Critics At Large

Are You There, McPhee?: John Guare at a Low Point

noreply@blogger.com (Critics at Large) — Mon, 04 Jun 2012 16:00:00 +0000

Paul Gross (centre), with Hope Springer and Matthew Kuenne, in Are You There, McPhee? (Photo: Michal Daniel)

What in the world has happened to John Guare? The great American playwright who authored Six Degrees of Separation, The House of Blue Leaves, Bosoms and Neglect, Marco Polo Sings a Solo, the Lydie Breeze plays and the screenplay for Louis Malle’s Atlantic City has returned to the breathtaking rate of production he enjoyed in the seventies and eighties. He opened a new play, A Free Man of Color, at Lincoln Center a year and a half ago; another, Are You There, McPhee?, just closed the McCarter Theatre season in Princeton, New Jersey; and the Signature Theater in New York has scheduled a third for next year. But A Free Man of Color and Are You There, McPhee?, are hardly recognizable as works by Guare, whose plays are distinctive for hooking wild, complicated plot lines to perhaps the most acute instinct for dramatic structure since Eugene O’Neill. These new projects are rambling and aimless. A Free Man of Color, an early-nineteenth-century picaresque inspired by the life of Joseph Cornet, the richest black man in New Orleans, had magnificent production values, but as a race play it was both pedantic and incoherent, like Suzan-Lori Parks’s much lauded Topdog Underdog. And poor Jeffrey Wright, as Cornet, asked to carry the whole enterprise on his back, wandered through the scenes with a slightly puzzled resoluteness, as if neither Guare nor the director, George C. Wolfe (who also staged Topdog Underdog), had bothered to hand him a map. But at least A Free Man of Color was about something. Are You There, McPhee? has miles of narrative but no theme. It’s a lost play.

The frame is a scene at a Manhattan party where a playwright named Mundie (Paul Gross) is asked to tell a story. The one he comes up with is a shaggy-dog tale about a visit he made to Nantucket some years earlier on police business, when the tenants of a house he’d bought there with the proceeds from a successful play turned out to be child pornographers. (Nantucket figures significantly in Guare’s career. It was where Marco Polo Sings a Solo was originally produced, and the setting of his masterpiece, the two-part post-Civil War drama divided into Gardenia and Lydie Breeze.) When Mundie arrives he finds the house, which once belonged to a famous children’s book writer, abandoned; the local police chief (Patrick Carroll) suspects him of involvement in the porn ring; and it seems everyone he comes across participated in a community theatre production of one of his plays, The Internal Structure of Stars. The experience had a profound effect on all their lives, and they haven’t forgiven Mundie for failing to respond when one of the actresses – the daughter of the children’s-book author, who was also the real-estate agent who sold him the house – invited him to come down and see the performance. At the end of the first act, a Vietnam vet who calls himself McPhee (John Behlmann) and drinks with Mundie at a local bar persuades him to bring an enormous lobster in a garbage can to the home of the real-estate agent as a peace offering. But instead of finding her there, he comes upon a couple, Peter and Wendy (Jeremy Bobb and Molly Camp), babysitting her two children (Matthew Kuenne and Hope Springer), who don’t know that their father (Danny Mastrogiorgio) – whom we see only at the other end of a telephone line – has either killed their mother or driven her to suicide, and is out in Hollywood trying to broker a production deal. As the curtain falls, Mundie is left alone with the kids, without food supplies or money. (The little boy flushes his clothes, with his wallet stuffed in his pants pocket, down the toilet.)

Playwright John Guare (Photo: Paul Chinn)

Guare has no doubt dealt with his share of amateur companies who’ve begged him to attend their editions of his plays; it’s a good comic premise. But the snippets we hear from The Internal Structure of Stars sound dreadful (the idea would only work if they sounded wonderful), and he hasn’t fleshed out any of the characters, who also include Mundie’s on-again, off-again girl friend (Alicia Goranson). In Guare’s good plays, the plots rhyme in utterly unexpected ways, and the rhyming reflects the idea of connection that is his great theme, just as it’s Thornton Wilder’s in Our Town and Jane Wagner’s in The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe (the American play by a Guare contemporary that, though vastly different in style, reminds me most of Guare). What seem at first like coincidences in Six Degrees of Separation – like the scene where the friends of the protagonists, happen to witness the suicide of an aspiring young actor, linked to both couples through a con man who’s invaded all of their lives – turn out to be evidence of a profound binding of the characters’ fates that both alters them forever and yet can’t bring them closer together because of the insurmountable barriers of class. But in Are You There, McPhee? the coincidences are nothing more than that, and the endlessly strung-out plot begins to pound on your skull like a headache you can’t get rid of. It doesn’t help that Guare falls back on the cheap, nerve-jangling strategy of having the phone ring every few minutes (as it does, to similar effect, in David Mamet’s Oleanna).

I loved Paul Gross on the three-season Canadian TV miniseries Slings and Arrows, but he’s not especially good here, and most of the rest of the cast is terrible. The burden of all the bad acting has to fall on the director, Sam Buntrock: compounding the problems with the script, Are You There, McPhee? is one of the worst pieces of direction I’ve ever seen in a professional theatre. The scenes aren’t shaped at all; the staging is a mess; and instead of directing the two children, Buntrock obviously just told them to scream and heave themselves at the adult actors and throw things. I wanted to throw a few things, too, but not at the actors.

– Steve Vineberg is Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and film. He also writes for The Threepenny Review, The Boston Phoenix and The Christian Century and is the author of three books: Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style; No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade; and High Comedy in American Movies.

Boot(y) Camps: Sweating and Working It Out

noreply@blogger.com (Critics at Large) — Sun, 03 Jun 2012 16:00:00 +0000

One of the signs of spring in the city – aside from robins, patios, and Vespas – are the Lulemon-clad armies performing gruelling rounds of burpees, crunches and squats in public parks. Yes, as bathing suit season draws near and the layers of clothing start to come off, so must the extras on the body that have accumulated over the winter. Our monolithic fitness industry offers an endless array of options for those who either need or desire a source of guidance in their routine. One cannot walk several blocks without feeling the guilt-inducing reminders of fitness clubs, boxing studios, or flyers for the “boot camp.” This year, based on a combination of curiosity and bemusement, I decided to gear up and join these boot-camp goers. What I discovered was something truly enlightening.

Over the past decade, fitness boot camps have grown in popularity across North America. Men and women voluntarily pay to have their butts whipped into shape by a drill sergeant leading them through military-inspired workouts. The original style involved a barking ring leader encouraging (yelling at) their sweat-drenched victims to finish their (boy) pushups. From this concept spawned a sub-series of female-focused camps designed by women. The main difference? Replacing the R. Lee Ermey (the actor – and real DI – who played the DI in Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket) with a preternaturally peppy, pink-spandex-wearing instructor. One who had the body of Demi Moore, circa G. I. Jane, and the hair and face of Demi Moore, circa Striptease. It left you feeling you had something to aspire to rather than fear. The workout was also a more female-body focused combination of resistance training and cardio.

Given my lone wolf approach to fitness, my decision to jump on a bandwagon was surprising even for yours truly. I’ve been a tenacious runner for over ten years, and I cycle to work as soon as the sun stays out. The rest of my time is spent carrying or herding a three-year-old flight risk. I prefer these activities because, with perhaps the exception of the latter, I find them to be a therapeutic escape from otherwise over-articulated activities. However, eventually I was in want of an alternative; something more challenging. Something with structure; that offered camaraderie and guidance. Thus I identified and sampled my options.

First there was running club. That was short-lived mainly because I found the name alone was too much of an oxymoron. My running is my own. There was a contemplation of gym memberships, but commitment phobia promptly averted me. Kick-boxing I found a bit too Ally McBeal. I'm a long-time yogi who eventually came to terms with the fact that I’m just too impatient. While many yoga instructors did offer a challenge, without fail, at the end of class, all instructors wanted me to relax and exhale all of my worries and stresses away. (This made me so anxious!) Finally, there were those tamed-down “dance” lessons, where gaggles of young women met in converted lofts and incorporated pole dancing, lap dancing, and other striptease-based moves into their workouts. These workshops were absolutely worth a visit, but not ideal for the long run. (The trouble came when I had to explain to others at work and in my life where I was going.)

I finally tested two boot camps that were most rewarding: Booty Camp, now a nation wide franchise originally started by Sammie Kennedy of Toronto (Kennedy’s mantra of goal setting motivation, combined with nutrition guidelines, helps women feel empowered about their fitness routine); and Empower Me Fitness, which is owned and led by Adrienne Davis. The same velocity, but with more intimate class sizes.

The time spent at Booty Camp and Empower Me Fitness was invigorating. With the exception of the winter months, the camps were held outside, offering fresh air along with a workout. They are affordable and offer a variety of packages for convenient scheduling. While you were supervised and guided through your workout, you are never singled out or embarrassed. In addition to the perks and the challenging circuits, I left feeling better, stronger, and happier. What I really took away from the camps, and what I believe was the explanation for their success, was their philosophies. The philosophies that believe change is possible, and that one can be the best they can be. The entrepreneurs behind the camps share their personal stories of change and growth – real women telling real women what is truly possible. Also, the confirmation that all one really needs to achieve their utmost potential is themselves, and maybe a little sweat and encouragement.

Below are the links to the two boot camps

http://www.empowermefitness.com

http://www.bootycampfitness.com

– Laura Warner is a librarian, researcher and aspiring writer living in Toronto. She is currently based in the Canadian Broadcasting Centre’s Music Library.

Shakespeare’s Bookmark: Come, Thou Tortoise by Jessica Grant

noreply@blogger.com (Critics at Large) — Sat, 02 Jun 2012 16:00:00 +0000

As a bookseller, I encountered rather mixed reactions to Canadian fiction. These tended to be something like Oh or Um or No Thank You. Usually, all three.

What is wrong with Canadian fiction, I would ask.

It is too bland, they would say. Too drab. I don’t like it.

Oh, I would say back.

And then I would offer them Come, Thou Tortoise in hopes of changing their minds.

The first novel of Newfoundland’s Jessica Grant, Come, Thou Tortoise wanders between two narrators. The first is Audrey “Oddly” Flowers, whose father lies in a coma after an accident – or as Oddly insists on calling it, a collision – with a Christmas tree. Oddly flies home to St. John’s to be with her family, stubbornly optimistic in the face of growing questions about her father and her future. Whether she’s inventing strange shovels, rescuing laboratory mice, or getting trouble with the Greater Toronto Airport Authority, Oddly’s voice made me smile from the first page.

The second narrator is Winifred: an old, slow soul with a fondness for long drives, a homemade paper castle, and an interest in Shakespeare. Also, Oddly’s tortoise. Her periodic interludes give us a peek at the life Audrey has left abruptly back in Oregon. Sardonic and wry without jarring the reader, the reptile brings an endearing perspective that, like her keeper, manages to keep the story intriguing and unpredictable.

Grant – through Oddly’s often wilfully oblivious voice – refuses to spell out exactly what’s going on, taking this to an almost extreme level in the elimination of most punctuation from the book’s text. No question marks, quotation marks or drastic formatting anywhere. Why would one do this. Perhaps to achieve a certain kind of rhythmic, deadpan tone in the writing. To give the impressions that we are reading Oddly’s thoughts as they come to her, without any kind of embellishment or editing. Seems like a risky premise that could have proven distracting – and if you aren’t expecting it, it can take a few pages to get used to – but I applaud Grant for taking it.

So does it work.

Boy does it ever.

Author Jessica Grant

For a novel built out of grief, Come, Thou Tortoise made me laugh. A lot. Possibly in public. Grant tempers her grim premise with humour that somehow avoids straying into black comedy. The book’s tone owes a great deal to Grant’s appealing protagonist, who shines light into the dark and unexpected corners of life and marvels like a child at what she discovers there. For much of the novel, we aren’t sure what to make of Oddly’s youthfully innocent view of the world. Aside from her unique diction, her charm comes from the little details of life onto which her mind fixates, turning them around in her head and in front of the reader though her pithy narration. Comas become commas, executors become executioners, tired people are unslept, and planes stay in the air through the collective good will of all aboard – or possibly magic. Because of her flow-of-consciousness style of storytelling, this journey inside of Oddly’s scattered brain feels vibrant and genuine. Finding ways to avoid looking at her loss straight on, she ends up glancing between colourful distractions and deeply personal flashbacks, which makes witnessing both her joy and her grief all the more gripping.

Another word that tended to unsettle my bookstore cliental was ‘quirky’. Perhaps they heard it as ‘childish’, ‘silly’, ‘unrefined’. Come, Thou Tortoise is perhaps all of these, but only in the best ways, the most human ways. It’s a kind of understated humour that feels Canadian, perhaps because it looks at all those deep, sticky questions of life and death and family, only sideways, while shovelling the driveway with orange mittens.

Can you be bland and drab while wearing orange mittens.

Maybe.

But not while reading this book.

– Catharine Charlesworth is an avid lover of books, the web, and other inventive outlets for the written word. She has studied communication at the University of Toronto while working as a bookseller, and is currently employed in online advertising in downtown Toronto.

Neglected Gem #16: Stone Reader (2002)

noreply@blogger.com (Critics at Large) — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 16:00:00 +0000

Stone Reader has a delicious premise. The director, Mark Moskowitz, a voracious and life-long reader whose library has followed him around from youth to middle age, revisits a book called The Stones of Summer that he first acquired in the early seventies, after he’d read a rave review in The New York Times claiming it as the book of its generation. Moskowitz tried it on two occasions and put it aside, but now, nearly thirty years after its release, he reads it from cover to cover and finds it enthralling. So he checks on the Internet for other works by its author, Dow Mossman, who wrote it as a young man, just out of the University of Iowa writing program. (The Stones of Summer began as his M.F.A. thesis.) To his surprise, Moskowitz can’t find any other works by Mossman, or any further references to him or to this prodigious debut novel. So he sets out to find Mossman, and to learn why he never published anything else. His quest, which becomes an obsession and takes up a couple of years of his life, has him journey to New England, Manhattan and Iowa and puts him in touch with a variety of people who were once linked to Mossman or to the Iowa writing program, or who can shed light on the elusive and exasperating publishing process. He interviews former New Yorker chief Bob Gottlieb, who, as a young editor at Knopf, was instrumental in getting Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 in print; the literary critic Leslie Fielder (in what may have been his final interview); Frank Conroy, head of the Iowa program, and William Murray, whose tough-love approach to his students at Iowa both battered them and left them grateful admirers (and to whom The Stones of Summer is dedicated); John Seelye, who wrote the review in the Times; and Carl Brandt, Mossman’s agent at the time when he put out the book. He even tracks down the artist who designed the cover.

This one-of-a-kind documentary, which is funny and affecting and continually surprising, isn’t only about the vanished author and his disappearing book. (Moskowitz locates a handful of copies on the net, as well as a wonderful anecdote: someone remembers sitting next to a woman on a plane who carried a copy with her wherever she went, just in case she found other readers who adored it as much as she did.) And it isn’t primarily about the vagaries of publishing, though what we learn about the ease with which a gifted writer can slip through the cracks is enough to give an aspiring novelist nightmares; there was one sitting near me, who confided that after seeing the picture he wasn’t sure he could return home to his laptop. Stone Reader is a paean to the joys of reading – to the way the books we love come to reside within us, shape our friendships, in some significant way define who we are. “When I read Dickens,” Conroy says wistfully, “I can feel the old man over my shoulder,” and all of us for whom books are indispensable know just what he means. There’s a charming scene where Moskowitz and one of his childhood friends wander through the children’s section of the library they frequented as kids, recalling when they read certain books and exchanged them, and how those books led them to others. Moskowitz also talks about a bookstore he discovered in his adolescence, where he found Catch-22 and graduated to adult reading tastes. He’s the ideal reader, the one Mossman or any author must fantasize about. Books matter so much to him that when he drives out to spend a couple of days with Seelye, he stocks his car with novels and literary criticism that might just come up in conversation. And sitting opposite Brandt in his Manhattan office, he stacks up the books that have made his private list of the best first novels of the twentieth century – saving The Stones of Summer for last, to gauge Seelye’s response.

Mark Moskowitz and John Seelye

Moskowitz’s mother taught him how to read because she couldn’t wait to share her favorite books with him. (As of the film, which came out in 2003, she was still alive and they were still close.) And late in the movie, he includes a scene where his own son tears open a package from Amazon and sits down eagerly in the living room to begin the treasure he finds inside – Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Stone Reader, with its ambling, picaresque form and its marvelous, quirky cast of characters (my favorites are the novelist and teacher Bruce Dobler, who tells a peerless story about William Murray, and Murray himself, with his sticky brogue and little boy’s giggle and undiminished sense of wonder), is a movie every devoted reader should love, the way we love a classic narrative. And what does Moskowitz find at the end of his quest? See for yourself. I’d no more reveal the answer than I’d blab what happens at the climax of an adventure novel I wanted to pass on to a friend.

Note to readers: Mark Moskowitz's Stone Reader will be screened at Ryerson University in Toronto as part of their annual Silver Screens Arts Festival currently running until Sunday, June 3rd. Critics at Large's Kevin Courrier will be introducing the film and speaking to special guest Mark Moskowitz after the screening. Stone Reader still has tickets available and will be shown on Saturday, June 2nd at 6:30 pm. See the schedule on our home page (right sidebar) for location and ticket information.

Atlas Pumped – Muscle: Confessions of an Unlikely Bodybuilder

noreply@blogger.com (Critics at Large) — Thu, 31 May 2012 16:00:00 +0000

When I was a young lad reading my Superman and Batman comic books, I was always fascinated by an ad that appeared in every issue. It featured a skinny young guy (not unlike myself) sitting on the beach with his fetching girlfriend and having sand kicked in his face by some jock who was built like an express train. Of course, the lean kid was humiliated, and the girl ran off with the beefcake. This was the selling point for Charles Atlas, a popular bodybuilder who could turn your beanpole frame into a brickhouse and you'd never have to have sand kicked in your face again.

The very idea of crushing bullies with a quickly acquired set of brutal biceps had a certain appeal (especially for a guy who for years to follow would have to grow used to losing girlfriends to intimidating guys with Ferrari's), but it wasn't alluring enough for me to send away for barbells and catch what Samuel Wilson Fussell, in his autobiographical expose Muscle, calls "the disease." The "disease" he describes is the obsession with transforming yourself into the fearsome giant you once dreaded. In Muscle: Confessions of an Unlikely Bodybuilder (William Morrow, 1992), Fussell takes us pretty far into the secret world of the sissy who hides inside his hulking flesh. "The beauty of it all," he confesses, "lay in the probable fact that I would never be called upon to actually use these muscles. I could remain a coward and no one would know." What makes Muscle such a compelling read is that Fussell brings a frighteningly precise awareness of what he did to himself and why.

At times, delving into Muscle is like plunging into a memoir of a drug addict who finds compelling ways to describe what he finds so pleasurable about the addiction even though he knows that he's killing himself. "If it meant feeling safe and protected, I was willing to give up everything...my life pre-iron no longer existed for me. It happened to someone else, someone smaller, frailer, less substantial than this new-and-improved packaged version." Fussell's addiction to bodybuilding began in 1985 while living in New York City. Having just graduated from Oxford, the son of very literate parents – his father was historian Paul Fussell (who just died last week) – he was plagued by illness. At six-foot-four and 170 pounds, he found himself "looking cadaverous," and discovered that the cause of the sickness was the violence in the city.

One day while escaping one of New York's more unstable citizens (who just happened to be chasing him with a crowbar), Fussell fled into a bookstore, and found himself face to face with the book, Arnold: Education of a Bodybuilder. The image of a robust Arnold Schwarzenegger, the John the Baptist of the barbell set, sealed Fussell's fate. For four years he built himself up to 257 pounds, and competed in three bodybuilding contests until he woke up to the horror that he'd transformed himself into a caricature of manhood. "The physical palisades and escarpments of my own body," he writes, "served as a rock boundary that permitted no passage, no hint of a deeper self – a self I couldn't bear."

Ultimately, his desire for muscles melted away and he gave up bodybuilding to become a writer. In Muscle, Fussell takes us beyond the narcissism of the body image into the self-hatred that lays beneath it. It's a riveting journey through a subculture he describes compellingly as "part puritan, and part P.T. Barnum," with characters called Sweetpea, Mousie, Nimrod, and Vinnie going through the purifying rituals of pumping iron, developing attitude, and walking with a swagger. It's about steroid use, the vitamins and proteins that need to be ingested daily. It's about the nascent fascism of men seeking "perfect" bodies while sporting T-shirts that say "Don't growl if you can bite" and "I'd rather be killing communists in Central America."

One of the more revealing aspects of Fussell's memoir is how the author arrives at the source of his pathology. While the bodybuilder thinks he is intimidating the world, he's really insulating himself from a world he finds terrifying. In the highly absorbing Muscle, Fussell demonstrates that the bully on the beach was a coward all along.

– Kevin Courrier is a writer/broadcaster, film critic, teacher and author (Dangerous Kitchen: The Subversive World of Zappa). His forthcoming book is Reflections in the Hall of Mirrors: American Movies and the Politics of Idealism. With John Corcelli, Courrier is currently working on another radio documentary for CBC Radio's Inside the Music called The Other Me: The Avant-Garde Music of Paul McCartney.

Brutal Sympathy: Women in Peckinpah’s Westerns

noreply@blogger.com (Critics at Large) — Wed, 30 May 2012 16:00:00 +0000

Teresa (Sonia Amelio) and General Mapache (Emilio Fernandez) in The Wild Bunch

Can a filmmaker obsessed with machismo also be feminist? With Sam Peckinpah, you wonder. His luminous westerns – Ride the High Country (1962), The Wild Bunch (1969), The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970) and Junior Bonner (1972) – are lyric meditations on machismo. They’re about cowboys, outlaws, drifters and rodeo stars caught in a changing world, and the last flaring up of their spirits before they are pinioned by the machinery of that change. But they are also about how those men relate to the women they encounter on their journeys, women, like them, trapped by circumstance and fighting to retain some glimmer of their humanity. The gloriously spacious landscapes of the American west (shot in each case by Lucian Ballard), with the teeming blues and yellows of wide skies and sweeping country, express the paradoxical entrapment these characters feel, their longing to break free and their uncertainty of what they’d be breaking free to, but they also infuse the movies with a kind of moral spaciousness. The characters, male and female, have room to be who they are, without judgment before the eyes of the camera. That’s the romanticism of Peckinpah’s westerns, and it often comes out in romantic plots that bring together pairs of lovers in sublime meetings of equals.

It’s not exactly that Peckinpah stands out among the work of other American New Wave directors for his sensitivity to female experience – not in a generation that includes Robert Altman (McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Thieves Like Us), Arthur Penn (Bonnie and Clyde, Alice’s Restaurant), Robert Towne (Personal Best) and Brian De Palma (Carrie, Blow Out). It’s the way he gets at that experience that is so unusual and so dazzling. I can’t think of another filmmaker who can refract a feminist sensibility through male, at times misogynistic, perspectives. That’s what Peckinpah does in The Wild Bunch, which, unlike Ride the High Country, The Ballad of Cable Hogue or Junior Bonner, has no heroine or even any single female character on screen for more than a few minutes. Instead, the women are diffuse, and they become part of the imagistic tapestry of the movie, indissoluble from its human vision and moral dimension. In the sensory overload of its turbulent pacing the feminist ideas can feel oblique and at times almost encrypted, but it’s Peckinpah’s most complicated examination of romantic sympathy.

Ben Johnson, Warren Oates, William Holden and Ernest Borgnine in The Wild Bunch

The guys in The Wild Bunch are a band of aging outlaws, led by Pike Bishop (William Holden), looking for one last score before they turn in. But the last score – the robbery of a Texas bank (the town is called Starbuck) – goes awry: they’re preempted by a gang of bounty hunters headed by Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan), Pike’s former partner, and they escape a bloody gun fight that mows down dozens of civilians in the cross-fire only to find a decoy instead of the loot they expected. The Wild Bunch ends in an even bloodier and more horrifying shoot-out – it’s a tragedy about the decline of these anti-heroes – but first it takes us through their last days together, into their failing and surging hopes for some kind of freedom, and into their memories.

The members of the Bunch don’t understand the women they sleep with – usually prostitutes, but in the case of Pike and Angel, lovers now dead or left behind – and the movie takes their perspective, so much so that even when women appear on the screen, they rarely speak, or they speak in Spanish without subtitles. With the exception of one exquisite scene, which I’ll talk about in a moment, they seem to keep to the corner of the screen, or else they appear in flashes. If you think Peckinpah’s objectifying these women by failing to give them voices, then you’re missing the glory of his filmmaking here – the way he can show, in poetic glimmers as though at the margin of consciousness, what the men fail to see, without every breaking sympathy with them (they’re brutal, but they’re still the heroes). The women might be images but they’re not devices or decoration. As in still photography, their faces tell of full, teeming interior lives that are not unspooled in narrative: the open fear on the face of a girl peering out behind the walls of a house as the Bunch enters a Mexican village on horseback; a woman nursing her baby against the sounds of marching soldiers counting off (“un, dos, un, dos”) in Mapache’s stronghold. (The camera pans out from a close-up of the child suckling at its mother’s breast until we can see the mother’s face, watching the soldiers out of the corner of her eye.)

Peckinpah directs William Holden and Aurora Clavel on set

The Wild Bunch is built up from images like these, always seen through the eyes of the men, accumulating in a furious torrent. Peckinpah doesn’t distinguish between visual and dramatic ideas. And he gets performances of such poetic physicality so in sync with the spirit of his movies that the movies themselves can feel like they were built around a single gesture or expression. (Think of the loose, limber style in Junior Bonner that seems to extend from Steve McQueen’s easy muscled grace as he rides that rodeo bull.) The images are sometimes micro-performances. In a flashback, Pike’s lover, Aurora, undresses for him in front of the bedroom mirror and holds back her hair as she blows out a candle, a beat before her husband bursts in with a gun and shoots her. It’s a quietly beautiful moment, with all the flickering luminosity of the candle, and it has a depth Peckinpah seems to intentionally steal out from under us when the candle goes out and the bullets are fired.

The most complex scene with a female character feels like an extension of one of these brief scenes. Angel (Jaime Sanchez), one of the outlaws in Pike’s gang and the only Mexican, encounters his ex-lover Teresa (Sonia Amelio) in Agua Verde, the stronghold of the revolutionary General Mapache who has ravaged their native town. While Angel abandoned his home to join up with the Bunch in a bid for freedom from poverty, Teresa survived the massacre of the town by becoming one of Mapache’s prostitutes. Teresa’s scene comes in at just under two and a half minutes, from the moment Angel spots her in the crowd, calling out happily to Mapache, through her momentary exchange of words with Angel (in Spanish, and without subtitles) once he catches her eye, to Angel, possessed by fury, pulling out his gun and shooting her in the chest as she sits laughing on Mapache’s knee. Unless you can follow the Spanish, you experience the scene between Teresa and Angel in sounds and images: it’s pure sensuality. Amelio gives her entire performance in her face, and Peckinpah films her in exquisite close-ups that read like the cinematic equivalent of Greek tragedy (she’s like one of the women in Euripides’ proto-feminist The Trojan Women).

Why does Angel shoot Teresa? How you read Peckinpah’s use of women in The Wild Bunch probably rests on how you read this scene, and because Peckinpah uses the language barrier to playfully obscure the content of their conversation, you have to read the scene the way you read all the scenes of women, as an image. I suppose you could see this as a moment of sexual jealousy and rage against a woman who resists sexual subservience. And in a way it is, but there’s more here. Angel doesn’t see Teresa as a possession he’s lost control of: He identifies with her. Like Angel, Teresa left the village to cobble together some kind of life for herself. She abandoned the town, but so did he; her betrayal is his betrayal. “I left the village so I wouldn’t starve,” she tells him. “But now I’m happy. Very happy.” (Her face, with its contortions of grief and regret and gleaming with the vehement determination to survive, say something else.) Angel kills Teresa in a shattering moment of self-recognition. He kills her because he can’t make her two-dimensional otherwise. It’s violence used against the emotional complexity of the movie, against the fullness of feeling and all the contradictory responses that fly in the face of objectification.

Angel (Jaime Sanchez) confronts Teresa (Sonia Amelio)

Sympathy is Peckinpah’s great subject because he’s incapable of romanticizing it: he shows how it can produce both redemption and spectacular violence. The sympathy that brings lovers together in a meeting of equals in Ride The High Country and The Ballad of Cable Hogue is the same sympathy that makes Angel kill Teresa, Deke, the bounty hunter in The Wild Bunch hamstrung into pursuing his former gang, prefer to let civilians get mowed down in the cross-fire of a gun fight than take down his ex-partner Pike when he has a clear shot. And so The Wild Bunch, a movie about sympathy and identification, ends in a senseless apocalypse of violence, almost a cleansing, from which a new band of weathered rogues emerges, warily, to fight another day. Nothing can keep these men from defending and protecting one another, from finding uncanny reflections of themselves in the actions of others (what makes Pike any better than the General Mapache, the movie asks, what makes the corrupt sheriff Harrigan any better than the convicted criminal Deke), but nothing can stop the violence either.

There is a feminist premise in The Wild Bunch, but you ultimately can’t claim it as a feminist movie because it won’t sit still long enough to be one. Peckinpah can’t get comfortable with any one response to what he shows you and so the furious force of the images and their erupting, unpredictable emotional content explodes the moral dimension you expect from a western. Pauline Kael called it “a brilliantly directed and photographed study in confusion” because it even exceeds its premise as a realist anti-war film – Peckinpah gets lost in the violence as in an abstracted reverie. The images take over. But its confusion is also what makes it a riveting study in sympathy: the movie is driven inexorably forward by its angry spiritual restlessness. As Peckinpah builds battle scenes as visual montages of abstracted perspectives, each image refracted through the eyes of another character, he gets a cubist effect. He’s creating an abstracted history painting, like Picasso’s Guernica, but in moving images. And in a way the moving images allow Peckinpah to go even further than Picasso, because he’s breaking down the sense of time and not just the sense of visual perspective. The suspense that grows to an almost excruciating pitch in the first shoot-out in Starbuck, before the first trigger is pulled, forces a response out of you and then forces you to interrogate your own response. (You are so relieved when the tension breaks and the bullets start firing, and then you’re horrified by your relief.)

That refusal to settle for a singular effect, the refusal to settle, even, for an identifiable moral vision (you can find one in Ride The High Country and The Ballad of Cable Hogue), comes from Peckinpah’s refusal to be cold to anything on the screen. And he won’t let us go cold, either. Like Angel’s feelings for Teresa, like Pike’s for Aurora, the woman he left behind, Peckinpah’s feeling for the images he realizes is not alienation but furious sympathy. The movie can’t objectify the women because it’s constantly shattering our ability to retreat into the kind of comfortable objectification that makes brutality bearable.

Susan George as Amy Sumner in Straw Dogs

Of course, Straw Dogs, the nihilistic male fantasy Peckinpah made in 1971, is not only not feminist, it’s misogynistic. I can’t in good conscience write about Peckinpah’s feminist sensibility without pointing out that two years after The Wild Bunch and right in the middle of the sweep of masterpieces that includes The Ballad of Cable Hogue and Junior Bonner on either end, he made a movie about human apathy so misanthropic it perpetuates the very sickness it describes. A psychological thriller about a couple, David and Amy Sumner (played by Dustin Hoffman and Susan George), who rent out a small fortress of a country home in the Cornish village where Amy grew up, Straw Dogs is notorious for a scene in which a leering pack of guys, brutish philistines with menacing stares, invite a pliant David out shooting with them, while a couple of them take turns sneaking back to the Sumner cottage to rape Amy. (Her ex-boyfriend Charlie, played by Del Henney, is one of them.) The rape scene is just one example of the misogynistic attitudes of the movie: Peckinpah lets you see Amy suffer, but it’s the suffering of a brutalized sex kitten. Unlike Teresa in The Wild Bunch, Amy really is being punished for her polymorphous sexuality: while her second rapist, who sodomizes her, leaves her traumatized, the first one pacifies her. She didn’t just get what was coming to her, but it also turns out to be good for her.

David is an American, and his retreat from the U.S. to England to work on his book (he’s a mathematician) is supposed to tell us that morally he’s puny and impotent. He leaves because he won’t “take a stand,” as Amy puts it, on the political turmoil in his home country. (To prove his manhood, he defends the fort and kills the philistines who try to cuckold him by ogling and raping his wife; it’s a vengeance story in which triumph means hanging onto possessions, of which Amy is one.) But that’s not David’s retreat, it’s the director’s. Straw Dogs is Peckinpah’s retreat from the roiling complexities of The Wild Bunch, the perverse romanticism of its violence, and into a crudely singular vision of human motive, of men and women, of good and evil. It might have been a necessary movie for Peckinpah, but it was also a cowardly one.

Straw Dogs is so completely a retreat, an escape into the anti-humanist fantasy, that Peckinpah turns not only to a new country and a new genre, but to a totally new visual vocabulary. The spacious possibilities for human complexity in the westerns implode in Straw Dogs. Instead of broad, luminous landscapes, the psychological metaphor is the fortress David locks himself up in. The movie’s built like that house, cold and precise, all the antique decorations death traps waiting tensely to spring. Yes, the house is rigged up with death traps – the rat catcher Amy brings home in the opening sequence and hangs over the mantle becomes the toothy jaw that slices her rapist ex-boyfriend in the final massacre – and the movie is rigged, too; Peckinpah lays the trap of how we should read each character right at the beginning. It's pretty complex for a movie the essential metaphor of which is of rats and rat-catchers, but that’s still what it is; the movie is a laboratory in which humanity plays out as a self-detonating science experiment.

It seems unimaginable that within a year of Straw Dogs Peckinpah went on to make the incandescent Junior Bonner, an unconventional contemporary western about rodeo cowboys infused with a melancholy sweetness of such delicacy it makes Straw Dogs seem like it comes from another planet. But it’s no less baffling than the fact that Peckinpah’s most loving paean to romantic sympathy, The Ballad of Cable Hogue, was made the year before Straw Dogs. Cable Hogue is about the love affair between an enterprising drifter played by Jason Robards and an exiled prostitute, Hildy, played by Stella Stevens who create a shared home in the desert on the margins of civilization. It’s a romance in which nothing is expected and so everything given. Possession is utterly beside the point for these characters, who associate possession with a world that tramples on people like them. Even ownership of the desert spring that transforms him from a dusty vagabond into an entrepreneur, even ownership of life, seems a passing, transitory state to Cable. There’s a moment that echoes the image of Aurora undressing for Pike in The Wild Bunch when Hildy emerges from Cable’s bedroom in her nightgown – she’s told him through the closed door that she can’t possibly stay out in the desert with him, but they at least have one night – she glows in the last light of the desert evening, and Cable drinks in her image like he’s receiving some divine revelation. (In those moments of gratitude for the love that’s given freely, Robards registers emotional shifts in his broad face as dramatically as shifts in the light in the open desert sky – he gets all the colors.) Cable Hogue distills the romantic spirit at the core of Peckinpah’s sensibility: love without possession. If that’s not a feminist stance, I don’t know what is.

– Amanda Shubert is a founding editor of Full Stop, an online journal of literature and culture. She works at the Smith College Museum of Art in Northampton, Massachusetts.

A Private Battle, Publicly Fought: Our Obsession with Competitive Running

noreply@blogger.com (Critics at Large) — Tue, 29 May 2012 16:00:00 +0000

The start of Halifax's 9th annual Bluenose Marathon, last Sunday

Last Sunday was the 9th annual Bluenose Marathon in Halifax. At 8am, I laced up my sneakers and got ready to run the 10K. Leading up to the race, when anyone inquired as to the distance I was running, I found myself apologetically admitting that I was only doing the 10K. The 10K was in fact the most popular of the 5K, 10K, half marathon and full marathon, with almost 2800 participants. As I crossed the finish line with a sense of pride at completing my lowly 10K, I began to wonder what (besides a sense of pride) compels our society to embrace running as we do.

For many of us, running is a chance to run away, to escape. Of course, everyone escapes different things in different ways. Over ten years ago, Running Times published an article entitled “The Marathon Mystique.” Their claim was, particularly in the age of convenience and shortcuts, we run marathons for the sheer challenge – to escape the banality of everyday life with a rigorous training schedule and finite goal. In a recent Globe and Mail article, Katrina Onstad writes convincingly that she runs to be alone – to escape the world and all the noise that comes with it. But for every runner in training mode, there’s a casual jogger. For every solo sprinter, there’s a running community.

Community is certainly at the center of any race day; the runners themselves form only one part with the spectators, volunteers and officials who come together to make race day special. Observing all those people rallying as you run by panting will turn even the most stoic runner giddy. I almost cried when I ran by a father and his daughters with signs that read “go, complete stranger, go” (father), “run like you stole something” (teenage girl) and “free piggy-back rides” (youngest girl, who looked as if she could barely carry a pillow). You don’t often see strangers cheering on ordinary strangers just for the hell of it. Competitive running reminds us of our humanity.

Mari-Beth crossing the finish line

From walking the 5K to running the full marathon, there is a race for everyone. Amongst the final finishers of the Bluenose 5K were those with disabilities, those who had every excuse not to participate. Inspiring seems too trite a word. Of course, those who complete the full marathon are inspiring in their own right. The marathon distance connects us with history – with all those who ran the epic distance before us and with the Greek myth that gives name to the legendary race.

There’s confusion around the details of Pheidippides’s momentous run that inspired Olympic Games founders to create the marathon distance. Depending on the source you use, you’ll get a different version of Pheidippides’s 42.2 km journey over the Plains of Marathon. Was he announcing victory or seeking help? And why did the Greeks send a runner, not a horseman? The only commonality is that Pheidippides dies at the end of his journey (a finale I’m sure today’s marathoners can attest to, figuratively if not literally).

Likewise, there is no clear answer to why we run, especially competitively. It seems like a healthy activity, but with so many runners complaining of knee braces, ankle sprains and strained hamstrings, one wonders if perhaps walking is a more “natural” form of exercise. Running is a very solo sport, but the community of race day is anything but. Distance running is no doubt a challenge, but broken down to the essentials running is really quite simple: you put one foot in front of the other and repeat. And then there’s the paradox of competition itself. Although we are competing against each other, our shared sense of humanity as we push past the finish line creates compassion in the competition.

– Mari-Beth Slade is a marketer for an accounting firm in Halifax. She enjoys hearing new ideas and challenging assumptions. When not hard at work, she appreciates sharing food, wine and conversations with her family and friends.

Back to Coolidge: Nice Work If You Can Get It and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

noreply@blogger.com (Critics at Large) — Mon, 28 May 2012 16:00:00 +0000

Matthew Broderick and the Cast of Nice Work If You Can Get It

With the obvious exception of George and Ira Gershwin, no one involved with the new Broadway musical Nice Work If You Can Get It is at his or her best: not the director-choreographer, Kathleen Marshall (also represented currently on Broadway by her irresistible production of Cole Porter’s Anything Goes), or the two stars, Matthew Broderick and Kelli O’Hara, or the scenic designer, Derek McLane or the costume designer, Martin Pakledinaz. Joe DiPietro’s book is a limp reworking of the plot of the Gershwins’ 1926 hit musical Oh, Kay! (the original was the work of those skillful musical-comedy wordsmiths, Guy Bolton and P.G. Wodehouse) about the romance of a playboy and a bootlegger whose hooch is stashed in the cellar of his Long Island mansion. It would have made sense for Marshall to stage a revival of Oh, Kay!, which still has a lot of charm and a delectable score. (You can hear the score complete, impeccably restored by Tommy Krasker, on a 1994 Nonesuch recording with Dawn Upshaw as Kay.) Nice Work is a jukebox musical with twenty-one Gershwin tunes shoehorned in, many of them randomly. Often musicals in the pre-Show Boat days (Oh, Kay! was one of the last, opening just thirteen months earlier) and even afterwards were just vehicles for songs and performers, but as disposable as the dramatic situations may have been, the songs generally fit them. At least a third of the song cues in Nice Work are about as convincing as the ones in Mamma Mia!: Billie (O’Hara), the renamed heroine, may be feisty but she’s not the kind of girl who would demand of a would-be lover, “Treat Me Rough.” And why, exactly, is she singing “Hangin’ Around with You” while (masquerading as a domestic) she serves dinner to Jimmy (Broderick) and his house guests?

Only two of the songs, “Someone to Watch Over Me” (the hit of the original show) and “Do, Do, Do,” have been rescued from Oh, Kay! The rest come from a variety of other Gershwin scores. “Do It Again” from The French Doll predates George’s collaboration with Ira (Buddy DeSylva wrote the lyric). “Treat Me Rough” and “But Not for Me” are from Girl Crazy, “Looking for a Boy” and the show’s cabaret-set opener, “Sweet and Lowdown” from Tip-Toes, “I’ve Got to Be There” from Pardon My English. “By Strauss,” which most Gershwin fans probably remember best from the 1951 Vincente Minnelli film An American in Paris, was a one-off contribution by the brothers to a 1936 musical called The Show Is On. “I’ve Got a Crush on You” was written for Treasure Girl and then reused in the second version of Strike Up the Band, which is also the source of “Hangin’ Around with You.” “Delishious” and “Blah Blah Blah” hail from the Gershwins’ first movie score, Delicious, and “Demon Rum” from The Shocking Miss Pilgrim – not made until 1946, nine years after George’s death, and containing songs Ira and Kay Swift dug out of his manuscripts. The other seven songs are all associated with Fred Astaire, Gershwin’s personal favorite among the interpreters of his own work. “Fascinating Rhythm” and “Lady Be Good” are from Lady, Be Good! And “’S Wonderful” from Funny Face – the two musicals the Gershwins wrote for Astaire and his sister and first dancing partner, Adele. “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off” and “They All Laughed,” among the last songs George penned, were sung by Astaire and Ginger Rogers in the film Shall We Dance, and Astaire crooned “Nice Work If You Can Get It” in A Damsel in Distress the same year, 1937. Nice Work’s single contribution to the history of Gershwin performance is its rediscovery of a plaintive ballad called “Will You Remember Me?” that the brothers wrote for Lady, Be Good! but never used.

Matthew Broderick and Kelli O'Hara

Most of the songs are sung competently, a few more than that. Judy Kaye shows off her dramatic soprano on “By Strauss,” though her role, Duchess Estonia Dulworth, a proselytizing, love-starved teetotaler who travels around with a (not especially well used) vice squad of young men in pinstripe suits, is a bad mistake. O’Hara and Broderick sound sweet together on “’S Wonderful” and “Will You Remember Me?” and it’s always a pleasure to listen to her phrasing and the way she mines the emotion of a lyric, especially a ballad. “Someone to Watch Over Me” is lovely, and it’s safe to say that no one has done more with “But Not for Me” since Judy Garland in the movie version of Girl Crazy seven decades ago. But though I’d gladly watch Kelli O’Hara in anything, raucous, tomboyish, salt-of-the-earth roles don’t serve her distinctive bruised delicacy. (She wasn’t an ideal fit for The Pajama Game either.) One of the nicest musical moments is “Do, Do, Do,” which Broderick strums on a banjo and sings as part of a barbershop quartet – perhaps a nod to The Foursome, who introduced “Bidin’ My Time” in Girl Crazy. (There’s another nod for Gershwin aficionados: when Jimmy and Billie meet for the first time and he asks her name, she lies and says it’s Gertrude. Gertrude Lawrence was the star of Oh, Kay!) But though Broderick, with that stylized vocal attack that mixes up parts of W.C. Fields and Dudley Moore, is enormously likable, he’s too old for the part of a much-married ne’er-do-well who’s still trying to prove to his no-nonsense mama (Estelle Parsons, who shows up twenty minutes from the end) that he’s mature and responsible. Broderick is in quite a few of the numbers, and his dancing is just OK; you get the sense that Marshall, one of the best choreographers working today, was constrained by having to work so many of the dances around him, since except for a lively Charleston in the first-act finale, “Fascinating Rhythm,” nothing in the choreography makes a strong impression. There’s an awful, campy number (“Delishious”) in which half a dozen chorus girls in marcelled platinum wigs pop out of the tub where Jennifer Laura Thompson, as Jimmy’s self-involved fiancée Eileen, is bathing, joined by chorus boys in baffling outfits that look like they came out of a road company of The Three Musketeers.

Thompson’s role is another bad mistake. Her character is so irritating that you groan inwardly every time she shows up, and it’s hard to decide which is the worse idea: making her a parody of an Isadora Duncan-like modern dancer or having her sing a lyric-altered “I’ve Got a Crush on You” (“You’ve Got a Crush on Me”) to Jimmy as she walks down the aisle. Michael McGrath does what he can with a second-rate vaudeville part, Billie’s partner Cookie McGee; Stanley Wayne Mathis can’t figure out what to do with his role, the police chief who, unaccountably, joins Jimmy and Billie on a woefully misplaced “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off.” These two men are far too talented for the stuff they have to get into here, as is Terry Beaver, who plays Eileen’s dad (and the Duchess’s brother), a senator who’s also a judge and a reverend. (There’s no dearth of dopey ideas in this show.) On the other hand, the scenes between Chris Sullivan as the outsize sad sack Duke Mahoney (the third of the bootlegging trio) and Robyn Hurder as his main squeeze, Jeannie Muldoon, are very pleasing. They get to sing “Do It Again” in act one, though when Broderick gets around to “Do, Do, Do” in act two you can’t help thinking that it’s essentially the same song except that “Do, Do, Do,” written four years later, is better. The entire evening feels like a stretch without a point.

Deborah Rush, Aaron Lazar, Megan Hilty, Clarke Thorell, Rachel York and Stephen R. Buntrock in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

The high-octane Charleston near the end of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, the final Encores! production of the season, is just one of this show’s many delights. It’s choreographed by Randy Skinner and set to “Keeping Cool with Coolidge.” By coincidence for one weekend you could see two Jazz Age-set musicals, neither of which was actually written during the twenties, and naturally you have to make comparisons. The score of Gentlemen (by Jule Styne and Leo Robin) couldn’t possibly equal the Gershwin playlist for Nice Work If You Can Get It, but John Rando’s production is light and buoyant. The musical comes from 1949; it made a star of the indescribable Carol Channing. (Well, maybe not indescribable: Pauline Kael once wrote that she grins like an albino Louis Armstrong.) Its source is a series of sketches Anita Loos wrote in the twenties – and published as a novel at the insistence of her friend H.L. Mencken – in the voice of Lorelei Lee, a busty blonde from Little Rock, Arkansas with little education but a hilariously affected rhetorical style, an iron-clad practicality when it comes to finding sugar daddies, and absolutely no inhibitions. (Freud tries to psychoanalyze her but gives up.) She and her hard-boiled friend Dorothy Shaw travel to Europe together; they’re inseparable, though Lorelei is constantly embarrassed by Dorothy’s wisecracks (she thinks they’re unrefined) and anxious about Dorothy’s penchant for falling in love with men without first investigating their bank balance. Lorelei is an icon of Coolidge-era prosperity, though Howard Hawks’s 1953 movie version, which is the closest most people have come to the musical, updates the story, pointlessly. (And except for Marilyn Monroe and the “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” number, it’s very dull.) The stage musical is no masterpiece, but it retains the spirit of the book (Loos and Joseph Fields co-adapted it) and when it’s performed as well as it is by Encores!, it more than justifies a revival.

Lorelei is played by the vivacious Megan Hilty, one of the contenders for the role of Monroe in the TV series Smash. The audience falls in love with her on her first entrance, and any outliers certainly succumb by the time she finishes singing “I’m Just a Little Girl from Little Rock” (“I was young and determined / I was wined and dined and ermined”). She has a habit of throwing out her arms as if she were mimicking a flowering tree: very elocution-class, very funny. (It goes along with Lorelei’s diction – “a girl like I” and so on.) Hilty gets most of the good songs, though there are a few left over for two talented crooners, Clarke Thorell as Lorelei’s beau Gus (“Bye Bye Baby,” which plays on in your head after you’ve left the theatre) and Aaron Lazar as Dorothy’s swain, Henry Spofford (“Just a Kiss Apart”). The bobbed brunette Dorothy’s songs are all unmemorable, but Rachel York vivifies them. York sees to it that the show never founders when Hilty’s off the stage; it’s fun to hear what she can do with a Dadaist line like “How can one man eat so many carrots and be so unlike a rabbit?” The terrific cast also includes Deborah Rush as Spofford’s mother, who keeps resisting his efforts to restrain her when she wants to hang out with the flappers; Simon Jones (you might remember him as Bridey in the TV series Brideshead Revisisted) as Sir Francis Beekman, whom Lorelei knocks off his feet during the crossing, and Sandra Shipley as his wife; Stephen R. Buntrock as Gus’s business rival (he manufactures zippers; Gus is the button man), a “physical culture” fanatic; Brennan Brown and Steven Boyer as hand-kissing father-and-son Parisian lawyers (an uproarious vaudevillian bit straight out of the novel); Megan Sikora as a Follies girl; and a pair of astonishing African American hoofers named Phillip Attmore and Jared Grimes. (Grimes did some jaw-dropping tapping in Cotton Club Parade for Encores! last fall.) Attmore & Grimes, as they’re billed, are inheritors of the Nicholas Brothers’ legacy: on “Mamie Is Mimi,” where they partner Sikora, they execute a back flip that culminates in splits.

The entertainingly flamboyant costumes include an embroidered violet gown and matching jacket for Rush and an ostrich fan for Hilty. (David C. Woolard is listed as costume consultant.) Rob Berman does his usual marvelous job with the singers and the Encores! Orchestra. The high points include a counterpoint chorus number (“In the Champ de Mars”) that becomes an American in Paris-style dance, but it’s “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,” of course, that brings down the house in the middle of act two. It turns out there are several obscure verses, so Hilty keeps sailing offstage to loud applause, then sailing right back on to deliver unexpected encores. She’s a honey.

Writer Harlan Ellison: He Has A Mouth, and He Will Scream

noreply@blogger.com (Critics at Large) — Sun, 27 May 2012 16:00:00 +0000

Writer Harlan Ellison turns 78 today and if you don’t know who he is, you should. I mention his birthday, as well, because he’s dying, or at least that’s what he told The Daily Page in an interview in September 2010, just before his appearance at a science fiction convention in Wisconsin, reportedly his last public appearance. "The truth of what's going on here is that I'm dying," says Ellison, by phone. “I'm like the Wicked Witch of the West – I'm melting. I began to sense it back in January. By that time, I had agreed to do the convention. And I said, I can make it. I can make it. My wife has instructions that the instant I die, she has to burn all the unfinished stories. And there may be a hundred unfinished stories in this house, maybe more than that. There's three quarters of a novel ... When I'm gone, that's it. What's down on the paper, it says 'The End,' that's it. 'Cause right now I'm busy writing the end of the longest story I've ever written, which is me."

Now it’s not for me to question Ellison’s comments – as of this writing, he’s still around nearly two years later – and his health problems are likely quite serious – he had a crucial heart bypass operation in 1996. Nor has he published an original collection of stories since Slippage in 1997 (Troublemakers, his 2001 collection was mostly made up of previously published material with new introductions aimed at a younger demographic who likely didn’t know his work.) But this is not what this post is all about. It’s a celebration of one of America ’s most unique, uncompromising and fascinating talents, who’s been a constant in my life since high school.

I don’t remember exactly how I stumbled upon Ellison’s work, but I still recall how startled and excited a young woman was when I was in CEGEP (Grade 12 and Grade 13 in my home province of Quebec) and she spotted one of his books on my desk. That was my first glimmer of understanding that people who do know Harlan Ellison’s writing are not indifferent to it. I sensed, too, at the time that Ellison was Jewish like me. There was something about his passion and his determination to make things right in the world, which was so apparent in his books. (That’s otherwise known as Tikkun Olam, repairing the world, a Jewish mandate actually.) Turns out I was right, but unlike myself who grew up in relatively safe and accepting surroundings – I can count the few anti-Semitic incidents I’ve experienced on the fingers of my two hands, in both Montreal and Toronto – Harlan most decidedly did not. Growing up in the 1930s and 40s in the small town of Painesville, Ohio, the only Jewish family in town, he was constantly tormented for being Jewish, regularly beaten up, preached at and made to feel unwelcome. (Tragically, he also witnessed his father dropping dead of a heart attack in 1949 when Harlan was only fifteen years old.) He got through it, of course, and takes great delight in pointing out that his chief tormentor, one Jack Wheeldon, died young, but it formed him into a man who knew exactly what he wanted, didn’t take shit from anyone and, god forbid, if you crossed him in any way, made you pay dearly for your temerity. (If Ellison still drove and had a bumper sticker on his car, it likely would read You Don’t Fuck with Ellison!) My favourite incident of this nature remains his suing filmmaker James Cameron after the director boasted that he’d borrowed much of the storyline of The Terminator (1984) from Ellison’s script for The Outer Limits episodes "Soldier" (the similarities between the two are obvious and startling) and "Demon With the Glass Hand". Ellison sued, received a settlement ($100,000 is the figure I read), and then when the crawl that acknowledged the connection between his script and Cameron’s movie was (accidentally!) omitted from the film’s first video release, sued again and garnered another $100,000 for his efforts. (As I said, you don’t fuck with Ellison.) That’s just one example of Ellison’s protectiveness of his copyright (he’s now copyrighted his name, incidentally). I don’t want to tell you what he did when a publisher crossed him and inserted a cigarette ad into one his story collections. (Hint, it involved a dead gopher, sent by Second Class mail.) But it should be clear by now that this is one man who cares passionately about his work, his rights and abiding by one’s word.

He also doesn’t suffer fools gladly, which is an understatement. Here’s the reporting of an incident in his career, from David Hughes’ book The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made (I, like Harlan, hate that abbreviation for science fiction (SF is preferred), but that’s what the book is called). One of many writers and directors called in when the first Star Trek movie was being considered, Ellison proposed an intricate, complex tale wherein the crew of the Starship Enterprise had to decide whether they had the moral right to wipe out another species in order to preserve the world as they knew it and humankind’s domination of it. The film was to take place at the dawn of time. But one clueless studio executive then proposed, since he’d read and enjoyed Erich von Daniken’s silly book Chariots of the Gods about alien exploration of Earth in the past, that Mayans figure into the equation somehow. When Harlan pointed out that there were no Mayans at the dawn of the time, said executive said no one would know the difference. “I’m gong to know the difference,” exploded Ellison. Things got worse from then on in, ending with Ellison responding to the threat that if he wanted to write the picture, Mayans had to be included by exclaiming, “'I’m a writer, I don’t know what the fuck you are!' And I got up and walked out. And that was the end of my association with the Star Trek movie.”

That’s actually a pretty mild retort, by Harlan’s standards, but certainly our loss as the first Star Trek movie was a real dud. Ellison, of course, also wrote the episode from the original Star Trek series, entitled "The City on the Edge of Forever", wherein Kirk and Spock had to let a charismatic woman (played by Joan Collins) die or change our time-line forever. It’s still considered (and not just by me) to be the finest single episode of the show ever written. Harlan being Harlan, still wasn’t entirely satisfied with the final result (as you can read in 1995’s Harlan Ellison’s The City on the Edge of Forever, which details his fights with show creator Gene Roddenberry and actor William (“James T. Kirk”) Shatner over elements of his script.), but he didn’t hate the screenplay enough to take his name off of it and stick on Cordwainer Bird, his dreaded nom de plume for anything he feels has been destroyed beyond recognition. He did, however, sue Paramount Pictures for his cut of the merchandising rights from the episode and won an undisclosed settlement. (Did I mention that he likes to sue on a regular basis? Usually with good cause, I might add.)

Joan Collins & William Shatner in City on the Edge of Forever

One has to distinguish between Ellison’s work for television, which is often tampered with (to its detriment, as in the case of the compromised Canadian SF series The Starlost), and his literary output, which rarely is. There’s also the danger that his rambunctious personality and aggressive, albeit necessary, manner can overshadow his great writing and books and, too often, define him as a caricature of an angry young (old) man. That would be a shame, as it is his work which should be the main and only criteria on how to judge him, and by that measure, there’s so much worth reading by him that I hardly know where to begin.

He’s crafted some (award-winning) classic and iconic stories of the science fiction genre, including “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream”, “The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World”, “'Repent, Harlequin!', Said the Ticktockman”, “From A to Z, in the Chocolate Alphabet”, “The Deathbird”, “A Boy and His Dog” (made into a nifty 1976 movie by L.Q. Jones), “Jeffty is Five’”, ''Shatterday", and “How’s The Night Life on Cissalda?”, among so many others. Those tales play with science fiction tropes, such as dystopias, computer domination, time travel, but with an original Ellison spin on them – they’re tales that are painful, compelling, angry, satirical, imaginative and provocative in equal measures. But he’s also written tough-minded mainstream short stories, such as “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs”, his cry of horror at the real life 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese, brutalized by her New York rapist/ killer over a long period of time while residents of her apartment block, hearing her screams for help, supposedly did nothing. (I say supposedly, because there’s some question of whether they actually knew what was happening, but I don’t think its hard to believe the basic reality of the murder and Ellison’s story, as such callous events have occurred at other times. In any case, the 'facts’ don’t take away from the emotional power of Ellison’s story.) Other terrific stories of his have dealt with racial and religious prejudices, “Daniel White for the Greater Good”, which was praised by literary wit Dorothy Parker, no less, who felt it surpassed anything she’d ever written on the subject (You can read about that in the intro to Ellison’s’ collection Gentleman Junkie and Other Stories of the Hung-Up Generation (1961), and the semi- autobiographical “Final Shtick”, about a Jewish comedian who’s hidden his background but is forced to deal with the anti-Semitism of his past when he returns to his home town. Harlan also, daringly went undercover in a gang while researching his fascinating, illuminating book Web of the City (1958), and committed at least one morally questionable act while in the role of hoodlum, a typically honest confession by a man who never stints on telling the truth even when it makes him look bad.

Then there’s his work as an important editor. Dangerous Visions, which is celebrating the 45th anniversary of its 1967 groundbreaking release, is justly celebrated still as perhaps the most important science fiction anthology ever put out, one which featured key writers (such as Philip José Farmer, Norman Spinrad, Samuel Delaney, and Theodore Sturgeon), pushing the envelope of SF when it sorely needed to grow up and challenge its readers. He followed that one up with the equally important Again, Dangerous Visions (1972) but, alas never delivered on the proposed final anthology in the trilogy, to be called The Last Dangerous Visions. He jokes about it – writers are still waiting for their long-ago sold stories to see the light of day – but I suspect he simply got in over his head on delivering one more mammoth undertaking of the sort involved in putting the first two anthologies together.

But while I’m an enormous fan of Ellison’s fiction, I think it’s as an essayist that he especially shines. And it’s what I remember most when I first started reading him. (I pretty much pick up any publication or book that has something by or about him in it, with the result that nearly one whole bookshelf is devoted to his writings alone.) He’s incredibly confessional and open, whether it’s tallying the number of women he’s slept with when a girlfriend asked him (over 500, but don’t judge him on what that means psychologically, he won’t have it), or movingly describing his loving if distant relationship with his mother and conversely, his estrangement from his conservative older sister Beverly. Other superb essays of his have examined the (often shocking) intrusions of science fiction fans into their favourite writers’ lives (that one, "Xenogenesis" caused quite a fuss in genre circles when it was published in Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine); the beneficial societal effects of the '60s, despite popular culture's disavowal of that; and the new found respectability of comic books and his memories of them as a kid. It was radio and comics that first exercised his vast imagination. Overall, reading his essays in such seminal collections as Sleepless Nights in the Procrustean Bed (1984), which contains his rumination/eulogy about his mother Serena Rosenthal Ellison; or An Edge in My Voice (1985), which includes a highly disturbing essay about Ellison’s stalker and how he got back at him, has given me such a vivid sense of the man that I almost feel I know him better than some of my closest friends. He certainly gets under people’s skin; his superb book of TV criticism The Glass Teat (1970), which collected the columns he wrote for the alternative Los Angeles Free Press newspaper, got him into big trouble with the Nixon administration when he wrote that Vice President Spiro T. Agnew masturbated with copies of Reader’s Digest, so much so that he claims in the intro to his follow-up book of criticism The Other Glass Teat (1975) that Nixon and Agnew made sure that The Glass Teat was pretty much banned under pressure from Nixon, et al. (I believe him; Nixon was thinner-skinned than most Presidents, and Agnew was a bully and a thug. Fittingly, Nixon's visage adorns one of the gargoyles perched atop Ellison's not so humble California abode, cleverly nicknamed Ellison Wonderland.) But that’s Ellison, as he puts it, hot water is his natural element.

Of course, to get into hot water on such a regular basis, you have to actually get up off your ass and do things. Doing nothing is not and never has been Ellison’s way. He marched for civil rights in Selma in 1965, when few celebrities and artists did, and ended up in jail for his troubles. (I’d love to know what he makes of Barack Obama’s victory as President, but he’s cynical enough to likely feel that it doesn’t mean as much as it should in terms of racial progress in his country.) He boycotted states which refused to ratify the never-adopted Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), which would have been a game-changing, landmark feminist document if it had ever been passed. And he’s been fiercely loyal to his friends, usually fellow writers, when he feels they’ve been wronged (Robert Silverberg, a major writer in his own right and one of Ellison’s oldest buddies, has, only half-jokingly, said that Ellison would kill for him if need be.)

Ellison Taking No Prisoners

Not surprisingly, someone as volatile as Ellison is just as often on the outs with any number of people, not all of whom he is suing. (He can build friends up so high that they invariably disappoint him when they slip up, one way or another.) I won’t go into details here – you can find out about his various contretemps for yourself on Wikipedia) and I, too, have heard stories of his flipping out on people and after haranguing them verbally, calling back later to apologize when he realized he’d gone too far. But my own experiences with him have been benign and gratifying even though I was so intimidated the first time I interviewed him in university that I only took five minutes of my allotted 10-minute interview time over the phone. (I have his home phone number, but so does anyone who wants to have it; he won’t make himself inaccessible to his good friends, but I wouldn’t advise calling him just to gush or bother him.) I’ve interviewed him three times, the last when he turned 60 in 1994, and have met him twice in person, once when he came to lecture at Ryerson Polytechnic Institute (now Ryerson University) on a very snowy February evening, if I recall, adverse weather which still didn't deter his many fans from showing up, and another when he appeared at a local science fiction convention (I treasure a photo of myself and him where he's pointing to one of my Censorwatch columns, a gig I had at the Toronto Star exposing the vagaries and idiocies of provincial film censorship. That’s up Harlan’s alley, even though he’s rather weak as a film critic (Harlan Ellison’s Watching (1989), regretably the only book of his which I have personally autographed.) Each time I observed a generous friendly guy who patiently signed autographs and spoke to his fans for hours, even as I left to go home. He also, and I’m kvelling here, particularly complimented me for simply calling him a writer and not ghettoizing him as a science fiction scribe – which many do and which he hates – and then listing his credentials in all fields. Believe me, you want praise from the guy and not the reverse. I still remember how intimidated the late Toronto film critic John Harkness was simply being on the same panel as Harlan. He was muttering to himself how glad he was that it wasn’t Harkness vs. Ellison.

I don’t doubt that Ellison can be his own worst enemy. Walking off The Twilight Zone show, on CBS in 1985 when an anti-Santa Claus Christmas episode, called "Nackles", which he wrote was prevented from airing at the holiday season, still strikes me as biting off your nose to spite your face, since as consultant to the series he got so much good stuff on air. ("Nackles" never was completed and, reportedly, was to be Ellison's directorial debut,) His experience as creative consultant to J. Michael Straczynski's excellent '90s SF show Babylon 5 was much better. But being who he is, you can’t really expect him to behave any other way. I prefer to think of Harlan Ellison as a cranky old Jew (his description of himself in Erik Nelson's fine documentary on him Dreams with Sharp Teeth (2008), which I suggested for Toronto’s Hot Docs documentary film festival) who still fights the good fight. His output has trailed off for the most part and, sadly, he’s developed the distressing tendency of overwriting some of his stories (His most recent 2010 Nebula Award winner, “How Interesting: A Tiny Man”, which tied for short story, is one of his lesser efforts, but fortunately not badly written. It was his fourth Nebula, which is annually given out, in several categories, by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Ellison was also honoured as Grand Master by the organization in 2006.) But we’ll always have his incisive and poignant stories (check out one of his longest ones, “The Resurgence of Miss Ankle-Strap-Wedgie” in his Love Ain’t Nothing But Sex Misspelled (1968), a Marilyn Monroe-like story of a lost soul in Hollywood, which is unforgettable) and indelible essay collections. His original compilations, Shatterday (1980) and Angry Candy (1988), with a memorable introduction where Harlan rails against the loss of so many friends and influences in a short time, are still in print (and my 'staff picks', along with Dangerous Visions, at the bookstore where I work), but you can find any number of his books in used bookstores and online. The Essential Ellison collects a representative sample of his output over a 50 year career spanning interval, and is the perfect introduction to his work. (I'm still kicking myself for not purchasing a (pricey) autographed limited special edition of the book when I had the chance.) You can also hear the man expounding about literature and life and numerous other subjects on a collection of six CDs, entitled On The Road with Ellison and put out by Deep Shag records. I own the first one on vinyl and it's an apt reminder of how passionate, cutting and, indeed, funny, Ellison can be.

Harlan with wife Susan

I don’t know how much longer Harlan has left – my own feeling is that the Angel of Death is scared shitless to try and take him away – but like the similarly uncompromising late filmmaker Robert Altman and late musician Frank Zappa, this utterly distinctive American artist should be cherished and exalted. He’s won a slew of awards, including from the writers' organization PEN, for his work promoting freedom of speech, but he's still not as well known as he should be, if he’s known at all by your average reader. Nor should he have to pass away before that happens. But either way, he matters, not just while he’s alive as he suggested in one of his acknowledgements, but for many years after. Hopefully, he'll still be with us for a very long time. Or as the Yiddish expression puts it, Biz a Hoondred oon Tzvuntzig (May you live to be 120)! Now that I think on it, with all he’s accomplished, professionally and personally, he kind of has. Happy Birthday Harlan and many more to come!

– Shlomo Schwartzberg is a film critic, teacher and arts journalist based in Toronto . He teaches regular courses at Ryerson University 's LIFE Institute, and is currently teaching a course on American cinema of the 70s.

Igor's Boogie: The Rites of Stravinsky

noreply@blogger.com (Critics at Large) — Sat, 26 May 2012 18:40:00 +0000

It should come as no surprise that if any one composer could cause a riot, it would be Igor Stravinsky. Unpredictable in nature, and comparable in stature to painter Pablo Picasso, Stravinsky was an enigmatic figure who moved like a chameleon through the cultural world. He made his reputation with his erotically charged masterpieces The Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911), and The Rite of Spring (1913). Throughout these works, you could hear Stravinsky gradually forsaking the world of romanticism which would lead him to ultimately forge a new style of neoclassicism in 1920 with Pulcinella. Yet right at the moment when he was pioneering that phase of his musical career, he joined forces with his serialist adversaries, Anton Webern and Arnold Schoenberg, who had abandoned classicism altogether. "People always expect the wrong thing of me," Stravinsky once said. "They think they have pinned me down and then all of a sudden – au revoir!"

Born in St. Petersberg in 1882, Stravinsky had such a great aptitude for music that the colourful Russian composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov took him on as a pupil. In 1909, Russia's top impresario, Serge Diaghilev, heard two of Stravinsky's first compositions, Scherzo fantastique and Feu d'artifice, at a concert in St. Petersberg. He was so impressed that he commissioned Stravinsky to write a couple of numbers for a ballet he was producing. Out of that encounter came The Firebird which was an overnight success. While not as daring or innovative as his later ballet scores, The Firebird still had something more foreboding than the exotic colours of Rimsky-Korsakov. Diaghilev could hear immediately that Stravinsky's work had what author Joan Peyser in To Boulez and Beyond called "a latent barbarism." This "latent barbarism" would, of course, be even more explicit in his next work for Diaghlev titled Petrushka. This piece, with its polytonality and sharper rhythms, caused something of a small commotion.

Petrushka, the story of a puppet who is bestowed with life, premiered in 1911, with the legendary dancer Nijinsky in the title role. At the time, Nijinsky was revolutionizing ballet in much the same way that Stravinsky was revolutionizing music. They both were taking the formal decorum out of their respective art forms and releasing the inherent primal impulses in their pieces. The ballet featured parodic elements, repetitive rhythms, and passages where Stravinsky echoed the mechanical and soulless world in which Petrushka found himself. (For those with a keen ear, American composer Frank Zappa, who was influenced significantly by Stravinsky, once wrote a hilarious pop satire called "Status Back Baby." In the song, a young football star fears he's losing his status at his high school so he looks for affirmation from his peers by painting posters and joining De Molay. In the bridge of the song, Zappa plays a guitar solo that quotes the opening melody of Petrushka, driving the point home that if Stravinsky's ballet score is about a puppet that longs to be human, Zappa reverses the process by writing a song about a human who longs to be a puppet.) The composer also illuminated the dual elements in Petrushka's character – both his mechanical and human sides. "I had conceived the music in two keys in the second tableau as Petrushka's insult to the public," Stravinsky remarked. "I wanted the dialogue for trumpets in two keys at the end to show that his ghost is still insulting the public."

Northwest Ballet's performance of Petrushka

Though Petrushka caused some commotion, it was nothing compared to his next score, The Rite of Spring. This startling new piece was a culmination of what Stravinsky was working toward in The Firebird and Petrushka. "One day, when I was finishing the last pages of The Firebird in St. Petersburg, I had a fleeting vision," he recalled. "I saw in my imagination a solemn pagan rite: sage elders, seated in a circle, watching a young girl dance herself to death. They were sacrificing her to propitiate the god of spring." The score called for the largest orchestra Stravinsky had ever assembled (and with plenty of percussion). This was no romantic rendering of the genial spirit within nature, or the renewing elements of the seasons; The Rite of Spring was about the scourge of dehumanization. Russian and Hungarian folk tunes were integrated into the score, but even if the themes were familiar to the ear, the instruments played them in unfamiliar registers. Stravinsky had the time signatures change rapidly after each bar. The bassoon sounded like it had a bad cold. Arpeggios blurted from woodwinds. Meanwhile, the pizzicato of the first violins set the pace, with running sequences filled with squawks, trills, and shrieks. The music prodded with an erotic force.

On the night of the famous premiere at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris on May 29, 1913, Stravinsky could sense trouble in the audience right from the opening notes. It was an audience that historian and author Modris Eksteins describes in his book, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (1989), as one "to be scandalized, of course, but equally to scandalize. The brouhaha...was to be as much in audience reactions to their fellows as in the work itself. The dancers on-stage must have wondered at times who was performing and who was in the audience." Stravinsky recalled the first stirrings of dissension: "I heard Florent Schmitt shout, 'Taisez-vous garces du seizieme'; the 'garces' of the 16th arrondissement were, of course, the most elegant ladies in Paris. The uproar continued, however, and a few minutes later I left the hall in a rage; I was sitting on the right near the orchestra and I remember slamming the door. I have never been that angry." The piece was also called "monstrous," a "massacre," and the choreography compared to "epileptic seizures."

Stravinsky & Nijinsky

These seizures and massacres, which represented the violence of both birth and death, were prescient warnings of what lay ahead, too. The Rite of Spring laid waste to the idealized past and opened the door to the modernist sensibility to come with James Joyce lurking around the corner. As choreographer, Nijinsky demanded a physicality from the dancers that was brutal and harsh and where the rhythms were complex. The conventions of beauty were undermined and the serenity of those conventions were rendered obsolete. The Rite of Spring broke through all quaint considerations of beauty into something newly evolved and startling in its depictions of nature's uncompromising power. Within the piece, you could hear the primitive forces that anticipated the savagery of the World Wars, which would kill millions; the brutality of the Russian Revolution, which would turn the world upside down and force Stravinsky from his homeland; the Holocaust; the carnage of famines; and the inflamed passions of nationalism that would unleash massacres around the world after the fall of communism.

Katsushika Hokusai's The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife (1814)

It's likely no small irony that Stravinsky and The Rite of Spring would over time gain acceptance, but the composer would continue to experiment and challenge musical conventions. (He would never again, though, incite another riot.) Stravinsky broke with the Russian orchestral school during World War I and started working with smaller ensembles. He settled in Paris after the Russian Revolution in 1917 and composed his first foray into neoclassicism with Pulcinella before ultimately turning to the United States after the death of his wife and child from tuberculosis. While he would in his late career emulate the beautifully sparse serialism of Webern, The Rite of Spring would become a continuous leit-motif into the waking dreams and nightmares of movies. Composer John Williams in his score for Steven Spielberg's Jaws would comically make the link to The Rite of Spring attributing one of the ballet's themes (duh-duh-duh-duh duh-duh) to the shark who was the movie's force of nature. As Anais Nin reveals her piquant discovery of lithographic copies of Katsushika Hokusai's erotic woodblock prints (The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife) to a publisher in the opening moments of Philip Kaufman's Henry and June (1990), the faint melody of the opening notes of Spring can be heard as if it had been stored with the lithographs in the Pandora's box that Nin opens. Since Henry and June was the first film to earn an NC-17 rating, replacing the X-rating often assigned to pornography, Stravinsky's daring score continued to have its finger on the pulse of the culture. But with all its barbaric beauty, The Rite of Spring can still give the finger to the tired tropes of proper decorum as well.

On the Road to Nowhere: Sacha Baron Cohen’s The Dictator

noreply@blogger.com (Critics at Large) — Fri, 25 May 2012 16:00:00 +0000

Sacha Baron Cohen stars in The Dictator

How do you top outrageous, frequently brilliant films like Borat (2006) and Bruno (2009)? British actor Sacha Baron Cohen obviously faced that dilemma with his latest movie, The Dictator. His previous two movies already demonstrated – filtered through his boorish Kazakhstani character Borat, and flamboyant gay fashion journalist Bruno – the wide canvas of ignorance, racism, rampant political correctness and anti-gay prejudices and discomfort prevalent in America and the world. Yet, particularly in Borat, it also showcased the United States as a strangely accepting society, which bent over backwards to accept Borat’s odd, even disgusting behaviour, as just something he did that should be tolerated because his were cultural acts. The fact that Borat’s anti-Semitic rants were conducted in Hebrew (Cohen, of course is Jewish) just added to the subversive nature of his movie. And his blatant attempts to outrage, in person, Islamists and Orthodox Jews alike in Bruno testified to his physical courage, to go where few comedians/actor have ever gone before. Yet he also fit into the proud pantheon of gutsy Jewish comics, from the Marx Brothers to Lenny Bruce, who, in various ways, stormed the gates of propriety to expose the hypocrisy and intolerance lying inside.

In that light, Cohen has raised expectations in terms of subject matter and approach to controversial situations and material. Those hopes for an even harder-hitting film have been dashed with The Dictator, a mostly pallid comedy that does nothing new and, in fact, copies much of what has gone before.

A homage of sorts to Charlie Chaplin’s classic The Great Dictator (1940), where a naive Jewish barber ends up doubling as the dictator’s look-alike, a thinly disguised takeoff on fascist dictator Adolf Hitler (Adenoid Hynkel in the movie), The Dictator reverses the process with the North African dictator of the fictional country Wadiya, Admiral General Hafez Aladeen (Cohen) – a cross between Muammar Gadhafi and Kim Jong-Il, complete with their cult of personality. He must impersonate an ordinary New York immigrant when he is forced out of office by his duplicitous uncle Tamir (Ben Kingsley). Taking a job at a feminist vegan collective (trust me that’s not as funny as it sounds) and slowly falling for its proprietor Zooey (Anna Faris), he schemes to get back into power and usurp the even more moronic double (also Cohen) who is pretending to be him, even as he begins to discover the nice guy lurking inside. (The other villains in the film are Chinese government officials and rapacious Western oil executives. They're not my favourite people but aren't they always the bad guys in the movies?)

Anna Faris and Sacha Baron Cohen in The Dictator

Oddly enough, in this case Cohen has been trumped by none other than Adam Sandler, whose clever, similarly-themed comedy You Don’t Mess with the Zohan (2008) postulated what would happen when an Israeli Mossad agent (Sandler), getting tired of the spy business, faked his death and ended up in New York working as a hairdresser (his ultimate dream) and falling for a Palestinian woman. The joke, in what is one of Sandler’s few worthwhile funny films, is that the Israelis and Palestinians, once settled in America and working regularly, forget their differences, at least until outsiders remind them that they’re supposed to be mortal enemies. The Dictator, despite a few timely jabs at Iran’s nuclear program (Aaldeen thinks that Iran’s president Ahmadinejad looks like a snitch on Miami Vice – one of the film’s few witty lines) and the sway of anti-Semitism, misogyny and tyranny in the Muslim world, isn’t really all that smart politically.

That Aladeen rarely ever evokes Allah or pretends to be pious for political gain, as Saddam Hussein did, suggests that Cohen is stepping back from directly assailing religious fundamentalism and religious hypocrisy in the Muslim world. In a finale that deliberately pays tribute to the barber’s pacifist speech at the conclusion of The Great Dictator, Cohen would rather take a few, admittedly dead-on shots at U.S. imperialism and myopia instead. That speech was preachy to the extreme; Cohen’s comes a little too late, after an unfunny storyline, to make much of a comedic impression. Even ostensibly gutsy jokes like Aladeen’s video game that replicates the Munich massacre, wherein Israeli athletes were murdered at the Munich Olympics by Palestinian terrorists in 1972, is cribbed from Jonathan Kesselman’s hilarious ‘jewsploitation’ movie, The Hebrew Hammer (2003) where neo-Nazis played games like Gestapo Pool Party in one of the movie’s best over-the top scenes. Besides, if you want comedies that take sharp jabs at all sides of the political spectrum, Trey Parker and Matt Stone's Team America: World Police (2004) has already tilled that fertile soil. The Dictator’s general preference is to indulge in numerous sexual double entendres, crass jokes about bodily functions, torture and some silly banter between Aladeen and Zooey, nothing we haven’t seen before in You Don't Mess with the Zohan, or in Cohen’s earlier movies. And some of the jokes are cruel, even misogynistic for no good reason; they’re more like director Larry Charles’ work on the nasty misanthropic Curb Your Enthusiasm than from his funny, gentler approach on Seinfeld.

Sacha Baron Cohen as Borat

Cohen doesn’t even try that hard to get those weak jokes across, many of which, including the use of Hebrew as the basis of the "Arabic" being spoken in the film, are recycled from his other movies. He seems bored, even when playing the dim goat herder who is being passed off as the real Aladeen. Charles (who also helmed Cohen’s Borat and Bruno) doesn’t bring much of a flow to the movie, ironic because the semi-improvised Borat and Bruno were more cohesive than this ostensibly scripted effort. The rest of the cast, except for Jason Mantzoukas who brings a bit of life to his role as Nadal, a Wadiyan nuclear scientist just itching to build a bomb to use against Israel, is similarly lacklustre. I’ve never seen Kingsley so uninterested in a role before and, frankly, I don’t get the appeal of Faris (The House Bunny), a bland Tina Fey wanna-be.

I don’t know if Cohen – who wrote the film with three other screenwriters, Jeff Schaffer, Alec Berg and David Mandel, who also co-produced the film with him – got tired of the concept for The Dictator by the time he got around to making it, or was more focused on his upcoming role as Freddie Mercury in Stephen Frear’s and Peter Morgan’s adaptation of the life of rock group Queen’s flamboyant front man, but whatever the reason, his heart doesn’t seem to be in this movie. I trust he hasn’t lost the fire in his belly – The Dictator is a soft R movie at best – and will eventually find some new deserving target to properly and intelligently eviscerate. The Dictator, however, won’t impress anyone who’s heard of or seen Cohen’s antics, in character, on screen or off. We rightfully expect more from this guy. Better luck next time.

– Shlomo Schwartzberg is a film critic, teacher and arts journalist based in Toronto. He teaches regular courses at Ryerson University's LIFE Institute, and is currently teaching a course on American cinema of the 70s.

Don't Fugeddaboutit: The World of a Jersey Shore Wordsmith

noreply@blogger.com (Critics at Large) — Thu, 24 May 2012 16:00:00 +0000

Author Gene Ritchings

Full disclosure: Gene Ritchings was our saving grace. In the late 1990s my Critics at Large colleague, Kevin Courrier, and I went down to New York City for ten days to research a book about NBC’s Law & Order. We’d gotten permission and a promise of access from the show’s creator, Dick Wolf, but that blessing did not necessarily mean instant acceptance in the Big Apple. We were interlopers who needed to conduct interviews that arguably might be more in-depth (and perhaps even invasive) than those done by the usual entertainment media briefly visiting the set.

Initially, the crew seemed to eye us with suspicion and the actors barely noticed our existence – until Ritchings, the production coordinator, took us under his wing. He also bent a few rules to help us navigate the bureaucracy and frenetic schedule that any TV series must establish to keep functioning. “We try to ward off the occasional feeling of being beleaguered and overextended and overworked because that’s the life we chose,” he said then.

After almost 15 seasons at Law & Order, Ritchings returned to a life that’s equally turbulent: journalism. It’s the career he first embraced at 18 and the New Jersey native has now also written a new novel, Winter in a Summer Town, that taps into his early experiences in print media without becoming a full-blown autobiography. The teen protagonist, Eddie Bonneville, lands a newspaper job covering the Garden State county where he has grown up with profound feelings of anger and alienation. The kid almost kills another student in a boxing match, then struggles to reinvent himself as a coming-of-age citizen committed to nonviolence. That goal is continually challenged by the systemic local political corruption he encounters as a novice reporter and by the wild zeitgeist of the era, the late 1960s.

During that period in his own life, despite his suspicion that classes were akin to jail rather than “a door to the future,” Ritchings wrote essays for his high school paper on religion, pornography and Vietnam. On the same day one of his pieces about the military draft producing cannon fodder for war appeared, he was expelled due to “excessive truancy” and beaten up by some thuggish contemporaries who disagreed with his views. Good-bye, adolescence. Hello, workaday world. A gig from 1968 through the end of 1969 at the Ocean City Daily Observer, a tabloid only published five days a week, allowed him to pen an opinion column. “I was insufferable. I’d fallen under the spell of Ayn Rand,” he explained, referring to the Atlas Shrugged author whose ideas about laissez-faire capitalism have more recently inspired the Tea Party and various conservative libertarians.

Luckily, he also had been dazzled by Jean Genet, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. The most influential read was the latter scribe’s memoir, A Moveable Feast, which details his time in the 1920s as a foreign correspondent in Paris for the Toronto Star Weekly. “Like him, I wanted to communicate in prose that’s spare and provocative,” Ritchings said.

Interesting opportunities presented themselves during his Observer stint. Ritchings wrote about the Woodstock festival and a Vietnam moratorium march at which demonstrators were tear-gassed. But what seemed like a real scoop emerged when he received a phone call from a colorful figure Ritchings later discovered had been “a bagman who carried bribes from local businessmen to politicians and eventually went into the witness protection program.” Under intense scrutiny by law enforcement officials, the mobster apparently hoped to settle a few scores by squealing.

“He asked me to bring a tape recorder and interview him. He named names, accusing people of bribery and extortion,” Ritchings recalled. “I thought I’d stumbled onto the story of the century.” Instead, his publisher locked the tape in a safe, saying “the guy was crazy and to go out cover some real news.”

Here’s where real life intersects with fiction, since Winter in a Summer Town involves a tell-all session with the mafioso-like Matty “The Mule” Esposito – who admits to having blood on his hands from assorted killings – and a publisher’s subsequent attempt to stifle the revelations. The stunned youngster does not desist, which subjects him to escalating peril in a region rife with deception and betrayal amid greedy expectation of real estate development schemes.

“I was not as naive and idealistic as Eddie but too unsophisticated to know how to really investigate,” acknowledged Ritchings, who in January 1970 left for a bigger and better publication, the Asbury Park Press. “It’s the paper of record for the Jersey Shore, with a gigantic circulation.”

Once again, he was able to delve into topical issues. “One quiet night, a photographer burst into the newsroom to let us know that blacks were burning down the other end of town,” he said. “I was chased and accosted while covering the riots. And it initiated my exile to another bureau, Tom’s River, about 40 miles away from Asbury Park but light years away culturally.”

His sin? “I think it was because I’d referred (in a story) to the West Side, which was impoverished and mainly African-American, and the East Side, mainly upscale and white,” noted Ritchings, who quit the Asbury Park Press in June 1972 and relocated to California for a few months before signing on as an editor at the Observer back home.

By the summer of 1973, he was hitchhiking around Europe and, in the U.S. again, kicked around for a few years as a roadie for a well-known Jersey bar band, Holme. The guitarist’s sister, working as a second assistant director in the film industry, later found him a production assistant job on The Soldier, a 1982 cold war thriller about terrorists and plutonium and Middle East oil. Other movie projects kept him occupied through the rest of that decade.

Actor Chris Noth on Law & Order

In 1991, television beckoned. He enjoyed steady employment until 2005 at the sprawling Chelsea studios of Law & Order, the mothership program that went on to spawn additional cops-and-courts shows in the Dick Wolf franchise. Ritchings co-wrote the teleplay for a Season Five episode titled “Pride” that aired on May 24,1995. It centers on the homicide of a gay city councilman that may have been a hate crime and spotlights the final performance by Chis Noth as Detective Mike Logan – until he popped up again in the same role for Exiled, a 1998 NBC movie about the character, and on Law & Order: Criminal Intent from 2005 through 2008.

Ritchings crafted a previous literary effort in 2003: Frankenrocker is the sci-fi tale of musicians and mutants manipulated by a corporate Big Brother that has succumbed to the dangerous but profitable lure of image-making. Immersed in his Jersey journalism roots for the past three years or so, he now oversees nine weeklies as acting managing editor of the Hudson Newspaper Group but somehow found the time to finish Winter in a Summer Town. His 344-page endeavor began two decades ago as a screenplay “that arose out of my involvement in the Mythopoetic Men’s Movement.”

For clueless folks like me who draw a bank with this phrase, Wikipedia explains that it’s about liberation from constraints of the modern world that obscure the gender’s true masculine nature. Ritchings attended a lecture by poet Robert Bly, a leader of the cause, which aims to foster emotional and physical well-being.

“Young men are left on their own in how to grow up,” he said. “There’s a sudden burst of testosterone for a boy in puberty. They want attention, admiration and guidance from their male elders but homophobia gets in the way. And they face Oedipal problems. Fathers are there to provide things like food and shelter but not to educate your soul.”

The education of Eddie’s soul in the novel ricochets from a distant, disapproving dad to an editor he initially admires until realizing there's a secret agenda at play. The context is a community full of intolerant straight men driven by avarice and a desire for power. Only Billy, his gay landlord and lawyer, gives the confused lad any sense of solace.

Eddie’s fickle high school sweetheart, Ivy, has gone off to college in Manhattan and hooked up with some Weather Underground types planning a bunch of nasty actions. In order to escape their control, the sexually voracious girl decides to let an old Jersey boyfriend come back into into the picture but never tells him about her complex ties to the militants. Though vehemently opposed to America’s conflict in Vietnam and conscription – an apparent inevitability he’s desperate to avoid – his chosen path as a child of rage is peace.

It’s a fascinating dilemma and, in reality, this path has not been easy for the progressive son of a conservative Republican. “I once met Richard Nixon and probably became a Democrat at that very moment,” Ritchings pointed out.

While promoting his current book, he has started “a psychological thriller set in the world of film and TV production in New York City.” Why not? After toiling for so long in the Law & Order trenches, Ritchings surely knows where all the bodies are buried.

Wait a minute! That’s pretty much what crooked Matty “The Mule” Esposito confesses to an incredulous Eddie Bonneville. But you’ll have to read Winter in a Summer Town for the exact locations.

Gene Ritchings’ novel can be purchased at
www.winterinasummertown.com or www.amazon.com

– Susan Green is a film critic and arts journalist based in Burlington, Vermont. She is the co-author with Kevin Courrier of Law & Order: The Unofficial Companion and with Randee Dawn of Law & Order Special Victims Unit: The Unofficial Companion.

When the Real Pod People Intrude: Oliver Hirschbiegel's The Invasion

noreply@blogger.com (Critics at Large) — Wed, 23 May 2012 16:00:00 +0000

In my last post, I talked about the two-dozen plus DVDs I picked up for a buck each at the Rogers rental shutdown. As I stated, a few of the films I grabbed I assumed would be pieces o' crap, such as Oliver Hirschbiegel's The Invasion (2007 - starring Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig) which I had heard nothing but bad things about. It was the fourth version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, so I bought it for $1 to watch at some point just to complete the “collection.” So imagine my surprise when, except for the completely destroyed ending and idiotic bits here and there throughout the film, I found The Invasion well-acted, credibly made and far more pointed than I was expecting it to be.

In the first two versions, the invasion was literally a space-born spore that came to earth (never explained in the Don Siegel's effective 1956 version; carried to our planet on the solar winds in Philip Kaufman's brilliant 1978 version). Abel Ferrara's weak 1993 Body Snatchers also left it unclear where the spores came from, but suggested environmental problems – not space spores – on a military base caused the pods to evolve and take over people. In Hirschbiegel's version, spores have attached themselves to a returning space shuttle which experiences a catastrophic failure. When the shuttle breaks up on re-entry, it spreads the spores across the US (especially around Washington, DC, where most of the film is set) attached to the shuttle's wreckage.

The most intriguing thing about every version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers is how they have tried to be a commentary upon the time in which they were made. Don Siegel's 1956 version is generally received two ways: either it's a warning about the McCarthy witch hunts and how good people can be destroyed by the group mind's fear of communism; or it's a warning against the insidious creeping of communism itself. Kaufman's 1978 masterpiece is a look at the collapse of Sixties idealism and the emergence of the navel-gazing Me Generation and Reagan-era conformity where nobody wants to seem out of step with everybody else. For an exceptional examination of these first two films, see my colleague Kevin Courrier's post here.

The pod, in the 1956 film

Ferrara's version, rather lamely, puts the negative focus on the military and how it demands complete obedience of its members. No, really? Military people obeying orders? As Count Floyd used to say on SCTV, “Ooooh, scary.” There is also a suggestion that our destruction of the environment caused the pods to evolve, which might have had some promise, but Ferrara – an overrated hack at best – didn't properly explore it. Hirschbiegel's take puts the spotlight on our fears of disease. The first people are taken over not by a pod duplicate, but the spores themselves. One touch (people picking up pieces of the shuttle are the first affected) and the spore enters the blood stream, attacks the human cells and replicates/replaces them while they REM sleep. There is no taken-over remains to get rid of in this version because the same body is used, just absorbed by the spore life-form a cell at a time. If truth be known, to me the giant pods always seemed a bit silly even in the terrific versions of the films. Didn’t anybody consider that the appearance of really large versions of milk-weed pods all over the place was out of place?

In The Invasion, Nicole Kidman plays Washington, DC psychiatrist Carol Bennell (only the Ferrara version didn't use the Bennell name – the hero's name in Jack Finney's original novel – for the film's hero/heroine). She's a single mother now divorced from her husband, Tucker Kaufman (Jeremy Northam – named in tribute to director Philip Kaufman), who works for the Center for Disease Control (CDC). As the film starts, he is on the scene of the shuttle disaster and accidentally touches a piece of the wreckage, thus becoming one of the first infected. A few days later, Bennell first becomes concerned that there's something amiss in society when one of her patients, Wendy Lenk (Veronica Cartwright – another tribute to Kaufman's version, since Cartwright played one of last humans standing at the end of his version), thinks her husband isn't her husband anymore. She describes a terrible attack he levelled on their dog when it growled and tried to attack him. Bennell sends her home with new meds and an insistence that she contact her if the husband does anything else odd. As the appointment finishes, Bennell receives a call from Kaufman saying he wants to see their son, Oliver (well-played by Jackson Bond). Bennell at first refuses because Kaufman has had nothing to do with her or their son in years, and now he's suddenly back. Why? She reluctantly agrees, and drops off Oliver with Kaufman, but is still concerned. She tells her concerns to her colleague and friend, Ben Driscoll (pre-Bond Daniel Craig). Long story short, she begins to piece things together and, with Driscoll's help and that of another colleague, Dr. Stephen Galeano (Jeffrey Wright – Felix Leiter in the later James Bond movies featuring Craig), try to determine a cause. They also discover that some people who suffered Encephalitis as a child (such as her son, Oliver) are immune to the spore's attack. (One disturbing moment occurs when Bennell asks one of the turned what they will do with her unturnable son. He says, “There’s no place in our world for the immune.” Namely, Oliver and all like him will be killed.) The race is then on to rescue Oliver and stay awake. Hirschbiegel's version works best on two levels. On one level, there’s our fear of a pandemic flu, such as the 2003 SARS outbreak in Hong Kong, Toronto and other cities. And two, are we too violent as a people?

Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig

Fear of disease reached such heights in 2009 that I recall panicked line-ups around the block to receive flu shots to protect against the potentially lethal H1N1 virus, which scientists at the CDC and at Health Canada claimed would run roughshod over society killing or making millions ill. As it turned out, they either cried wolf causing a near panic, or the shots worked. I think, unfortunately, it was the former. Though I believe in the necessity of vaccinations, I don't believe in fear mongering, so I didn't get the shot and I came through that winter not only without the flu, but not even a cold. Granted, I wasn't in any of the at-risk groups, but still I thought – and still feel – that as long as I have an immune system that functions on its own (and I do whatever I can to keep it strong), unless the risk seems really dire, I don't bother with the annual flu shot.

This is the first thing The Invasion plays with brilliantly. In the film, many US citizens are infected because the “pod people” take over the CDC and concoct a vaccine that is supposed to stop some sort of pandemic. In fact, the inoculation is actually the spore itself which will transform anybody injected into a pod person. Of course, as fear broadcasts go out over the media, the herd mentality takes place and everybody rushes out to get inoculated. (I guess that means I'd be on the run from the pod people because I refuse to get a flu shot.) The spores can also be passed on by a secretion spit from the mouth of a pod person into the unchanged human's face. (For example, early in the film, Bennell is captured by Kaufman who sprays her with the spore, so she really has a need to stay awake because she won't turn until she does.)

The second thing the film does really well, in an unnerving sort of way, is something that plays constantly in the background as Bennell and Driscoll race around trying to stop the invasion and try to stay awake. As more and more humans are turned, the TV broadcasts talk incessantly about how peaceful and non-violent the world is becoming. Basically, we humans are a very violent bunch and perhaps we need to be turned in order to save ourselves from ourselves. It is a smart move in the film giving us the suggestion that perhaps the world would be better if we were all turned. After all, look how peaceful the world becomes. Very sly.

And then the whole movie falls apart. (SPOILER ALERT.) In what has to be the most retarded happy endings ever conceived (or tacked on – more on that in a second), Bennell and her son are racing away from a hoard of pod people. Gaetano is in a helicopter trying to pick them up. He has earlier taken the spore to a facility where they've “miraculously” developed a counter serum that will not only undercut the spores, but turn back everybody already turned. They make it to the helicopter and then cut to one year later and everybody's back to normal (with our violent tendencies also back). What? How asinine. Are you kidding me? First, how did they find that “cure” so quickly? Second, did the pod people basically not fight back; just docilely submit to the change? However, we have no way of knowing because once the helicopter lands and picks up Bennell and Oliver, the film cuts to one year later and everything is happy happy joy joy. It makes absolutely no sense and undercuts everything the film is working towards. (Don Siegel’s original version also had a ridiculous tacked on get-the-FBI finale, but at least it didn’t damage the overall impact of the picture.)

Director Oliver Hirschbiegel in 2009

I think I know what happened. The real pod people didn't like what they were seeing and intervened. In this case, the pod people were the executives at Warner Brothers (and probably notorious action producer, Joel Silver). They took one look at what sort of ending Hirschbiegel and good screenwriter David Kajganich came up with and shrieked that familiar pod people shriek. They replacedHirschbiegel (a German filmmaker who to that point was known for his harrowing film about Hitler's final days, Downfall, so just what did they expect?) and also Kajganich because The Suits feared the two of them were aiming for something dark, I bet. The Suits brought in The Wachowskis (the brothers behind The Matrix movies) to rewrite (did the producers not see the nonsensical second and third Matrix movies?) and James McTeague (V for Vendetta – did they not watch that god awful film?) to reshoot. They basically destroyed the The Invasion. It's pretty easy to see where these sequences were dropped in: a line such as “turn everybody back” spouted by Wright; an incomprehensible exchange between Kidman and Roger Rees' Yoric; a visually exciting but utterly ridiculous chase scene with a bunch of pod people piled on Bennell's car as she careers through the streets trying to get to the helicopter; and the entire last five minutes.

Hirschbiegel and Kajganich had the right idea. They built an incredible mood and tension without overt action scenes and you can still see that film through the cracks of the mess the film became. But in 21st century Hollywood, for a summer movie (it was originally planned for release in June 2006, but due to reshoots came out in July 2007) to have almost only minimal action, to be about mood, tension and character, AND feature a downer ending, there was just no way. Somewhere, in an alternative universe, the film Hirschbiegel and Kajganich wanted to make was shot, edited and released, probably to great acclaim. We got the pod people version.

– David Churchill is a critic and author of the novel The Empire of Death. You can read an excerpt here. Or go to http://www.wordplaysalon.com for more information (where you can order the book, but only in traditional form!). And yes, he’s begun the long and arduous task of writing his second novel.

Weasels Ripped My Flesh: Josef Skvorecky's Headed for the Blues (1997)

noreply@blogger.com (Critics at Large) — Tue, 22 May 2012 16:00:00 +0000

Last winter when author Josef Skvorecky passed away, we didn't have room to post a proper obituary in Critics at Large. So I thought I'd take the opportunity today to perhaps address something of what his life meant to me through one of his later efforts, Headed for the Blues (1997). Headed for the Blues is actually divided into two books. Beginning with the memoir of the title, and written by the author while looking back at his homeland from his new one in Canada; it is followed by "The Tenor Saxophonist's Story," which consists of 10 short stories written between 1954 and 1956 while Skvorecky was still in Prague. The purpose here, no doubt, is to provide contrasting attitudes about the past – the place and people he left behind – through stories that capture all the reasons why he did depart.

Headed for the Blues examines why those reasons are never cut and dry. What Skvorecky demonstrates, with a cool irony and a sardonic grin, is that just because you leave the traumas of home behind, it doesn't mean that they still can't haunt you. During the opening few pages, Skvorecky confronts us with names, places and distant memories. Yet the story's not told in the chronological sequencing of a conventional remembrance. His thoughts pour out as if they'd been first blended in a Cuisinart. The narrative shifts back and forth through time, too, with sentences that run on as if the author wasn't sure he'd find enough breath to get the words out.

The urgency to speak – to find clarity or certainty – is deliberate, and the book's style, with its jazzy bounce and swing, carries the plot. While it takes a little time to get your bearings (because the rush of words leave you feeling the sensation of stemming a flood), the urgency has a point because this memoir from a Czech exile is an attempt to validate a life during a time of Stalinist repression. It's about how memories – and time itself – can lose its linear shape and meaning in a totalitarian society; a society where it becomes next to impossible to consolidate those memories when the government's role is to deny you the experience of them. Headed for the Blues also pulls the rug out from under all our efforts to find our roots because the story is infused with a homesickness borne out of unresolved efforts to define a home. To paraphrase blues singer Percy Mayfield, it's about being a stranger in your own hometown.

The book opens in 1969, with Skvorecky, a university professor in Toronto, looking back to the grim shadow of 1948 when the communist putsch deployed a Stalinist regime in Czechoslovakia. The memoir touches many moments (both tender and tragic) and issues (both political and personal), but the two threads that run through this reminiscence is Skvorecky's correspondence with his good friend Prema, who becomes an exile after broadcasting from a stolen transmitter; and later, Pavlas, a different kind of exile with "a mushy voice" and an obsequious agenda who meets him in Toronto. Prema travels the world from Algiers to Sicily, showing up in Australia, yet eventually coming home just to get booted out. For Skvorecky, Prema represents all the comforts of having a homeland, coupled with justifications for leaving it. Pavlas embodies the treachery that robs your homeland of its comforts, constantly reminding you that you never leave it behind.

Josef Skvorecky

The dark humour in Headed for the Blues (it suggests Kafka with a chuckle) uncovers the world of fizls, agents of the secret police ("rhymes with weasels"), and the "exhausted executioners," claimed by the government to be tired because of the volume of killing. Skvorecky demonstrates time and again that behind the boldly defined face of the communist revolutionary is actually the faceless bureaucrat who finds fulfillment in wiping out lives and identities. No wonder Skvorecky is compelled to write: "Anyone capable of the extravagance of words must tell everything he knows ... Truth will be forgotten, because perhaps it is the young, the happy ones ... who are entering an age when only the diligent fizls grow weary, the executioner is idle."

The short vignettes that make up "The Tenor Saxophonist's Story" function like parables about politics and morality. They also feature a familiar figure from Skvorecky's earlier work, his alter-ego Danny Smiricky, who appeared in Skvorecky's first novel, The Cowards (1958), The Swell Season (1975), as well as in The Engineer of Human Souls (1977) and The Republic of Whores (1969), the sax player who describes himself as "a champion of caution." In many ways, though, I like to think of him more like Ivan (Robin Williams), the innocent hero of Paul Mazursky's lovely and bittersweet Moscow on the Hudson (1984), another story about defection and homesickness. (Ivan also played the sax.) Danny is an observer who tries to behave decently in a system where betrayal and expedience have become the norm. In the story "Panta Rei," we watch through Danny's eyes the worst aspects of careerism, where one character changes political colours with the ease one uses to change shoes. In "Truths," political naivete is cleverly linked to the sexual version of the same innocence. And in "Little Mata Hari of Prague," the true nature of what is considered a classless society is horrifically revealed.

Robin Williams in Moscow on the Hudson

Headed for the Blues is a precise examination of the Stalinist horrors of the Czech past and a stirring remembrance of what Skvorecky left behind (and a good guess at what lay ahead). But considered today, the book truly gains in perspective. No doubt, like many of us, Skvorecky didn't anticipate the rapid fall of communism and the Velvet Revolution of Vaclav Haval. When I interviewed Skvorecky back in 1988 (included as one of the Talking Out of Turn interviews in Critics at Large), a year before that revolution, and asked him whether he trusted Gorbachev and glasnost, he said, "These liberal-left journalists are simply too trusting. They have no historical memory. Many people know that Gorbachev is in power, but they forgot that he made his career in the KGB. I'm not saying that this determines his future, but I would be more cautious. Exiles like myself know totalitarianism, and Canadians fortunately do not."

Skvorecky was, of course, wrong about Gorbachev's future, but his comments about the value and necessity of having a historical memory is precise. The cautionary tone of Headed for the Blues hints in its comic despair that things will never change. But because Josef Skvorecky, in his lifetime, cultivated that historical memory, a memory that struggles to uncover the complexity of truth, he made change more inevitable than he may at first realized.

– Kevin Courrier is a writer/broadcaster, film critic, teacher and author (Dangerous Kitchen: The Subversive World of Zappa). His forthcoming book is Reflections in the Hall of Mirrors: American Movies and the Politics of Idealism. With John Corcelli, Courrier is currently working on another radio documentary for CBC Radio's Inside the Music called The Other Me: The Avant-Garde Music of Paul McCartney.

The Untimely Demise of Leap of Faith

noreply@blogger.com (Critics at Large) — Mon, 21 May 2012 16:00:00 +0000

Raúl Esparza and the cast of Leap of Faith (Photos by Joan Marcus)

On Sunday afternoon May 13th I saw what turned out to be the final performance of a vibrant new musical called Leap of Faith. Upon receiving a baffling (but hardly unprecedented) review by Ben Brantley in The New York Times that referred to it in the opening sentence as a black hole that sucks up everything that gets near it, the production began to bleed money. It did receive a nomination for the Best Musical Tony – normally a stopgap for failing shows; producers keep them open until after the awards in the hope that a prize or two might generate some activity at the box office. Here, though, there was no chance of that, since Leap of Faith received no other nominations -- not for the vivid Alan Mencken-Glenn Slater score, or Christopher Ashley’s direction, or Sergio Trujillo’s terrific choreography, or Robin Wagner’s handsome, ingenious set, or Donald Holder’s lighting or William Ivey Long’s costumes, and, most remarkably, not one single nomination for anyone in the amazingly talented cast. The Best Musical nod, then, was a slap in the face: the subtext was “We don’t think there’s a single distinguished quality in this musical but there were only half a dozen new musicals this season and you’re not as bad as Bonnie and Clyde.” One wonders if the Tony voters actually went to see Leap of Faith at all or if they read Brantley and opted to stay home. If so, they missed a hell of a show.

Janus Cercone and Warren Leight adapted Leap of Faith from Cercone’s screenplay for the 1992 movie, starring Steve Martin and Debra Winger as a nickel-plated revivalist preacher and his partner in crime, the equally cynical young woman who manages his traveling Jesus circus. In both versions, the Reverend Jonas Nightingale (“Nightengale” in the movie), who’s on the run in other parts of Bible country for passing bad checks and other forms of fraud, decides to pitch his tent in a small Kansas town in the midst of a long drought that has devastated farms and – in the present-day stage edition – exacerbated an already woeful economy. Jonas’s agenda is to take advantage of the locals’ desperation and their need for some, any, brand of hope. They expect him to heal their various kinds of wounds and to make it rain. “The beauty part,” as Jonas (Raúl Esparza) explains to us at the beginning of act two, is that if no miracle transpires, “it’s on them: they didn’t believe enough.” The material is related to N. Richard Nash’s play The Rainmaker, where a charismatic young man not only promises rain but enchants a spinster who’s given up on the possibility of romance. (Memorably, Burt Lancaster and Katharine Hepburn played those roles in the 1955 movie version of The Rainmaker, and Woody Harrelson and Jayne Atkinson brought new vitality to them in the 1999 Broadway revival.) It’s even more closely linked to Meredith Willson’s The Music Man, where a con-man itinerant drummer named Harold Hill plans to rook the citizens of an Iowa town out of their money by convincing them that their children can only be saved from moral decrepitude by playing in a marching band – until the combination of a stiff-backed librarian and her lonely kid brother locate the heart he didn’t know he had. The idea is the same in all three: behind the phony show-biz hype lurks a touch of authenticity that hornswaggles even the hardest case. That would be Jonas, who is so unsettled when he manages to heal someone for real that his immediate response is anger, as if he’d been conned. The Rainmaker’s Starbuck, Harold Hill and Jonas are all variants on a classic American type, the magnetic swindler that Melville invented in The Confidence Man. These softer versions allow for a happy ending; if you wanted to take them into darker waters you’d end up with a tragic figure like O’Neill’s Hickey in The Iceman Cometh or an ironic one like Paul in John Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation, whose belief in his own con is a kind of schizophrenia.

Steve Martin in Leap of Faith (1992)

As a movie Leap of Faith didn’t work, though it had some wonderful sequences (certainly the best I’ve ever seen in a movie directed by Richard Pearce). The elements just didn’t come together, and some of it, like Winger’s romance with a true-blue sheriff (an extremely miscast Liam Neeson) and the back story explaining how Jonas got to be the crook he is, never rang true. And though Martin’s ice-cold spieler was something to watch, you wanted to keep your distance. Pearce and Cercone were striving to avoid compromising the character by having him refuse to believe even when the crippled teenage boy (the prodigious Lukas Haas) who won’t stop believing gets up off his crutches at the climax of Jonas’s tent meeting and walks on his own two feet. But at the end, the movie didn’t feel ambiguous, just insufficiently worked through. In the musical, Cercone and Leight return to the lineage of their character and allow him to be knocked on his ass by forces he’s never believed in, and the book takes us there by juxtaposing Jonas’s skepticism and that of his sister Sam (Kendra Kassebaum) – a modified version of the Debra Winger character – with Ida Mae Sturdevant (Kecia Lewis-Evans), their gospel leader, who believes simultaneously in Jonas and in the God he only pretends to serve. The book and the songs keep pairing the characters as foils, linking them thematically. Ida Mae knows she’s compromising; so does Marla McGowan (Jessica Phillips), the town sheriff, the mother of the boy, Jake (Talon Ackerman), who lost the use of his legs in the accident that killed his daddy three years earlier. She doesn’t believe he’s ever going to walk again but she lies to him, encouraging him to think otherwise. (In the movie the boy’s mother is a waitress, played by Lolita Davidovich; the musical combines that character with the sheriff and thus provides Jonas rather than Sam with a romantic interest.) Yet Marla wants to close Jonas down for his fakery and for encouraging his audience – which, inevitably, includes Jake – to have the same kind of hope. To Ida Mae and her daughter Ornella (Krystal Joy Brown), who sings in Jonas’s choir, Jonas is a savior of a kind because he pulled Ornella out of a life of drugs and promiscuity. Ida Mae’s son Isaiah (Leslie Odom, Jr.), with his Bible college degree, is quick to condemn Jonas, but his mother points out that the boy’s role model, his late preacher father, was a cold man who didn’t earn his son’s emulation.

Raúl Esparza and Jessica Phillips

When Jonas delivers a bogus message to a young widow (Dierdre Friel) from her husband and she throws her wedding ring into the plate, we have two opposite reactions: we can see the emotional manipulation on Jonas’s side but we also see the emotional commitment on the widow’s – the beauty of the gesture that says she has enough faith to go on with her life and pull herself out of her paralyzing grief. It’s what you might call a Robert Altman moment. Altman once said in an interview that what he wanted to evoke in audiences at the end of Nashville, after the country singer Barbara Jean has been shot and Barbara Harris revs the stunned crowd into singing “It Don’t Worry Me,” was a double reaction: horror at their fickleness (they just saw one of their idols gunned down before their eyes and now they’re singing?) and admiration at their resilience (they just saw one of their idols shot and yet they’re still able to get up and sing). I’m not trying to suggest that Leap of Faith is a masterpiece like Nashville, but that it’s layered and complicated and has a lot going on in it – considerably more than most musicals, or even most straight plays.

Mencken has written a great deal of rousing music (“Rise Up!,” “Lost,” “Dancin’ in the Devil’s Shoes,” “Are You on the Bus?” and other songs) as well as a couple of fine duets for Jonas and Marla, the sexy “Fox in the Henhouse” and “I Can Read You.” It needs a few more ballads, though it does have a lovely one in the second act, “Long Past Dreamin’,” which Phillips performs affectingly. In only one number does the emotion feel whipped up: the second-act “People Like Us,” sung first by Sam and then by Marla. Mencken and Slater must have been overjoyed when they heard the performers who were going to sing their songs: the musical numbers constitute one tour-de-force after another by the likes of Phillips, Kassebaum, and especially Kecia Lewis-Evans, Leslie Odom, Jr. and Krystal Joy Brown. It would be tough to pick the highest point, but “Are You on the Bus?” – which begins as Ornella’s challenge to her fellow gospellers, some of whom, under Isaiah’s influence, have threatened to walk off the show; then shifts to Sam’s censuring Jonas for losing his nerve; then culminates in Ida Mae’s criticism of Isaiah for his black-and-white vision of the world – is really something. The afternoon I saw the show, the audience wouldn’t stop applauding at the end of the number, which ends with the three soloists stepping upstage and Esparza moving down. So Esparza, in a touchingly sweet gesture during this swan-song performance, stopped the performance, beckoned Brown, Kasesbaum and Lewis-Evans back downstage and let them take the applause, which turned into a standing ovation. (It’s worth mentioning that the ensemble – and, among the principals, Odom – are a gifted crop of singers and dancers.)

Esparza is marvelous as Jonas: he has the right ironic tone and his numbers are mesmerizing. What he doesn’t have in this role is that hint of real emotion underneath the flamboyant display, and if he did his two showpiece numbers, “King of Sin” in the first act and “Jonas’s Soliloquy” in the second, would be not just musical-comedy knockouts but truly great. It’s the quality Robert Preston had in The Music Man. That a young musical-theatre performer could come close enough to make you ask for so much is a tribute to Esparza, and to Leap of Faith.

Pathos With Laughs: David Storey's Home at Soulpepper

noreply@blogger.com (Critics at Large) — Sun, 20 May 2012 16:00:00 +0000

Maria Vacratsis, Michael Hanrahan, Oliver Dennis & Brenda Robins in Home (Photo by Cylla von Tiedemann)

Toronto's Soulpepper Theatre Company's nuanced staging of Home, written by the British playwright David Storey back in 1970, offers up a whole slew of meanings. The production conjures up different memories and notions of what a home is, but in this important play it’s also about belonging. They have resurrected an almost forgotten gem, a Broadway hit for two of England’s greatest actors, Ralph Richardson and John Gielgud, and their director, Lindsay Anderson, over forty years ago. This new version opens a door to a whole new perspective on the work without fear of expectation or comparison. For director Albert Schultz, Home is about the absence of family. The play features five characters who are only related only by the place in which they live – unfortunately it is an asylum for the mentally ill.

Home features a day in the life of five characters: three men and two women. Each character is flawed, but not so much to pose any danger to the other. Their behaviour is subtle and suggestive. While the women are tough and strong, the men are emotional wrecks who put on a brave face to disguise their inner pain. The men are played by Oliver Dennis as Jack and Michael Hanrahan as Harry. (Andre Sills plays Alfred, the body builder.) When the play begins, Harry and Jack meet outside in the very spare garden for sunlight and conversation. Ken MacKenzie’s minimalist set features a slowly moving film of clouds in the background while the action takes place downstage. Their talk might be full of wit as they carry on light conversation, but you never make the mistake of considering it lightweight. Each one tries to hide deeper feelings by using words to cover up what ails them. So topics like the weather, meal breaks and family make up their patter. The sad part is the fact that one day becomes like the next for these characters whose only relief comes in the form of reinvention or by changing their personal histories.

The women, played by Brenda Robins as Kathleen and Maria Vacratsis as Marjorie, are much more forthright and bitchy. These are hardened women: Kathleen is suicidal and constantly complaining about her sore feet. Marjorie, who is older, is full of rage and expresses it with sarcasm and colourful dick jokes. She’s distrustful of men in general constantly telling Kathleen to “pull down her dress.” The female characters offer quite a contrast to the males. The men are internally scared of showing emotion because they don’t know how to express it in words. So they simply begin crying uncontrollably and reach for a handkerchief to wipe their eyes.

Home presents its themes quite simply. While the men and women carry themselves with great dignity, it’s not a romantic play because these individuals are seeking inner-redemption and a freedom that cannot be achieved in a personal relationship. We know they are damaged goods and they know they are damaged goods, so it would have been silly for any cheap romantic notions to be attempted. Ironically, considering the place their in, each character quietly needs the other to survive. So as the play progresses, taking place through the course of an afternoon, the ensemble slowly reveals that they are in an institution whose limits are the walls of the grounds of which there is no escape. These characters, who could just as easily be your next-door neighbours (or members of your own family), are performed beautifully with economical movements and gracefully dignified interactions.

Storey’s writing, which is a sly blend of Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter, is full of non-sequiturs, puns and absurdities. The text is a continuous exchange of gags, carefully timed, to appear as ordinary conversation. Written for the common person’s ear and completely reliant upon the actor’s timing and delivery, Dennis and Hanrahan relish the opportunity to enjoy the crisp exchanges and they resist playing off the comic beats. They understand the importance of being in the moment and not “acting” for the sake of a laugh. Home gathers its strength out of subtext where it's not what the characters are saying that’s important. It’s what they’re hiding that draws our attention. One definition of home is described as “a place where one’s affections center, or where one finds rest, refuge or satisfaction.” But you're not totally convinced these characters will ever find it. Which is why it's refreshing to see a play that isn't trying to impress the audience by hitting them over the head with edicts regarding mental illness. It is the humanity of the work that is its strongest asset. Although Storey’s play is considered a comedy, Home is a work with pathos and we all feel it, no matter how big the laughs.

Soulpepper’s production of Home by David Storey, closes June 20.

– John Corcelli is a broadcaster and occasional theatre director. He's currently working on a radio documentary, with Kevin Courrier, for CBC Radio's Inside the Music called The Other Me: The Avant-Garde Music of Paul McCartney.

Talking Out of Turn #29: Leonard Cohen (1984)

noreply@blogger.com (Critics at Large) — Sat, 19 May 2012 17:33:00 +0000

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show, On the Arts, at CJRT-FM in Toronto. With the late Tom Fulton, who was the show's prime host and producer, we did a half-hour interview program where we talked to artists from all fields. In 1994, after I had gone to CBC, I had an idea to collate an interview anthology from some of the more interesting discussions I'd had with guests from that period. Since they all took place during the Eighties, I thought I could edit the collection into an oral history of the decade from some of its most outspoken participants. The book was assembled from interview transcripts and organized thematically. I titled it Talking Out of Turn: Revisiting the '80s. With financial help from the Canada Council, I shaped the individual pieces into a number of pertinent themes relevant to the decade. By the time I began to contact publishers, though, the industry was starting to change. At one time, editorial controlled marketing. Now the reverse was now starting to take place. Acquisition editors, who once responded to an interesting idea for a book, were soon following marketing divisions concerned with whether the person doing it was hot enough to sell it.

Tom Fulton, the host of On the Arts at CJRT-FM

For a few years, I flogged the proposal to various publishers but many were worried that there were too many people from different backgrounds (i.e. Margaret Atwood sitting alongside Oliver Stone). Another publisher curiously chose to reject it because, to them, it appeared to be a book about me promoting my interviews (as if I was trying to be a low-rent Larry King) rather than seeing it as a commentary on the decade through the eyes of the guests. All told, the book soon faded away and I turned to other projects. However, when recently uncovering the original proposal and sample interviews, I felt that maybe some of them could find a new life on Critics at Large.

Leonard Cohen

When we spoke to poet and singer/songwriter Leonard Cohen, he had just come out of a relatively long period of contemplation that dated back to 1979. The culmination of that hermitage was a collection of prayers, psalms, meditations, and contemplative texts he wrote called Book of Mercy (McClelland & Stewart, 1984). Little did any of us know, perhaps not even Cohen himself, that shortly after the publication of this book, his music career would once again catapult him back into the larger public arena.

kc: This new work, Book of Mercy, seems like a culmination of a long, quiet and contemplative period.

lc: That's a good way to put it. It certainly wasn't a book conceived out of choice. You don't find yourself sitting down deciding to write a book of prayers. Sometimes the only voice you can find is the voice of prayer. So it's that kind of book. I found myself in a contemplative predicament for a number of years and I studied and looked into these matters. This is the book that came out of that activity.

kc: What prompted this activity?

lc: I think you just find yourself shattered without any other recourse but to address the source of things. Everybody finds themselves at that place from time to time.

kc: So this is the kind of book that you can only write when you've had some years to consider those sources?

lc: I think that's true. I think you have to have the experience of loss and misdirection, or a sense of failure to do this.

kc: That's curious. When I was reading it, I could feel with each prayer a stripping away of illusion.

lc: That's what I was trying to do. After all, you're not on the stand when you are praying. You can't come with any excuses (laughs). And you don't really have a deep belief in your own opinions any longer, or your constructions about the way things are. That's why you pray. You don't have a prayer (laughs). You're trying to locate a source of strength that you just don't command.

kc: But didn't you sometimes find that strength earlier in your career through your songs, poems and novels? Or has that just changed?

lc: Let me put it this way. When I was operating an elevator once in New York, at least ten people a day used to make that joke, "How's business? Up and down?" And I think that's the way it is.

kc: Do you think though that your past work has prepared you, too, for things you find yourself contemplating now?

lc: Yes. I think that's very true. In fact, in a tiny way you find that your work becomes prophetic for yourself. I don't mean prophetic in the big sense. But you find that you write about things that haven't happened yet. And they unfold as you have written them.

kc: Perhaps the hardest part of that process is coming to terms with being emotionally naked.

lc: I don't think those are risks that you choose. You find yourself in the predicament where you can't use any of your clothing. You can't use any of your armor. It doesn't mean that one shouldn't have clothing or armor. You need that to operate in this veil of tears...

kc: ....But you're almost suggesting that your hand gets forced.

lc: Yeah (laughs). You can't use any of the things you're used to using.

kc: When you started Book of Mercy was there at least a conscious attempt to write a series of psalms?

lc: I had a secret hope that I might make something out of it. The activity was so intense that I didn't end up with plans for it as it was being written. From time to time, I thought, you know, maybe I'm still a writer and maybe this is a book, but most of the time it was conceived from a place where you can't plan.

kc: How much of an influence did the Torah have on the collection?

lc: I was studying a lot at that time especially the last four years. That kind of writing has always touched me more than any other kind of writing. Those rhythms definitely crept into the style of it. Some people have criticized the book on that level saying that the language is too antique. But it's the tradition I grew up in and it's natural for me to speak that way. We do have a devotional language that we've learned although I haven't stayed totally within that kind of expression. But Book of Mercy has those echoes certainly.

Leonard Cohen performing "Hallelujah"

kc: How connected then are these prayers to your music given how the language of the Torah has influenced so much of your music's rhythms?

lc: Those are considerations after the fact if it's your habit to express yourself in rhythms and with musical qualities as it is mine. At the same time, I was writing a number of songs which I'm soon going to put out in an album [Various Positions]. But Book of Mercy, unlike an album of songs, is not a book of poems. It's something else. I think it would only be accessible to somebody who is in a kind of trouble. It's also a very tricky kind of trouble to promote it. Here I am peddling a book in the market place because you want the book to survive. But I know that it can only be useful to somebody who needs to open their mouth in that kind of way.

Coda: I was aware during our talk that Cohen seemed to be contemplating (and accumulating) more and more unexpressed thought as the interview was progressing. So after our chat ended with the comment above, he asked me if he could play me something that he felt might best fully answer the questions that the interview kept peeling away. He was my last interview that morning so all I had was my lunch waiting. I figured that I had my whole life to eat lunch, but little time to spend with Leonard Cohen. So we went into the control room that had just been vacated by our technical producer. He handed me a cassette that was obviously a promo tape with no writing on it and asked me to fast forward it to the concluding song on side two. As I cued the tape correctly, I brought up the volume on the control board while he lounged back in his chair as I did in mine. As the song began gently, he looked over to me and said, "I think this song best answers your questions during our talk." The song that played was "Hallelujah." Once it ended, I gave him back the tape now forgetting what my response was to what I just heard. We shook hands and I gave him back the tape thanking him for the opportunity to hear this new unreleased song. After escorting him to the door, I went to heat up my lasagna never considering that the song I first heard with Leonard Cohen would turn out to be such an iconic one.

Neglected Gems #15: Palookaville (1995)

noreply@blogger.com (Critics at Large) — Fri, 18 May 2012 17:00:00 +0000

Palookaville, the title of the disarming first feature by Alan Taylor, refers to the generic state of existence shared by the three main characters. Russell (Vincent Gallo), Sid (William Forsythe) and Jerry (Adam Trese) are unemployed friends in their thirties – too old to be living the way they are, and painfully conscious of it. Russell boards with his family; he survives off the salary his brother-in-law (Gareth Williams), a cop, brings home. Russell’s girl, Laurie (Kim Dickens), lives next door, so he has to sneak through their bedroom windows to sleep with her. Sid’s wife left him ten years ago; he lives alone with her photo on the night table, and with his smelly dog. His phone is disconnected, his couch is repossessed, and he takes most of his dinners at Russell’s house (he’s a favorite of Russell’s mom’s). Jerry’s wife Betty (Lisa Gay Hamilton) works in a supermarket, where her manager paws her; when Jerry interrupts a groping session, he blows up and the boss retaliates by firing Betty. Furious, she makes Jerry go back and apologize so she can continue to support the family (they’ve got a baby).

These low-rent types keep planning initiatives – legal and illegal – to shake themselves loose from their rut, and then trip over themselves when they try to carry them out. They’re the sad-sack descendants of the characters Paddy Chayefsky used to write in the fifties. But unlike Chayefsky, the screenwriter, David Epstein (who was inspired by some stories by Italo Calvino), has a gift for dialogue. He’s also got an idiosyncratic sense of humor: the jokes are like trick pool shots that ricochet off three sides before pinging the ball into the pocket. In the film’s opening sequence, the guys try to knock off a jewelry store but since Jerry, the layout man, screwed up the geography, they end up in the adjacent bakery instead. (Epstein reworks the botched robbery sequence that climaxes the classic Italian heist farce, Big Deal on Madonna Street, but here it’s just the intro.) When the cops arrive, Jerry’s hiding behind the pastry tray, with telltale dabs of powdered sugar all over his face. (He and one of the cops reach for the same brownie.) Jerry escapes detection, but Ed, one of the officers on the scene, is sure he knows who’s responsible. His hands are tied, though, because later on that evening he drops by to visit the local whore (Frances McDormand, in a lovely cameo) and Russell, who’s a pal of hers, is sitting around her apartment shooting the breeze. Russell and Ed – Russell’s “cop-in-law,” as Laurie calls him disdainfully – are in a comic stalemate.

Palookaville is a scruffy, relaxed comedy with undercurrents of feeling. Taylor was an NYU graduate who’d directed some episodes of the TV show Homicide (he later became known for his work on The Sopranos) but he was already a master at tone shifts and atmosphere. His cinematographer, John Thomas, eventually wound up on Sex and the City but in his younger days – he also shot Barcelona – he worked in the vein of the great French New Wave photographer Raoul Coutard, vivifying a reduced urban palette and underlighting for texture rather than to make an obvious sociological point. Taylor’s wonderful with the actors; there isn’t a false note in any of the performances. As Jerry the befuddled innocent, Trese is a marvelous clown. And when Bridget Ryan shows up as Enid, a clerk at a used-clothing store, that superb, underrated character actor William Forsythe lucks out with an ideal comic partner. Enid sees Sid at a bus stop, trying unsuccessfully to scam the driver into giving him a free ride by putting on a blind act, and she’s so impressed that she invites him in out of the rain and ends up sharing his bed. She empathizes; she says she’s faked blindness and deafness, too – for the experience. Forsythe and Ryan make a sublimely loopy couple; her huge, warm eyes seem to take the chill off his scrap of a life. Palookaville is a movie about living on a shoestring but it doesn’t feel emotionally deprived.

A Lot to Be Grateful For: TV Viewers Get an Early Thanksgiving

noreply@blogger.com (Critics at Large) — Thu, 17 May 2012 18:00:00 +0000

The cast of Cougar Town

Last week’s episode of ABC’s Cougar Town opened with a scene with Jules (Courtney Cox), Laurie (Busy Philips) and Ellie (Christa Miller) suddenly wondering aloud why they didn’t get to celebrate Thanksgiving together this year. In fact, Cougar Town had an extended hiatus this year, after being bumped first from a September launch and pushed back even further in November in order to make room for some ABC’s new comedies. In the end, Cougar Town’s third season only premiered in mid-February – making a Thanksgiving or Christmas episode effectively impossible this year. Jules however offered a solution: they would celebrate Thanksgiving in May. The episode (titled “It’ll All Work Out") was one of the season's best, playing off the always surprisingly deep relationships that have developed among this handful of goofy characters, and highlighting everything that makes the show such a pleasure to watch. But more than that, it hit home for me.

May is traditionally the month when the networks firm up their schedules for the coming television season and the fates of the current shows are finally confirmed. Last year at this time, I was mourning NBC’s decision to cancel Outsourced, one of my favourite new comedies of the year. The year before, we lost Victor Fresca’s delightfully original Better Off Ted and Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse. And in May 2009, NBC announced it would not be renewing Life. For an avid TV fan, in short, May is rarely a good month. But for the past few weeks, I’ve been feeling something I don’t normally feel in the month of May: grateful. And so when Jules and the rest of the Cul-de-Sac Crew sat around the table last week and reflected on how much they have to be thankful for, it was hard for me not to join in.

While the month has brought some disappointing news – most notably NBC’s decision to cancel Awake after only producing 13 episodes – two of the strongest new shows of the season, NBC’s supernatural procedural Grimm and New Girl, Fox’s comedy starring Zooey Deschanel, will be back in the fall. Grimm has easily charmed its way into becoming my favourite new hour-long show of the season, mainly by doing the genre thing well, and knowing when to break format. And New Girl, after some initial growing pains, has grown into a strong ensemble comedy, with Max Greenfield’s portrayal of Schmidt easily one of the stand out new characters on television.

Zooey Deschanel and Max Greenfield on New Girl

But more significantly, this May has been a month of surprising renewals for some of my favourite, but somehow always struggling, shows: first among them, Cougar Town itself. After a shaky few episodes early in its first season, the sitcom has matured into one of the most consistently warm and funny comedies currently on the air. But ABC’s confidence in the series has demonstrably waned since its premiere in 2009, and in light of the show's delayed season this year, few of its fans believed it would renewed by the network. But last week, just as ABC made its expected announcement that it would not be bringing the show back in the fall, the cable network TBS confirmed that it would be picking up Cougar Town for a 15-episode fourth season to be aired in January. The long-term future of the sitcom still remains up in the air, especially with the recently announced departure of the show’s creator and showrunner Bill Lawrence (Scrubs), but life is life, as they say. And one more season of a beloved show is often more than a TV fan can hope for!

In fact, it has been a month for ‘miracle seasons’. Last week, I wrote about Fringe which, despite the science fiction series’ historically weak ratings and largely cult following, was gifted a fifth and final season by the Fox network. This most recent season of Fringe often feels like well-funded fan fiction (a realization which didn’t quite hit me until the middle of the finale episode last week), and I’m thrilled that the series will get the chance to finish up its story properly. It is gratifying (and not a little bit astonishing) to see a network demonstrate commitment to a series which so often pushes against the narrative norms of broadcast television.

But perhaps the most ‘miraculous’ save of the year is also the most surprising: after its infamous shelving of the show back in November, NBC has given Community a 13-episode order for next year. The comedy, unceremoniously taken off the air in December, returned to Thursday nights in March to air this season’s remaining 12 episodes. Ratings for the new episodes have slipped since it returned, and have actually levelled off at a lower level than the fall, but the NBC seems to have heard the voices of Community’s very vocal fans, and rewarded them with at least one more season. (Few but the show’s most diehard supporters can believe the show will get more than those 13 episodes, but considering where we were just a few months ago, I don’t expect to hear anyone complaining.) Lower ratings notwithstanding, the second half of the season gave us some of the show best episodes yet: its spot-on Law & Order parody/homage, with its hilarious guest turn for The Wire’s Michael K. Williams; more ambitious multi-episode arcs, involving a recurring role of John Goodman as the head of Greendale's secretive Air Conditioning Repair School; and a darkly self-conscious foray into product placement. This last story (“Digital Exploration of Interior Design,” March 29) showcases everything that makes the series such a unique comedic voice: with a deftness rivalled only by that master of meta-product placement Stephen Colbert, of the “Hail to the Cheese Stephen Colbert's Nacho Cheese Doritos 2008 Presidential Campaign Coverage”, the episode succeeded in somehow both endorsing and demonizing Subway restaurants, with a fable of star-crossed love and corporate depersonalization. Based on the direction of the second half of Community’s current season, I don’t expect Dan Harmon – the show’s creator and showrunner – to pull any punches next year. Considering what the series already looks like, it is difficult to imagine what Community might become when it has nothing to lose!

Adam Scott, Amy Poehler, and Rashida Jones

And to cap off the “what I am grateful for” list: last week, NBC announced that Parks and Recreation would be returning with a full 22-episode fifth season. After last year’s stellar third season – which had introduced Rob Lowe and Adam Scott as series regulars – Parks and Rec pulled out all stops for this current season. The series, struggling for ratings along with the rest of NBC’s Thursday night comedy block (which this season included the veteran 30 Rock and Community), spent the season taking the show’s characters out of their comfort zones after Leslie (Amy Poehler) deciding to run for her first elected office. The on-going story of Leslie’s struggling campaign for Pawnee city council more than played to the show’s greatest strengths: its unique capacity to be simultaneously disarmingly sweet and bitingly funny.

With so many comedies – perfectly entertaining and often very smart shows – about good-hearted people getting eaten alive by a world that plays by different rules, it is easy to grow used to the idea that optimism and enthusiasm are only ever introduced in order to be slowly stripped away. And in fact, in those few stumbling first episodes of the show before the series firmly distinguished itself from The Office model, Parks and Rec threatened to go that route. But once it found the strength and everyday heroism of these characters (especially Amy Poehler’s Leslie Knope – who may well be one of the most admirable comic characters, female or male, on TV right now), it hasn’t looked back. Leslie truly believes in local government, truly believes that government can be a force for good – and just as often I walk away believing it too. The season closed (spoiler alert!) with Leslie going off-script on an acceptance speech that would make a Tea Partier tear up. It is a credit to the show that even after more than three years, Leslie’s fundamental lack of cynicism never makes her the butt of a joke, but always draws up those around her, and the viewers too.

So this May, I am having my own Thanksgiving: for the wonderful shows that we will continue to enjoy for another year, for the characters that have made this a delightful season of television. And perhaps I will even include the network executives who seem to all of a sudden be making some genuinely right-headed choices in my thanks.

The seasons of Fringe, New Girl, and Parks and Recreation have already ended. NBC will be airing a three-episode block of Community tonight to finish off this season’s run. The final episode of Grimm’s first season will air tomorrow night on NBC and CTV. Cougar Town's season finale airs on May 29th.

– Mark Clamen is a lifelong television enthusiast. He lives in Toronto, where he often lectures on television, film, and popular culture.

Kitchen-Sink Gangsters: Down Terrace and London Boulevard

noreply@blogger.com (Critics at Large) — Wed, 16 May 2012 16:00:00 +0000

Robin and Robert Hil star in Down Terrace

As I said in my post last year about the death of the DVD rental shop, one thing I would miss was the habit of walking the aisles looking at all the titles and stumbling across a gem I'd never heard of. Then after reading the plot on the back of the box, I decided whether to take a flier and rent it. The Eclipse was one such gem I discovered this way, which I've already discussed here. Now, with the announcement three weeks ago that Rogers would no longer rent DVDs, that window of discovery, for me at least (there are no independent DVD rental shops in the city north of Toronto where I live), has now closed.

However, I had one final chance this past weekend that resulted in, if not huge dividends, at least some very pleasant surprises. Three weeks ago, after Rogers announced their decision, I ventured to our one-remaining store to see what deals I could get. All DVDs were listed as buy one get one free. So, I was able to pick up about 8 or 9 recent films, such as Hugo, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2012), A Dangerous Method, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, plus others, for about $7 each. Over the next two weeks, I went a couple of more times to see if the discount got greater. It had not. But this past Friday I decided to go one more time. The discount was now buying one get two free. They had been pretty picked over, but there were still a few things of interest, such as the three discs of Season Two of The Republic of Doyle. Then just as I was about to wrap it up, the manager came out and announced they had just been informed all DVDs were now $1 each. That changed things. I bought 27 movies. Timing is everything.

My selections were a mixed bag, including several pictures I'd thought about renting, but never got around to, such as Splice, 30 Days of Night, Me and Orson Welles, Casino Jack, Margin Call, Triage, and others. Now, not a lot of these were pictures I'd want to normally add to my collection (since I hadn't seen them), but at $1, what was there to lose? I even picked up Mean Streets and Sleepy Hollow – they were a little kicked in, but played fine. I also picked up a title or two that are probably pieces o' crap, such as The Invasion, the fourth version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers that was lambasted when it was released in 2007. But since I'd seen the other three versions, I decided to “complete the set.”

Keira Knightley and Colin Farrell in London Boulevard

I also took a chance on a few films I knew nothing about: The Ledge (a film about a man on a ledge, not to be confused with The Man on the Ledge), Down Terrace and London Boulevard. Of this group, the only two I've just watched are Down Terrace and London Boulevard. Both are British gangster films, and both deal with just-released gangsters dealing with freedom, but, except for the fact they made almost the same amount of money when released theatrically in the US (they never opened in Canada) – less than $17,000 – they couldn't have been more different. London Boulevard is a big-budget British film starring Colin Farrell, Keira Knightley, Ray Winstone and David Thewlis. It was the directorial debut of William Monahan – screenwriter of The Departed and Kingdom of Heaven. With its pedigree on display, there were clearly a lot of expectations for this picture. Monahan took pages from several other films, especially Guy Richie's filthy-mouthed gangster pictures like Snatch, Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, the Daniel Craig picture Layer Cake, and Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard to craft his screenplay. He then created a mash up that, up to a certain point, actually worked rather well until it came apart at the end when he tried too hard to come up with an ironic ending (that he actually copped from Layer Cake, if truth be known).

Farrell plays Mitchel, an ex-con, released from prison for assault who decides to go straight (so far, so clichéd). He's got problems, though, including his drug-addled former partner in crime, Billy (Ben Chaplin), who wants to recruit him back into bad ways. Billy continues to work with the film's Big Bad, Gant (a credibly disturbing Ray Winstone) as a debt collector. He also has to contend with his ditzy tart of a sister, Briony (Anna Friel). After doing a little muscle work for Billy and Gant, Mitchel decides to take a job he's been offered to work as a handyman/bodyguard for reclusive, paparazzi-bothered actress, Charlotte (Keira Knightley). Of course, when Mitchel comes into her world, Gant decides he will horn in and find a way to steal her Francis Bacon paintings and her collection of super cars. With Mitchel on the inside, Gant figures he's got an inside track. He figures wrong because Mitchel and Charlotte start to fall in love. Once again, so far, so clichéd. And yet, during these rather touching parts, the film starts to take on an edge of originality. Charlotte's keeper is a hilarious ex-hippie druggy played with stoned wisdom by David Thewlis. He guides Mitchel through his early days on the job giving the picture a sense of humour it desperately needs along with the developing love story between Mitchel and Charlotte.

And yet, because of Monahan's divided ideas, the picture – beautifully shot by Chris Menges – never can decide if it wants to be a Richie gangster picture or a meditation on fame and love. It is unfortunate that it spends far more time on the former rather than the latter because the latter is the far more interesting material. Farrell and Knightley are both very good here, and their growing attraction to each other is quite credible.

The biggest problem with London Boulevard is that it just doesn't take enough chances. Monahan again and again falls back on the safe and violent instead of really digging into the meat of the story. Maybe he's developed the Ridley Scott disease of doing whatever The Suits say regardless of what it does to the picture (Kingdom of Heaven being the prime example of this), because it looks like the love story was seriously truncated at the expense of the bang bang. And yet, it is still a film worth checking out. Why it never got a real release in the US is beyond me because if it had been properly handled, it probably could have made, if not $50 million dollars, a damn sight more than $17,000 (it made about $4 million internationally).

Robin Hill in Down Terrace

The real surprise amongst the 27 films so far, was Down Terrace. It cost $30,000 to make and sure looks it, and only made less than $10,000. How it ever got a DVD release in Canada is beyond me, but I'm glad it did. Down Terrace examines a criminal family in an unnamed city outside of London. As the picture starts, the son, Karl (Robin Hill), has just been released from prison for an undisclosed crime. His father, Bill (Robert Hill – Robin's real life father), has also just been released for another undisclosed crime, and they go home to a cramped home where Mom (Julia Deakin) makes tea and tries to keep the peace. The first 15 minutes of the film are a bit confusing because the accents are very thick (and there's no subtitle option), and the fact the narrative doesn't really find its feet until about the 20-minute mark. For the first 15 minutes, the family and some hangers on gab about innocuous things, play music, drink booze and tea. The film is broken into fragmented pieces by black screen inserts between each sequence. It takes a while to get used to this technique because at first there seems to be no story here, just a bunch of yobs shooting the breeze. Robin Hill also wrote, co-produced and edited the film. He's a good actor and his screenplay, though it feels more improvised than really scripted, is ultimately a credible slice of (low) life. He is no editor, though. He doesn't succeed in the first 15 minutes building any rhythm or structure to the story. Finally, after Karl's very pregnant girlfriend arrives on the scene, things begin to make sense. The girlfriend is loathed by the father and she makes no bones about telling Bill she doesn't like him much either. Mom tries to find a way through to the girl in order for calm.

Bill is also under threat because his “bosses” are unhappy with the money he's making (another thing that is deliberately never made clear is what illegality Bill and company are involved in). Facing these threats, he becomes convinced that Karl and he were ratted out (or “grassed” as the Brits say) by one of their team. Once the film gets its legs, it manages to find a fine balance between humour and explosive, out-of-nowhere violence as the family tries to determine who may be the rat and what will have to be done to him/her.

Robert Hill as Bill is also very good. When the anger of this tormented family gets too much, he escapes into either booze, a crack pipe (the scene when both he and Karl do crack together is both strangely funny and disturbing), or guitar playing and singing. He is also very believable as a mid-level criminal trying to find balance between home life and his “work.”

Now, I don't want to overpraise Down Terrace, because it is a bit of a mess for the first 15 minutes, and it is really hard to understand the characters throughout, but working from a nothing budget (80% of the picture was shot in that cramped house) it has more ambition in examining a criminal family than most bigger budget Hollywood crime epics. These are kind of dull-witted people who have nothing else but crime from which to earn a living. There is nothing glamorous here. The Godfather, or The Departed, this ain't. No doubt this is probably what the life of a career criminal family is really like: scrambling to make ends meet while keeping the wolf (be it a snitch or an impatient boss) at bay. There's no happiness here and nothing cool about this life. It is a deep trench that even when the “proper revenge” is meted out, it doesn't mean by film's end that there's ever going to be anything good for these people.

I still have several pictures to go, such as the aforementioned The Ledge that may end up being a unexpected surprise, but the saddest part is that joy of discovery is now gone. It's not the same flipping through the choices on Rogers On Demand or Netflix (especially since I hate watching movies on a computer), or prowling through various download sites that are all over the Internet. The model has changed and I don't think it is for the better.

– David Churchill is a critic and author of the novel The Empire of Death. You can read an excerpt here. Or go to http://www.wordplaysalon.com/ for more information (where you can order the book, but only in traditional form!). And yes, he’s begun the long and arduous task of writing his second novel.

Neglected Gems #14: Impromptu (1991)

noreply@blogger.com (Critics at Large) — Tue, 15 May 2012 16:00:00 +0000

Hugh Grant as Chopin and Judy Davis as George Sands, in Impromptu

It was a brilliant stroke to cast Judy Davis as the nineteenth-century French novelist George Sand in the 1991 Impromptu. Resolutely bohemian and independent-minded, Sand, who wore suits, smoked cigars and took on a series of lovers, was such a proto-modernist figure that Davis’s very contemporariness – her driven moodiness and tremulous fervor, the eroticized fullness of her presence – seems jarringly right for this woman, as it did when she played a version of D.H. Lawrence’s wife Frieda in Kangaroo. Impromptu, written by Sarah Kernochan and directed by James Lapine (Kernochan’s husband), is a farce populated by celebrities – Sand, Chopin (Hugh Grant), Lizst (Julian Sands) and his mistress, Countess Marie d’Agoult (Bernadette Peters), the playwright Alfred de Musset (Mandy Patinkin) and the painter Eugène Delacroix (Ralph Brown). And Davis’s Sand, offering her love to Chopin with an extravagant combination of sensual abandon and religious devotion, is its emotional core. She hangs outside the closed door of the study where she first hears him play, transported in every fiber of her being; she crawls into his room through the window and lies on the rug, receiving his genius like holy water; she fixes her deep, deep blue eyes on the consumptive composer and begs him to take her strength, which she has too much of. As Davis plays her, this woman is utterly fantastic. Completely conscious, completely self-possessed, she plans every attack on Chopin’s resistance (he finds her terrifying, her finds her appalling). When she thinks he’s turned off by her masculine attire, she shocks everyone by appearing in an evening gown (in the colors of the Polish flag, as a tribute to his homeland). When Marie, scheming to win him herself, cunningly advises her to play the male aggressor and win him as if he were a woman, she shows up at his tailor’s. (Jenny Beavan designed the stunning costumes.) Davis reads Kernochan’s hilarious one-liners with the sureness of a first-rank classical comic actress. What makes her performance extraordinary, however, is the emotional intensity that braces Sand’s outlandish behavior. She can segue in and out of farce on a dime, but when she tells Chopin she loves him, thrusting herself forward as if she were bouncing off some centrifugal force that’s taken hold of her, there’s an ache in her voice and an ache in her wide, naked eyes.

After all the inflated, implausible movie biographies produced about the lives of serious composers (including the 1945 A Song to Remember, with Cornel Wilde as Chopin and Merle Oberon, and the 1960 Song Without End, with Dirk Bogarde as Lizst and Genevieve Page as Marie d’Agoult), it’s a relief to have these famous figures’ follies rendered in a high-kicking comedy that makes no pretense at getting the facts right (Kernochan’s script is largely invention) and focuses on how idiotically these stars of the 1830s conducted themselves. If you take Lizst and Chopin very seriously, this probably isn’t the film for you; Kernochan and Lapine portray them and their friends as possessing no greater dignity – or, for the most part, no more elevated motives – than the bumbling thieves in the classic heist comedy Big Deal on Madonna Street. Sands plays Lizst as a stiff with a temper whose only talent is for technical sleight of hand – every time we hear him on the piano, he’s whipping off chromatic scales. Chopin’s music, on the other hand, is beautiful and soulful, but he’s absurdly fragile – a trembling, crippled bird, unnerved by the thought of sexual adventure, hopping all over the room in fright whenever George enters, permanently awash in embarrassment. Grant is charming, and his Polish accent is a delightful joke, right on the cusp of Saturday Night Live. But he brings something tender to his Chopin creation, too, and his moral outrage at the thoughtlessness of his companions has the force of conviction.

Emma Thompson in Impromptu

Their insensitivity is pretty amusing, though; it’s great fun to watch a movie in which even consumption can be the target of a good joke. When George praises Chopin’s music, pronouncing it fit for the ages, Marie quips, “The only thing that’s eternal about him is his cough.” When she passes the news of George’s infatuation on to Lizst, he replies, incredulously, “The Polish corpse?” When a duchess (Emma Thompson) who’s mad on the arts and on scandal, invites the whole crew to her country house for two weeks, and the incessant rain puts everyone in a foul mood, they get up a little avant-garde theatrical to fend off the boredom, and it turns out to be a rather pointed spoof, performed in whiteface, of her and her distracted husband (Anton Rodgers), who’s obsessed with hunting. Thompson is superbly funny as the Duchesse d’Antan, who greets her guests decked out as a shepherdess and has her servants place laurel wreaths on their heads. But her finest (and one affecting) moment comes when she sees herself ridiculed on stage by her guests.

Kernochan muffs the structure. The country section (which is exquisitely shot by Bruno de Keyzer) feels like the movie’s climax, as it generally is in a farcical roundelay like this one – as well as George and Chopin and Marie and Lizst, de Musset, a one-time paramour of George’s and currently her bitterest enemy, is in attendance, and the lover she’s been trying to get rid of, the obstinate, persistent Mallefille (George Corraface), comes running after her, determined to catch her in flagrante with Chopin and challenge his rival to a duel. But the picture keeps going after the fairly clumsy dissipation of this episode, and you feel a little disoriented when time passes and George appears at Chopin’s door, claiming that Marie, whom she’d enlisted as a go-between at the Duchess’s, passed off George’s love letter to Chopin as her own. (We know that, but when did George find out?) As a piece of direction, Impromptu could be more fluid and even-handed; sometimes Lapine, making his first movie (he’s celebrated as a stage director), makes all the right decisions in terms of tone and coaching the actors. Patinkin is light and free of mannerism; he looks like he’s on holiday. (More recently he’s been doing some of the best work of his career, on the TV series Homeland.) And Peters, with her crinkly, bewildered takes, her carving-knife bitchiness and twinkling façade of guilelessness, is a wonder. When Chopin, who has spotted a line from the love letter in George’s latest novel, confronts Marie with her duplicitousness, Peters makes the Countess’s futile attempts at denial moving. Suddenly she’s like a caught butterfly, pinioned by the truth.

Gatz: Borne Back Ceaselessly into the Past

noreply@blogger.com (Critics at Large) — Mon, 14 May 2012 16:00:00 +0000

The cast of Gatz (Scott Shepherd, centre). Photo by Joan Marcus

By the time I caught up with Gatz, the Elevator Repair Service’s staged reading of the entire text of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, a few weeks ago, it was in the midst of a second run at the Public Theatre in New York and it had been touring. Gatz, which began performances in 2010, has been an unqualified hit for the company (whose founder, John Collins, directed it); it’s won a raft of awards and on weekends audiences are still lining up in hope of cancellations. The play runs for six hours plus three intermissions, including a ninety-minute dinner break, so it’s a considerable commitment of time and energy. I was certainly glad I’d made the investment but I’m not entirely sure what it was I saw.

The setting, designed by Louisa Thompson, is a contemporary office, indifferently furnished. When the computer of one of the employees (Ben Williams, substituting at the performance I attended for the usual star, Scott Shepherd) stalls, he pulls a copy of Fitzgerald’s novel out of a drawer and begins to read it out loud, and though his reading is interrupted briefly by the passage of time (the day ends; he returns to the office at night and again the next day), it’s continuous. For a while he’s the only reader, taking not only the role of the narrator, Nick Carraway, but the other characters as well, but the positioning of some of his co-workers and the odd prop or gesture echoes the text in an almost offhand way, and eventually some of them join in. Eventually they take the other parts, usually acting them, off book while he remains a reader. However, when Jordan Baker (I saw Annie McNamara, standing in for Susie Sokol) -- the beautiful, confident golf pro whom Nick meets through his cousin Daisy Buchanan (Victoria Vazquez) and her husband Tom (Gary Wilmes) and falls into a romance with – confides in him the story of Daisy’s interrupted romance with the young soldier, bound for the Great War, who turns out to be Nick’s neighbor Jay Gatsby (Jim Fletcher), she reads it rather than acting it. And on the two occasions when Meyer Wolfsheim, Gatsby’s gangster associate (based on Arnold Rothstein, the man who fixed the 1919 World Series), turns up, he’s invisible; Nick reads his role like a stage manager going on for an ailing actor.

The actors haven’t been cast because they exhibit the qualities we associate with Fitzgerald’s celebrated cast of characters, and they don’t make any attempt to evoke the period (or, in the case of the actresses playing the two southerners, Daisy and Jordan, the accents). Vazquez, for example, has the aura of a contemporary intellectual and she’s much warmer than the Daisy Fitzgerald wrote; she’s reminiscent of the young Elizabeth McGovern. Gatsby (referred to in the program as “Jim” – an allusion, as the title of the play is, to his original identity as the poor-born North Dakotan Jim Gatz, before he reinvents himself as the unimaginably wealthy Jay Gatsby) is balding and rather nasal, and though he’s a mesmerizing performer in his way, he certainly doesn’t suggest Gatsby’s charisma. The first party scene, the drunken interlude at the house that Tom sometimes shares with his mistress Myrtle Wilson (Laurena Allan), is staged to look like an office party, and the wingdings at Gatsby’s mansion in West Egg, across Long Island Sound from the Buchanans’ dock in East Egg (these are Fitzgerald’s semi-satirical version of the Hamptons), are approximated by some general bustle around the stage – including, for example, one of the women’s spilling a bag of Oreos and having to gather them up. But sometimes Collins’s staging and Mark Barton’s beautiful lighting evoke images from the book, like Nick’s first glimpse of his neighbor at night, looking over the Sound, or Myrtle standing at an upstairs window of her house, restless and increasingly desperate, as she spots Tom in a car outside at her husband’s gas station. The actors don’t appear in period costumes until, suddenly, some of them do: Myrtle in her cream-colored evening dress, Gatsby in his pink suit. The sound design (by Williams) generally provides the offstage noises appropriate to the story: quarreling, motors arriving, twenties music, and so on.

Annie McNamara and Kate Scelsa

Why a generic office locale? Neither of the two answers I can come up with has much to recommend it. The first is that we’re meant to see the reader as a reflection of Fitzgerald’s Nick, stuck in an empty job selling bonds to which he’s not committed and from which he eventually retreats when he’s had enough of New York and of the vacuous, sealed-in aristocracy represented by the Buchanans and which an arriviste like Gatsby can never penetrate. The second is that Gatsby is the story of every ordinary American because Gatsby’s impossible and bankrupt dream is the American dream. The problem with the first is that Fitzgerald spends almost zero time in Nick’s workplace; aside from the idea that he’s selling bonds (i.e., nothing), it doesn’t have special meaning in the novel. The problem with the second is that it’s a cliché.

How is the style of the production supposed to work, and what is the style, anyway? That’s at least a more interesting question, though I’m not sure I can answer it either. At first I was reminded of André Gregory’s experiment with Uncle Vanya, which wound up as Louis Malle’s great 1994 film Vanya on 42nd Street, where actors in rehearsal clothes with sparse, sometimes anachronistic props, acting on an almost bare playing space in the orchestra of an abandoned old theatre, get so deep into Chekhov’s characters that our minds supply the physical details that the production doesn’t bother with. In Vanya, a stray item like the “I Love New York” coffee cup that Wallace Shawn’s Vanya drinks from will intrude on Gregory’s suggested realism and remind us that we’re watching the bare bones of a production, but only momentarily, and the effect isn’t Brechtian alienation but its exact opposite: to make us marvel at how completely the actors have wrapped us up in the play and the characters, to echo, in a way, the effect of those moments in the live theatre when we’re stirred briefly out of a magnificent performance because the man next to us coughs or the woman in front of us shifts her head. The difference is that the “I Love New York” coffee cup is a metaphor for those things – for anything, in fact, that seems to make the possibility of being transported at the theatre implausible, and consequently for the miracle of that transported state. But Gatz works very hard to keep us aware, certainly throughout the first half, that we’re watching not only a piece of theatre but a staged reading of a classic novel. Is it Brechtian, then? Well, only at the moments when the actors comment on their characters or on the action, like Jordan executing a mock Charleston at one of Gatsby’s parties or an actor in a chauffeur’s cap wheeling Daisy onstage on an office chair (to the tea party à trois Gatsby has asked Nick to give so that he can have a social excuse to become reacquainted with her) or Gatsby giving Nick a sideways glance when he lies transparently about his upbringing. I hated these touches (there are plenty of them in the first half), when the production ironizes the text and gives the impression – though, to be fair, I don’t think this is intended – that the company is superior to it. They reminded me of times during the first season of the TV series Mad Men when a scene underscores the quaintness of the early sixties, with all that broad-daylight imbibing and all that cigarette smoke and all those casual dangers we now know to be wary of, like children playing in plastic. (I don’t know if Mad Men has continued along the same track, because all that editorializing put me off so much I stopped watching it after season one.)

Jim Fletcher, Victoria Vazquez, Scott Shepherd

But sometimes the juxtaposition of staging or performance with Fitzgerald’s ideas feel magically right, and sometimes an image or even an incidental detail dovetails mysteriously with one’s experience of the book. When Nick and Jordan’s backs are suddenly reflected in the upstage window, we think of the power of the past, which Gatsby deludes himself into thinking he can recapture and which is encapsulated in the famous final sentence, “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” The file boxes stacked on shelves stage left, a feature so common in an office setting that we barely notice it at first, acquires a similar resonance as the play moves on. The tech (Frank Boyd) who goes to work on the reader’s computer wears overalls that allow him to disappear seamlessly into the role of George Wilson the gas station owner, whose misapprehension that he and not Tom is sleeping with his wife, compounding his grief over Myrtle’s death by a hit-and-run driver he assumes is Gatsby, leads him to shoot the titular character in his swimming pool. (When Norma Desmond shoots Joe Gillis at the brink of her swimming pool in Sunset Boulevard, surely Billy Wilder is evoking the most celebrated shooting in modern American fiction, just as Tony Camonte in Howard Hawks’s Scarface is a pop-culture knock-off of Gatsby when he shows off his expensive shirts.) Even the odd, anachronistic clacking of a typewriter at the other end of the reader’s desk has the effect of bearing us back into the past – especially since the typist is Jim Fletcher, who is about to play Gatsby.

Fletcher and Boyd are stand-outs among the cast, but Williams has the showpiece part, reading the whole damn book and playing Nick and several small roles (not only Wolfsheim but the cop on the scene of the accident and the witness into the bargain). Scott Shepherd is reportedly amazing in the part; I was sorry not to have been able to see him. But Williams gives an extraordinary performance. At first his line readings seem to sit on the edge of irony or perhaps bemusement, but after a while those qualities are simply subsumed into his reading of Nick’s character. Fitzgerald has often been criticized for giving Nick less color than the other main characters (perhaps Jordan is the exception here), but when you see the book performed in its entirety in this way it seems to be his story more than Gatsby’s: the story of his moral struggle with the vacuous, solipsistic and finally callous aristocracy that the Buchanans represent and to which he reluctantly belongs and the story of his other struggle to comprehend and evaluate Gatsby, who he thinks for a long time embodies everything he loathes but who turns out to have real depth and substance. (Gatsby makes a terrible mistake about Daisy, whose romantic allure is only that her voice is “full of money,” but he stands by her, taking the fall for her when she, at the wheel of his car, knocks Myrtle down.) But Nick can’t resolve his feelings about Gatsby, because Fitzgerald can’t and so of course we can’t either. The last thing he says to him – besides thanking him for his hospitality (“we were always thanking him for that – I and the others”) – is a shout across the lawn after they eat one last meal together: “They’re a rotten crowd . . . You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.” But he adds, for us, “I’ve always been glad I said that. It was the only compliment I ever gave him, because I disapproved of him from beginning to end.”

This is one of the production’s most evocative scenes, and at the end of it Gatsby is offstage, so we’re keeping him in our heads, just as Nick must after he’s been murdered by poor, broken George. But Fletcher returns in the flesh for Gatsby’s death and he stays upstage right up to the funeral.

During his reading of the aftermath of Gatsby’s death, Williams flips through the novel impatiently, as if he were looking for something he can’t find – the meaning of that death, perhaps, or even the meaning of that life? Then he closes it and just speaks the lines to us, and he doesn’t open it again until he gets to its famous last words. Long before then, though, for reasons I can’t explain, Gatz has enveloped us in Fitzgerald’s marvelous story and those marvelous characters in that Vanya on 42nd Street way – precisely the effect I’d given up hoping for. It happens sometime after the dinner break, early in act three (all the annoying cute ironies have slipped out by the second half), and by act four the play has become hypnotic. We’re left with the potent feelings that The Great Gatsby always evokes.

Canadian Music Man: Bernie Finkelstein's autobiography True North

noreply@blogger.com (Critics at Large) — Sun, 13 May 2012 16:00:00 +0000

To paraphrase Gordon Lightfoot, “There was a time in this fair land when the music did not run…” It was not “long before the white man and long before the wheel,” but it was long before Bernie Finkelstein, and “the green dark forest was…silent.” Then Bernie heard the music, and decided to do something about it.

He’s one of the Bernies. Alongside Bernie Fiedler and Bernie Solomon, the Bernies were big in Canadian music. Fiedler ran the Riverboat Coffeehouse, Solomon was a lawyer, and Finkelstein managed Bruce Cockburn and Murray McLauchlan (among others), and their collaboration put everything under one roof: artist management, concert promotion, a record company, music publishing and a concert venue. It was genius, except, as Bernie Finkelstein says in his book True North: A Life in the Music (McClelland & Stewart, 2012), “things in the music business are never straightforward. It’s not a business for the faint of heart.”

True North is the long-promised memoir of Bernie Finkelstein. It tells the story of how a high school dropout who went from being a toilet seat and floor tile expert at Honest Ed Mirvish's legendary Toronto store, to owning Canada’s longest-lived record label, True North Records. It really is, as the sub-title says, A Life in the Music Business. In 1966, Bernie began managing The Paupers, a talented group of musicians and songwriters which included Adam Mitchell and Skip Prokop. They seemed to have it all. Bob Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman, liked them, and brought Finkelstein in for a consult. They partnered, and The Paupers released a couple of albums on the Verve Forecast label. They even appeared at the Monterey Pop Festival, and then they broke up. It’s a common story in the music business, and it’s just one of the stories Bernie details in this fascinating book.

He’s not the greatest writer in the world, but he can spin a good yarn. The fact that he lived through the whole thing makes the tale worth telling. There are tales of drug use in Yorkville back in the Sixties and Seventies, and the odd mention of love affairs, but mainly Bernie focuses on the music, and that’s what he’s done for his whole career. Whether managing The Paupers and Kensington Market in the Sixties; or looking after Bruce Cockburn, Murray McLauchlan and Dan Hill in the Seventies and Eighties, Finkelstein had his finger on the pulse of the Canadian music biz.

Bernie Finkelstein

And he is not faint-hearted in the least. He appears to have been unafraid to step in at any level to manage, to produce, and then to distribute his artists. And he had a gift for promotion that carried him through the years. His label, True North Records, continues to release the music of Bruce Cockburn (who has been with Finkelstein throughout his whole career) and many others. Mention the names Murray McLauchlan, Blackie and the Rodeo Kings, Rough Trade and you get a cross section of the variety of artists Finkelstein has handled. Add to that list Sarah McLachlan, Nelly Furtado and Arcade Fire who benefited from grants from MuchFACT (www.muchfact.ca, a foundation to assist Canadian talent, which Finkelstein chaired for many years) and you get a sense of the impact this music-loving businessman had on the scene.

Bernie sold the True North Records in 2007, although he stayed on as Chairman and consultant, and he continues to manage Bruce Cockburn, but you have to know that we have not heard the last of Bernie Finkelstein. He took some time off to write this book, and Canadians should be glad for that. It documents an era of growth in the Canadian music world when Canadian artists got record contracts, when they were played on the radio, when the people who booked venues like the CNE learned in no uncertain terms just who these talented people were. Bernie recounts the time that Murray McLauchlan was banned from playing the CNE because of claims that he was not family friendly. The booker had confused him with the foul-mouthed comedy folkies McLean & McLean! His stories are classic, and, told in his own voice, they make for a quick, riveting read.

It’s about time some folks from north of 49 started writing about our music. For a long time all we had was Ritchie Yorke’s Axes, Chops & Hot Licks, but now we can add True North, to a much longer list including Jason Schneider’s Whispering Pines, Nicholas Jennings’ Before the Gold Rush and the works of Dave Bidini and John Einarson. As a group, they help to expand our understanding and appreciation for our homegrown artists and the business they call music.

– David Kidney has reviewed for Green Man Review and Sleeping Hedgehog. He published the Rylander Quarterly (a Ry Cooder-based newsletter) for 8 years before turning it into a blog, at http://rylander-rylander.blogspot.com . He works at McMaster University as Director of Learning Space Development and lives in Dundas with his wife.

Hit Me With Music: The Soundtrack to Kevin MacDonald's Film Marley

noreply@blogger.com (Critics at Large) — Sat, 12 May 2012 16:00:00 +0000

"Hit me with music," is Bob Marley's triumphant call in the song, "Trenchtown Rock," heard on the soundtrack to Kevin MacDonald's documentary, Marley (Island/Tuff Gong, 2012). (The film recently debuted in Toronto on May 3rd as part of the Hot Docs Festival, while Marley himself died of cancer 31 years ago, yesterday.) One thing you can say about his music, too, which is chronicled on this two-CD set from the early, ska numbers of the 1960s ("Simmer Down" and "Small Axe") to the more popular works of the 1970s, ("One Love" and "Redemption Song"), is that it never seems to go out of style. Bob Marley's work has now transcended the artist who created it. According to his widow, Rita Marley, that's "because he put his all, his heart and soul and his life, into his music, this is why it has the opportunity and the authority to live after him."

I think the reason for Marley's longevity is the universality of his songs. While they may talk about political activism ("Get Up Stand Up") and the dehumanized aspects of the industrialized world ("Concrete Jungle"), he was also a composer who seemed to cut through the noise of political rhetoric and speak directly to the heart of people. He created an effective sound, especially in the mid-70s, by breaking through geographic lines and bringing his infectious rhythms to ganja-filled auditoriums where he greeted audiences pining for a new idealistic vision in the unfulfilled, post-Woodstock nation. I remember when "Jammin" pierced the pop music of 1977 with an earnest yet irresistible beat. It was as if Marley knew the world could accommodate him even with references to the obscure religious ideas of Rastafarianism. While that likely didn't matter to the throngs of fans who were looking for an excuse to smoke pot, you didn't have to be a stoner to appreciate Marley's intentions. The live Babylon By Bus (Tuff Gong/Island 1978), with its infectious call for a new world, was in constant rotation in every suburban kid's music collection.

On disc two of this marvelous set, Marley also features a number of live recordings that capture both he and his band The Wailers in good form. What impresses a listener going through this soundtrack is how remarkably tight with a rock steady rhythm they were. The live version of "War" is particularly irresistible as Marley laments the woes of the poor and disenfranchised where "everywhere is war." While Marley won assurances with populist calls of "victory" because "we know we shall win ... good over evil," it's the more personal Marley that comes through on many of his songs such as "High Tide or Low Tide" where he invokes God as an equal partner in finding one's salvation in troubled times. The quieter, more intimate artist is revealed in songs like that as well as "Is This Love," which is not on this release.

Considering how crazy and mixed-up the world in which we live tends to feel these days, perhaps it's time for us to rediscover Bob Marley once again. After all, as the tracks on Marley seem to insist over and over, "one good thing about music, when it hits, you feel no pain. So hit me with music, hit me with music."

– John Corcelli is a musician and broadcaster. His documentary about Wallace Hartley, bandmaster of the Titanic was broadcast on the CBC’s flagship current affairs program, The Sunday Edition. He's currently working on a radio documentary, with Kevin Courrier, for CBC Radio's Inside the Music called The Other Me: The Avant-Garde Music of Paul McCartney.

Just Another Tired Action/Superhero Movie: Joss Whedon’s The Avengers

noreply@blogger.com (Critics at Large) — Fri, 11 May 2012 16:00:00 +0000

Coming out on the heels of his inventive horror movie The Cabin in the Woods, I’d certainly hoped that writer/director Joss Whedon (Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Serenity) would work his cinematic magic on The Avengers, the much-anticipated Marvel superhero movie which brings together various characters from the Marvel universe: Thor, Captain America, Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk among them, as the new crime fighting unit called The Avengers. Unfortunately, this latest superhero movie is just another tired, pedestrian film whose elaborate special effects pretty much bury anything original, witty or creative inherent in the material. In short, it’s the same old thing: an impersonal franchise movie with little entertainment on offer.

Carefully calibrated in terms of storyline, and following on the chronologies of The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man and Iron Man 2, Captain America: The First Avenger and Thor (all conceived by Marvel Studios as part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe), the movie features most of the same actors in their parts (only Edward Norton who played the last incarnation of the Hulk didn’t return, after contract talks broke down. He’s been replaced by Mark Ruffalo in the role). Incidentally, the current comic book version of The Avengers line-up showcases some other characters, including Spider-Woman, Red Hulk and Protector, whom I’m not familiar with. X-Men’s Storm is also a member, but The Incredible Hulk and Black Widow, both of whom are in the film, are not.

Scarlett Johansson as The Black Widow

The group – which includes Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), the Hulk (Ruffalo), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), Captain America (Chris Evans) and Thor (Chris Hemsworth) – are brought together by Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), the head of secret spy agency S.H.I.E.L.D. as part of a project called The Avengers Intuitive. Originally shelved because of Fury’s doubts about the wisdom of putting together such a volatile mix of strong-willed personalities together in one group, the Initiative is revived when The Tesseract, an energy source of unknown origin and powers, is stolen by Thor’s adoptive brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston), who’s been promised complete dominion over Earth by an extraterrestrial race known as the Chitauri. Along the way, he’s hypnotized superhero Hawkeye and scientist Dr. Erik Selving (Stellan Skarsgård from Thor) to make them go over to Loki’s side. In a bid to save the Earth from enslavement, The Avengers eventually square off against Loki and the Chitauri.

The operative word here is eventually, as the movie takes an awfully long time to get where it’s going. First off, The Avengers have to squabble among themselves, engage in one-upmanship, and fight each other before overcoming their differences and uniting as a team against Loki and company. That’s on top of the excessive exposition on tap in the movie – why not assume fans of The Avengers, who will, no doubt, make up the bulk of this film’s demographic have seen all or most of the other Marvel movies and are up to speed on who’s who in this cinematic world? It’s pretty slow going, but once The Avengers hits its supposed stride, the film still doesn’t improve much. I’m not sure if Whedon felt constrained by the rules Marvel sets out for any film adaptation of the comic books – let’s not be too radical here! – or, more likely, that he felt intimidated by the responsibility of helming such a big-budget extravaganza and displayed excessive caution for fear of fucking things up. In any case, the film evinces virtually none of his trademark wit or style. Other than a few good physical jokes, usually involving the Hulk, this movie could have been directed by any competent director, that’s how little personality it actually has. (He’s on record as blaming the studio for gutting his three-hour, supposedly more personal cut of the film; the final bland version runs 2 hours and 20 minutes.) Oddly, the film’s (too) many actions sequences are especially disappointing since he demonstrated such a remarkable facility with those types of set pieces in Serenity – Whedon’s superb big-screen adaptation of his equally distinguished Firefly (but quickly cancelled) TV series.

Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury

Stuck in the middle of all this is the film’s mostly talented (and mostly wasted) cast. Only Ruffalo shines in The Avengers; he brings some potent emotional power to his role as the conflicted Dr. Bruce Banner, who’s always painfully aware that the monster within, The Incredible Hulk, can burst forth and swallow him up in the process. The rest of the actors are underused or asked to needlessly reprise what they’ve done on screen before. We’ve already seen Downey’s sarcastic shtick as Iron Man’s alter ego, industrialist Tony Stark in Iron Man (and presumably Iron Man 2, which I didn’t bother with). It wears thin here. Hemsworth’s Thor seems lost without Natalie Portman to play off as his putative love interest. The lightweight Evans is just as dull as he was in Captain America. As for Jackson, well he seems to be chafing to do more with Nick Fury than he’s allowed to. I wish The Avengers were at least R rated; a profane Jackson is a lot more entertaining than the linguistically neutered character he plays in The Avengers. Even Hiddelston’s Loki, a fascinating quasi-villain in Thor, has been simplified in The Avengers. Now he’s just another run-of-the-mill bad guy/god. As for Johansson and Renner, good actors both, well, since they’re not superheroes as much as spies, as the Black Widow points out, their characters can do little to compel us to follow them in their adventures. She has some martial arts skills; he can fire a crossbow, hardly unique powers. An archer with a crossbow, really!

And while Skarsgård and Clark Gregg, as S.H.I.E.L.D. special agent Phil Coulson, aren’t given that much to do in The Avengers, the biggest waste is Cobie Smulders as S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Maria Hill. If you’ve enjoyed her acerbic wit and sly characterization as reporter Robin Scherbatsky on the long-running sitcom How I Met Your Mother, well keep watching it. All she gets to do in The Avengers is look fetching and worried, hardly a proper use of her talents.

Tom Hiddleston as Loki

There are other problems with the movie’s storyline. It lacks grit. When New York is attacked by Loki and the Chitauri near the film’s conclusion, all we see (in 3D, natch) are a lot of destroyed buildings and cars but no civilian causalities, which lessens the effect of the destruction meted out to the Big Apple. That would likely have necessitated a more restrictive, in terms of an audience, R rating and lesser profits, of course. And the whole nifty idea of Captain America, who was frozen in ice in the 1940s only to be revived in the present and thus challenged by a new world that largely doesn’t understand or appreciate his iconic status as an American war hero, is folded into this film instead of standing out in its own movie. A few scenes with him reacting as a fish-out-of-water aren’t nearly satisfying enough.

I grew up reading Marvel comics, preferring their conflicted, angst-ridden heroes and heroines to their D.C. counterparts who generally struck me as kinda boring, actually. D.C.’s Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, even Superman, just didn’t seem to have as riveting back stories or complex villains or nuanced story-lines as the Marvel brand did. (D.C.’s Batman, with his tragic history, profound ambivalence about being a crime fighter, and nebulous relationship with the citizens of Gotham City, always seemed more like a Marvel superhero to me.) The irony – now that Hollywood has gotten its grubby mitts on the characters, and even though Marvel ostensibly now has more control on how its creations end up on screen then they used to – is that the cinematic Marvel movies aren’t nearly as interesting or as layered as the comics that gave birth to them, even though presumably the unique nature of those comics were the reason they were chosen to be adapted into film in the first place. The very qualities that attracted me, and so many others, to the prickly Marvel universe of characters have, for the most part, been subsumed in favour of special effects that render the Marvel movies as indistinguishable as any other SFX driven superhero movies. (There are a few exceptions, Spider-Man 2 was a masterpiece that captured Peter Parker’s tumultuous world perfectly, and Thor had a genuine low-tech B movie charm, but that’s about it.) The Avengers is now a massive hit and the sequel, alluded to after end credits, is a done deal, but even if Whedon signs on to it, I can’t imagine it will be much better than the original. I harbour a faint hope that Whedon will be allowed to let his inner id to run wild as Joe Dante managed to do in his superior Gremlins 2, but it’s only a faint hope. There’s too much riding on the Marvel movies to take those types of chances, but I suppose if the fans flock to the Marvel productions anyway, it doesn’t much matter whether the films do justice to their antecedents or not. But if that’s the case, they should have left well enough alone and adapted something else to the screen instead.

– Shlomo Schwartzberg is a film critic, teacher and arts journalist based in Toronto. He teaches regular courses at Ryerson University's LIFE Institute, and is currently teaching a course on American cinema of the 70s.