Star Wars fans will apparently get the chance to watch the entire Disney+ “Obi-Wan Kenobi” series as one big movie event on June 22, 2022 at the Scotiabank Theatre in Toronto.
“Obi-Wan Kenobi” begins 10 years after the dramatic events of “Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith” where Obi-Wan Kenobi faced his greatest defeat-the downfall and corruption of his best friend and Jedi apprentice, Anakin Skywalker, who turned to the dark side as evil Sith Lord Darth Vader. This event will feature a live Q&A, hosted by Richard, with Hayden Christensen (Darth Vader) and director Deborah Chow.
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!
This week on the Richard Crouse Show we meet actor and musician Noah Reid. He became involved in theatre around age six, has been regularly appearing on television since his high school years and has appeared in films like “Buffaloed” and “Disappearance at Clifton Hill,” but it was his performance as Patrick Brewer, business partner and later husband, of Dan Levy’s character David on “Schitt’s Creek” that made him a household name.
Patrick was already a well-loved character on the series when, in season 4, episode 6, he serenaded his David with a very familiar tune. The “Simply the Best” scene is one of the most emotional scenes in the entire series for the iconic couple, and is now a fan favorite. It also taught us something new about Noah Reid… he can really sing.
Turns out, he’s an accomplished musicians with three albums featuring his powerful vocals and honest delivery. His first two albums, “Songs from a Broken Chair” and “Gemini,” collectively have garnered 145 million streams, two nominations at the 2022 Canadian Folk Music Awards in the Songwriter of the Year and New/Emerging Artist of the Year categories and landed Noah on four Billboard charts. His latest album is “Adjustments,” which will be available everywhere you legally download and buy music this month.
We get to know Noah, and talk about his latest, on-going project, starring on Broadway in “The Minutes,” a show about the inner-workings of a city council meeting in the fictional town of Big Cherry.
Each week on the nationally syndicated Richard Crouse Show, Canada’s most recognized movie critic brings together some of the most interesting and opinionated people from the movies, television and music to put a fresh spin on news from the world of lifestyle and pop-culture. Tune into this show to hear in-depth interviews with actors and directors, to find out what’s going on behind the scenes of your favourite shows and movies and get a new take on current trends. Recent guests include Ethan Hawke, director Brad Bird, comedian Gilbert Gottfried, Eric Roberts, Brian Henson, Jonathan Goldsmith a.k.a. “The most interesting man in the world,” and best selling author Linwood Barclay.
Listen to the show live here:
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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.
Star Wars fans will apparently get the chance to watch the entire Disney+ “Obi-Wan Kenobi” series as one big movie event on June 22, 2022 at the Scotiabank Theatre in Toronto.
