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Non-MX Articles: Tom McCamus (2/09 Booky's Crush)

Globe and Mail 2/13/02: Tom McCamus

HIGHLIGHT: BOOKY'S CRUSH
CATHERINE DAWSON MARCH
February 13, 2009

This is one of the best tween/family films I've seen all season - and that's not just the ramblings of a mother sick of Miley Cyrus's increasingly mature shenanigans on Hannah Montana.

Set in Toronto during the 1930s, Booky's Crush is a new movie based on the novels by Bernice Thurman Hunter. Rachel Marcus is entirely believable as the 11-year-old of the title, who's moving from the boys-are-silly to the boys-are-actually-kind-of-cute stage of her life.

The script is warm and sweet, but not saccharine - Booky's family is struggling as the Depression worsens but are not as badly off as others, and an awkward chat between Booky's father (Stuart Hughes) and an out-of-work old friend (Tom McCamus) is as relevant today as it was back then.

Hughes's wife is played by real-life wife Megan Follows - casting that reinforces the family dynamic between Booky, her parents and three siblings. Another smart touch is the way each character's personal dilemmas dovetail nicely with the central storyline - Booky's first love. Our household looks forward to seeing more Booky films.

Sunday, 8 p.m. on CBC

© The Globe and Mail

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Excerpt from The Lindsay Post 2/10/09: Tom McCamus

A bittersweet tale of those other hard times
Posted By BRIAN GORMAN, © ZAP2IT

"Booky's Crush," airing Sunday, Feb. 15, on CBC Television, is the third in a series of family dramas about the Thomson family living through the Depression in Toronto.
....
Like its predecessors, "Booky Makes Her Mark" and "Booky and the Secret Santa," this movie is based on a series of children's novels by Bernice Thurman Hunter, a former Eaton's employee who published her first book in 1981, when she was 59.

And like the others, it was filmed in Hamilton, Ont., because so little of Depression-era Toronto remains as it was in the 1930s.

"Booky's Crush" tells a pair of parallel stories.

A new boy has come to school -- someone with a whiff of danger about him -- and Beatrice "Booky" Thomson (Rachel Marcus) has fallen hard.

Meanwhile, her brother Arthur (Dylan Everett) has begun to display exceptional artistic ability.

This has put him in conflict with his father, a harness maker who has had to abandon his craft, which has no financial potential, for a factory job that pays the bills.
....
A subplot of "Booky's Crush" involves an old friend of Thomas' (Tom McCamus) who has lost his job and has been dropped like a dirty rag by all his friends, including the Thomsons.

We see him at a birthday party, secretly drinking and glaring at his fair-weather friends.

As Follows says, it adds a slightly ominous tone similar to the one we see in the news today, that "the roller coaster is about to go down."

© Lindsay Post</a>