LOGLINE: Based on a true story, in “The Great Escaper,” a new Michael Caine-Glenda Jackson movie now playing on theatres, a World War II veteran sneaks out of his care home to attend the 70th anniversary commemoration of the D-Day landings in Normandy.
“He has done it before,” says wife Rene (Jackson) of her husband’s trip, “but then they were shooting at him.”
CAST: Michael Caine, Glenda Jackson, Will Fletcher, Laura Marcus, John Standing, Jackie Clune, Danielle Vitalis, Brennan Reece, Wolf Kahler. Directed by Oliver Parker.
REVIEW: This stranger-than-fiction story has all the hallmarks of a British against-all-odds, stiff-upper-lip drama, but transcends the “cheeky chappie” stereotypes and platitudes of those kinds of feel-good films with the performances of the late, great Glenda Jackson and eternal favorite Michael Caine. The story of a sprightly old codger cutting loose is deepened by the characters, a wartime couple who have rarely spent a moment apart since the end of WWII, and the film’s examination of loss, survivor’s guilt and screenwriter William Ivory’s celebration of growing up and growing old.
It’s heartfelt, but not sentimental. Jackson, who passed away months after filming, and Caine, who says this will be his last film, bring with them the lived-in mannerisms of a lifelong couple, people who have weathered life’s ups and downs, devoted to their lives together. It’s mostly in the subtext, but is summed up, touchingly and succinctly by Rene. “We have never wasted one second of our time together. We’ve only done, normal, little everyday things, but, by God we did them well. And we still do.”
Even though Caine and Jackson spend most of the film in separate countries, and are rarely ever in the same frame, their bond is the glue that holds “The Great Escaper” together.
Also touching, but again, not overly sentimental, are the interactions between Caine and fellow veteran Arthur (John Standing). The pair are strangers who meet on the way to the D-Day anniversary, but their common experience as soldiers, and shared psychological pain, give them a unique connection.
“The Great Escaper” uses the story to make a comment on the futility of war, while paying respect to those who perished. “What a waste,” Caine says, standing in a French soldier’s cemetery, as the camera pulls back to reveal hundreds of soldier’s graves. It’s a chilling and powerful show-me-don’t-tell-me moment that effectively uses images to make an impact.
“The Great Escaper” could easily have traded on nostalgia to tell its tale, softening the portrayal of the aging leads, but instead takes a much more realistic approach to make broader points about the lasting effects of war, our treatment of veterans and the risks of glorifying combat. It’s not a gritty film, but there is grit in the way it expresses itself.
On Friday, December 15 – 7 pm and Saturday, December 16 – 2 pm (sold out!) & 7 pm, the TO Live Orchestra will present Disney’s The Muppet Christmas Carol in Concert featuring a screening of the complete film with the musical score performed live to the film.
The Muppets perform the classic Charles Dickens holiday tale, with Kermit the Frog playing Bob Cratchit, the put-upon clerk of stingy Ebenezer Scrooge (Michael Caine). Gonzo, as Dickens, narrates the story with the help of Rizzo the Rat. The film also features Miss Piggy as Emily Cratchit, Gonzo as the narrator Charles Dickens, Fozzie Bear as Fozziwig, and Robin the Frog as Tiny Tim. Scrooge receives visits from spirits of three Christmases— past, present, and future. They show him the error of his self-serving ways, but the miserable old man seems to be past any hope of redemption and happiness.
The original score was composed by Miles Goodman (Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Little Shop of Horrors) with songs by Oscar-, Emmy-, and Grammy-winning songwriter Paul Williams (“Rainbow Connection,” “Evergreen”).
Richard Crouse hosts a special preshow event before the screening!
If “Game of Thrones” style decapitations are your thing, the fifteenth-century set “Medieval,” now playing in theatres, may be right up your alley.
Based on the early life of famous Hussite commander Jan Žižka of Trocnov (Ben Foster), “Medieval” is like an old-timey superhero origin story. Žižka’s story is the stuff of cinema. He was a fearsome warrior, a hero who never lost a battle, so the story isn’t what bogs down the movie, it’s the telling of it.
Set in 1402, the film opens with the voice of Lord Boresh (Michael Caine). “Power, tyranny, Violence; Europe is engulfed in war, plague and famine.”
In other words, “Yikes!” The Holy Roman Empire is in chaos, following the death of its reigning emperor. To prevent King Sigismund of Hungary (Matthew Goode) from taking the throne by force, Žižka is conscripted to kidnap Lady Katherine (Sophie Lowe), the French fiancée of Lord Rosenberg (Til Schweiger), a powerful ally of Sigismund.
In retaliation, France sends an army to retrieve her. As the heat rises on the battlefield, so it does between Katherine and Jan, who, when he isn’t busy wielding an axe to fight against the corruption and greed of the ruling class, find the time to fall in love.
From the title on down, “Medieval” has a generic feel. It is bloody and brutal—with the appropriate bone-crunching SFX—when it needs to be, and features fine period details, but the storytelling is formulaic; “Game of Throne” Lite.
There are interesting elements, particularly regarding the warrior’s religious convictions and political leanings, but the Foster feels miscast. His trademarked intensity is missing, which is bewildering considering the amped up nature of the battle footage.
“Medieval” is ham fisted. The action scenes are absolutely brutal, featuring the kind of violence usually reserved for bloody horror movies. The political intrigue is convoluted, and for a film that aims to pay tribute to a real-life hero, inaccurate. It gets the tone of the time correct. The reaction of the rebellious locals, worn down by years of high taxes, feels authentic, but Boresh, for instance, the catalyst of much of the action, has been cut out of whole cloth. It feels as though the history has been manipulated to fit the story director Petr Jakl wanted to tell, rather than fashioning the story around the history.
Yesterday rumours on Twitter had it that Michael Caine was retiring from acting, calling it quits after a celebrated career. Turns out that isn’t true!
“Regarding retirement, I’ve spent over 50 years getting up at 6 a.m. to make movies, and I’m not getting rid of my alarm clock!” Caine said in a statement to Variety.
I wanted to share a quick interview soundbite with you from an interview I did with Michael Caine a few years ago. Click HERE to watch the video!
“Come Away,” a new fantasy film for kids starring Angelina Jolie and David Oyelowo and now available as a Download to Own, weaves familiar themes and characters into its uneven story of loss and love.
Jolie and Oyelowo are Rose and Jack Littleton, a married couple with three children, David, Peter and Alice (Reece Yates, Jordan A. Nash and Keira Chansa). When we first meet them, it’s a contented family, with a carefree mother, a model ship building father and happy-go-lucky siblings.
Cracks begin to appear when prissy Aunt Eleanor (Anna Chancellor) swoops in, teaches Alice “how to be a lady” and sends David off to a private school.
Soon after tragedy strikes, leaving David dead, and the family in tatters. Peter and Alice, who we soon come to understand are actually Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland try to fix things by selling a family treasure but instead are swept into a dangerous adventure that features a menagerie of fabled characters come to life, the Hatter (Clarke Peters), the Red Queen and the White Rabbit.
Themes of alcoholism, gambling addiction and death make “Come Away” a movie unmoored from any sort of pigeonhole. It’s not exactly a children’s film, although it contains many elements of kid’s entertainment but it doesn’t quite seem geared for grown-ups either.
On the upside, there’s nothing formulaic about the storytelling. Ideas that reflect real life issues are bashed into one another, held together with ribbons and bows. Even when the film takes an imaginative twist it is generally grounded in some earthly and very grown up concerns. Tonally, it’s an uneasy match that gives the film a wonky tone.
“Come Away” is a very handsomely appointed movie, with beautiful imagery and fanciful set decoration. There are interesting performances, particularly from Gugu Mbatha-Raw as the adult Alice, but the remix of two classic tales, “Peter Pan” and “Alice in Wonderland,” never achieves lift off as a flight of fantasy.
Calling all emerging, aspiring at home filmmakers; this challenge is for you. Christopher Nolan’s feature films are known to be cherished, cinematic experiences, guaranteeing the next project by the visionary auteur will be an event like no other.
TENET is set to hit theatres in Canada on August 26, 2020 and if you haven’t poured over the brain-bending trailer countless times yet, here’s what you need to know: John David Washington (BlacKkKlansman) stars as The Protagonist, armed with only one word—Tenet—and, fighting for the survival of the entire world, journeys through a twilight world of international espionage on a mission that will unfold in something beyond real time. Not time travel—Inversion. Whoa. Robert Pattinson, Elizabeth Debicki, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Clémence Poésy, Himesh Patel, Michael Caine and Kenneth Branagh also co-star for one stacked cast.
As with any Christopher Nolan film, there’s much to unpack and we want to see how you interpret the concept of time for a chance at a major prize.
Do you see time as forward, backward, looping or something else entirely? Grab your camera or phone and create a 55-second video for the Inspired by Tenet National Filmmaker Contest that shows your skills as a filmmaker. The most inventive, exciting entry, as chosen by CTV film critic Richard Crouse, will win $10,000, debut nationally on etalk and be featured in the Cineplex Pre-Show in theatres across Canada. Whether you grab your family to create a fully-produced, time travel epic, or your dog for a looping video of cuteness, all you have to do is show how you interpret time.
“We’re living in a twilight world.” That’s the password The Protagonist (John David Washington) and Company use in “Tenet,” the new Christopher Nolan mind-bender, now playing only in theatres, but the movie’s premise is more “Twilight Zone” than twilight world.
The movie opens with a breathless and loud rescue sequence in an opera house in Ukraine, the first of the movie’s several eye-and-ear-popping action sequences. At stake is a mysterious component, part of a much larger device, with the power to end the world. A nuclear holocaust? “No, something worse.”
The Protagonist is tasked with piecing together the potentially world ending puzzle. “Your duty transcends national interest,” says his handler Victor (Martin Donovan). All he has to go on is a gesture and a code word, Tenet. “It will open some of the right doors,” Victor says, “but some of the wrong ones too.”
So far, “Tenet” feels like an elaborate James Bond style story, complete with exotic locations, enigmatic characters and a world that needs saving.
Then things get complicated.
The Protagonist isn’t simply dealing with the usual spy stuff, like international intrigue, a Russian oligarch or femme fatales. He’s fighting against “inversion,” a disturbance in the very fabric of time, that sees material running backwards through time, while the rest of the world moves forward. So, in the upside-down story of “Tenet,” an “inverted” weapon could affect the past as well as the present.
It’s a reversal of the way we think of linear time. It’s not time travel. The Protagonist doesn’t jump back to ancient Egypt for a quick chat with Cleopatra or zip forward to talk to his 100-year-old self. When he inverts, he is in the moment, but running counter to everyone else. “You’re not shooting the bullet,” he’s told by a researcher (Clémence Poésy). “You’re catching it.” Then, by way of clarity, she adds, “don’t try and understand it,” which may be the best advice The Protagonist has received to this point.
Teamed with shadowy operative Neil (Robert Pattinson), The Protagonist enters a topsy-turvy world of high-end art, down-and-dirty dealings with strongman Andrei Stor (Kenneth Branagh) and a clock that is moving backwards and forwards simultaneously. “You have a future in the past,” Neil says to The Protagonist.
At the centre of the action is John David Washington, hot off his Golden Globe Best Actor nomination for “BlacKkKlansman.” He’s in every scene, and whether wearing a Brooks Brother suit (in one of the film’s funniest exchanges) or hanging off the side of a building, he’s a convincing action hero with acting chops. It’s a demanding role and he pulls it off with equal parts bravado and restraint. It takes swagger to anchor a movie like this but in his relationship with Kat (Elizabeth Debicki) he reveals a flirtier, more tender side. The protagonist is a well-rounded character and, if they don’t do a “Tenet 2: Time Gone Wild” perhaps his name could be added to the list of 007 candidates.
The supporting cast, Branagh as the “all our lives in his hands” villain and Debicki as his beleaguered wife and Pattinson as the calm, cool and collected mercenary, all acquit themselves well but “Tenet’s” real star, however, is Christopher Nolan.
For blockbuster starved audiences Nolan delivers the kind of spectacle we’re used to seeing in the summer months. As per usual, he avoids CGI wherever possible in favor of practical effects. The results are eye-popping. The big set pieces—like an airplane driving through a building—don’t have the kind of digital disconnect that often comes with computer generated action. The show-stopping sequences are busy, exciting but most of all, organic, and the sense of peril (and pageantry) that comes with that is undeniable. Add to that Nolan’s use of IMAX cameras and you have wild action that fills the big screen in every way.
With a complicated story comes drawbacks. In the first hour there is a lot of exposition. People ask questions—Do you know what a free port is? How does inversion work?—while others take the time to answer them all in an effort to keep the audience in the loop. There’s a lot of talk about theories and plans but Nolan keeps things lively with lightning fast—with a capital “F”— pacing.
Will you understand the puzzles of “Tenet’s” time manipulation story? Maybe, maybe not. It’s definitely a movie that will hold up to multiple viewings, revealing new info and fostering more understanding of the plot each time. The trippy last hour is jam packed with artfully arranged action scenes that manipulate time in increasingly psychedelic ways. While you may feel lost in time as the movie careens toward the end of its 150-minute running time with an involved and inversive climax that weaves the past into the fabric of The Protagonist’s mission, you may wish you could invert time and relive the story again. And you can, for the price of a ticket.
“Tenet” opens in over 70 countries worldwide, including Europe and Canada, starting on Wednesday, August 26.
It’s hard to know exactly how to categorize “The Trip” movies. Since 2010 Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon have co-starred in a series of British television travel shows, later cut down to feature length movies for North America.
The first saw the dynamic duo do a restaurant tour of northern England, then came “The trip to Italy” where they followed in the footsteps of early 19th century English poets on the Grand Tour. This time around trade plates of pasta for pintxos and paella in “The trip to Spain.”
The films are semi-fictional ad libbed culinary road trip adventures that have become increasingly melancholy as the odometer clocks each passing mile. They aren’t documentaries nor are they Food Network style travel shows. They are funny, although the laughs are fewer and further a part in the new, but they also contain moments of profound despondency. Sometimes they seem to be little more than a showcase for Coogan and Brydon’s prodigious gifts of celebrity mimicry, other times they are pathos dipped examinations of aging.
The third course on their culinary trip sees these two—imagine an intellectual version of The Two Ronnies—sample the best of Spain’s New Traditional restaurants, take in the sights but they spend most of their time not appreciating the beautiful coastal scenery but hilariously poking fun at a who’s who of Hollywood, including Al Pacino, Sean Connery and Woody Allen.
Wedged between the jokes and Michael Caine impressions is Coogan’s dissatisfaction, both personal and professional. Contrasted with Brydon’s happy family life and career, Coogan’s fear of becoming last week’s news as he enters his fifties gives the film an edge the others haven’t had. That means “The Trip to Spain” isn’t nearly all-out funny as the others, but it does have more substance. The others weren’t exactly empty calories but this one feels weightier.
“The Trip to Spain” features much of the stuff fans expect—Brydon’s “small man in a box” voice makes an appearance and Coogan’s way with words gives us culinary descriptions like, “life affirming butter”—but director Michael Winterbottom is clearly in a Cervantes state of mind as he sets his Don Quixote and Sancho Panza off on a new Spanish adventure.
