out four or five days a week and has no plans to slow down on his work schedule of pumping out one or two action films a year. “It’s a way of making a living for me because people want to see me do it,” he says. “In an action movie you can have fun and be a kid and play with guns and cars… and a few beautiful women if you’re lucky. At the same time when you are directing you get an intellectual challenge as well because you are making all the decisions about music and editing. It’s is a great job. It’s hard work but very challenging and very rewarding.”
John Waters listens to Bobby ‘Boris’ Pickett’s Monster Mash every day. He claims dancing to the song keeps him happy.
“It’s even more fun to do with Kleenex boxes on your feet,” he says. “Howard Hughes used to do that. I was fascinated by that. I thought, ‘Why did he do that?’ until I put them on one day. Do the Monster Mash in Kleenex boxes and you will not need Prozac or any kind of drug. It will put you in a good mood even if you have chemical depression.”
The 64-year-old Waters, a provocateur once labeled “The Pope of Trash” by William Burroughs, is best known as the twisted mind behind Pink Flamingos and Hairspray, but he’s also a journalist with writing credits that range from pieces for Rolling Stone to Vogue.
On the surface his latest work, a book titled Role Models, is a compendium of pieces on people he admires—that’s everyone from Johnny Mathis, who Waters says is ”beyond fame, beyond race, beyond trying too hard” to Esther Martin, a foulmouthed Baltimore bartender—but what emerges from the pages is something different.
“It is really my memoir,” he says, “it is about me but it is told through other people. They had to relate to my life in some way. They had to lead extreme lives in a way I could relate to mine. Perhaps something awful happened or something good happened, or [they had] great success or great failure or notoriety.”
The spotlight he shines on his subjects also illuminates the man behind the words. The one-time “Pope of Trash” is revealed as a sharp-tongued, but loyal and compassionate friend.
Take, for instance, his 14, 000 word defense of Leslie Van Houten. As a nineteen year old Van Houten, under the spell of Charles Manson, stabbed Rosemary LaBianca sixteen times. Waters befriended her twenty seven years ago. “I told her, ‘I’ve known you for a long time and you are a role model to me, to [be able] to get through this terrible thing that happened,” he says. “Can she ever get better? Can she ever survive the terrible crime she was involved in? And I think she has and I think she deserves a second chance. This is my letter to the parole board.”
We also learn of his taste for people on the fringe, whether they be pornographers like Bobby Garcia, who shot hundreds of videos of himself having sex with Marines or Zorro, a legendarily drug addled Baltimore stripper. Waters treats them all respectfully and notes that he would be hurt if they took offence to anything he had written about them.
“I find people’s personalities fascinating,” he says. “I do try and understand everybody and that’s what this book is about. These people have had it worse or better than me and they’ve had to be brave and bravery is a complicated word, but they somehow have survived. Each one of those people taught me a lesson in a weird way.”
Toy Story 3 is about toys. All kinds of toys. Some familiar, like the hilariously vain Ken doll voiced by Michael Keaton, others less so, like Mr. Pricklepants, a small stuffed toy with a deep baritone supplied by Timothy Dalton.
The stars have come out to play toys in the film, but what toys did they play with as children?
Jeff Garlin
The burly Curb Your Enthusiasm actor who voices Buttercup the Unicorn says his most memorable toy wasn’t actually a toy, but the box it came in. “I used that box for a year as a fort, as a robot,” he says. “I loved the box. And now my kids, as they open up gifts, love boxes.”
Joan Cusack
“I had a Barbie head,” says Cusack, who returns to the Toy Story franchise for the second time as the voice of Jessie, the Yodeling Cowgirl. “Just the head. It was sold like that. It was her head and her neck was like a tray and we did make-up and hair on the head. That’s all I can really remember. The rest of it was all make-believe and forts and playing house and stuff. It wasn’t so much toys back then.”
Michael Keaton
The Batman actor didn’t play with Ken dolls as a kid — he just plays one in the movie — but he does fondly remember a baseball glove he had as a youngster. “I wish I still had it,” he says. “It was perfectly worked in.”
Kristen ‘Trixie the Triceratops’ Schaal
The baby-voiced actress best known as Mel on Flight of the Concords, says her favorite childhood toy also came in a box, but unlike her co-star, she actually played with the contents. “My great aunt gave me a box of costume jewelry that I used forever until I lost every piece,” she says. “I would pretend to be a madam! No! Just kidding! A princess!”
Timothy Dalton
The former Mr. Bond — now the voice of a stuffed hedgehog with theatrical ambitions — agrees with Cusack. “We made things up,” he says. “We played with tin cans, stones and bits of wood or paper. Or we played games or went on adventures like tramping across the fields thinking we were adventuring heroes. It was before the space age but we did what these guys in the movie were doing except we did it in our heads.”
Given the Hollywood success novelist Dennis Lehane has had in recent years you’d expect him to live in the 90210 area code. No dice, says the blunt speaking author of Mystic River, Gone Baby Gone and Shutter Island (which comes to DVD and Blu Ray June 8).
“If you live in LA you’re suddenly that guy,” he says on the line from his home in Boston. “You get lost in it. Everywhere you turn everyone is a writer. Where I live now I’m it, at least for a couple of blocks there’s no other writers.”
Certainly there are no other authors in his area with a tinsel town track record like his. The film adaptations of his novels have put him on a first name basis with legendary filmmakers like Clint and Marty and have earned seven Oscars nominations. But don’t look to him to take all the credit for the success of the movies.
“There are only two things I can take credit for and I’m not being falsely disingenuous or anything,” he says, “I’m just being honest. I seem to write characters that actors are attracted to. I invest a lot in my characters, so my characters tend to have multiple dimensions. OK, there I go. I just pumped myself up.
“Other than that I will only get in business with the absolute crème de la crème talent wise and taste wise. Just look at my behind-the-credits people. Look at my producers; they are people that if you look at the CVs are extremely impressive. That spreads out to other talented people. Who are talented people going to pick to write your screenplays? They are going to pick talented writers. Who are they going to pick to do the director’s job? They are going to pick talented directors. Who are the directors going to pick? They’re going to pick talented actors and so on. That’s really what’s been going on.”
Talented though he may be, he’s never adapted one of his own novels for the screen.
“I’m not particularly interested in adapting my own work. It is just not something that I can do. I’m just not competent. I’m the last person you should trust. I don’t know how to cut. I just spent two or three years of my life trying to get a book to 401 pages. Not 402 and not 399 and then you are going to turn around and say that’s the guy I want to trust to cut it to 135?”
Shutter Island, Lehane’s ominous thriller turned Martin Scorsese film about a U.S. Marshal (Leonardo DiCaprio) investigating a disappearance at the remote Shutter Island hospital for the criminally insane, sprung from two separate incidents.
“When I was a little kid my uncle took me out to one of the harbor islands and pointed out where a mental institution—the skeletal remains were still there—and it just stuck in my head. Many, many years later I had a crazy dream one night. I wrote it all down and woke up the next morning and looked at my notes and those notes are pretty much what Shutter Island is.”
Watching Scorsese work, he says was “mind boggling,” but true to form he didn’t spend much time on the set.
“Sets are so unbelievably boring if you don’t have a purpose on them,” he says. “A caterer is far more important on a film set than a novelist. A caterer, hey man, they give you the food; a novelist is just standing there saying, ‘I thought this up.’”
He’d rather be at home, in Boston. “It continually fuels me plus Bostonians are just funny sons-of-bitches. How else would I get to hear great lines all the time?”
The director of Michael Caine’s latest film, the crime drama Harry Brown, says Caine is the only person in England who everybody loves.
“He is a great Briton,” says Daniel Barber, “and he is admired in Britain by everyone, high, low or whatever as being one of the great Britons. He comes from very humble origins; he is truly a man of the people like very few people are.”
In reaction, Caine laughs, “I dunno. They say, ‘You’re an icon now.’ I say, ‘I don’t know how to do that.’ There’s no lessons. There’s no special icon bar where you go, meet up and learn what to do. I just consider myself lucky.”
The humble routine is part of what makes Caine beloved, but his Harry Brown co-star, Emily Mortimer, adds, “People feel both in awe of him because he is an icon but he is, at the same time, somehow accessible. That’s an amazing combination. To be a big movie star but for people to feel that they know you and that you are a good bloke and you’d be a good person to have a pint with.”
Harry Brown takes Caine back to his roots. The film, about a widowed man who strikes back at the hoodlums who have terrorizing his community, was shot in his old stomping grounds.
“It’s amazing because we were working on the same estate that he grew up on,” continues Mortimer. “A lot has changed since then, but that was incredible for him; an inspiration for him. There’s a big wall in the Elephant and Castle with a big painting of him as his character from Get Carter on it. There were moments when the 76-year-old Michael Caine would walk past this wall in the projects, in the middle of real degradation with this iconic image behind him. Moments like that were fantastic.”
“I always said I come from the slums,” says Caine of the E&C neighborhood where he was born, “and I do, but when I went back I didn’t realize how lucky I was. Because when we were shooting late at night, I’d talk to the neighbourhood boys and I realized I was quite lucky because I had two thing they didn’t have: I had a happy family life and I got an education. So I had two valuable things they didn’t have, and one thing they did have that I didn’t. That was drugs.”
Caine blames drugs for the rise in hoodlum culture that Harry Brown portrays. “In the end,” he says, “they wipe out all feeling for the other person.”
But despite strong feelings on the subject, Caine believes making Harry Brown taught him something.
“This movie changed me,” he said “in as much as I started out thinking, ‘Let’s go out and make a movie about killing all these scumbags,’ and then I met these people and realized they were helpless, just as much as the victims, and they had been neglected and they need help.”
Given Colm Feore’s habit of playing historical figures — he’s starred as everyone from Pierre Trudeau and Glenn Gould to Admiral Husband E. Kimmel on screens big and small — you’d imagine in a movie about the reincarnation of a Soviet politician called The Trotsky, he must be playing the legendary Bolshevik.
“I looked at Trotsky and he had hair, so that was out,” Feore laughs.
In fact, in the film the actor plays the authoritarian principal of Montreal’s (fictional) Jacques Parizeau English School who tries to prevent Leon Bronstein (Jay Baruchel) — a student who believes he is the reincarnation of revolutionary Leon Trotsky — from unionizing the school’s students.
“I was between episodes of 24 so I hadn’t shaved,” he says, “and I thought, ‘Why don’t I just keep not shaving? I’ll present myself to (director) Jacob (Tierney) and say, ‘Would this work for you? I think this would this give us a certain Lenin-esque feel.’ I thought, ‘I’ll go Lenin, he’ll go Trotsky and it will be eerie.’”
Feore — who sprinkles his conversation with words like “supercilious” and self depreciating comments — has more than a passing resemblance to the Russian revolutionary.
“We had this huge Lenin poster behind Jay’s head at one point,” he says. “Jacob framed the shot so that when I turn away I’m perfectly framed in the poster.”
The actor, who jumps back and forth between big budget films like the upcoming Thor, TV work and small films to fill in the gaps was taken by the script the moment he read it.
“To me it seemed very springy,” he says. “It has a bouncy intelligence to it. Particularly since it came from young people. Right now I am surrounded by young people. I have my kids and I think, ‘What would flatter them in reflection?’ If they see themselves as smart and able to change their world, this is a message I would like to be able to send. There is something heroically quixotic about the way Jay’s character forces his way down his path.”
The movie has earned comparisons to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and other American teen comedies, but Feore says it “probably couldn’t have been made anywhere else. The Canadian-ness of this film is our genius for subversion while playing it straight. It’s not tongue-in-cheek. … I like that the gags are layered in and it works on a second viewing. There are political statements under the political statements.”
Does a country that already has a Hockey Hall of Fame and a ubiquitous coffee chain named after a defenceman really need a singing and dancing tribute to the sport? Director Michael McGowan thought so and the result is Score: A Hockey Musical, a parody of hockey violence set to a soundtrack that rhymes baloney with Zamboni.
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