As one half of Hipgnosis, Aubrey “Po” Powell helped create some of the most indelible images of the 1970s. If you you love the album covers for Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side Of The Moon, “Band On The Run” by Paul McCartney and Wings and Led Zeppelin’s “Houses Of The Holy” join us tonight at the Scotiabank Theatre in Toronto (259 Richmond Street West) at 7:05 pm. I’ll be speaking to him about the stories behind these incredible album designs.
“Transformers: Rise of the Beasts,” the globe-trotting seventh installment in the “Transformers” live-action film series, is both a sequel and a prequel. Set in 1994, it wedges the story between the events of “Bumblebee,” set in 1987, and “Transformers,” which takes place in 2007.
Primarily based on Hasbro’s “Beast Wars” storyline, it reboots the franchise with a new cast and a new tribe of Transformers.
The story begins as Noah (Anthony Ramos), an unemployed Brooklyn-based electronics expert, desperate for cash to help his ailing little brother, steals a silver-blue Porsche 964 Carrera RS 3.8. What he doesn’t realize is that the car is actually a rebellious Autobot named Mirage (voice of Pete Davidson) with the ability turn invisible and create illusions.
Meanwhile, while working at a museum on Ellis Island, artifact researcher Elena (Dominique Fishback) discovers a bird sculpture with unusual markings and the symbol of the Maximals, the mostly peaceful descendants of the Autobots. More fuel-efficient than their ancestors, with a cry of “Maximals, MAXIMIZE,” they transform into animals like a western lowland gorilla (Ron Perlman), a peregrine falcon (Michelle Yeoh), a white rhinoceros (David Sobolov) or a cheetah (Tongayi Chirisa).
Inadvertently engaging a key for interdimensional space travel, Elena attracts the attention of the heroic Optimus Prime (voice of Peter Cullen), the Maximals, the dark, planet-destroying god Unicron (Colman Domingo) and an evil subgroup of the Decepticons called the Terrorcons.
“Once I have this key,” snarls Unicron, “I alone will reign supreme.”
If the planet is to be saved, the Autobots, Maximals, Noah and Elena must join forces, travel to a remote village in Peru and secure the all-powerful key. “This is about the fate of all living things,” says Optimus Primal (Perlman).
“Transformers: Rise of the Beasts” delivers what fans expect from the franchise. The transformations from car-to-character are cool, the action scenes deliver the expected heavy metal punch, Optimus Prime is as stentorian as ever and the Maximals are underused, but pretty cool.
Director Steve Caple Jr. also adds in an appealing human element with the addition of Ramos and Fishback, and even the alien robots are imbued with a bit more soul—and in Mirage’s case, more personality—than usual.
It’s a shame then, that the simple story isn’t more interesting. The individual elements work well, in some cases better than in Michael Bay’s franchise instalments, but we’ve seen too many end-of-the-world scenarios in recent years. It may be Armageddon time, but familiarity breeds, well, maybe not contempt, but complacency. The stakes just don’t seem all that high because they’re hung on a predictable story with a generic superhero premise.
Having said all that, “Transformers: Rise of the Beasts” is a good time at the movies. Sure, it could use a little more air in the tires in the mid-section and there is way too much exposition as we reach the end game, but it delivers what matters to fans: rock ‘em, sock ‘em robot action writ large.
“I don’t think they’ve invented a word for what Dali is,” says a friend of the famous Spanish surrealist painter in the new film “Daliland,” in select theatres and streaming on VOD. Indeed, he leaves behind a complicated legacy.
By the 1970s, Dali was probably the most famous living artist in the world.Treating life like one never ending carnival, he was as famous for the surrealism and symbolism in his work as he was for his celebrated up-turned moustache and public hijinks, like walking an anteater on a leash for the paparazzi.
This story begins in 1974 as the jejune James (Christopher Briney) becomes Dali’s (Ben Kingsley) assistant. The innocent, former art school student idolizes the painter, but, as he is thrust into the eccentric artist’s decadent lifestyle, he learns there is trouble in Daliland. “Sometimes It can be so hard being Dali,” says the artist.
Dali’s complex relationship with wife Gala (Barbara Sukowa) complicates both the artist’s professional and personal life. More about money than marriage, she is her husband’s mother figure and muse, but also siphons his bank accounts to fund the musical aspirations of her latest boyfriend, Jeff (Zachary Nachbar-Seckel), a singer best known for his starring role in “Jesus Christ Superstar.”
As James becomes embedded in the sideshow that has become Dali’s life, he becomes aware of the fraud and backroom deals that keep the artist’s coffers stuffed with cash.
“Daliland” isn’t so much a biography of the artist, even though there are many biographical details on display, including flashbacks to his younger life where he is played by Ezra Miller. Instead, it is a portrait of a time, of the moment when fine art became commodified and artists became marketers as well as painters. As a personality, Dali was, arguably, more famous than his work, but it was his celebrity enabled him to charge more per painting, and, ultimately dupe people into buying fakes because of the demand for his name.
Director Mary Harron paints a vivid picture of the cult of celebrity, and the price Dali paid for the quest for fame. A once revered artist, he died famous, but with a tarnished legacy. His commitment to life as the greatest form of art—the parties, the publicity stunts, the hedonism, self-mythologizing, etc—overshadowed his true gift, his ability to create truly unique artistic works. Add to that, shady business deals and money generating scams, and you have a colorful story tinged with tragedy.
Kingsley embraces Dali’s larger-than-life, “you’re in the presence of genius,” side, but never simply plays the caricature. His performance centers the outlandish story with humanity, and as the character ages, empathy for the man behind the moustache.
“Daliland” features interesting work from Sukowa as the fiery Gala and Kingsley, but does a better job at essaying the decadence of this pivotal moment in art history than providing a complete portrait of its subject.
Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey “Po” Powell created some of the most famous images of the 1960s and ‘70s. Under their design company name Hipgnosis, they created album covers that often garnered as much attention as the music on the LPs.
“Squaring the Circle (The Story of Hipgnosis),” a new documentary, directed by legendary photographer Anton Corbijn, and now playing In theatres, reveals the secret sauce that went into making classic covers like Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” and “Wish You Were Here,” Paul McCartney and Wings’ “Band on the Run” and Led Zeppelin’s “Houses of the Holy.”
Told first-hand by Powell, who describes the relationship with his late, prickly partner Thorgerson with great detail and love, the story begins in the late Sixties in the Cambridge, England art scene, and a friendship with the band Pink Floyd.
Falling into a career as a photographer, Powell took the cover photos for Floyd’s second album “Saucerful of Secrets,” while Thorgerson created the wild psychedelic images that framed the band’s pictures. The success of that collaboration led to the creation of Hipgnosis, a company name created as a portmanteau of “hip” for their new and cool approach, and “gnostic,” meaning “wise.”
Using new interviews with Peter Gabriel, Paul McCartney, Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, Noel Gallagher, David Gilmour and Roger Waters, combined with archival footage and interviews, Corbijn goes behind the scenes to reveal the fiery personalities and off-kilter creative process that made Hipgnosis so unique.
The creative inspiration seems to have sparked by the chalk and cheese relationship between Thorgerson and Powell. Powell admits upfront that he was almost as interested in the money as he was the art—“I just wanted to make money and be successful and do the things I wanted to do,” he says.—whereas Thorgerson was a spendthrift, who never let a budget get in the way of a good idea. That push and pull ultimately blew their relationship and company apart, but until punk rock came along, and their extravagantly art designed covers went out of style, the pair, despite their differences, created magic.
Along the way are great stories about how the giant, inflatable pig featured on the cover of Pink Floyd’s “Animals” album, drifted away from the shoot and landed in a farmer’s field, and how Thorgerson once offered Led Zeppelin a cover idea originally designed for Judas Priest. Then there is the story of “Wish You Were Here’s” burning man cover and the Wings Greatest Hits compilation cover, a photo of a small statue shot on location on a snow covered mountaintop in the Swiss Alps. “There was a lot of that in those days,” says McCartney, referring to the cover’s ridiculous cost. “We loved it. It looked great, but then someone said, ‘You could have just gone in a studio in London, and just got a big pile of salt and stuck the statue on top of it. But, you know, that’s just too easy.”
In the end it was changing tastes and shrinking record company budgets that brought the Hipgnosis era to a close, but, as one expert says, until that moment, they were a “lens of fascinating excess.”
Corbijn’s doc is straightforward, austere almost, with little of the wild excess or off-the-hook imagination that typified the work of its subject, but “Squaring the Circle” does do a great job of placing the album artwork in context of its time and timelessness. “There’s a great quote from someone,” says Gallagher, “’Vinyl is like the poor man’s art collection. The posh people have the art on the wall. Working class people have art on the floor, stacked against the wall.’”
Richard hosted the one year anniversary of “Harry Potter and the The Cursed Child” live onstage at the Ed Mirvish Theatre on Yonge Street in Toronto. The show has welcomed more than 500,000 audience members – and half of those have been new theatre goers – and closes on July 2, 2023.
After sitting through all two-and-a-quarter hours of “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse,” the latest animated adventure of the universe jumping superhero, your spidey senses won’t be the only thing left tingling.
A wild pop culture pastiche of visual styles that jumps off the screen in ways that will give your eyeballs a Charles Atlas style workout, it is a full-body experience on the big screen.
Gwen Stacy (voice of Hailee Steinfeld) and Miles Morales (voice of Shameik Moore) return from 2018’s “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.” Both are he off-spring of police officers, and both have secret identities as Spider-Woman and Spider-Man, respectively.
When Gwen becomes estranged from her father, she disappears into the Spider-Verse, a series of connected but independent universes, each with its own brand of Spider-People. As The Spot (voice of Jason Schwartzman), a villain covered in portals that allow him to transport from place to place, threatens to shred the very fabric of the Multi-Verse, Gwen and Miles go interdimensional to fight the new threat.
There they find Spider-HQ, sore of a Quantico for all various and sundry Spider-Folks, like Spider-Woman (voice of Issa Rae), Spider-Punk (voice of Daniel Kaluuya) and alpha arachnid Miguel O’Hara (voice of Oscar Isaac). When Mile inadvertently disrupts the Spider-Verse he learns an important lesson about the sacrifice required to be a Spider-Man.
“Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” is a spider web of Marvel mythology, relationship drama, action and some very funny moments, combined with extraordinary, state-of-the-art visuals. In the action scenes, co-directors Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers and Justin K. Thompson pull out all the stops to create a singular experience that has more to do with the anarchic spirit of the original comic books than the recent spate of superhero movies. Stylish and frenetic, the action scenes are so colourful they often look like an artist’s paint-palette exploded on the screen.
When the film isn’t in motion, it takes the time to explore the relationships between parents and kids, with the added twist of superheroes trying to figure out their place in the world (or should that be worlds?), while trying to navigate their teens. It adds themes of loneliness, responsibility vs. obligation and having autonomy over one’s own life. Through Gwen and Miles, and a heaping helping of action, the importance of writing one’s own life story is the focus of the story.
Ultimately, the success of “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” isn’t simply about the eye-popping nature of the visuals or the humour or the emotional aspect of the story. All are great, but what makes it special is that it feels fresh. It’s a superhero movie, with all the world saving tropes you expect, but it feels more like a comic book come to life than most, if any, other superhero flick.
The Boogeyman may be the most prevalent and terrifying creature to haunt the night. With no specific appearance, the Boogeyman can be anyone or anything that hides in the dark recesses of your mind, or under your bed.
In the new horror film, “The Boogeyman,” based on Stephen King’s short story of the same name from the 1978 anthology “Night Shift,” and now playing in theatres, the titular character is a murderous, malevolent force who feeds off grief.
The movie focusses on 16-year-old Sadie (“Yellowjackets” star Sophie Thatcher) and younger sister Sawyer Harper (Vivien Lyra Blair), both still smarting from the tragic death of the mother. Their father, therapist Will (Chris Messina), is so consumed by his own grief he is unable to provide the support his daughters need.
When Lester (David Dastmalchian), a disturbed man who claims that someone or something killed his children, shows up at their home, desperate for help, he unwittingly brings with him a dangerous entity that feasts on their anguish.
At first Sadie and Sawyer’s fear of this mysterious presence is brushed off as a “manifestation” of their imaginations. “When there are scary things we don’t understand,” says Dr. Weller (LisaGay Hamilton), “our minds try and fill in the blanks.”
As the terror continues, however, Will begins to take the danger seriously, as Sadie seeks ways to neutralize the threat.
“The Boogeyman” is another entry in the low light horror movie sweepstakes. Director Rob Savage keeps the aperture turned down, shooting in most scenes in the near dark, which is a perfect incubator for horror, but begs the question, “If the boogeyman only comes in the dark, why not turn on the lights?”
That quibble aside, “The Boogeyman” is an effective slow-burn tale of terror. It takes its time with the scares, introducing jump scares and slamming doors early on, building anxiety and tension, before getting face-to-face with the face of evil.
The monster itself is nothing much special, but the idea of it is the stuff of nightmares. A creature that feeds off you at your lowest point, that “likes to play with its food” to “scare them until they’re done,” is something that can burrow its way deep into your subconscious. It is at the center of the film, but Savage opts for jump scares over the psychological, blunting some of the story’s true emotional horror.
Having said that, the relationship between the two sisters ups the ante as Sadie risks it all to protect her younger sibling.
“The Boogeyman” is more anxiety inducing than actually scary, but it is an interesting take on grief, and how sometimes you have to put the past behind you to move forward.
“Bones of Crows,” a new period drama now playing in theatres, covers decades of history, but is tied to recent, horrifying events.
Jumping through time, from the 1800s to the 2020s, the story of the intergenerational trauma caused by the Canadian residential school system, focusses on the family of Aline Spears (Grace Dove). A Cree woman born to a large, happy family in 1930s Manitoba, everything changes when Aline and her siblings are forcibly taken from their parents who are told they will be thrown in prison if they don’t sign over their children to the residential school system.
Abused, physically and emotionally—“I could kill you and bury you out back and nobody would care,” a priest snarls at the headstrong Aline.—the priests and nuns systematically attempt to strip the siblings of their Indigenous heritage, religion and identity, forcing them to assimilate them into the dominant Canadian culture. It is, as one character says, “a lesson in unrelenting cruelty.”
During World War II Aline escapes the horrors of the school by enlisting in the Canadian Army.
“The only way we can make sure they don’t send you back to that school is to send you to war.” During her raining to become part of an elite squad of code talkers who used the Cree language to disguise military intelligence, she meets and marries Adam (Phillip Lewitski).
Returning home from war to raise their family, Adam suffers PTSD, while Aline is haunted by the abuse she suffered at the hands of her sadistic teachers.
As the movie skips through time, we learn more about the residential school, Aline’s life after the war, her sister’s legal woes and the next generation, the children that carry the trauma in their DNA.
The process of healing is ever present, however, as Aline remembers the words her mother said to her as she enlisted in the army. “You be everything you are meant to be. Don’t let the darkness win. Don’t let them win.”
Métis-Dene writer and director Marie Clements covers a great deal of ground, much of it hard going. The cruelty and attempts to dehumanize Indigenous youth are brought to horrific life, and the depictions of residential schools; child abuse, sexual and psychological abuse and racism may be very unsettling for many viewers.
But even though the film chronicles a century of generational trauma, it is also a celebration of Cree resilience and tradition. There are eye-opening depictions of atrocities, necessary to tell the story, but as Aline confronts the past, there is also a sense of justice.
It is a story of hard truths, told with skill—despite its sprawling nature, it doesn’t feel bloated—and emotion that gets to the heart of how generational trauma forever altered the lives of the characters.
As one half of Hipgnosis, Aubrey “Po” Powell helped create some of the most indelible images of the 1970s. If you you love the album covers for Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side Of The Moon, “Band On The Run” by Paul McCartney and Wings and Led Zeppelin’s “Houses Of The Holy” join us tonight at the Scotiabank Theatre in Toronto (259 Richmond Street West) at 7:05 pm. I’ll be speaking to him about the stories behind these incredible album designs.
