Richard writes about the future of drive-thru restaurants in today’s Toronto Star.
“People in their cars are so lazy, that they don’t want to get out of their cars to eat,” said Jessie G. Kirby in 1921. He was the co-owner of Kirby’s Pig Stand in Dallas, Texas, which became the first drive-thru restaurant to open in the United States.
Six years after making his proclamation, Kirby’s was an undisputed success, serving more than 5,000 chicken-fried steak and pork sandwiches, onion rings, milkshakes and slabs of Texas toast every night… Read the whole thing HERE!
Richard is hosting The Doug Wright Awards on Saturday, June 18, at Harold Town Park, 725 Church Street, in Toronto, at 7 p.m. ET—hosted by Richard Crouse! Bring a blanket (a limited number of chairs will be available). You can also watch live on their YouTube channel.
The Doug Wright Awards is pleased to announce the nominees for its 18th annual honours, selected from works published by Canadian creators during the 2021 calendar year.
The Doug Wright Award for best book
The Shiatsung Project
Brigitte Archambault
Conundrum Press
The Rock From the Sky
Jon Klassen
Candlewick Press
Stone Fruit
Lee Lai
Fantagraphics
Fictional Father
Joe Ollmann
Drawn & Quarterly
The Nipper: The Doug Wright Award for emerging talent
Sofia Alarcon Endsickness No. 1
Self-published
Sami Alwani The Pleasure of the Text
Conundrum Press
Brigitte Archambault The Shiatsung Project
Conundrum Press
Alexander Laird Sleemor Gank: Burg Land No. 1
Self-published
Kyle Simmers and Ryan Danny Owen Pass Me By: Gone Fishin’ and Pass Me By: Electric Vice
Renegade Arts Entertainment
The Pigskin Peters: The Doug Wright Award for best small- or micro-press book
Endsickness No. 1
Sofia Alarcon
Self-published
Fruit/Soil
Kim Edgar
Moniker Press
The Northern Gaze
Akeeshoo Chislett, Chris Caldwell, Cole Pauls, Andrew Sharp, Juliann Fraser, Esther Bordet, Alison McCreesh, Keith Verbonac, Princess J; edited by Kim Edgar
Hecate Press
Sleemor Gank: Burg Land No. 1
Alexander Laird
Self-published
Dwellings No. 2
Jay Stephens
Black Eye Books
The Egghead: The Doug Wright Award for best kids’ book
Simon and Chester: Super Sleepover!
Cale Atkinson
Tundra Books
Otter Lagoon
Mike Deas and Nancy Deas
Orca Book Publishers
Living with Viola
Rosena Fung
Annick Press
Shirley and Jamila’s Big Fall
Gillian Goerz
Dial Books for Young Readers
Over the Shop
JonArno Lawson and Qin Leng
Candlewick Press
Etty Darwin and the Four Pebble Problem
Lauren Soloy
Tundra Books
This year, 153 entries by Canadian authors and artists were submitted to the Doug Wright Awards in four categories. Nominees and winners were chosen by a panel of three judges per category. Books from approximately 40 publishers were submitted, along with more than three dozen self-published works.
Creators with multiple nominations include Sofia Alarcon, Brigitte Archambault, and Alexander Laird.
Publishers of multiple nominees include Candlewick Press, Conundrum Press, Drawn & Quarterly, and Tundra Books.
Each winner will receive a small cash prize, and the winner of The Nipper will be awarded a week-long retreat at the Valleyview Artist Retreat, in Caledon, Ontario. Congratulations to all of this year’s nominees!
Giants of the North: The Canadian Cartoonist Hall of Fame
This year’s Giants of the North inductee is Margaret Bloy Graham (1921–2015), a children’s book creator, best known for her work on Harry the Dirty Dog.
The Ceremony
The Doug Wright Awards returns live and in-person for 2022, with host Richard Crouse, in the open air of Harold Town Park, 725 Church Street (on the north side of Church, directly behind the Toronto Reference Library), on Saturday, June 18th, at 7 p.m. ET. The event will also be livestreamed on YouTube. The Doug Wright Awards is a featured event of the Toronto Comic Arts Festival.
Judges
Thanks to this year’s judges: Sami Alwani, David Craig, Jamie Coville, Inderjit Deogun, Mike Donachie, Ebony Flowers, Napatsi Folger, Jamie Michaels, Peter Phillips, Veronica Post, Shea Proulx, and Sherwin Tija.
About the Doug Wright Awards
The Doug Wright Awards were founded in 2005 to celebrate excellence in the field of Canadian comics. The awards are named for Doug Wright (1917–1983), the creator of the long-running strip Doug Wright’s Family (a.k.a. Nipper), one of the most widely read and loved Canadian comics of the twentieth century.
The opening minutes of “Lightyear,” the new, Pixar origin story now playing in theatres, inform us that what we are about to see is the film that inspired “Toy Story’s” Buzz Lightyear character. In other words, it’s the movie that inspired the merch that inspired a movie that inspired even more merch.
Chris Evans voices the square-jawed, heroic and slightly goofy Space Ranger Buzz Lightyear. After a disastrous crash landing on a strange planet, his attempt to rescue the crew, including Alisha Hawthorne (Uzo Aduba), his best friend and commanding officer, goes wrong, leaving everyone stranded on a hostile planet 4.2 million light-years from Earth. His famous Space Rangers helmet weighs heavy on his head. “Everyone is stuck here because of me,” he says.
Determined to return home Buzz embarks on a series of experimental flights using various configurations of jet fuel, trying to find the right formula to achieve the hyper speed needed to cut through space and time.
But something strange happens. For every minute he’s in space, a year passes back on the planet. As Buzz tries trip after trip, his BFF Alisha ages, gets married has a child, and later a grandchild Izzy (Keke Palmer), while Buzz remains, more or less, unchanged.
On the planet, sixty years has passed before Buzz, and his smart and adorable computer companion cat Sox (Peter Sohn) try one last test trip, one that will unite him with Izzy, her “volunteer team of motivated cadets” and Zurg, a menacing force with an army of robots.
At first blush, “Lightyear” may seem like the origin story we don’t really need. Twenty-seven years, three sequels, one direct to video flick and a television series later, you wouldn’t think there would be much left to say about the character, but Pixar has found a way.
“Lightyear” is a Pixar film through and through. You expect the top-notch animation, some cool looking robots, cutesy side characters and the occasional laugh for parents and kids. Less expected is how fun the action-adventure is and how effective the patented poignant Pixar moments are.
It’s a hero’s journey, one that actually humanizes the little hunk of talking plastic (or coded series of bits and bytes) and imbues a catchphrase like “To infinity and beyond” with a new, heartfelt meaning.
“Lightyear” may well inspire a renaissance in the character and spawn more toys, but this movie is much more than merch.
I compare the experience of watching “Spiderhead,” a new psychological prison thriller starring Chris Hemsworth, Jurnee Smollett and Miles Teller and now streaming on Netflix, with going to a nice restaurant with a dirty bathroom. The food, service and atmosphere are top notch, but go to the restroom after dinner and if it’s dirty, that’s what you’ll remember most about your visit.
Such is the fate of “Spiderhead,” a movie that makes a good impression right up until the final minutes.
Hemsworth is visionary Steve Abnesti, a chemist who runs Spiderhead, a remote penal institution where his experimental, mind-altering drugs are tested on inmates. Prisoners live in beautiful cells that resemble hip hotel rooms and eat gourmet food. There are no bars on the doors and not a single orange jumpsuit in sight. “Your presence in this facility,” says Abnesti, “while technically a punishment, is a privilege.”
In return for the relaxed rules and relative luxury of the prison, inmates are equipped with a module or Mobi-Pak containing mood altering drugs. Administered by the amiable Abnesti, these concoctions are part of a larger study analyze the effects of manipulating emotions. “Our work will save lives,” says Abnesti. “Not just one life, many lives. We’re making the world a better place.”
Inmate Jeff (Teller) is Abnesti’s go to guinea pig. The pair have a special bond forged over a shared belief that the inmate experiments are for the good of all humanity. But when Jeff is forced into partaking in a cruel drug trial, he suspects his trust has been misplaced. “The time to worry about crossing lines,” Abnesti says, “was a lot of lines ago.”
Based on the New Yorker short story “Escape from Spiderhead” by George Saunders, the film explores moral dilemmas and the ethical quandary of exerting control over the powerless for personal gain. The very idea of forced injections is an even bigger hot button topic than when Saunders wrote the short story.
So why did I feel like I just left a dirty bathroom as the end credits rolled?
It’s the recency theory. The last thing you see is the thing that makes the lasting impression and “Spiderhead,” despite an interesting premise, some good performances and a growing atmosphere of apprehension and mistrust, rushes the ending to the point where you wonder if the filmmakers ran out of film, time or interest in the story. Tonally, the all-of-a-sudden action packed ending feels tacked on and uninspired.
Ultimately, “Spiderhead” disappoints because it gets so much right, but, in the end, doesn’t trust the idea-driven story to satisfy.
“Life is not an oyster,” says Maurice Flitcroft in “The Phantom of the Open,” a new feel-good film starring Mark Rylance and now playing in theatres. “It’s a barnacle.” It’s a rare moment of despair for the endlessly optimist man who followed his passions, in an unlikely journey to becoming a British folk hero.
Flitcroft, a 46-year-old crane operator I the same shipyard in Barrow-in-Furness, England, where his father and grandfather worked, but after dabbling in painting, music and even stunt driving, he adopted the Oscar Wilde quote, “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars,” as his mantra.
He encourages his wife Jean (Sally Hawkins), his stepson Michael (Jake Davies) and twins Gene and James (Christian and Jonah Lees) to go for it and live their dreams.
In 1976, facing unemployment, Flitcroft takes up golf with an eye toward playing in the oldest golf tournament in the world, the British Open. He’s never played before, but has determination, heart and a belief, “an open championship should be open to everyone.”
Unbelievably (although this is a true story) he qualifies and in the qualifying round scores a catastrophic 121, 49 over par, a record for worst score that has yet to be broken. British Open organizer Keith Mackenzie (Rhys Ifans) is outraged—”I want him banned from every club in the country!”— but the press love the plucky golfer’s underdog story and the public, both at home and abroad, embrace him as an inspiration. “Practice is the road to perfection,” he says.
“The Phantom of the Open” is as sweet as Flitcroft’s tea. He takes six sugars in every cuppa, and that sugar rush keeps him and the movie moving forward.
Falling in line with Brit, true-to-lie-feel-good movies like “Fisherman’s Friends,” “Eddie the Eagle” and “Calendar Girls,” or jovial television shows like “Ted Lasso,” this one is kept aloft by masterfully amiable performances from the cast led by Rylance and Hawkins.
Rylance practically beams light as the upbeat dreamer. What could have been a caricature of a whimsical fantasist is tempered by the actor’s considerable comedic skill as well as his ability to find the core of humanity in every character he plays. It would have been easy to play Flitcroft as a broad character with a head full of dreams and nothing more, but Rylance sees to it that we see the person not the farce.
“The Phantom of the Open” is kind of old fashioned, but contains solid laughs and dives deep to reveal the class prejudices the crane operator suffered as he pursued bis dream. Most importantly, it is about the importance of following your heart, no matter where it takes you, to find happiness.
“The stuff I build isn’t for everyone,” says Welsh inventor Brian (David Earl) in “Brian and Charles,” a quirky new comedy now playing in theatres, “but that’s OK by me.”
Similarly, the film isn’t built for everyone, but those with a taste for sweet-natured eccentricity will find much to like here.
Brian leads a solitary life working on his whimsical inventions, like a puzzle made from ping pong balls, an airborne cuckoo clock, an egg belt and trawler net shoes. “They don’t always work,” he says. “but I’ve got so many ideas up here I just move on to the next one. Doesn’t bother me.”
He‘s a dreamer with an active imagination and a shed stuffed with spare parts, like a broken washing machine and a mannequin head, which he uses to cobble together an ungainly, seven-foot tall robot. Unlike most of his other creations, the “very, very cheeky robot” actually works. “I’ve learned building a robot is like making a cake,” says Brian. “You start off wanting a Victorian Sponge and wind up with a Blancmange.”
With a blue light that gives his one eye a twinkle, the artificially intelligent automaton names himself Charles Petrescu (Chris Hayward) and quickly becomes Brian’s best friend. “My tummy is a washing machine!” he exclaims. They watch television together, share Brian’s favorite cabbage-based dishes for dinner and even the occasional hula dance.
As Charles “grows up” he becomes truculent. He wants to leave Brian’s rural Welsh village to see the world and listens to heavy metal music that cuts through the quiet of Brian’s cottage like a knife blade. His new bad attitude also brings him to the attention of town bully Eddie (Jamie Michie) who wants Charles for his own, to entertain his kids.
Shot mockumentary style, “Brian and Charles” is an oddball portrait of a lonely man who finds companionship, a sense of purpose and courage in an unlikely way. The title characters, with the help of Hazel (Louise Brealey), a local woman (and possible love interest), become a family, with all the ups and downs that suggests.
“Brian and Charles” is sweet, bizarre and quietly funny, with a scene stealing performance from Hayward, whose voice work as Charles is both charming and hilarious. The film has a very distinct voice, heavy on the awkward humor, that won’t be for everyone. But for every gag that feels stretched there is an undercurrent of amiability that draws the viewer in.
Eddie, the film’s bully, is played with too hard an edge and seems somewhat out of place, but apart from that one misstep, “Brian and Charles” is a singular, original take on finding your logical, not biological family.
“Bigger,” says Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) in the trailer for “Jurassic World Dominion.” “Why do they always have to be bigger?”
It’s a legit question. The good doctor is, of course, referring to the dinosaurs that, once again, are causing problems in our modern world.
But the question might also apply to the movie itself.
The follow-up to “Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom,” and the sixth and final film in the franchise, is bigger and louder than the movies that came before it, but as a viewer you may ask yourself, “Why?”
Set four years after Jurassic Park was destroyed by an erupting volcano, “Jurassic World Dominion” begins with dinosaurs let loose worldwide, living among humans.
Dino whisperer Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) and girlfriend, founder of the Dinosaur Protection Group Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard), are in hiding, protecting Maisie Lockwood (Isabella Sermon). As a teenage clone of Jurassic Park co-founder Benjamin Lockwood’s daughter, her DNA is of great interest to Lewis Dodgson (Campbell Scott), the villainous CEO of Biosyn. When she is kidnapped, Owen and Claire give chase.
At the same time, locusts with prehistoric DNA devastate the globe’s grain supply, prompting paleobotanists Ellie Sadler (Laura Dern) and Alan Grant (Sam Neill) to launch an investigation. Their search for answers leads them to Biosyn and a familiar face, chaos theory mathematician Ian Malcolm (Goldblum).
The dinosaurs and the story may be bigger than the last time round, but remember, bigger is not always better. The original “Jurassic” franchise worked because if a streamlined simplicity to the storytelling mixed with masterful execution. Oh, and lots of dinosaurs.
“Jurassic World Dominion” has lots of dinosaurs and some fan service but misses the mark otherwise. It is a talky dino-bore with none of the suspense that made “Jurassic Park” edge of your seat stuff. The action scenes are murky and few-and-far-between, there’s lots of dodgy CGI and unlike the reconstituted dinosaurs, it feels lifeless. Luckily Goldblum reappears after a quick cameo off the top to shake things up with his trademarked droll wit in the third act.
Near the beginning of the film Dern’s character Ellie sees a small dinosaur and coos, “this never gets old.” She clearly hasn’t seen “Jurassic World Dominion.”
“Hustle,” a new sports dramedy staring Adam Sandler, now streaming on Netflix, is an underdog story like “Rocky,” if that movie featured Burgess Meredith’s name above the title instead of Sylvester Stallone.
Sandler plays Stanley Sugarman, a veteran basketball scout for the Philadelphia 76ers. Decades spent on the road searching for new talent have left him weary and jaded, missing his wife (Queen Latifah) and daughter (Jordan Hull).
His new boss, the arrogant Vince Merrick (Ben Foster), isn’t making the job any easier. The two butt heads over Stanley’s latest find, Spanish b-ball phenom Bo Cruz (NBA star Juancho Hernangomez). On the court Bo is all unrefined power, used to hustling unsuspecting players for cash. Stanley sees greatness in him, but Bo’s troubled past raises alarms with Merrick and the 76ers management.
Convinced he has a winner, Stanley brings Bo to the United States. They form a bond based on their love of basketball and family, and together set out to prove that they have what it takes to succeed on the court and in life.
“Hustle” may be formulaic and easy to read, but it succeeds because of the chemistry between Sandler and Hernangomez. What begins as an odd couple pairing quickly becomes something more. This isn’t “Billy Madison” with a basketball, it’s a story of fathers and sons, of mentorship, one that provides uplift while avoiding the sentimentality that often shoehorns its way into movies like this.
Sandler’s performance is simple. It’s not as showy as his work in “Uncut Gems” or “Punch Drunk Love.” Instead, he infuses Stanley with world weariness tempered with resilience, to create a sincere portrait of a man and the game he loves. Screenwriters Taylor Materne and Will Fetters nail the seriocomic tone, feeding Sandler a string of self-depreciating one-liners that help define the character.
Director Jeremiah Zagar and cinematographer Zak Mulligan capture the excitement of the game with frenetic on-court camera work that heightens the drama and showcases the NBA action and player skills.
“Hustle” is an upbeat, predictable sports story but succeeds because of the stakes. You’ll know where this story is going (NO SPOILERS HERE) but it transcends the usual sports narrative because the characters have it all on the line. It’s not about the basketball, really, it’s more about the struggle of overcoming adversity and thus has a universal appeal even if you’ve never heard of an Alley-Oop.
Author Jane Austen passed away, age 41, in 1817 but her influence has proven to be timeless. Her novels, literary studies in parody, burlesque and irony mixed with social commentary, have enjoyed second lives in everything from “Clueless,” an update of “Emma” set in Beverly Hills, and the self-explanatory “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.”
Add to the list, just in time for Pride Month, “Fire Island,” a new LGBTQ2+ romantic comedy on Disney+, based on Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice.”
Joel Kim Booster stars as Noah, part of a twentysomething group of friends who gather every year for a week of mixing and mingling at a Fire Island house owned by their friend and den mother Erin (Margaret Cho). It is a tradition and a sacred “gay Disney World” weekend for bookworm Max (Torian Miller), pleasure seekers Luke (Matt Rogers) and Keegan (Tomas Matos) and Noah’s best friend Howie (“Saturday Night Live’s” Bowen Yang) who now lives in San Francisco but makes the trip every year.
Determined to arrange a love match, or at least a hook-up, for the insecure Howie, Noah is on the look-out for eligible men.
Enter the “prejudice” part of the story, the Mr. Darcy character, Will (Conrad Ricamora). He’s a snobby, wealthy man visiting the island with a gaggle of his lawyerin’ and doctorin’ friends. Will’s friend Charlie (James Scully) and Howie hit it off, but will Noah and Will be able to overcome their differences and become friends?
Originally created as a series on the now-defunct Quibi service, “Fire Island” has expanded to feature length with its exploration (by way of Austen) of class and status intact. Booster, who stars and wrote the script, transposes Austen’s corsets and petticoats for Speedos and wild drug and booze fueled parties but maintains the source material’s study of overcoming obstacles for true love, class status and, especially in reference to Noah’s clique, the strength of a family network. The bond between the guys is at is the heart of this R-rated movie and helps anchor the raunchier and lighter “Legally Blonde” moments.
Director Andrew Ahn keeps up the pace, and makes Fire Island look like a million-dollar getaway. That glossy style, combined with Austen’s sensibility, adds up to an entertaining comedy of manners; lightweight, but celebratory.
