In Contention

Tag: Passchendaele

  • 9/6 Oscarweb Round-up

    Gerard Butler and Thandie Newton in RocknRolla• Nancy Kriparos keeps her Oscar diary going with looks at “Passchendaele,” “RocknRolla” and “Burn After Reading.” [Awards Daily]

    • Tom O’Neil and Jeffrey Wells talk up the Oscar prospects of Danny Boyle’s “Slumdog Millionaire.” [Gold Derby]

    • Wells, meanwhile, seems to be talking himself out of seeing Spike Lee’s “Miracle at St. Anna” as best he can. [Hollywood Elsewhere]

    • David Poland calls “Lovely, Still” the first real surprise of Toronto. [The Hot Blog]

    • Anne Thompson responds positively to Richard Linklater’s “Me and Orson Welles.” [Thompson on Hollywood]

    • The Kingdom of Jordan will leap into Oscar’s foreign language film race for the first time ever with Amin Matalqua’s “Captain Abu Raed.” [Variety]

  • TORONTO: “Passchendaele” (***)

    PasschendaeleLet’s face it, we all wanted it to be the great Canadian film we have been waiting for for so long, the one that would become mainstream enough to make its mark on the box office charts and enjoy some praise from critics around North America. We wanted “Passchendaele” to be the great Canadian film that was also popular with mass audiences in the manner of Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan.”

    And it’s a rare occurrence.  Two examples leap to mind.  “The Sweet Hereafter,” Atom Egoyan’s 1997 masterpiece, was the last universally acclaimed work of cinematic art out of this country, while “The Barbarian Invasions” took home an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.

    Paul Gross, a bona fide stud of a Canadian movie star (but no Spielberg) has wanted to make “Passchendaele” since listening to the stories his grandfather used to tell him. The $21 million dollars he was given to start production was unheard of for a Canadian film, but to his credit every penny is up there on the screen. His recreation of the period is quite stunning, capturing the very essence of a small Canadian town circa 1917.

    Gross catapults his audience back to the muddy fields of the First World War, where soldiers sat and slept in cold, wet and muddy trenches, the smell and sights of death all around them, awaiting the enemy’s advance, awaiting hell to escape from the bowels of the earth. His work at the helm in these sequences is flawless, and though all war films are forever compared to what Spielberg accomplished in the summer of 1998, this was a very different war.  It was one lacking the technologies we had by the 1940s, a much more brutal and unforgiving conflict with almost barbaric weaponry. I mean, Jesus, bayonets?  Gas? Rocks? Whatever they could hit with or throw.

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  • TIFF 2008 announces opening night gala

    The first press conference of the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival was held yesterday for the announcement of the Opening Night film, traditionally given to a Canadian film.

    Canadian filmmaker Paul Gross will kick off the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival with the world premiere of his World War I epic “Passchendaele.”

    Set during the height of the First World War, the film tells the story of Sgt. Michael Dunne (Gross), a soldier who is brutally wounded in France and returns home to Calgary, torn apart by what he saw in combat. While in the military hospital he meets Sarah, a mysterious and beautiful nurse with whom he falls deeply in love. When Michael’s younger brother signs up for duty in the war, Michael re-enlists to protect his younger brother. They are among thousands of Canadians sent to Ypres where a third battle is being waged against impossible odds.

    Co-Director of the Film Festival Cameron Bailey said, “Paul Gross is an inspiring Canadian and a leader in our industry. By paying tribute to our nation’s heroes — including his own grandfather an Alberta veteran of Passcehndaele — Gross uses the viceral charge of movies to contribute a foundation chapter to our national history.”

    There are so few Canadian pictures about our histroy and heritage that I am damned excited about this one Gross has the talents and smarts to make this a truly magnificent epic.