Latest news with #JayBaruchel
Yahoo
26-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
How to Train Your Dragon gets new UK streaming home ahead of the remake's release
How to Train Your Dragon has found a new UK streaming home ahead of the live-action remake's release. The 2010 animated DreamWorks classic aired on ITV1 yesterday, and is now available to stream on ITVX. That means UK viewers can watch the film for free. The free tier does have ads, but you can pay for ITVX Premium at £5.99 a month/£59.99 a year. The film follows an awkward teenage viking boy named Hiccup (Jay Baruchel) who decides not to follow in his clan's footsteps by killing a dragon that he meets. Instead, he decides to befriend the creature, calling it Toothless. Adapted from Cressida Cowell's 2003 book of the same name, the upcoming live-action remake will follow the same plot, and has even brought back Gerard Butler as Hiccup's dad, Stoick the Vast. Related: UK film release dates The films also share the same director, Dean DeBlois, who stated that he doesn't understand the criticism about why they're making a live-action version. "It's an interesting one for me, because I've firmly been on the side of not just adapting those films as a trend," he said. Related: "I love animation, and I love those films that come out of the studios, but I've never been for remaking movies in a new medium without any real purpose to it. "But when Universal talked about this project and seeing it through as a live-action film, it, to me, kind of pinged something in me regarding the making of the first movie that was always an ambition for Chris Sanders and I. Which is to lean into a live-action sensibility." The How To Train Your Dragon live-action remake is released in cinemas on 9 June. The animated version can be streamed on ITVX now. Digital Spy's first print magazine is here! Buy British Comedy Legends in newsagents or online, now priced at just £3.99.£18.99 at at EE£328.00 at at Audible at £49.99 at at at at Amazon£54.98 at at at at EE at at at £91.40 at at at Amazon at at at at at at at EE£19.00 at Game at at at Sky Mobile at Pandora at at Game£123.99 at at at Three at at at at Pandora at at at at at at at £1199.00 at AO at at Fitbit£49.99 at at at at at at at at at at at at at at at John Lewis at at at at at John Lewis at at at at at Amazon£184.00 at John Lewis & Partners£90.00 at at at at at at John Lewis & Partners at Three at Fitbit at at at at at at at Amazon£32.99 at Amazon£6.62 at at at Three at at at Amazon at at Apple at at at at at at at at John Lewis£49.99 at at at at Audible at at at at EE at at at at at John Lewis at EE at at £379.00 at at at at Amazon at at at Apple at at at Samsung at Three at Apple at at Microsoft at at at John Lewis at at at crunchyroll£22.00 at Amazon at at AO£79.00 at Samsung£449.00 at John Lewis£79.98 at at at at at at John Lewis & Partners£79.98 at at Microsoft£299.00 at Microsoft at at at at John Lewis£269.99 at at at at at Amazon at at now at John Lewis & Partners at at at Microsoft at at at at at at John Lewis at at at £6.65 at at at at at at at at at at at at at at at at at at at You Might Also Like PS5 consoles for sale – PlayStation 5 stock and restocks: Where to buy PS5 today? IS MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE 7 THE BEST IN THE SERIES? OUR REVIEW AEW game is a modern mix of No Mercy and SmackDown
CBC
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
A dystopian animated short featuring Jay Baruchel leads Canadian films at Cannes
Anxiety is the theme at this year's Cannes Film Festival. No, I'm not referring to the Doechii song (though I'm sure that'll be playing at all the afterparties); or the chatter around Trump's proposed 100 per cent tariff on international films; or programming like Ari Aster's Eddington, which taps into post pandemic divisiveness, and the final Mission: Impossible, where Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt wages war on an insidious AI. I'm talking about the Canadian films at Cannes this year, arriving on the Cote D'Azur like a dark cloud. There's Anne Émond's Peak Everything, about a man feeling emotionally crippled by the climate crisis. Its French title is Amour Apocalypse. Félix Dufour-Laperrière's animated feature Death Does Not Exist follows the tumultuous inner-life of a radical activist wrestling with existential decisions they must make to save society from where it's headed. In Martine Frossard's animated short Hypersensitive, a woman's fraught search for emotional healing sends her down a surreal rabbit hole that brings her closer to nature. And Bread Will Walk, Alex Boya's eerie and macabre animated short about two kids on a nightmarish journey, imagines the most fantastical take on what the world would be if we stay comfortable and complacent. The latter features Jay Baruchel, Canada's king of anxiety-riddled comedy, lending his vocals to the two children trying to hide from a world struck by a zombie-like plague caused by biochemically engineered food. People are mutating into bread. They're rounded up into concentration camps and fighting starvation by eating each other. It's a Hansel and Gretel meets Grapes of Wrath kind of story that taps into the same worry over industrial farming, mass production and commodification of our most bare necessities that Baruchel has grappled with in his apocalyptic documentary series We're All Gonna Die (Even Jay Baruchel). "It dovetails with my cynical worldview perfectly," Baruchel says, of his collaboration with Boya. Both are on a Zoom call with CBC Arts to discuss representing Canada at Cannes with a film that Baruchel describes as "Brothers Grimm with a healthy dose of 21st century nihilism." We're a couple weeks out from the festival. Baruchel is calling in from his Toronto home, sporting a Montreal Canadians hoodie and cap, and bringing his boisterous and huggable energy to the conversation. Boya, is at his National Film Board (NFB) desk in Montreal, surrounded by film props and gadgets. Boya hoists up to his camera a creepy animatronic of the main character in Bread Will Walk and a massive, mutated melange of actual bread, which he experimented with when he considered making his film using stop-motion animation. "That's disgusting," Baruchel says. One of the reasons Boya abandoned the stop motion approach is because his attempts at filming an animatronic character turning into bread, by using a translucent oven and actual yeast, risked burning down the NFB. "There's all kinds of biohazardous iterations of the project," says Boya, with a mischievous grin. Boya is an experimenter. He tinkers with all the ways he can push technology for his art. As we're talking, he's got a prototype robotics arm strapped to his wrist, which he's using to study "muscle memory alongside temporality" for a project where robotics meets cognitive science and animation/art. He regularly drops head-spinning concepts into our conversation, which would be intimidating if he weren't so gentle and genuine about it all. "He is whatever the exact opposite of full of shit is," is Baruchel's take on Boya. Bread Will Walk is actually drawn from his graphic novel about a walking bread pandemic, The Mill, which Boya originally published — right before the pandemic had everyone stuck at home baking bread — in NFT form. He says he was exploring "database storytelling" and atomizing his story into a world-building project. When approaching Bread Will Walk, Boya even tried on the latest AI tools, to see if they could push the animation further. "I had an open mind with regards to a lot of these new technologies," he says. "But to do exactly what we were doing, it looked better when a human being does it. "You realize that the authorship of a human being speaking to another one, a lot of that happens in the invisible space between the frames," Boya continues, explaining the relationship to the screen and its audience. "That is really a communication between two people. Can I have two robots talk over a coffee? What's the point, right? You can have a coffee shop with two language models talking to each other and the coffee is going to get cold. There's something existentially innate about speaking as humans that is embedded in storytelling and embedded in filmmaking and animation." Keeping humanity at the centre also happens to be Bread Will Walking 's whole aesthetic. The film's evocative hand drawn animation, all bleeding earthy colours and sinewy lines, moves like one continuous shot, where it appears less like the characters are roaming through the world, and more like the environment is mutating around them. They remain the constant in a dehumanizing landscape. The other constant is Baruchel, who voices not only the two kids but all the other hostile characters who enter their orbit. It's a task that Baruchel admits stretched his vocal talents, even though he's really seasoned at this kind of gig. Long before Baruchal spent a decade behind the mic as Hiccup in the How To Train Your Dragon franchise, he was a voice actor in animation and French to English dubs. In fact, one of his earliest gigs was another NFB animated short called One Divided by Two: Kids and Divorce, a film about how triggering divorce can be, which itself was pretty triggering for Baruchel. "I was a 12-year-old kid whose parents' marriage was imploding before my eyes," he says. "[It] was more of a bummer than even this one." The stretch for Baruchel this time around was the singing during a crucial moment in Bread Will Walk, which he describes as both a scary and humbling proposition. "They were cool enough to say if you don't want to sing you don't have to," he says. "But of course, I am a narcissist and a whore, so I was like, 'of course.' … Everybody there was wonderful but good lord, did I ever feel like a guy stuck on a mountain." For Boya, Baruchel's struggle on that mountain, his anxiety during the process, becomes part of the text, and the humanity between the frames. It also reinforces his reasoning for having one actor voice everyone, as if the whole film was an expression of a singular inner monologue. "You're kind of in this limbic state," says Boya. "The character is almost talking to themselves and having all these characters within themselves." Boya then addresses Baruchel about his performance directly: "The tension of having you defy yourself, define yourself and then fight with yourself in this procedural, adversarial learning of carbon-based matter is quite special to see. And quite special to see documented."
CBC
06-03-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
How art can help us harness this moment of Canadian patriotism for good
Social Sharing While many have joked about it online, it feels true that Canada hasn't seen a surge of national pride quite like this current wave since the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, when red mittens were everywhere and gold medals made us all feel a part of one team. But also, this time feels different. The stakes are higher, and our need to come together as a country feels more urgent than ever. So, how do we turn this unprecedented moment of Canadian patriotism into something deeper than a fleeting reason to cheerlead for Canadian culture? Today on Commotion, host Elamin Abdelmahmoud speaks with rapper Shad Kabango and actor Jay Baruchel about how art can help define and strengthen our national identity — and help us avoid the pitfalls that can come with nationalism. We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud on your favourite podcast player. WATCH | Today's episode on YouTube: Elamin: A lot of people are maybe realizing for the first time that they've been mostly consuming U.S. culture … without it even necessarily occurring to them that they're watching U.S.-made shows or listening to U.S.-made music…. And then they are maybe looking to change that. You, Jay Baruchel, have been banging this Canadian movies and Canadian television drum for some time. What does it feel like for you now, to have the whole country maybe catch up to a place that you've been at for some time? Jay: Oh, well, that's a lovely question. I hadn't even asked myself that…. I'm psyched, and kind of inspired, and a bit surprised at this kind of reckoning of— choose your dirty word: patriotism, nationalism. Either way, it's been heartening. I'll say that I had doubts about how strong that strain was in our national identity, and would it weather a storm, for all the reasons you mentioned…. I think this is the kick in the arse that we've sort of needed, and I hope our country gets to blossom a bit more as a result of it. Elamin: I like that in your answer, you said, "Choose your dirty word," in terms of nationalism, patriotism, because I do think that is a part of how we approach this conversation. It feels a little bit new to some folks. It feels a little bit like, how do I wear this particular outfit? Shad, let me come to you. When I think about your music, I think about music that is distinctly rooted here, distinctly rooted in the conversations that we are having in this country.… And there's something about it that makes it different from music that was made anywhere else. When you take a step back, what is the role for you for Canadian artists in this particular moment? Shad: I appreciate that comment. Hip-hop is so much about place, right? And situating yourself … and finding a way to take pride in that place, and where you come from, and that community, right? And specificity. That's part of the work that art can do: it can situate people, and reflect their own stories back to them. It can help them take pride in who they are and where they come from and where they're rooted, right? So I think that's just a thing hip-hop has certainly always done, but I think all art can play that role. Elamin: I think about that as sort of an invitation to say, "Look around you and figure out what is the thing that makes your place distinct from any other place." And that can be as granular as your neighborhood, and as grand as your country. Part of becoming a country, part of zooming into the thing that gives you a collective identity is saying, "We do things a little bit differently here, and this is what it feels like for us to move through these different spaces."
