Guest: Rick Forchuk - TV Week Magazine Columnist and CKNW Contributor
In theatres:
- How to Train Your Dragon (2025): It has been 15 years since the Dreamworks animated version of this medieval tale of a group of Vikings who have been terrorized for generations but marauding dragons, and this is the first time that a Dreamworks film has made the stretch from animation to live action. The only holdover in the cast is Gerard Butler, who did the voice of the character Stoik in the original, the patriarch of the dragon-killing nation, here in full beard and Viking headgear, looking like the lead guitar player for ZZ Top. His son Hiccup (Mason Thames, age 17, who was in the horror-thriller "The Black Phone" three years ago), is something of a disappointment to Dad as he isn't in keeping with the family tradition of killing dragons. Hiccup is a bright young man, but he doesn't see the point in killing the creatures, and that feeling is hammered home when he encounters a Night Fury, one of the most rare, and most fearsome dragons in all creation
- The Life of Chuck (2024): Generally the feeling, after watching a movie based on a novel or a short story, is that, "the book was better." I am a big fan of Stephen King, and I read the novella on which this movie was based twice ... and after that, I still had no idea what the story was really about. My sister Janet, an equally sharp King fan came to the same conclusion as I - what the heck have we just read? Having seen the movie, this is one of those rare occasions where I can say, "the movie was far, far, better." I really came away from the book with no idea as to what it was that was being presented, but writer/director Mike Flanagan ("The Haunting of Hill House,: "The Fall of the House of Usher") had an uncanny way of taking the words off the page of Stephen King's book, and turning it into a screenplay that took many of the unanswerable questions from the pages into something that made perfect sense. The star of this film is Chuck as a teenager played by Jacob Tremblay, born in Vancouver, raised in Langley , and having received critical acclaim a decade ago for his exceptional turn in the Oscar-winning movie "Room." We see Chuck in two of the three acts of this film, which actually begins at the end with act 3, and moves to acts 2 and 1 through its run
On streaming:
- Implosion: The Titanic Sub Disaster (2025): This documentary, streaming on CBC Gem right now, plays out like a drama as it explores the reasons for the cataclysmic implosion of the Oceangate submersible in 2023. It has all the elements of a thriller, including good guys, suspected bad guys, and an outcome that, like the Titanic itself, we already know, but which keeps us on edge as the tension builds throughout its 90 minute running time. The submersible, built using a carbon fibre hull, was a for-profit item, designed to take paying passengers two miles below the surface to observe the wreck of the unsinkable ship that went down in the North Atlantic in 1912. If there is a villain here, it would be Stockton Rush, the founder and CEO of Oceangate, a man who appeared to be driven by profit even though in his interview off the top of the documentary, he speaks of having wanted to be an astronaut, but when it was clear that he would not be going to Venus or Mars, he turned to the deeps of the world's oceans for his explorations