SYNOPSIS: Based on a 1981 two-issue special of the X-Men comic series the new film begins in a post-apocalyptic future. Menacing robot warriors called Sentinels have created chaos for the mutant race, bringing them to the edge of extinction. To combat the threat long time enemies Professor X (Patrick Stewart) and Magneto (Ian McKellen) team up with Storm (Halle Berry), Blink (Fan Bingbing), Bishop (Omar Sy) and use Kitty Pryde’s (Ellen Page) teleportation ability to send Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) back in time to change history and prevent the creation of the murderous automations. His first task is to convince the 1970s versions of Magneto (Michael Fassbender) and young Professor X (James McAvoy) that they are stronger together than apart.
STAR RATINGS:
Richard: 4 Stars
Mark: 4 Stars
Richard: Mark, Days of Future Past offers up two for the price of one. Merging the young versions of Magneto and Professor X with their older counterparts is a cool idea, and certainly gives the movie a boost in the marquee department, but I felt the old timers were left with their own heightened sense of drama and not much else. It seems a shame to have McKellen and Stewart, the Martin and Lewis of mutants, on screen together and not give them much to do. What did you think?
Mark: This installment really belongs to McAvoy, Jackman, Jennifer Lawrence and Michael Fassbender. I didn’t care for the “future” plot with the fogey mutants, but I thought the movie snapped to attention when it flashed back to 1973. The sense of time and place seemed very authentic; in one scene Lawrence is dressed exactly like Carly Simon on the cover of her third album. I half expected her to launch into a rendition of “You’re So Vain” at Fassbender. There’s some interesting historical revisionism revolving around JFK and Nixon that even conspiracy theorists would find preposterous-more X-Files than X-Men—but I appreciated the creative effort.
RC: It’s a movie about time travel, mutants and serious actors like Michael Fassbender saying lines like, “We received a message from the future,” so, of course, it’s a little preposterous, but wrapped up in the time bending plot are some interesting ideas about racism, tolerance, war and rebellion. Not usually the stuff of summer blockbusters, but the X-Men franchise has always been a bit brainier than most. At times it’s a bit too ponderous, but I’ll take that over the flash-and-trash of most CGI epics.
MB: Me too. I like the franchise for its superior acting, plotting, and its whiff of Ayn Rand objectivism. But it’s got a sense of humour too, which is rarely found in these epics. There’s a fantastic scene in this movie where Evan Peters as the young Quicksilver, who can move faster than human time, rearranges an entire tableau of bad guys so they wind up hurting themselves instead of our heroes. But he does it with such juvenile glee that it captures the joy of being a powerful mutant and an adolescent prankster. And casting height-challenged Peter Dinklage to play a scientist out to destroy the “outsiders” is brilliantly ironic.
RC: The actors are all good, but I would argue that the real stars of the film are the ideas. Magneto, Professor and Wolverine are all complex, cool characters that bring the film’s themes to life; all the rest is set dressing, except for the Quicksilver scene you mentioned. That was like The Matrix without Keanu’s hangdog expression.
MB: Oh, and just a warning, Richard. When I googled the film there was a link to a movie called XXX Men. Do NOT click on this link!
Richard will be in Liverpool, Nova Scotia to host the 112 year-old Astor Theatre’s celebration of its new digital projector, for an evening titled Setting the Stage for the Digital Age.
He grew up just a few minutes walk from the theatre, and has fond memories of taking in matinees, sneaking out of the house to see movies during the week and being in the theatre practically every weekend.
Watch Richard’s interview with CTV’s Morning Live host Heidi Petracek HERE!
Richard hosted a screening of Academy Award winner Roger Christian’s “lost” movie “Black Angel” at the Royal Theatre in Toronto in May, 2014. They discussed the film, the creation of R2D2 and the light sabres and Roger’s intimate connection with the “Star Wars” universe.
Check out the film at iTunes. Here’s some info: The mythological drama follows a Knight returning from the wars to find his land destroyed and his family dead from a great sickness. Returning to the wars with nothing to live for, he falls into a river and is dragged down by the weight of his armour. At the last breath, he manages to pull off his armoured helmet. Swimming to the surface he ascends into a strange land where he meets a maiden bound to the Black Angel. He vows to save her and fulfil his Knights quest to rescue a maiden. In a fight to the death he confronts the Black Angel, a mysterious figure, an angel of death. Especially commissioned by George Lucas to accompany STAR WARS; THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK on its world release wherever a short film was programmed. The 25min medieval fantasy was written and directed by Roger Christian.
“It’s the thing that won’t go away,” says journalist-turned-screenwriter-turned-playwright Thomas Hedley Jr. of his most famous work, Flashdance.
Sitting at the grand Ed Mirvish Theatre on Yonge Street, just blocks away from the strip bars that inspired him to write the original story, he talks about bringing Flashdance to the stage.
“If you are going to do this for the stage, you have to play by the rules of the stage,” he says.
“You need a great love story and the singing and the dancing has to advance the story and you are locked into those techniques. It’s happening in front of your eyes. It’s not three or four body doubles. It’s more honest. That makes it play stronger.”
In 1983, Flashdance was a phenomenon. The story of a welder-by-day, exotic-dancer-by-night Alex Owens (Jennifer Beals) and her dreams of going to ballet school, made off-the-shoulder sweatshirts fashionable and became the number one R-rated movie of the year.
“It was a zeitgeist thing,” he says. “It just clicked.”
Hedley conceived the story years before at a bar called Gimlets in downtown Toronto.
“My friend Robert Markle taught painting at the New School. Like de Kooning, he wanted to have movement in all of his nude studies, so he found this place and these girls were doing it. He said, ‘You gotta come. It’s my Sistine Chapel but you have to behave. I don’t want jerky behaviour.’ I went there and watched him draw them. We were very avuncular. We weren’t like guys on the make or anything. We were the genteel, older men in the back. We got to know (the girls) very well. I’m always drawn to girls 18 to 20 who want to make something dramatic out of themselves and need to be an outlaw before they go off and marry the plumber. There is an enormous energy from those creatures and they were like that.”
The story’s provocative origins grabbed Hollywood’s attention but didn’t guarantee that the story would get turned into a film.
“It was not on the track to being made,” says Hedley, “and then a couple of movies fell out at Paramount and they had a big meeting and said, ‘What do we have?’ (Frank) Mancuso, who was the head of marketing, said, ‘I could sell this one, with the naked girls. Let’s do that one.’ It was lucky that it got made at all. It was a random thing.”
The new stage musical, lands at Ed Mirvish Theatre (formerly The Canon) on May 27, 30 years after the movie was released. It features all the songs from the film — hits like Flashdance What a Feeling, Maniac and Gloria — alongside new songs by Canadian composer Robbie Roth.
It’s a labour of love that has kept Hedley busy for almost 10 years.
“It’s like Sammy Davis, Jr. singing Candy Man,” he says. “If I were him, I’d never want to sing Candy Man but you have to stick with it because it has its own life.”
Richard hosted a screening of the lost fantasy epic “Black Angel” with Academy Award winner Roger Christian at The Royal Theatre (608 College Street) in Toronto on Tuesday May 20, 2014 at 7 pm.
From the royal.to: AT LAST! THE LOST FANTASY EPIC THAT ONCE PRECEDED THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK!
Sir Maddox, a medieval knight, returns from the Crusades to find his home rife with sickness and his family gone. As he journeys through this mystical realm he encounters a mysterious and beautiful maiden, who appears to him as he is drowning. Sir Maddox learns that the maiden is being held prisoner by a black knight and in order to free her must confront her captor, the Black Angel.
Black Angel was a 1980 short film that was shown before the theatrical release of Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back in certain locales. It was the directorial debut of Star Wars art director Roger Christian and was thought to be lost until the film was rediscovered in December 2011. Witness the return of this extraordinary fantasy film to the big screen, in the company of its director and on a newly minted and restored digital print!
The Brady Bunch is pop culture’s most famous blended family.
The story of a “lovely lady who was bringing up three very lovely girls,” and a “man named Brady with three boys of his own,” who “would somehow form a family,” ran for fives seasons on TV, endlessly in reruns and even spawned two movies.
“The Brady Bunch is a live-action modern fairy tale of family,” says Christopher Knight who played Peter Brady on the original show. “In this context it’s less odd that it’s lasted for over 30 years; and why it may last in some respects as long as Mother Goose!”
He may be optimistic on the eternal appeal of his show, but he’s not wrong to imply that the idea of blended families could remain the subject of stories and movies for years to come.
This weekend “cinematic soulmates” Drew Barrymore and Adam Sandler reunite for a third time, following The Wedding Singer and 50 First Dates, for Blended, a romantic comedy about the mixing and mingling of two families.
Hollywood has been blending screen families for years. The grandfather of these blended family stories has to be Yours, Mine and Ours.
Based on the memoir Who Gets the Drumstick? by Helen Beardsley, this 1968 Lucille Ball, Henry Fonda film sees a widow with eight kids and a widower with 10 children (including Mike, played by Tim Matheson 10 years before he found fame in Animal House) become one big (almost) happy family.
The film was produced by Ball, who became so friendly with the Beardsleys she treated all 20 of them to a trip to Disneyland. ABC and Paramount Studios were so impressed with the film they gave the green light to the similarly themed The Brady Bunch show.
The same year, movie legend Doris Day made her final big-screen appearance in With Six You Get Egg Roll, a blended family story about a widow with three sons who marries a man with a daughter. The kids don’t see eye to eye, but soon figure out a way to live together. Released so soon after Yours, Mine and Ours, Eggroll got good reviews, but, as Roger Ebert wrote at the time, “would probably seem funnier if it didn’t suffer by comparison.”
Finally, Step Brothers is an R-rated look at extreme Peter Pan Syndrome. Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly play 40ish men who become bunkmates and reluctant stepbrothers when their parents (Mary Steenburgen and Richard Jenkins) marry. The familiar reprimand “Grow up and act your age” fell on deaf ears with these guys. It’s like watching two overweight, foul-mouthed 10-year-olds with thinning hair going at each other, but it is good vulgar fun.
Film critic and former local Richard Crouse gives a lot of credit to the Astor Theatre for developing his love of movies.
Richard Crouse, former local and film critic, is coming to Liverpool on May 24 as MC for the Astor Theatre’s celebration of its new digital projector.
“When I discovered it, I ended up spending all my time there,” he says. “It’s really the place that gave me my love of movies.”
Crouse is coming down to host the Astor Theatre’s celebration of its new digital projector, for an evening titled Setting the Stage for the Digital Age.Crouse grew up just a few minutes walk from the theatre, and has fond memories of taking in matinees, sneaking out of the house to see movies during the week and being in the theatre practically every weekend.He later moved to Toronto and started a career as a writer, at first mainly in the music scene with a little bit in the movies. Slowly the movie side of things grew, until he was spending most of his time in the theatres again.
“It’s really where I always belonged,” he says.
Moving to digital is an important step for the Astor Theatre, he says, with Hollywood rapidly going to digital distribution.
“More and more theatres who aren’t making the change are having a hard time with programming.”
It gives the Astor a solid footing for the future as well, so it will be able to show the latest movies for years to come. He also sees it as a way for the Astor to continue to be a central part of the community.
“In a lot of ways, these one screen movie theatres can be part of the heartbeat of the community,” he says.
“(The Astor) is doing such a great job that I wanted to come down there and help celebrate that.”
Before the main movie, two short films by Nova Scotian filmmakers will play. Crouse says it harkens back to the days were theatres would show a newsreel or short film before the main picture.
“I thought it would be fun to replicate that for our night, so I found two really fun short movies made by Nova Scotian directors that will play before the main feature,” he says.
One has the rather provocative title of Sex with Hot Robots, but Crouse says he doesn’t want to say much more about them to pique people’s interest.
The main movie is called The Disappeared, which was shot along the South Shore and in Halifax. Once the movie has finished, Crouse is hosting a Q&A with some of the actors from the movie. The audience will be able to ask questions as well, and Crouse will also be asking people what their first movie they saw at the theatre was or what their favourite memory is from the theatre.
As for himself, Crouse doesn’t remember the first movie he saw in the theatre, and figures he probably wasn’t even walking yet at the time. However he has many vivid memories of the theatre. There was seeing The Sting with his father, and going back several times to see the Poseidon Adventure.
Then there was a very memorable scene from a movie called The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, starring Paul Newman.
“Maybe my strongest memory of anything on the Astor screen was a shot in that movie, where someone shoots another character, and the cameral pans down to show the scene through the hole in the guy’s chest.”
Crouse has been the film critic for CTV’s Canada AM for the past 10 years, and has hosted TV shows on Bravo and the Independent Film Channel. In addition to TV work, he hosts a radio show on News Talk 1010 and writes two weekly columns, which are syndicated across the country.
He is also the author of 10 books, mostly on film, with the latest on Elvis Costello coming out next year.
“I like to keep busy. The hub of what I do is movie and movie related, but I spin it off into different things,” he says.
On May 24, he hopes to see lots of people come out and spend the evening at the Astor Theatre to celebrate its new era.
“I think it’s going to be a lot of fun. It’s going to be a little unexpected.”
Richard review “Godzilla” and “Million Dollar Arm” with “Canada AM” host Beverly Thomson.
“Godzilla” plays like “Jurassic Park” times two, the thrills have been amped up but manages to maintain the spirit of the original while updating them for a new audience.
By Richard Crouse & Mark Breslin – Metro Reel Guys
