From Cineplex.com: “Summer is just around the corner and we’ve got some exciting movies coming to the big screen this sunny season including: Christopher Nolan‘s Dunkirk, Wonder Woman, The Mummy and Spiderman: Homecoming! So which movies will you be checking out?” Read the whole thing HERE!
Watch the video HERE!
From Cineplex.com: “For movie lovers, February should be officially changed to Oscarary because it’s that special time of year for us! The nominations have been announced, we’ve debated and speculated, and now it’s time to make our predictions! Our very own Tanner Zipchen and film critic Richard Crouse sat down together to discuss the nominees’ chances in each of our favourite categories: Best Actress, Best Actor, Best Picture, and Best Animated Feature!”
Watch all the videos HERE!
Watch Best Picture video HERE!
Watch Best Animated Movie video HERE!
Watch Best Actress video HERE!
Watch Best Actor video HERE!
Richard’s look back at “Titanic” from Cineplex.com: “These days Hollywood routinely thinks in terms of billion dollar grosses. That’s billion with a b. In 2016 the movie biz broke records, raking in north of $11.4 billion and in the last two years eight movies have cracked the billion-dollar threshold.
“In 1990s, however, those numbers were a rarity. Jurassic Park stomped all over its competition in 1993 but it took the story of a sinking ship to float to the very top of the box office. For a good chunk of the Clinton years (Bill, not Hillary) Titanic, James Cameron’s lush romance-disaster, celebrating its twentieth birthday at Cineplex in February, was, as Empire noted, “the planet’s favourite film…” Read the whole thing HERE!
From TheActionElite.com: “Well I’ve been a film critic in Toronto for more than 20 years and for the last 5 or 6 years I’ve been working with Cineplex on different projects. Throughout the year they’re showing a lot of older films and I would do little promo videos for them or I would do an interview with someone. We showed Pan’s Labyrinth a couple of years ago and I interviewed Guillermo Del Toro so we put together a night where we showed a 25-30 minute interview I did with him about making Pan’s Labyrinth and then showed the film…” Read the whole thing HERE!
From Cineplex.com: “The Toronto International Film Festival is just around the corner! With so many movies playing, it’s hard to figure out what’s worth checking out. So our pre-show host Tanner Zipchen and film critic Richard Crouse sat down together and discussed 10 movies they are excited for, including Denis Villeneuve‘s Arrival starring Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner and Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone teaming up for the third time in La La Land.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
“Richard Crouse, a film critic and pop culture expert, was part of the group that selected the movies that would be included as part of the festival. It basically involved them sitting around and lightheartedly arguing about what movies they would like to see back on the big screen.
“As Crouse said, there’s just something about going to see a film in the theatre and how watching a movie can be a rather enjoyable collective experience with others.
“There’s no better way to see a film than going to see it in the theatre,” said Crouse.”
Read the while thing HERE!
Richard talks about Cineplex’s Great Digital Film Festival with podcast legends Humble and Fred.
Listen to the whole filthy thing HERE!
By Richard Crouse – Metro Canada
Feeling down? You’re not alone.
Years ago Cliff Arnall, a tutor at the Centre for Lifelong Learning at Cardiff University, declared January to be the most depressing month of the year. “Following the initial thrill of New Year’s celebrations and changing over a new leaf,” Arnall said, “reality starts to sink in.” His study cited weather, debt, time elapsed since Christmas, average hours of daylight and unsuccessful New Year’s resolutions” as the reasons for the slump and named the third Monday of the month Blue Monday, the single most depressing day of the year.
Whether Arnall’s “sadness algorithm” passes scientific muster remains to be seen but there’s no denying January can be dispiriting. This year Cineplex is offering up a way to beat the January blahs—cheap movies. On January 18 Scene card members can redeem just 500 points to see any movie at Cineplex, from general admission auditoriums all the way up to the fancy-dancy VIP Cinemas.
In a recent survey Canada’s largest film exhibitor discovered 45% of Canadians say they typically feel rested after watching a movie while 38% say they feel “less stressed, like I took a mini vacation.”
Marston-Milbauer Eminent Scholar Emeritus at the University of Florida Dr. Norman Holland is an expert in psychoanalytic criticism and cognitive poetics, which in layman’s terms means he has made a study of how our brains translate activities like going to the cinema into pleasure. “It’s restful, no question,” he says.
“The parts of your brain that turn off are the parts that plan action because you’re not going to act on what you see on the screen in front of you. You turn off the systems that plan, that look ahead that evaluate futures. That explains the phenomenon of the willing suspension of disbelief. You accept the most improbable things, like Stars Wars or Spider-Man. At the same time the lower centres of your brain are generating emotions like mad in response to what you’re seeing. This is the peculiar phenomenon that you can feel and care about these people on the screen while at the same time knowing they are nothing but a fiction.”
The Cineplex survey indicates that when feeling blue 78% of Canadians look to funny movies to cheer them up. “We don’t want Ingmar Bergman on Blue Monday,” says Dr. Holland. “The idea is to do something for yourself. Do something that pleases you.”
Overall, according to Cineplex, Canada’s top two comfort movies are the Robin Williams comedy Mrs. Doubtfire and Pretty Woman with Julia Roberts and Richard Gere. Men chose the uplifting prison break movie The Shawshank Redemption as their favourite feel good flick.
Dr. Holland isn’t surprised the top movies are old favourites featuring big stars. “Familiar characters, familiar faces,” he says. “They’re people we’ve had good experiences with before and can expect [to have] good experiences with again.”
So what would the good doctor go see on Blue Monday? “8 ½ by Fellini,” he says. It’s a fanciful movie that engages both the emotional and intellectual sides of the brain. “I love Fellini.”
I own a lot of DVDs and Blu Rays. In fact, if you poke around the closets, drawers and hidden nooks of my house you’ll uncover old VHS videos and a handful of laser discs as well.
Trouble is, I rarely ever watch them. Given my line of work as a film critic I like having instant access to my favorite movies, but until the day comes when I can erect a giant screen in the den and have 50 people over to watch them with me, my preferred way to see a film will always be in the cinema, surrounded by strangers.
I love a big picture, big sound and hearing the reactions from an audience. There is no better sound than 500 people laughing at the same thing, or a few hundred gasping simultaneously in horror. Movies bring us together and, for my money, are best experienced in large groups.
So, when Cineplex asked me to help program the Great Digital Film Festival I was thrilled. Instead of rooting through dusty piles of DVDs to see some of my favorite films I now have the chance to see them the way they were meant to be seen, on the big screen.
To choose the films programmer Matt DeVuono and I asked ourselves one question, What movies would we like to see again on the big screen? Seems easy, but we’re both film geeks and the list quickly got unwieldy. We pared it down, looking for connections and anniversaries in amongst all the cool titles we had chosen. Eventually we had a list that included everything from all the X-Men movies, to retro cult hits like The Rocketeer and The Monster Squad, and a twofer from Guillermo Del Toro, Pan’s Labyrinth and Hellboy. We also programmed 25th anniversary screenings of Darkman and Dick Tracy, Kill Bill Volumes 1 and 2, and for sci fi fans, Blade Runner: The Final Cut, Alien and Aliens.
Another of the great pleasures of helping to put this together was the chance to sit and speak, exclusively, to Guillermo Del Toro about the making of Pan’s Labyrinth. It is a beautiful film and he was very open and honest about the challenges of bringing his vision to the screen. That interview will run just before the movie on the Monday and Thursday of the festival.
The Great Digital Film Festival is the country’s only national film festival, but more than that, it’s a way to reconnect and remember why we loved these movies in the first place.
