In a recent interview Mel Gibson said he’s out of the business of financing his own films because, “I’m not a fool.”
Neither is Zach Braff.
Both must be worth big bucks—Gibson from the movies, Braff from starring on 175 episodes of “Scrubs”—and could likely use some of their own capital to make their own movies but Gibson says he’s out of the game completely while Braff used the popular crowd sourcing site Kickstarter to raise money for his latest.
“Wish I Was Here” is part of the small—but growing—trend of celebrity driven films paid for by contributions from the general public. The almost-mid-life crisis story raised $2 million in just forty eight hours (ultimately procuring $3.1 million of a reported $5.5 million budget), attracted an all-star cast—Kate Hudson, “Frozen’s” Josh Gad, Mandy Patinkin and “The Big Bang Theory’s” Jim Parson—and some backlash from critics who felt that crowdsourcing should be left for artists who aren’t also starring in giant Disney movies.
Fact is, “Wish I Was Here’s” backstory is a bit more interesting than the story on the screen.
Braff plays Aidan, an underemployed actor whose life is unraveling. His kids are about to be kicked out of Hebrew school because his father (Patinkin), who has been paying the bills, has been diagnosed with cancer and can no longer afford the monthly payment. His wife Sarah (Hudson) is supportive of his acting dream but nearing the end of her tether. Brother Noah (Gadd) prefers cos play over actual emotions and his two kids (Joey King and Pierce Gagnon) are maturing faster than he is.
“Wish I Was Here” plays like two movies. The first forty-five minutes is a cleverly written comedic look at Aidan as a manboy with far more responsibility than he can handle. It’s ripe with gentle character based laughs that emerge from the situations and don’t feel forced.
It’s only in the second half when Braff (who co-wrote the script with his brother Adam) allows sentiment to get in the way of the movie’s momentum. Despite Patinkin’s line, “Eventually when things get tragic enough they circle back to comedy,” the final forty-five minutes, which deal with the loss of Aidan’s father, takes a darker tone. That’s OK, life sometimes changes on a dime, but the cleverness of the set-up is replaced with mawkishness.
Sometimes it works. Hudson’s heartfelt “tell your sons you love them” speech to her-father-in-law is shot simply with lingering close-ups on the actor’s faces. The scene has an intimate in-the-moment feel and is very moving.
Less so is Gadd’s big moment, (VERY MILD SPOILER ALERT), a Comic Con sequence that is a bit too quirky to fit the tone of the film that surrounds it.
By the end credits the movie worked for me more often than not, but I wished that there were fewer clunky moments. For every scene that rings emotionally true—and there are quite a few of them—there is another that feels forced. The beauty of “Wish I Was Here” lies in the former, and certainly not in the passages that feel left over from another, lesser quirky indie comedy.
Synopsis: After enjoying big Easter and Passover meals, the Reel Guys like to treat the family to a good movie. Because there are as many different kinds of family movies as there are colours on the most psychedelic Ukrainian Easter egg, this week the guys have a look at their favourites. From the big screen to rentals for the small screen they choose movies that will put an extra hop in your step this weekend.
Richard: Mark, if you’re planning to take the kids out to the movies this weekend, there are two recent family flicks that deserve to be seen on the big screen. The Lego Movie is possibly the weirdest, most psychedelic kid’s entertainment since H.R. Pufnstuf, but it is also one of the best films of the year so far, kid’s movie or not. Then there is Mr. Peabody & Sherman, a big animated film inspired by a time travelling segment from the TV show Rocky and His Friends. It’s the only kid’s movie with an Oedipal joke and the kind of children’s movie that I think parents and kids will enjoy, but probably for completely different reasons.
Mark: Richard, so far The Lego Movie is the most exciting movie of the year, family or otherwise, but it should be noted that it, too, has a strong Oedipal theme in it. As a father of a three-year-old, I’m never quite sure what family entertainment means; what’s appropriate for my little boy is different than what might entertain an eight-year-old. Pretty much anything animated works for all ages, but then it gets complicated. And gender plays a role in choosing the right flick, too. Young girls love The Wizard of Oz, but young boys, not so much. But you never know. My little one loves Frozen, just out on DVD, even though it might seem “girly” to some.
RC: People love Frozen. I’m not one of them, but there is no arguing with the success of that movie. I’m more on side with Despicable Me II, which I thought was great fun despite its predictable plot. The story of chrome-domed former bad guy Gru’s (Steve Carell) working with the Anti-Villain League could have written itself, but the inventive gags contained within are the reason the whole family will enjoy the movie. There are lots of fun characters, but it’s really all about the Minions — Gru’s yellow, jelly-bean-shaped helpers — who spice things up with their own special kind of anarchy. Speaking in gibberish, they’re fun and more than worth the rental.
MB: Despicable Me II is a treat but my little guy deemed it “too scawy”. But I look forward to a family viewing of E.T. — the greatest family movie ever. Young or old, boys or girls, who doesn’t love the tale of that lovable little alien? Also on my eventual DVD queue would be Gremlins and even Home Alone. Kids love movies with kid heroes.
RC: Speaking of kid heroes, the adaptation of the classic Maurice Sendak children’s book Where the Wild Things Are isn’t a movie for kids as much as it is a movie about being a kid. Max is the hero, a lonely kid who goes to where the wild things are. It’s a slow moving, simple film about deep feelings. It’s not a slick, brightly coloured kid’s film with a connect-the-dots plot and an easily digested moral, but it is a magical movie.
MB: I never got the appeal of the movie or the book, but maybe I’ve been missing something. But here’s an idea: Sit down with the family and watch A Hard Day’s Night. Everyone loves The Beatles, and this is the pop group in full cheeky-cute mode. Their rock songs from 1964 sound a lot like kids music today, with their melodic hooks and innocent lyrics.
“I was sitting in a dark theatre watching Aladdin,” he says. “Robin Williams is playing this insane genie character. I’m on the floor, as is the rest of the audience, and I looked over at my mom and said, ‘I want to do that one day,’ meaning, I want to be the comedic relief sidekick in one of these Disney films.”
Cut to a decade later.
“I was about three years out of college and I called my mom up and said, ‘I don’t think I want to do this anymore.’ She started crying. I said, ‘I’m going to go to law school.’ I thought my mother was going to celebrate that she wouldn’t have to worry about me anymore. But she was really disappointed. And I said, ‘Why are you disappointed?’
She said, ‘Because you’ve been dreaming about this for 15 years, but you are only allowing yourself to live out your dream for three years and I think that is unfair to yourself.’ It was very startling to hear her say that.”
“A week later I got my first big break on Broadway doing a show called The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. I guess it was at that time I realized I was going to be OK.
“Book of Mormon was the point at which I realized I had reached a new level. That I had made it. I wasn’t a working actor anymore, I was an actor who was a part of something very special and that would allow and afford me more opportunities to do what I had dreamed of.”
Those opportunities include starring in TV shows like 1600 Penn and movies like Jobs, and, of course, making his dream from 1993 come true with Frozen.
“To get that phone call, saying, you are that guy,” he says, “I had to hold the phone down because I was sobbing with joy.”
Olaf, his comedic sidekick snowman, already has at least one fan — Gad’s young daughter.
“She was two-and-a-half when I took her to see her very first movie in a movie theatre, which was Monster’s University. The teaser for Frozen, which featured just my laugh [played before the movie].
“Off of that laugh she turned to me and said, ‘More dada. I want more dada.’ I had to turn away from her because I was embarrassed by the tears.”
A titan in Hollywood and one of the largest media conglomerates in the world, the Mouse House is looking back at their rich history in a very interesting way.
For instance, Get a Horse, the dazzling new short that plays before Frozen in theatres, is the first original Mickey Mouse theatrical cartoon in almost two decades.
But more than simply being a reintroduction to a beloved character, it’s also a deft marriage of old and new techniques that features, through some technical wizardry, the first vocal performance from Walt Disney since the 1960s.
In the live action roster there’s the Oscar hopeful Saving Mr. Banks, the story of the making of the classic Mary Poppins, and Tomorrowland, an epic sci-fi saga that was allegedly inspired by the contents of a mysterious box found in the Disney archives.
The ninety-year-old company has one eye on the past and the other very much on the future.
“We like to think of our legacy as a springboard to the future and not something that anchors us so you can’t move your feet,” says Walt Disney Animation Studios General Manager and Executive Vice President Andrew Millstein.
“There is a great wealth of characters and visual material but in its day the best of Disney was innovative and moved with audiences. We should do the same. Whether it is Get a Horse or Frozen or Big Hero Six, in terms of our approach to stories or animation or technology, we’re building on our legacy for our future.”
So what should audiences can anticipate from Disney in the next few years? Millstein says audiences should, “expect the unexpected.”
“We have to be fiercely original. We have to give audiences things they haven’t seen before. We want to surprise audiences. We want our stories to be compelling, the worlds to be great, the technology and the visuals to be stunning. If we do our jobs well, that is what’s going to happen.”
Millstein knows what he’s talking about. He’s been with Disney since 1997, when he started there as a production executive in the studio’s motion pictures group.
“It makes me feel very proud that I am part of a company that is creating content and films that you know are going to live for a long, long time,” he says. “We’re part of the zeitgeist of modern history.”
Don’t have time to see “Frozen,” the new animated Disney film, at the movies? Not to worry. The beautifully animated film takes Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen and turns it into a blueprint for a Broadway show or maybe even an all-skating Ice Capades extravaganza that will soon be playing at a theatre or rink near you soon!
Frozen is the story of two royal sisters, the Princesses of Arendelle, Anna, a spirited adventurer (Kristen Bell) and Elsa, a cryokinetic queen (Idina Menzel) with the awesome power to manifest ice and snow. Like Carrie, but colder.
On the night of her coronation an emotional Elsa accidentally unveils her icy power, plunging her kingdom into an endless winter. Shunned by her people and called a “monster” by the haughty Duke of Weselton (Alan Tudyk) Elsa turns a cold shoulder and goes into hiding on the remote North Mountain.
To save the realm from the eternal cold snap Anna sets off with mountain man Kristoff (Jonathan Groff), his reindeer and a sun-worshipping snowman named Olaf (Josh Gad). On the way the Elsa’s ice palace Anna discovers why her sister is cold-hearted, some magical trolls and the true meaning of love.
“Frozen” has all the elements of classic Disney. There are handsome princes, amusing animals, catchy songs and not one, but two princesses. All the fundamentals are in place and perhaps that’s part of the problem with the film. It feels like all these elements banged together to create one whole.
The music, by husband and wife team Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez (who also wrote “The Book of Mormon” and “Avenue Q”), are plentiful with Broadway style tunes popping up every couple of minutes. But the songs don’t feel like they fit together as a whole, almost as if they are from different shows. The Celine Dion style show-stopping pop of “Let It Go” is at odds with the goofy fun of “In Summer.”
The songs themselves are top notch, as is the animation and the most of the voice work—luckily Josh Gad spices things up with his unhinged Olaf voice—but the film as a whole doesn’t have the wit or the invention of “Get a Horse,” the short that is scheduled to precede “Frozen” in theatres. In this case the opening act freezes out the lukewarm main attraction.
The new animated film Frozen features something unique — dueling Disney princesses.
“I think what was really important for this movie was to have the female perspective,” says co-director Chris Buck.
“We have two female leads and there are times that as a male director you can go to the stereotype of what a female character might do.”
That’s where co-director and writer Jennifer Lee came in. “Jen would always take it to a different place,” he says. “She would say, ‘Make her real. Make her believable.’ So I think that really helped. It was a good balance.”
Based on a Danish fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen, Frozen is the story of two royal sisters, Anna, a spirited adventurer (Kristen Bell) and Elsa, a queen (Idina Menzel) with the awesome power to create ice and snow. Sibling is pitted against sibling when Elsa plunges her kingdom into an endless winter and Anna must act to save her sister and the empire. “You want to make these movies to last forever but we have to bring ourselves to it,” says Buck. “We have to bring today’s sense of entertainment and character to our characters.”
“We’re huge Disney fans and I grew up with Disney,” says Lee. “When you watch a Disney film you are constantly feeling it. It is a combination of comedy and drama but it is together in such a way that you feel you are in the world. That is something we both love more than anything because that, to me, is what makes them timeless and resonate. You feel the character and you feel the stakes. You relate to them. I think Disney does that better than anyone.”
Buck says that one of the big challenges in making Frozen was creating a movie for not “just the Disney family but also for the general audience, for everyone of all ages.
“I feel more than anything, a responsibility not to necessarily the company but to the audience,” says Buck. “To the audience who comes in expecting a Disney movie and giving them the best of that. What does that mean to them? It’s humour and emotion and beauty and all of that. For me, that’s the pressure.
“I was speaking to a live action director who does more movies in the PG-13 and R-rated realm and he said, ‘What you guys do is the hardest thing in the world because you try and reach everyone.’”
The most surprising thing about “Frozen” a new horror film from “Hatchet” director Adam Green, is that it isn’t a Canadian movie. With its vast vistas of snow, wolf attacks, two Canadian leading men and body parts getting stuck to cold steel poles, “Frozen” has Great White North written all over it.
Set on a remote ski hill in Massachusetts “Frozen’s” story is very simple. Three snowboarders—Parker (Emma Bell), her boyfriend Dan (Kevin Zegers), and his best friend Lynch (Shawn Ashmore)—get stranded on a ski lift fifty feet in the air after the hill has shut down. The resort, only open on the weekends, won’t reopen for another five days and unless they can find a way to safely get off the lift they will freeze to death.
This is situational horror. There are no monsters, just bad timing and bad decisions that force the unlucky trio to face their darkest fears—the dark, the cold, heights and the worst foe of all, Mother Nature. Director Green subtly ups the ante every minute of the film’s running time, believably building horror, both physical and psychological. Not that much happens and the action is at a minimum but “Frozen” is an extremely tense movie.
Green makes good use of the stark surroundings and sound design. I’m not sure what they used to create the squishy sound that dominates one grisly scene, but it proves conclusively that sometimes what you hear is scarier than what you see.
On the downside, the barebones story doesn’t demand the full feature length treatment. In the early moments of the film, once the lift stops suddenly, it feels like the movie will movie along quickly. Once the action starts—or, more accurately stops—the fear and tension build a little too rapidly. The three friends fall apart in seconds, panicking too soon. Green let that bit of pacing get away from him, but soon has the real horror start and gives them a reason to be on edge.
Still, at ninety minutes “Frozen” feels padded, particularly during the, occasionally interminable small talk the friends makes to take their minds off their predicament. Too often it feels like filler and worse, frequently sounds like acting school monologues. The prattling gets tiresome as the movie nears its final moments and a bit of trimming here and there could have brought this down to a lean and mean eighty minutes.
Green has pulled good performances out of the actors, particularly from newcomer Emma Bell, who avoids the usual pitfalls of being the only female presence in a horror film.
“Frozen’s” tense story of survival will, at the very least, make you think twice about that trip to Whistler next year. Maybe Myrtle Beach would be a better choice…
The most surprising thing about “Frozen” a new horror film from “Hatchet” director Adam Green, is that it isn’t a Canadian movie. With its vast vistas of snow, wolf attacks, two Canadian leading men and body parts getting stuck to cold steel poles, “Frozen” has Great White North written all over it.
Set on a remote ski hill in Massachusetts “Frozen’s” story is very simple. Three snowboarders—Parker (Emma Bell), her boyfriend Dan (Kevin Zegers), and his best friend Lynch (Shawn Ashmore)—get stranded on a ski lift fifty feet in the air after the hill has shut down. The resort, only open on the weekends, won’t reopen for another five days and unless they can find a way to safely get off the lift they will freeze to death.
This is situational horror. There are no monsters, just bad timing and bad decisions that force the unlucky trio to face their darkest fears—the dark, the cold, heights and the worst foe of all, Mother Nature. Director Green subtly ups the ante every minute of the film’s running time, believably building horror, both physical and psychological. Not that much happens and the action is at a minimum but “Frozen” is an extremely tense movie.
Green makes good use of the stark surroundings and sound design. I’m not sure what they used to create the squishy sound that dominates one grisly scene, but it proves conclusively that sometimes what you hear is scarier than what you see.
On the downside, the barebones story doesn’t demand the full feature length treatment. In the early moments of the film, once the lift stops suddenly, it feels like the movie will movie along quickly. Once the action starts—or, more accurately stops—the fear and tension build a little too rapidly. The three friends fall apart in seconds, panicking too soon. Green let that bit of pacing get away from him, but soon has the real horror start and gives them a reason to be on edge.
Still, at ninety minutes “Frozen” feels padded, particularly during the, occasionally interminable small talk the friends makes to take their minds off their predicament. Too often it feels like filler and worse, frequently sounds like acting school monologues. The prattling gets tiresome as the movie nears its final moments and a bit of trimming here and there could have brought this down to a lean and mean eighty minutes.
Green has pulled good performances out of the actors, particularly from newcomer Emma Bell, who avoids the usual pitfalls of being the only female presence in a horror film.
“Frozen’s” tense story of survival will, at the very least, make you think twice about that trip to Whistler next year. Maybe Myrtle Beach would be a better choice…
In a recent interview Mel Gibson said he’s out of the business of financing his own films because, “I’m not a fool.”
