Critics At Large

A Short Excursion into the Novel: The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde

2012-02-15T12:00:00.000-05:00

When I first read The Eyre Affair (Hodder & Stoughton, 2001) a decade ago, its whimsical world enthralled, yet also perplexed me. Certain that many of its quips and literary references had flown clear over my young head, I felt inspired to go brush up on classic English literature. For The Eyre Affair is a book lover’s book, as Jasper Fforde weaves the familiar with the outlandish to create a novel that pays tribute to the cultural legacy of stories, while crafting a tale that’s remarkably original and unexpectedly smart.

Fforde's first novel, The Eyre Affair shows us mid-80s England through the looking glass, as described by police detective Thursday Next. In Thursday’s world, literature remains the pop culture medium of choice, the Crimean war rages on, and dodos make excellent pets. When an unusual book theft turns out to have links to Thursday’s past, she’s called in to help investigate. What follows is action-adventure that ranges from gripping thriller to Monty Pythonesque lunacy, climaxing with a voyage into Charlotte Brontë’s opus itself.

As I’ve often told a skeptical reader, don’t let the sometimes splashy cover art – or the presence of famous fictional characters – drive you away. Yes, the story includes many sci-fi/fantasy staples, including time-travel and quasi-magical technological gadgetry. However, these form a backdrop to a group of wonderfully original characters, Thursday herself one of the best among them. Her wry, deadpan voice makes the weirdness of her world seem almost blasé, as if it were not a peculiar corruption of our own, but exactly as it should be. Travelling by airship? Modern and practical. Richard III performed as an interactive show, Rocky Horror-style? A typical evening’s entertainment. As a result, when The Eyre Affair asks its readers to believe six impossible things before breakfast, we’re more than happy to suspend our disbelief and take strangeness in stride.

Author Jasper Fforde (Photo: Murdo Macleod)

While such a direct titular reference to another novel might still seem off-putting to some, Fforde avoids straying into the clichés of fanfiction by giving his borrowed characters a surprising sense of self-awareness. They know they’re fictional, that they live in linear narratives, and that they’re brought to life by readers. They exist almost as actors, sometimes quite different from the characters they ‘portray’ when a reader picks up a copy of Jane Eyre or Martin Chuzzlewit. When Thursday stumbles upon evidence of fictional characters in the ‘real’ world, she finds herself in the well-trodden middle ground between ‘fact’ and fiction, uncovering how stories can both reflect and reform those who read and write them.

While The Eyre Affair doesn’t delve into this as deeply as it might have done – perhaps a missed opportunity – later books in the Thursday Next series explore this theme more directly. The series also grows more outlandishly fantastic over the next five books, as Fforde becomes more confident in his world-building – a trend I expect to continue in the seventh Thursday Next book, Dark Reading Matter, due later this year. A few other minor kinks get smoothed out as well, as the villains in The Eyre Affair border on the cartoonish; dastardly ruffians who, while comical, would have benefited from more flushed-out backstories. Acheron Hades (one of the book's less subtly named characters) takes the Moriarty-style nemesis archetype and amps it up to 11. In spite of this, Fforde’s first volume remains unpredictably entertaining, thanks to a narrative that takes whimsy and runs with it.

I’ve had more than one person tell me they ‘don’t read fantasy’ or like ‘books about real things’. And granted, a novel like this – more in the vein of Terry Pratchett than the Brontës – isn’t for everyone. Yet even though Fforde takes our common conception of physics and history and bins it, the characters he presents remain real, flawed human beings. I’ve reread The Eyre Affair several times, and found a new little ‘aha!’ moment each time I return. It’s that joy of the imagination, of seeing the remarkable in the ordinary, that Fforde captures so well, and that makes for a great story.

– 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.

Two Hearts: Contrary Views on Valentine's Day

2012-02-14T12:00:00.001-05:00

Note to Readers: Since today is Valentine's Day, which always brings out strong feelings in just about everyone, we thought we'd address this romantic celebration from two completely different views. What is perhaps uncharacteristic about the following two posts, from Laura Warner and Mari-Beth Slade, is that the single woman still embraces the sentiments of Valentine's Day while the married one could just as easily give it a pass. As always, we leave the reader to choose for themselves. Enjoy.

Modern Love: A Hopeless Romantic’s Defense of V-Day

Being single when February 14th rolls around usually grants you fair ground for eye rolling, moping, or even resorting to the fetal position. More so, like many single or otherwise, you may even take it to the next level: smugness. Of course, that leaves you easily feeling morally above the entire notion of a day noted for celebrating romantic love. But even if you are happily attached, you don’t need a day to express your gratitude – especially when this once commemorative occasion has been molested and taken over by greeting card outfits. I, however, would like to take a moment and defend this occasion. Not only as a pleasant distraction from the otherwise perilous struggles of everyday life, but also as a symbol of hope for the most painful, beautiful, and powerful human experience.

Before I come off as a lofty fool, let me assure you: I’m as dysfunctionally single as I possibly could be without a hope in the world. For starters, I come equipped with young child, an interesting living arrangement, and an excess amount of checked baggage. I refuse to Internet date and I work in a profession that’s almost eighty per cent women. (Good luck with the organic encounters.) If that’s not hopeless enough, as I sit in a cozy neighbourhood coffee shop writing this, my mannerism here mirrors that of when I’m on a date. I take a sip of my cappuccino, along with a mouth full of my hair. I take a bite of my banana bread, half of which ends up in my lap. Then I just start unconsciously muttering to myself to the point where the gentlemen next to me feels the need to leave...quickly. It’s just not happening.

While I am tempted to be bitter, I also find those who savagely attack the day to be absolutely hilarious. Yes, I agree that Valentine’s Day, like Hallowe’en, Christmas, and Easter, has become over-commercialized. Every front window of every store we walk by is decked out in an orgy of pink and red. (Seriously, even the hardware store.) Yet to all those cynics who are disgusted by this, my advice, just don’t buy into it. Any consumer with any shred of common sense has the power and the right to forgo over-consumption. So I’m not letting you off the hook that easy.

If you are with someone, romantically, a day to invest in your relationship, should be the very least. We have several allotted holidays throughout the year dedicated to our families, our extended families, and to our children. Valentine’s Day is an excellent excuse to give your partner what they need. This doesn’t necessarily mean anything of a material nature. You need not spend a penny, especially if what they need is attention, a compliment, or any recognition. While I feel lucky to live in a time and place where we can choose the one we are with (er, provided that choice is mutual!), we sometimes completely take them for granted. We live in a world now where we are more and more distracted, unfocused, and stretched too thin. Our most intimate conversations during our most important relationships typically take place in electronic format rather than face to face. Valentine’s Day should serve as an example to stop, remember, appreciate, and try to carry that feeling on throughout the rest of the year.

If you’re flying solo, I also encourage the acknowledgement of the day. To stop and appreciate those people around you, even the platonic liaisons. Valentine’s Day allows us to celebrate those who are in our lives because we choose to have them in our lives. For those of us who live in societies that are progressive enough to recognize all kinds of “modern love” in its various combinations, we can take this moment to be grateful. That is, grateful that we have the freedom to choose how we live and who becomes a part of our life along the way. If we meet someone, someone incredible, there is nothing stopping the sparks from flying. We also have full freedom to become pathetic, insecure idiots. We have the freedom to be confused, betrayed, and even broken-hearted, i.e. to be human.

Whether you be single or attached, let today be the day when you remember how wonderful it is to – sometimes – act like a complete moron.

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

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Hold the Chocolates: Mixed Feelings about February 14th

Most women either love Valentine’s Day (if in a relationship) or curse it (if single). I’m pretty much indifferent. Although I am in a relationship, none but the usual passing affections get showered upon me come February 14th. In fact, my husband and I have a pathetic track record of even spending Valentine’s Day together. This year, my book club is meeting. Last year, I was at French class. Two years ago, we actually did travel to romantic Montreal for the weekend, but while my husband spent the night sipping Aztec hot cocoa with his brilliant pianist guy friend (they regularly get mistaken for a couple), I stayed in the hotel room and applied for a job that was closing the following day. Who says romance is dead?

It’s not exactly that I am anti-Valentine’s Day, although there are plenty of reasons to purposefully boycott the consumer cornucopia of corny hallmark greetings, stale cinnamon hearts, and chalky foil-wrapped chocolate. By the time mid-February rolls around I’m already bloated from stuffing myself through both Christmas and cold weather-induced hibernation; the last thing I want to do is slip into a lacy negligée and drink sparkling wine while reclining on a bed of rose petals.

I’m an extremely practical person and the idea of wasting money on flowers that wilt, candy that makes me fat, and cards that end up in the landfill just doesn’t appeal. I know my husband loves me when he takes out the garbage in subzero temperatures, picks me up from work in a blizzard, and tells me I’m beautiful when my mid-winter muffin tops droops over my yoga pants. Having a particular day to express this love just seems to cheapen the real expressions of love that come the other 364 days of the year. I don’t need reassurance through an expensive dinner on Valentine’s Day. I just need love to be there in practical ways when I need it. True loves grows out of respect, respect that is earned gradually, not purchased in a heart-shaped Russell Stover box.

I will appreciate opportunities to show love this February 14th. In fact I couldn’t resist buying Valentine cookie cutters (justification: they were only a dollar and I’ll use them again and again). So I will make heart-shaped ginger cookies with love and share them with my husband, family, friends, co-workers, and maybe even strangers on the street if I get the nerve. It’s not that we can’t use the reminder to show our love, just that I’m ashamed we often need one.

– 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.

Why We Go to the Theatre: Rosemary Harris and David Hyde Pierce

2012-02-13T12:00:00.001-05:00

Jim Dale, Carla Gugino, and Rosemary Harris in The Road to Mecca

In the Broadway revival of Athol Fugard’s The Road to Mecca by the Roundabout Theatre Company, the luminous Rosemary Harris plays Miss Helen, an aging Afrikaner widow in a small South African village (in an arid section of the country known as Karoo) in the mid-1970s who reaches out to a younger friend, Elsa Barlow (Carla Gugino), a Capetown schoolteacher, at a time of personal crisis. Miss Helen is an artist whose fanciful sculptures of animals and other creatures fill her yard and have unsettled her conventional neighbors for years. She and Elsa became friends when the younger woman, passing through the Karoo, stopped to admire the art – and Miss Helen, used to a mixture of disdain, mockery and dismissal from the other villagers, warmed to her enthusiasm. Elsa, too, is a renegade: she keeps getting in trouble with the school board because she encourages her students, who are black, to speak and write about equality. She loves Miss Helen because she sees her as that rarity, a truly free spirit, and that freedom is manifested in what she calls her Mecca, that yard full of wild creations that the close, churchgoing village of New Bethesda finds creepy, even shocking. But Miss Helen hasn’t been able to make any art for some time, and she fears that her inner vision – the images that appear to her, guiding her hand – may have stopped for good, leaving her in darkness. The desperate tone of her last letter has drawn Elsa to her cottage for a visit. She arrives just at the point at which the local minister, Marius Byleveld (Jim Dale), has almost persuaded Miss Helen to give up her solitary house and go into a home.

The Road to Mecca is a didactic drama that pits the expression of freedom against the staunch, staid, safe orthodoxy of the prevailing culture, which instinctually moves to suppress it. And in the context of a South Africa still under the yoke of apartheid, of course that orthodoxy has a distinctly political side that, in Fugard’s scheme, it is Elsa’s role to address. The preacher Marcus, though Fugard paints him as well-meaning and gentle, stands in for an unthinking, undifferentiated Christianity dedicated to perpetuating the status quo; his legitimate concern for Miss Helen’s welfare – which is prompted by a troubling incident in which candles set her living-room curtains on fire – simultaneously enables him to work toward stilling the creative impulse in her that, in his view, generates a sort of aesthetic paganism. (Dale, with his scarecrow frame and long, sorrowful face, makes a wonderful entrance, but the role gives him precious little to build on.) The play dramatizes the same theme as Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa: the conflict between a repressed Christian culture and a savage voice that threatens it. Both plays suffer from the familiarity of the theme and the careful, uninteresting way in which it’s worked through.

Rosemary Harris and Carla Gugino

The revival has a raison d’être, however: the luminous Rosemary Harris, who gives a richly colored performance. Most people know Harris only as Aunt May in the Spider-Man pictures, but she’s one of the great living actresses; if you’re able to get hold of a copy of the 1963 film of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, where she plays Yelena opposite Laurence Olivier and Michael Redgrave, or the British TV adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, in which she’s Mrs. Ramsay, you’ll see what I mean. And if you’ve ever been lucky enough to see her on stage you’re unlikely to forget the experience. She has a soft-hued intensity as Miss Helen that’s matched by nothing else in Gordon Edelstein’s production except for the magnificent set and lighting designs by, respectively, Michael Yeargan and Peter Kaczorowski.

I saw this play in New York in 1988 with Yvonne Bryceland and Amy Irving in the older and younger roles and didn’t care for it then. (Fugard played the minister and directed the show.) But I didn’t think I could pass up the chance to see Harris, and I looked forward to Carla Gugino, an underrated film and TV actress who co-starred at the Roundabout in 2006 in Tennessee Williams’s Suddenly, Last Summer, as the fragile, wasted southern belle whose tale of her cousin’s monstrous death on a Mexican beach is so scandalous that her rich aunt is willing to lobotomize her to silence it. It was a challenging role – the one Elizabeth Taylor wasn’t up to in the movie version – and Gugino who had been shaky at first, ultimately distinguished herself in it. (I saw the production in preview and then again shortly before it closed, because Blythe Danner was so amazing in the role of the aunt that I wanted to see her twice.) But Gugino’s not very good as Elsa, and odd as it seems, this performer, so natural and unstrained on camera, comes across as fussy and actorish. The part isn’t exactly a gift. Elsa is pedantic, impatient and demanding, even bullying, but impossible as her behavior to Miss Helen is, Fugard doesn’t seem to mean us to dislike her. I don’t know how the character is supposed to be played so that we won’t want to throttle her, but Gugino’s mannerisms distance us even more. The combination of the drab play and the drab production is wearing, but Harris’s delicacy and the range of her emotional palette are something to see.

David Hyde Pierce and Rosie Perez in Close Up Space

A fair number of lousy plays manage to see the light of day, but Molly Smith Metzler’s Close Up Space, which had a brief run at the Manhattan Theatre Club, is almost unimaginably bad. David Hyde Pierce plays the editor of a small publishing company who has succeeded in removing himself from the sphere of his rebellious, acting-out teenage daughter (Colby Minifie) by sending her away to a series of boarding schools. The girl’s problems are her sorrow over her mother’s suicide and her dad’s remoteness; in the course of the play she manages to throw herself in his way with such force that he can’t help relating to her. This is one of those plays in which the stylization (if you care to call the playwright’s grandstanding “stylization”) is supposed to justify the characters’ behaving in ways in which no one in the history of the world has ever behaved, and the inevitable reconciliation of father and daughter – which, for reasons not worth going into, takes place in Russia – is meant to be heartwarming enough to excuse the mess that’s preceded it. Given how dreadful the play is, you have to admire the actors, who include Michael Chernus, Jessica DiGiovanni, and Rosie Perez as the popular author whose novels keep the company solvent, for coming across as human beings. (Clearly the director, Leigh Silverman, deserves some credit.) And Hyde Pierce, that master of high comedy, attacks his juicy role with gusto yet without overstatement. Hyde Pierce manages a New York stage appearance every season and it’s always a mistake to miss him, whether as the theatre-loving homicide cop investigating a murder during a play’s Boston tryout in the musical Curtains (a real charmer of a performance) or as the Molière-style playwright in the verse farce La Bête (opposite the prodigious Mark Rylance) or in the revival of the rarely produced Samson Raphaelson comedy of manners Accent on Youth (a misbegotten production, alas). Years ago, when Hyde Pierce bantered weekly with Kelsey Grammer on Frasier, I dreamed of seeing him with Christine Baranski in Noël Coward’s Design for Living. He’s too old for either of the male roles in that play now, but he elevates everything he does. If only Close Up Space required a little less elevation.

– 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.

A Spy in the Cinematic House of Peril: Nobody is Safe

2012-02-12T12:00:00.026-05:00

Denzel Washington and Ryan Reynolds hit the road in Safe House

If you’re looking for a current movie about clandestine government operatives who betray their brethren, go see Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. If you’re looking for a current movie about clandestine government operatives who betray their brethren starring Denzel Washington, Safe House is your best bet at the moment – though not necessarily one that will stick with you beyond that juncture. The former thriller, adapted from a 1974 John le Carre novel, keeps its bloodshed to a minimum and adheres to the great British tradition of allowing tension to build under an otherwise laconic surface. The latter film revels in splatter, ramping up dastardly deeds with typical Hollywood adrenaline.

Washington employs his usual charisma and clever thespian chops as Tobin Frost, a CIA agent gone rogue for the past decade. The question is whether or not he’s really a sociopath, like the corrupt cop the actor essayed in Training Day (2001). When his Safe House antihero gets a chip containing a hush-hush file, he injects the damn thing under his skin to escape detection before beginning a 115-minute chase scene. There are actually numerous chase scenes, but the unrelenting action becomes a big blur. Frost is targeted by a seemingly never-ending supply of generic mercenaries so downright evil that the story almost veers into horror-flick territory, in which a monstrous entity continually rises from the dead. There’s one chief bad guy in particular (Fares Fares, a name so nice he uses it twice) who I thought had at least a dozen bullets pumped into him, yet the thug manages to pop up unscathed in the final denouement.

Joel Kinnaman in AMC's The Killing

The most individualized villain is Keller (Joel Kinnaman, a devilishly ambiguous detective in AMC's The Killing last season), whose brief but serpentine performance near the end gives Safe House a much-needed je ne sais quoi. You can’t take your eyes off him, a quality he shares with the equally lanky and enigmatic Michiel Huisman, a junkie musician on HBO’s Treme. In fact, Kinnaman should have been cast as the second banana to Washington: a youngster named Matt Weston. The role instead was granted to the far less interesting Ryan Reynolds. He’s a novice spy assigned to a boring job, as overseer of the sprawling Cape Town apartment that the CIA has retrofitted as a detention center should dangerous suspects surface in the South African city. Nothing ever happens in this ominous and supposedly secure pad, however, until suddenly it does.

In a nod to the Brits, a disillusioned MI6 agent (Liam Cunningham) hands Frost the aforementioned chip in order to expose some damning information. We only learn the nature of this evidence later, even though the secrets are by then quite obvious. The espionage is not terribly imaginative here. To flee the unyielding assassins, he turns himself in at the U.S. consulate and is then transported to the titular place where Matt will witness his first, ahem, enhanced interrogation. The rookie asks someone if the waterboarding is legal. This torture is in the capable hands of Robert Patrick, the murderous machine T-1000 in Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991) and the FBI’s John Doggett in 40 episodes of The X-Files (2000-2002).

Unlike the nefarious bosses in the Bourne franchise, Matt (Is this an homage to Damon, perchance?) has CIA superiors back at Langley headquarters that are devoid of distinct personalities: Barlow (Brendan Gleeson, in what may be his least compelling part in recent memory), Whitfield (an expressionless Sam Shepard) and Linklater (a wasted Vera Farmiga). She’s one of two throwaway females in Safe House; the other is Nora Arnezeder as Ana Moreau, Matt’s stunning French girlfriend who has no clue that he’s a spook. By the time her lover’s on the run, first pursuing then protecting Frost, their relationship has also become a victim of international intrigue.

Ruben Blades in Safe House

Washington isn’t the sole worthy focal point of this picture. The vastly underutilized and under-appreciated Ruben Blades, as Frost’s still loyal old ally living in a shanty-filled township, has a cameo that just about steals the show. When these two veterans are together on the big screen, the script by David Guggenheim (not to be confused with documentarian Davis Guggenheim) is momentarily elevated from the cliches that precede and follow the sequence. (Who wants to hear yet another utterance of the term “go off the reservation”?) But formula is what Swedish director Daniel Espinosa apparently had in mind for his English-language debut; both Kinnaman and Fares appeared in Snabba Cash (Easy Money), his 2010 Scandinavian drama about drugs and organized crime.

In a plethora of recent releases – Unstoppable and The Book of Eli (2010), The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 (2009), Deja Vu (2006) and Man on Fire (2004) – Washington has been doing the seasoned savior routine. All but Eli were under the direction of Tony Scott, with whom he has collaborated on five blockbusters. It might be good for his career to now and then select more idiosyncratic characters again, such as those in The Hurricane and The Bone Collector (1999), or in almost any Spike Lee “joint.” Many Denzel fans would be glad to see him return to the calibre of, say, Malcolm X (1992). He’s a luminous presence who simply must go off the reservation and avoid always playing it safe.

– 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.

Dmitri & Michael: Michael Bates's Acrobat

2012-02-11T12:00:00.002-05:00

Michael Bates is originally from Canada’s West Coast, namely Vancouver. For the past decade, he’s been living and working in New York as a jazz bassist/composer. But I met him in the mid-90s at a record store, the first choice for employment by any struggling musician, when he lived in Toronto. (Even though we were paid low wages, we enjoyed the luxury of listening to music 40 hours a week). In those days, Michael worked part-time while continuing to play jazz in the evening, when he could get a gig. He was a friendly young man, full of energy, humour and a strong focus on being only one thing in life: a working musician. He loved to play and he loved to talk about music, especially jazz.

I lost touch with him after I left the record store in 1996; hearing through the grapevine that he relocated to New York and was pursuing more formalized study and the art of composing. Occasionally I’d see his name in the paper or at a gig in Toronto, usually with his group, Outside Sources. In recent years, he became inspired to issue his own recordings as a leader on Sunnyside Records, an independent label established in 1982. On his new recording Acrobat (Sunnyside, 2011) , his inspiration comes from the superlative Russian composer, Dmitri Shostakovich (1906 -1975). The subtitle of the album is Music for and by, Dmitri Shostakovich and it offers up a challenge to any listener, whether you are a classical or jazz fan.

Acrobat: Music for, and by, Dmitri Shostakovich, which features Bates on double bass, Chris Speed, tenor sax and clarinet, Russ Johnson, trumpet, Russ Lossing, piano and Fender Rhodes and Tom Rainey, drums, is a stunning work fueled by a Russian composer whose life as an artist was paradoxical mix of mystery and sarcasm under the oppressive regime of Josef Stalin. Shostakovich, in spite of his difficult times under Stalin, remains for Bates a seminal figure because the composer was able to say things in his music that he could not say in words. For Bates, Shostakovich’s ability to overcome political oppression using the power of music to transcend it took him into deeper, more meaningful statements about humanity. Shostakovich's notion of artistic purpose, a purpose that defied order, gives Acrobat is an unpredictable sound. It's a free, improvised spirit in an attempt to capture the essence of Shostakovich, a mysterious man whose music offers a great deal of insight, albeit cryptic at times, into his life. I'm not sure if Acrobat offers insight into its leader, Michael Bates, but having known him all those years ago while working at that record store in Toronto, I was not surprised by his approach on this album.

Michael Bates

The album opens with an arrangement of the fourth movement of Shostakovich’s Piano Trio N2 in E minor, also known as “Dance of Death.” It sets the tone of the music as a lyrical, circus-like tent where anything can happen. The band plays the arrangement beautifully in spite of its rhythmic difficulty, although I can’t discern the bass in the mix. It’s also the only piece composed by Shostakovich. The record then unfolds as a variation on the main theme stated in track one. "Talking Bird" extends the circus ideas even further heard in a rapid fire spree. It’s a rewarding piece especially on repeated listening. “Some Wounds” is a much more contemplative work featuring Chris Speed on clarinet. His solo is eclectic without being ostentatious. In fact, the whole band expresses great freedom with musical ideas, especially on “Silent Witness,” where the use of the Fender Rhodes electric piano is particularly effective.

“The Given Day” offers a slightly more accessible rhythm and the band’s call and response opening line gives a showcase to the agreeable tones of Chris Speed on tenor sax and Russ Johnson on trumpet. The song “Yorodivy” heralds the influence of Shostakovich in a less impressionistic way. It’s a moody, ethereal work reflecting more the paradoxical nature of the Russian composer. My favourite is the closer, “Arcangela,” because of its warmer colours and depth of feeling. It’s also a stronger melody than the free-form works that preceded it. The band sounds best on this track, complementing the texture and dynamic range of each instrument.

Acrobat was recorded in one day and that aesthetic decision has its pros and cons. On the one hand, we get as immediate a musical statement as possible where the band is exemplary. On the other hand, there isn’t enough playful humour and compassion in the music as I would have liked. Shostakovich was certainly a dead serious composer, but he also had a sense of humour. If you listen to his Symphony N8, for instance, this musical snub at Stalin is filled with tweaking phrases and sarcastic notes. But I’m confident in time that the band will grow even more comfortable with the music and take the chances necessary to display the lighter, more humorous ideas always present in Shostakovich’s music. In the meantime, Acrobat: Music for, and by, Dmitri Shostakovich is a good record for anyone who wants a new musical challenge. Click here to learn more.

– John Corcelli is a musician and broadcaster. 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.

Strictly Genteel: Michael Sucsy's The Vow

2012-02-10T13:40:00.007-05:00

When you fall in love, it can strike out of the blue, in serendipitous ways, totally out of your control. Michael Sucsy's The Vow, on the other hand, is so predictable and controlled that you can set your watch to it. The picture also appears to be based on a true story, but usually when a movie has to remind you of such things it offers the opposite. Now I've seen a lot worse romantic dramas, popular ones that are especially disingenuous and effective in wooing audiences (Sleepless in Seattle immediately springs to mind), but The Vow isn't one of those. It wants to wear its heart on its sleeve, but it falls victim to its lack of conviction even in its own formula plot.

The story follows a happily married couple, Paige (Rachel McAdams) and Leo (Channing Tatum), artist bohemians out of Chicago, whose lives are shattered one night when a car accident seriously injures Paige. After coming out of her coma, she wakes up with severe memory loss without remembering that she is married to Leo. Since we quickly discover that Paige originally came from a wealthy family that she abandoned for reasons explained later in the picture, we know that the film is going to be a battle of wills between the sensitive artist husband she's forgotten and the rich rotters who want her back. Guess who wins?

Director Micheal Sucsy pulls away from laying the sentiment and melodrama on too heavy, but his noble decision also lays bare the creaky mechanics of the plot. For instance, when Paige's parents (played by Jessica Lange and Sam Neill as if they were trapped in hair-shirts) want proof that Leo and Paige are actually married, the best thing he can come up with is a voice mail message. Since we are living in 2012, couldn't Leo have also provided a Facebook page, maybe some Tweets or texts between them, or even some e-mails dating back to the beginning of their courtship? We're also led to believe that once he wins the first battle in bringing her home so she can gradually discover her memory of their life together, he springs on her a coming home surprise party that features all the people that she has no memory of knowing totally overwhelming her. (For all of Leo's sensitivities, he is something of a genial lug.)

Rachel McAdams and Channing Tatum

Sucsy does show a relaxed hand with the actors, something he demonstrated in Grey Gardens (2010) with Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange (which David Churchill wrote about in an earlier post), but the casting here plays havoc with the plot. While Rachel McAdams demonstrates more of the supple sweetness that made her a star in The Notebook, Wedding Crashers and Red Eye, she can't get a decent rhythm going with Channing Tatum. Tatum might be all heart as Leo, the idealized boyfriend and husband, but he can't give him a soul. His earnest handsomeness, which suggests Josh Hartnett without a libido, comes across as bland and too self-effacing. You spend most of the movie wondering why these two people are together and why you don't ache and feel for Leo when she can't remember him.

Scott Speedman

On the other hand, when you create a romantic rival for Leo and cast Scott Speedman in the role, you're really stacking the deck against poor Tatum. Speedman has such charisma and quick-witted vitality that he overturns the plot of the movie. Since he's cast as the Yuppie corporate villain with pomade hair and Perrier-breath, who Paige broke from when she turned away from her family, we're supposed to see him as the wolf in the hen house. But the wolf sets off such sparks between himself and McAdams that it's the only time in the picture when we feel any kind of romantic heat.

On the whole, trying to make good romantic pictures these days has become more and more difficult. Part of why the great love stories and comedies of the Thirties and Forties worked so well was not just that many came from terrific Broadway plays and their great writers and stars, it was also because love and sex was still considered a mystery. There was a erotic tension created out of innuendo and suggestion. Now that movies deal with eroticism with more explicitness, with neurosis clearly defined, the mystery is out of the bottle. Romantic writers and directors have to either delve further into raunch, as Judd Apatow has done, or (like The Vow) they simply try to resurrect old romantic virtues dressed up in contemporary clothes. Either way, we never get to the fundamental reasons of why two people meet each other and find that their lives are never the same afterward.

Despite its desire to delve into those realms, to give the audience a huge tug of the heart just in time for Valentine's Day, The Vow has no heart to give. It's strictly genteel.

– Kevin Courrier is a writer/broadcaster, film critic, teacher and author (Artificial Paradise: The Dark Side of The Beatles' Utopian Dream). His forthcoming book is Reflections in the Hall of Mirrors: American Movies and the Politics of Idealism. In January 2012, at the Miles Nidal Centre JCC in Toronto, Courrier began a lecture series (film clips included) based on Reflections. Check their schedule. 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.

Lilyhammer: Netflix’s Impressive Entry into New Original Programming

2012-02-09T16:00:00.004-05:00

Steven Van Zandt stars in Lilyhammer on Netflix

It’s been a big week in new media: as speculations about the future of Apple iTV reached a fever pitch, and Amazon announced a new partnership with Viacom that adds over 2000 new titles to its service, Netflix, the granddaddy of streaming media, premiered its first original television series: Lilyhammer, a low-key wiseguy-out-of-water comedy starring The Sopranos alum Steven Van Zandt. This is only the first of three series that Netflix will be offering exclusively to its subscribers. Last week, it was officially announced that Netflix would air an original new season (with full original cast and writers) of Fox’s beleaguered but brilliant sitcom Arrested Development (2003-2006) in 2013. And later this year, 26 episodes of David Fincher and Kevin Spacey’s House of Cards will be available exclusively on Netflix. Spacey will star and Oscar-nominated director Fincher (The Social Network) is directing the pilot.

But its innovative delivery system is fortunately not the only original feature of Lilyhammer. The show, a co-production by Netflix and NRK1 (the main channel of Norway’s public broadcaster), is a quirky black comedy, starring one familiar television face and a whole cast of Norwegian actors. What was completely unexpected, at least for me, was the fact that it is very much a Norwegian show, and much of the show’s dialogue is in Norwegian. When the show premiered on Norwegian television at the end of January, it broke all ratings records for the country with one in five Norwegians tuning in.

'Little Steven' performing with Bruce Springsteen in 2007

North American audiences are growing more familiar with Scandinavia – with the blockbuster success of Swedish author Stieg Larsson’s “Millenium” trilogy and the international success of Danish television’s The Killing, perhaps I shouldn't have been so surprised to see Van Zandt make the leap, both as an actor and as co-writer of the first episode. Van Zandt is perhaps most famous to television viewers for playing Silvio “Sil” Dante on HBO’s The Sopranos, though music fans probably know him best as “Little Steven” from his time as guitarist for Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band. In his six seasons on The Sopranos, Sil is portrayed as the most loyal of Tony Soprano’s crew, regularly executing FBI informants, making his character on Lilyhammer at once a reflection and inversion of his more famous role.

In the pilot’s opening scenes, Van Zandt’s character, Frank Tagliano, turns informant and enters witness protection. Convinced that he won’t be safe anywhere in the U.S., and still charmed by what he saw on television from the 1994 Winter Olympics, Frankie opts to relocate to Lillehammer Norway and its “clean air, fresh white snow, gorgeous broads.” The opening credits of Lilyhammer seem to be paying an implicit homage to The Sopranos, as Frankie’s car crosses a bridge out of New York City the scene shifts from the familiar Manhattan skyline and traffic to an ultra-modern train breezing through snowy Norwegian mountains. And so, mobster Frankie “The Fixer” Tagliano becomes the former club owner Giovanni Hendriksen, an American emigrant with Norwegian roots. Van Zandt is in practically every scene of the first episode, and his character so far remains notably likeable. Initially frustrated by the dreary one-story house (empty save for a freezer containing a single frozen pizza) and electric car that were waiting for him, Frankie – now called Johnny – slowly finds his own way among the denizens of this small mountain town. In the first episode, “Johnny” rescues a lost sheep, tries to bribe a public official, and participates in an illicit late night hunt for a predatory wolf that has been tyrannizing the community. (A morbid but somehow still sweet scene that has Frankie showing his new friends how to properly weigh down the wolf's corpse before dumping it into a frozen lake is typical of both of the show’s smarts and charm.)

But aside from the inescapable callbacks to The Sopranos, Lilyhammer looks and feels like little else on American television. And it isn’t American television. Developed by Norway’s Rubicon TV and filmed on location in Norway, with the exception of Van Zandt, the show not only has an almost exclusively Norwegian cast but crew too. The way the show is shot, the colour palette and the long takes, feels more European than North American. The majority of the dialogue is in Norwegian (subtitled in English) and most of Frankie’s scenes are bilingual, with Frankie speaking mobster-inflected New York English and using his (conveniently immediate) passive fluency in Norwegian to understand his costars.

Steven Van Zandt (centre) and two of his Norgwegian co-stars

Netflix hasn’t released any ratings of the show’s North American viewership, and why should it? The show dropped on Monday with all eight episodes of the first season, and in the short term, there is no easy way to measure the show’s popularity. Netflix viewers will come to it in their own time, likely over the course of many weeks. And what is precisely so promising about television’s evolution into a new direct subscription model is that any one new offering will only further sweeten an already substantial pot of available streaming television series and movies. If Lilyhammer is any indication, this might well encourage the production of smaller, riskier, and ever more interesting shows.

In the month since I've had Netflix at home, it is easy to see the attraction. For a fraction of the cost of even the most basic cable you get the instant gratification of channel surfing, along with digital quality big screen streaming. And, of particular interest to those of us becoming used to consuming television online and on DVD, there are no advertisements! There is one major caveat for Canadian viewers however: you need to pay attention to your bandwidth. Right now the programming available on Netflix Canada is a pale shadow of its U.S. sibling, offering a fraction of the content available down south, and the reason is clear. The vast majority of internet customers in Canada are beholden to Bell and Rogers – as the two major TV providers, both companies are particularly invested in the old way of doing things – and Canadian internet users are universally working with tight bandwidth caps. The duopoly of Bell and Rogers which controls access to the internet in most of Canada shows no sign that it will be active partners with Canadians as popular media firmly enters the 21st century, and why would they when there is no competition to encourage them to loosen the bonds of the restrictive (but assuredly profitable) bandwidth caps? Thankfully Netflix Canada, well aware of the limitation of Canadian broadband, allows users to adjust their settings to minimize the bandwidth of streaming shows by as much as two thirds. (30 hours of viewing for 9 GB of data, as opposed to the 31GB at the highest quality.) Still, if you are using it on a daily basis, you will need to keep track of your data usage, or else unpleasant surprises will await you when your bill arrives at the end of the month.

Bandwidth issues aside, with Lilyhammer, its recent (Canadian) exclusive airing of BBC’s The Hour, and all of its streaming content, Netflix is becoming a better and better investment. For those who don’t want to watch conventional TV, with its incessant and invasive advertising and largely inflexible viewing schedules, but who also don’t want to join the ranks of illegal downloaders, Netflix is an affordable and rewarding alternative. With Lilyhammer, Netflix offers a charming, if somewhat dark, story about new beginnings. And it is also an auspicious new beginning for Netflix.

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

Revisting the Past: Peter Gabriel's New Blood

2012-02-08T12:00:00.008-05:00

I've never been one to see a singer/performer more than once, maybe twice in concert. I've always felt why ruin the wonderful memories of the first time, especially if the concert knocked me out. So I've only seen David Bowie, Genesis, Bruce Springsteen, Sting, kd lang, Femi Kuti, Youssou N'Dour, Chicago, Sergio Mendes, Tito Puente, Santana, REM, Jethro Tull, Ultravox, Jamie Cullum and The Guess Who and others just the one time. (Okay, maybe I saw The Guess Who twice, but it was 15 years apart; and I saw N'Dour three times, but only once fronting his own concert.) The exception? Peter Gabriel. Between 1978 and 1988, I saw him in concert 5 times. Each concert was as good as the others, sometimes the next one topped the one before. The last time was during the Amnesty International tour in 1988 (that is also where I saw Sting, Springsteen, and kd lang).

Gabriel's music first captured my attention around the time he left Genesis in 1976. As the years rolled on he pushed himself by embracing world beat, reggae, jazz and, of course, rock, As his interests changed, so did mine. He introduced me to the wonders of African artists like Youssou N'Dour, Salif Keta, Thomas Mapfumo, King Sunny Ade and several others. His discoveries became my starting point for other discoveries. His concerts continued to attract me because, like his musical tastes, his presentations evolved and morphed from one idea to another. No one concert was the same as another. Eventually, as Gabriel stopped recording actively, my interests drifted away. My musical tastes began to evolve and change as I experimented with jazz, hip hop and sounds and music from countries all over the world. But, that curiosity and interest in exploring different music was first inspired by the works of Peter Gabriel.

I knew I'd really moved on from Gabriel when his album, Us, came out in 1992. I'm not sure if he'd lost the string, or whether the introspection of the music failed to capture me. “Digging In the Dirt” just felt like navel-gazing – “I'm digging in the dirt/To find the places I got hurt.” The rest of the album seemed trapped in amber. It lacked spark and lost my attention. I think I listened to it three times. His next album of songs, Ovo, came out in 2002. It was the soundtrack for the Millennium Dome Show in London (Millennium Dome is now called the O2 Arena) he co-created to celebrate the millennium (it opened on January 1, 2000). There were a couple of interesting pieces on it, including “Downside-Up,” but generally the scenario for the show was as cheesy as most rock operas from the 1970s. His next album not done for either a movie or show, Up, came out in 2002. He had taken 10 years to work and work and work on the album, and it showed. The first single, “The Barry Williams Show,” was a critique of talk-show hosts such as Jerry Springer. Gabriel took so long between Us and Up that the timeliness he'd shown in his albums such as So (1986) and Security (1982) was missing. Springer and his ilk were in major decline by the time Gabriel released his album, so the song felt dated by the time it was released.

Peter Gabriel with Genesis

I've long since given up awaiting an album of new songs from Gabriel. He's supposedly been working off and on on an album called O/I for years. However, in 2010 and 2011, he released two albums, one of cover songs called Scratch My Back (the idea being that he would cover songs by artists like David Bowie, Arcade Fire and Lou Reed, and then they'd release an album called I'll Scatch Yours – the second album has not yet come to pass), while the other, New Blood, was Gabriel taking songs from throughout his solo career and rerecording them with a full orchestra, but no drums, guitars or synthesizers. My first reaction was the same I had when Kate Bush rerecorded two of her albums in 2010 and called it Director's Cut. Namely, why?

I had no intention of buying it, since I thought the idea sounded like he was spinning his tires. However, while overseas recently, I found a copy of the CD for less than the equivalent of $7, so I thought, what the heck. Gabriel's intension was to take not his big hits, such as “Sledgehammer,” “Big Time” "Games Without Frontiers" and “Shock the Monkey,” but rather songs that may have been singles, but weren't as successful, such as “Don't Give Up,” “San Jancinto,” “In Your Eyes,” and “Red Rain,” and give them a new interpretation.

Peter Gabriel with orchestra

Sometimes, the idea just doesn't work, such as the first song, “The Rhythm of the Heat.” The problem is that, after a compelling beginning where Gabriel successfully replaces the World Beat sounds created originally with guitar and percussion with the full orchestra, it falls apart. About two-thirds of the way through, during a long musical bridge, the orchestral intrepretation begins to sound suspciously like a soundtrack album for a movie best never made. This issue appears a few more times during the album on songs such as “In Your Eyes” which turns into a conventionally bland love song that gets seriously undermined by having no credible replacement for Youssou N'Dour's souring tenor on the choruses that appeared on the original. “Don't Give Up” also loses its heart-breaking edge because Gabriel's daughter, Melanie, who duets with him on the song is not Kate Bush.

However, not all was lost. “San Jacinto” is just as strong now as it was on the So album. The decision to slow down this mournful song even more than it already was was a good one. The disturbing “Intruder,” where Gabriel takes on the voice of a deranged stalker/burglar, is actually better here than it was on the Peter Gabriel 3 (aka, Melt). On the original, the music soundscape took on a grating mechanical other worldly quality which unwittingly pushed the listener away, making them feel safe. This new version, with careful enuciation by Gabriel, doesn't give the listener that simple distancing technique. Instead, it is sung and performed as if the intruder is holding us in his grip, a knife at our throat, as he murmurs the lyrics in our ear.

But probably the biggest revelation on New Blood is “Downside-Up” from the Ovo soundtrack. Listening to this song now, post 9/11, has given this song an edge it did not have when it was written in 1999. Now, it sounds eeriely prescient:

I looked up at the tallest building
Felt it falling down
I could feel my balance shifting
Everything was moving around
These streets so fixed and solid
A shimmering haze
And everything that I relied on disappeared

Downside up, upside down
Take my weight from the ground
Falling deep in the sky
Slipping into the unknown
All the strangers look like family
All the family looks so strange
The only constant I am sure of
Is this accelerating rate of change

It is like Gabriel looked into the future, foresaw what was to happen in New York and wrote about it. His re-recording suggests he understood this too, because he shortens the song and boils it down to its very essence. And here, Melanie Gabriel duetting with her father is quite credible. The only “new song” on the album is on track 13. Gabriel had said, as mentioned above, that he had no intention of doing his best-known songs, such as “Solsbury Hill” from his first solo album. But so many people asked about it, he decided to include it. However, he didn't want it so directly connected to the flow of the rest of the album, so he created a “song” called “A Quiet Moment,” and that is exactly what it is. The four minute plus song is nothing more than the soundtrack of a field probably in springtime. We hear birds singing, the wind blowing, crickets chirping, water burbling and nothing else. Then “Solsbury Hill” begins. It's nice to hear such a well-loved song again, but ironically, the interpretation does not sound that different from when he originally recorded it.

Peter Gabriel today

I have no expectations that Peter Gabriel will ever again reach the heights he achieved in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s (including his spectacular soundtrack for Martin Scorsese's The Last Tempation of Christ which Gabriel called Passion), but his New Blood album was a fine remembrance of the work he achieved during the time he was at the top of his game. And for that, I will always be grateful.

Addendum: Hmm. Just noticed that Gabriel's last three studio albums' titles combine to say SoUsUp: sow us up. Wonder if it means anything?

– 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. And yes, he’s begun the long and arduous task of writing his second novel.

On Our Minds and Playlists: Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr

2012-02-07T12:00:00.005-05:00

The Beatles are a big part of why I listen to music at all. Twist & Shout (a compilation Capitol Records in Canada made out of their official UK releases) was the first album I ever owned. I was going to write, ‘the first album I ever bought,’ but of course my Mom and Dad bought it, and my brother Al and I shared it until the grooves were worn down. In fact, we didn’t even have a record player that would play 33 1/3 vinyl albums when it came along. We had to sit and stare at the sleeve for a week while my Dad took the old 78 rpm turntable into the local radio shop and had a new multi-speed turntable dropped in. The excitement was palpable as we came home from school that afternoon and counted the minutes ‘til Dad walked in with the new and improved record player! It was soon after hearing The Beatles that I asked for (and received) my first guitar. It was a Sunburst with a neck that was already warped, which made it very difficult to play. Lessons were frustrating, focusing on songs like “When the Caissons Go Rolling Along” instead of the really important tunes like “Anna” or “Boys,” “Please Please Me” or “Love Me Do.” Soon enough though I was able to strum along. That first Beatles’ album gave clues to the later development of the Four Mop Tops. Here we are nearly fifty years later … and in one week we’ve seen the release of new albums from Ringo and Paul.

John Lennon was gunned down in the street outside his apartment in New York over thirty years ago, but his son Julian just issued his fifth album. And George, who was claimed by cancer in 2001, was recently celebrated in a long-form documentary by Martin Scorsese. Paul and George featured on two Mojo magazine covers in 2011, and Rolling Stone issued two different special editions devoted to the band. The Beatles continue to be on our minds … and on our playlists. So let’s look at these two new releases.

Quincy Jones had this to say about McCartney’s new Valentine’s gift to the world: “The songs Paul chose for Kisses on the Bottom are songs I've heard and loved since I was a kid. I sat with Paul backstage at the first concert of his recent tour and had the privilege of listening to the entire record. These are some of the best songs ever written, and it takes a very special talent to bring them to light. Paul didn't bring 1/8th notes with him to these songs; he knows how to swing like the old school or Sinatra used to say, ‘he's in the pocket.’ There is simply no artist today who has the credibility, grace, and depth of character that Paul has. Our 49-year-relationship goes back to before The Beatles came to America and I love that Paul has taken the time to do this album. I've heard a lot of records covering these songs, but none of them have the authenticity that Paul's has.”

The songs are key to Kisses on the Bottom. They are drawn from the Great American Songbook, and one wonders why it took Sir Paul so long to get around to singing them. He has said in interviews that he didn’t want to be seen as copying Rod Stewart who, between 2002 and 2010, released five albums of these classic songs. It has long been known that McCartney loves this music; The Beatles covered “A Taste of Honey” on Please Please Me, “Til There Was You” (from The Music Man) on With The Beatles; and McCartney himself wrote songs capturing the flavour of the ‘30s like “Honey Pie,” and “Your Mother Should Know” on later Beatles albums (both songs are credited to Lennon-McCartney, but in reality McCartney wrote them alone). The songs on Kisses range from “I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter” (a song credited to Ahlert & Young, but likely from the musical mind of Fats Waller) to Johnny Mercer’s “Ac-cent-tchu-ate the Positive” and Irving Berlin’s “Always.” He brings to light more obscure tunes as well: “More I Cannot Wish You” from Guys and Dolls, and another Fats Waller tune “My Very Good Friend the Milkman.” The latter must have been a big hit in the UK as it also appears on Eric Clapton’s most-recent album. In fact, Clapton himself plays guitar on two songs, and Stevie Wonder adds his signature harmonica to a McCartney original “Only Our Hearts.” The main backing throughout the album is provided by Diana Krall and her band, and they capably add the swing that these songs need. Sir Paul’s voice is in fine form, but he tends to stay within his higher range.

He has called this an album for “coming home after work” which is the way I first heard it. I came home, put this on the CD player and relaxed. The trouble was the whole thing just blended into the background. Disappeared. On second listen, I noted Ms Krall’s piano breaks and little vocal harmonies. It’s all so very professional and obviously a work dear to McCartney’s heart. I’m just not sure that I’ll be returning to it often. It compares to Harry Nilsson’s A Little Touch of Schmilsson in the Night which I loved but haven’t listened to in years, or Ringo’s first solo record Sentimental Journey.

Ringo, of course, is nowhere near the vocalist that Paul is, but Ringo 2012 shows that he has come a long way over the years. Who would have imagined that he could present us with seventeen albums since 1970, or that his latest record would rock quite so hard as it does? It’s a guitar album, from one of rock music’s great drummers. Joe Walsh, Ringo’s brother-in-law, has accompanied him as part of the All-Starr Band, and is part of the session band for this release. Joe is not, however, the only guitarist on the project (Dave Stewart and Kenny Wayne Shepherd also appear). When Ringo’s first rock effort, Ringo, appeared in 1973 he was surrounded by numerous guest stars including John, Paul and George, T Rex’s Marc Bolan, Billy Preston, and members of The Band (and co-produced by that master of sound, Richard Perry). In 2012, he keeps it to a self-produced small-band recording. And it sounds great coming out of the speakers in the car. Ringo is a good producer … who’d’ve guessed?

The album has a couple of well-chosen covers, “Think It Over” (from a Buddy Holly tribute album) and “Rock Island Line” (from the skiffle years), but the rest of the songs are written or co-written by Ringo. The one solo effort is a re-recording of “Step Lightly” from Ringo. Ringo also plays guitar and drums here! His co-writer on the lead track, “Anthem,” is Glen Ballard who has worked with Alanis Morissette and Michael Jackson. “This is an anthem of peace and love…” Ringo sings, and it’s an appropriate way to start. If you have followed Ringo on-line you’ll know that “peace and love, peace and love” is his mantra. He follows this with a re-visit of “Wings” written with New York songwriter Vinnie Poncia. First appearing on Ringo the 4th, this is not a celebratory ode to Paul’s post-Beatles band but a love song. “If I had the wings of an eagle, over these broken dreams I will fly,” this time sung to a reggae beat with Joe Walsh on guitar. “Samba” is not quite a samba, but Van Dyke Parks’ collaboration guarantees interesting chord changes. The highlight of the album, though, is the song co-written with Dave Stewart, “In Liverpool.” Third in a series of musical memoirs following “The Other Side of Liverpool” from Ringo’s 2010 Y Not CD and his 2008 Liverpool 8’s title track, “In Liverpool” could be a Ray Davies song. It’s that good. “Me and the boys, me and the gang livin’ our fantasy … that’s how it was for me … how was it for you?”

How was it for us? Well it was great. It’s been a lifetime of music and more. How can a simple rock band have had such an impact on not just one generation, but all the generations that have come since we first saw them on The Ed Sullivan Show on February 9th, 1964? I remember that night like it was yesterday. We watched Sullivan every week anyway for Topo Gigio and the dancing bears, but that night was special.

Are these CDs as magnificent as that first appearance? Of course not. Sure, Ringo’s voice has its limitations, and Paul’s professionalism that sometimes masks his depth will always be an annoyance. But still, they’re not afraid to put themselves out in the market, and create albums as interesting as these two. Even the album covers appear related! Maybe they won’t inspire kids today to pick up a guitar, or drumsticks, but I’m keeping Ringo 2012 in the car for another week or two, and I’m looking for guitar chords for “My Old Friend the Milkman.” Or maybe I’ll try it on the ukulele! Hmmm.

– 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.

Befogged: On a Clear Day You Can See Forever

2012-02-06T12:00:00.000-05:00

David Turner, Jessie Mueller, & Harry Connick Jr. in On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (Photo: Nicole Rivelli)

It’s rather fascinating to sit through the new Broadway revival of the Burton Lane-Alan Jay Lerner musical On a Clear Day You Can See Forever because you keep trying to get into the heads of Peter Parnell (who revised the book) and Michael Mayer (who re-conceived and staged it). They must have thought it would work, but it’s hard to imagine how, even given the level of delusion on which the Broadway musical theatre sometimes operates – think of Twyla Tharp’s Bob Dylan musical The Times They Are A-Changin’ and Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, and didn’t someone just close a musical based on Bonnie and Clyde? On a Clear Day has a sumptuous score, but the book has always been trouble. When it began in Boston in 1965, before the original leading man, Louis Jourdan, had been replaced by John Cullum, Lerner was struggling with so many plot strands that the show ran nearly four hours, and after he’d trimmed it down to a presentable length for its Broadway opening it felt truncated, still excessively busy and random, as if he’d taken an axe to whichever overgrowths he could get at rather than melting the whole scenario down to a viable dramatic form.

The premise is complicated, to say the least. A psychiatrist named Mark Bruckner is approached by a nervous, chattering young woman named Daisy Gamble who hopes he can hypnotize her to stop smoking. He puts her under – she’s so susceptible that he barely has to say anything before she’s snoozing in his chair – and when he regresses her he discovers she had a previous life as an aristocrat in late-eighteenth-century London whose sexy portrait-painter husband wouldn’t stay faithful to her. In the course of interviewing Daisy’s witty, literate, elegant, independent-minded alter ego, Melinda Wells, Mark finds himself falling in love with her. So he spends as much time as he can with Daisy, who falls for him, mistakenly believing he’s courting her twentieth-century self – the only personality she’s aware she possesses. Mark is certainly a relief from her square fiancé Warren, who’s looking for employment with the company that can offer the best pension and who is happiest with Daisy when she’s at her most conventional.

Kristin Chenoweth as Daisy (2000)

The hyperactive plot also includes a previous suitor whom Melinda rejects for being a rake (just what her husband, Edward, turns out to be); an eighteenth-century shipwreck (end of act one) that is echoed in a narrowly averted air disaster (end of act two); and a press field day over Mark’s publication of his new, not-so-scientific thoughts about reincarnation that culminates in his being fired from the institute that has employed him. There’s even a brief appearance by a Greek magnate of incalculable wealth who wants to fund Mark’s research in the hopes that it will yield information on what his subjects will become in their next lives; the magnate has the cockeyed scheme to leave himself his fortune. (Now there’s a subplot Lerner should have hacked off, along with the number it generated, “When I’m Being Born Again.”) From all reports the glue that kept all these elements from flying off into the stratosphere in the original production was the star, Barbara Harris. And I’m guessing that it’s a combination of the songs (like “Hurry! It’s Lovely Up Here” – which Audra McDonald has covered exquisitely – and “She Wasn’t You” and “Melinda” and “What Did I Have That I Don’t Have” and “Come Back to Me” and the title number) and the spell Harris casts even over the Broadway cast recording that fools people into thinking there might be a good musical lurking somewhere underneath the mess. The 1970 movie version, Vincente Minnelli’s penultimate picture, was awful; even Barbra Streisand, in her prime, wasn’t much good as Daisy/Melinda. (And she and her leading man, Yves Montand, had so little chemistry that they barely seemed to be in the same film.) Encores! produced it as one of its polished staged readings in 2000 with Kristin Chenoweth, and she was charming (less so in the English sections), but the production mostly offered a glimpse of all the reasons why no one should ever revive On a Clear Day You Can See Forever.

Perversely, the new version, which is set mostly in 1974 Manhattan, eliminates the one component of the show besides those songs that is of genuine value: Daisy, whose self-effacing style and lack of self-esteem – in contrast to Melinda’s poise and self-possession – masks from Mark, for a time, the kooky charm that he eventually realizes makes her lovable. Lerner botches the moment of realization, but we get it anyway because there can be nothing ordinary about a character who’s played by Barbara Harris (or Barbra Streisand or Kristin Chenoweth). As evidence, she has wondrous extra-sensory talents: she makes flowers grow at the speed of time-lapse photography by singing to them, she can locate lost items, and she knows when a phone is about to ring or a visitor is about to arrive. In her place Mayer and Parnell give us David Gamble (David Turner), a nebbishy young gay man who works in a flower shop and is so terrified of commitment that whenever his boy friend, Warren (Drew Gehling), suggests they move in together he changes the subject. (Turner, who has a perfectly pleasant singing voice, gives the bland performance the script asks for.) David even hides his three-pack-a-day habit from Warren; that’s why he begs Dr. Mark Bruckner (Harry Connick, Jr.) for hypnosis sessions in the hope that they can help him erase the deception. David has no personality; his smoking and love of flowers and commitment phobia are his only characteristics. He has no special power over flowers (the omission makes his first number, “Hurry! It’s Lovely Up Here!” – previously the serenade Daisy uses to coax buds out of the earth – entirely superfluous); he can’t find Mark’s keys or hear his phone before it rings. But when Mark regresses him he discovers that up until moments before his birth during World War II he occupied the body of a vivacious Big Band singer named Melinda Wells whose life was cut off in a plane crash at the outset of what might have been a triumphant career. Mark falls in love with Melinda, so he keeps booking time with David in order to see her again. Presumably that prospect works better, in physical terms, for the audience, who sees and hears an actress, Jessie Mueller, in the role, than for Mark, a straight man who has to be aware that he’s chatting up – and, just before intermission, kissing – a young man. His obliviousness (to put it mildly) misleads David into thinking that Mark has developed an erotic interest in him.

Photo: Sara Krulwich

There’s something creepy about the set-up, and Mayer and Parnell, who are both gay, ought to have recognized it. This isn’t Twelfth Night, which provides some logic for the cross-dressing joke: Orsino finds himself drawn to a young man, Cesario, because Cesario is really the woman, Viola, whom by all rights he should be in love with, who’s his match in temperament and wit, education and (nearly) class. (Like many romantic comedies, Twelfth Night plays with the elements of high comedy.) The point of Mark’s infatuation with Melinda isn’t that he’s really in love with David Gamble but doesn’t know it, unless Mayer and Parnell want to try out that old saw that all straight men are really gay or everyone’s really bisexual. And they don’t, as it turns out: David ends up with Warren, after Mark proclaims, all evidence to the contrary, that he’s really a very special person. Parnell and Mayer try to explain away Mark’s erotic fixation on Melinda by giving him a back story: the wife he adored died four years ago and he still hasn’t managed to move past his grief. So, having researched Melinda’s short life and discovering her sad fate, he regresses David one last time to try to stop her from getting on the doomed plane. But Melinda, with the kind of transcendent wisdom that clumsy playwrights bestow implausibly on characters, explains to him that we have to accept our losses and live in the moment. So, the finale implies somewhat unpersuasively, Mark will finally start paying attention to the loyal colleague (Kerry O’Malley) who’s been waiting in the wings, setting him up on dates with her friends but really pining away for him.

In both versions of the musical, Daisy/David finds out what Mark has been up to by playing a tape of one of their sessions and is justifiably pissed off at both the shrink’s manipulation and his blithe dismissal of his/her present-day incarnation. (The song Lerner inserted in this slot is “What Did I Have That I Don’t Have,” which the Broadway cast recording suggests might have been the highlight of Harris’s performance.) On a Clear Day skirts Mark’s bad behavior by having him come to the realization that he’s been missing the prize right in front of his eyes (Daisy). But in the rewrite, where obviously Mark can’t come to the conclusion that it’s David he’s in love with, his behavior with his unsuspecting patient seems so egregious that not even the immensely likable Harry Connick can get us past it. Connick sings Mark’s songs sweetly but except for the scene in which he begs Melinda not to board the plane his acting isn’t very good, though based on his performance in Kathleen Marshall’s 2006 revival of The Pajama Game (where he partnered Kelli O’Hara) and his handful of movie roles, he’s a perfectly competent actor with a winningly unassuming presence. In On a Clear Day, most of the time he looks pinned like a butterfly to the idiotic script.

Jessie Mueller and company (Photo: Paul Kolnik)

You can’t blame Parnell and Mayer for wanting to get rid of the England scenes, which don’t work and don’t contain any good songs except for “She Wasn’t You.” The 1940s setting and the Big Band flavor seem like a good idea, though they don’t seem to have inspired the designers, Christine Jones (sets) and Catherine Zuber (costumes), any more than the mid-70s sections did; the production is exceptionally ugly to look at. However, the revision does give Jessie Mueller, a vibrant performer and the only reason to see the show, with a trio of good numbers, all of which have been interpolated from the only other collaboration by Lerner and Lane, the 1951 movie musical Royal Wedding. (That’s the movie in which Fred Astaire dances on the ceiling, a clip that is better known than the film itself, which is rather forgettable.) The show does provide the fleeting pleasure of hearing Mueller and Connick duet on “Too Late Now,” a bittersweet ballad that became a jazz standard. Less felicitously, it adds the three songs Lerner and Lane wrote for the movie of On a Clear Day, none of which deserves to be unearthed, including the Streisand-Jack Nicholson duet that Minnelli wisely left in the cutting room. (For the masochists among you, there’s a recording of it somewhere.)

Parnell’s staging is flat, and Joann M. Hunter’s choreography doesn’t add much in the way of invention. Aside from Mueller – a real find who suggests a muted version of the young Liza Minnelli with more of a turn for melancholy -- the show doesn’t have a raison d’être. And there isn’t enough of Mueller, whereas there’s far too much of bland David Gamble and his colorless boy friend Warren. The gay content of this On a Clear Day is as bafflingly pointless as it would have been if, say, the writers had made these characters Chinese and set the song about the cruise Harry takes Daisy on (the sprightly “On the S.S. Bernard Cohn”) in Chinatown. Some ideas should never make it out of the first brainstorming session.

– 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.

Time Waits For No One: The DVD Release of Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons

2012-02-05T12:00:00.029-05:00

For years now, Orson Welles’ flawed, mangled masterpiece The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), the follow-up to his legendary debut, Citizen Kane (1941), has languished in the public domain. Often looking like an old photograph that’s been left in the sun, it would show up periodically on television in a faded print, sometimes scratched and occasionally hard to hear, resembling a rough diamond dug out of the sand. The fact that the film, based on Booth Tarkington’s 1918 novel, is about the fall of an American aristocratic family in the early 1900s just as modern industrialization consigned their fortune and social position to history’s dustbin was no convenient irony. Orson Welles’ own claim to fortune, his struggle to climb to the pinnacle of becoming America’s great dramatic film stylist in the early years of sound, would find its own dustbin in the years to follow. Years of promising projects damaged by lack of funds (Chimes at Midnight, Othello), or great work marred by studio interference (Touch of Evil), would become the norm rather than the exception.

Since Welles’ career had been marked by small victories between broken hearts, the fact that Warner Brothers has finally acquired the rights to release The Magnificent Ambersons on DVD is good news indeed. It can now finally be seen in a digitally mastered print with much improved sound quality. But the bad news, and bad news always stalked the director like an unearned curse, is that there is no supporting material included; that means no commentary from a critic or historian, no documentaries, or even a booklet to tell the story of how the man who made Citizen Kane lost final cut of a movie that had more substance than his stunning entrée.

Curiously, Booth Tarkington’s novel, set in a fictitious city based on his hometown of Indianapolis, had already been filmed earlier in 1925 in a version now largely forgotten. Welles also saw its value early on and adapted the book for radio while at CBS with his Mercury Theatre of the Air in 1939. As the 1942 movie opens, with Bernard Herrmann’s wistful theme and variations waltz hovering faintly in the background, Welles (in a voiceover inspired by years of doing radio plays) speaks to us in Tarkington’s words. He takes us through a series of vignettes that introduce us to the town, its people, and the Ambersons, the upper-class pillars. The youngest Amberson, George, however is despised by the town for his arrogance brought on from being spoiled, or reflecting the un-American notion of entitlement. They wait for the day when he will get his “comeuppance.”

After the introduction, we jump years later, as the widowed Eugene Morgan (Joseph Cotton), a wealthy automobile manufacturer, has returned with his daughter Lucy (Anne Baxter) to attend a reception for George (Tim Holt), who is now being honored during his break from college. But Eugene has no interest in celebrating the life of George, instead he eagerly looks forward to seeing his mother Isabel (Dolores Costello), for whom he still carries a torch from his youth. (Eugene lost his opportunity to win Isabel's hand when he unwittingly embarrassed her while trying to serenade her.) While George despises Eugene for both his cars and Eugene's love for his mother, George is romantically drawn to Lucy.

Tim Holt, Dolores Costello and Joseph Cotton

The Magnificent Ambersons is about how the changing times transform people and their social standing, but it is also about how time waits for no one. Despite Eugene’s love for Isabel, circumstances prevents each of them from consummating their unrequited love. George may ultimately get his “comeuppance” but it comes at a time when the people who desired it most are not there to witness it; and his fall does not bring easy satisfactions. The story may be from Tarkington, but the underlying tone of the movie seems to come from Welles. With cinematographer Stanley Cortez using deep focused shots to bring the background into the foreground, we become party to the most private dramatic moments of the characters on the screen. If it can be said that the film delves into the ellusiveness of fulfilling one's desires, The Magnificent Ambersons also draws us into the evocative echo chambers of the family drama where those neurotic tensions can’t be resolved.

Orson Welles directing Ambersons

While it wouldn't be entirely accurate to say that Ambersons is a better work than Kane, it has a depth of feeling and detail that is far more affecting. After all, Citizen Kane is also about the rise and fall from aristocracy, but Kane is done in brilliantly conceived broad strokes turning the tabloid sensationalism of the Hearst papers against their creator. The political and psychological underpinnings of the picture however (though wildly entertaining) is conceived in the style of muckraking comic strips rather than with dramatic depth. (In a great work, as opposed to a great entertainment, Kane’s tragic life would be comprehended using more than just the easy symbolism of a lost sled from his boyhood to explain it.) The Magnificent Ambersons has a depth, however, that’s missing in Kane because Welles uses the techniques he learned in radio (and those he discovered in making Citizen Kane) and applies them with a shocking intimacy into areas behind the masks of social norms.

What’s missing in Ambersons, however, what keeps it from achieving the impact of Kane, is the absence of Welles in the picture. It isn’t enough that he narrates the story. As fine as Joseph Cotton is at suggesting a man left satisfied by his creations, but melancholic over losing the woman he loves most, is that he lacks the dimension that Welles could have given the part. Cotton is too genteel. While the movie features the lovely delicacy of Dolores Costello, and Richard Bennett’s fine work as the grandfather, it’s Agnes Moorhead as the spinster Aunt Fanny who ends up giving Ambersons the force it needs. Moorhead had only a brief scene as Kane’s mother in Citizen Kane, but here, she gives a masterful performance as a woman who is both destroyed and fulfilled by her raging self-pity.

Agnes Moorhead as Aunt Fanny

Of course, the cutting of the picture also hurt it. More than an hour was sheared by RKO Studios with a different, more upbeat ending added without Welles’ permission. Even though his production notes still exist, the excised scenes themselves were either destroyed or lost. Despite its damaged form, though, The Magnificent Ambersons has perhaps been more influential than Citizen Kane. (Who could possibly even try to top the audacity of Kane?) For instance, you can feel the stylistic sensibility of Ambersons in Martin Scorsese’s failed attempt to bring Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence (1993) to the screen (especially in its opening scenes). You can sense the spirit of Ambersons, with its reverberating themes of the fragility of time, perhaps most successfully in David Fincher’s underappreciated, if not misunderstood, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008).

It’s curious that the DVD release of The Magnificent Ambersons has arrived with so little fanfare. But I don’t think it’s a simple matter of the picture being forgotten, or rejected due to its fractured state. It may instead be a sad reminder of things we care not to think about. That is, the picture is about people who look and try to act like they have everything, but they can’t get the things they truly want. In Ambersons, Welles gives us regrets but he strips them of the kind of nostalgia that sometimes cheapens loss. “There aren’t any old times,” Eugene says when someone turns sentimental at George's celebration party. “When times are gone, they’re dead. There aren’t any times but new times.” There couldn’t be a better time for the release of The Magnificent Ambersons.

Rocka My Soul: The Ecstasy That is Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater

2012-02-04T12:00:00.000-05:00

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in Robert Battle's The Hunt. Photo by Paul Kolnik

The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater has landed in Toronto, and with an enormous amount of noise in the form of screams, cheers and ear-splitting hurrahs. The arrival of the New York-based troupe on our side of the border has always been cause for celebration; there’s no beating the potent physicality of the dancers, or the raw, often visceral connectedness an audience member feels for the choreography, often by a range of modern and contemporary dance artists.

But this time, there was added incentive for the standing ovation that greeted the company when on Thursday it gave the first of four scheduled performances at Toronto's Sony Centre of the Performing Arts. The run concludes today with matinee and evening performances of a mixed program. Since July, the 30-member ensemble has been guided by newly appointed director Robert Battle, a former dancer turned choreographer whose association with the Ailey company stems from 1999 when he was first appointed artist-in-residence.

Only the third director to helm the troupe since its inception in 1958 as a vehicle for African-American dancers and choreographers, Battle takes over from the esteemed Judith Jamison, a former company dancer whom Ailey hand-picked to succeed him in advance of his untimely death as a result of AIDS in 1989.

Battle has only been in the driver’s seat a short while, but he has already steered the company in a remarkably fresh new direction as evidenced by the first of two programs being presented as part of a multi-city North American tour that takes it to Montreal on April 17 before concluding at the end of May. For starters, Battle has electrified an already energized repertoire by mixing company standards with new works. These new works offer a radically different movement vocabulary and sensibility to present the dancers in a wholly different light, less as bearers of tradition and more as trailblazers in their own right. While the choreography remains centre stage, it is the dancers’ own stage presence and unbridled physicality (an illusion, actually, given the stark fact of how well trained they are) now competing for attention. Given how blistering hot the dancers are – it’s a rare treat to see bodies as supple, slinky and super-charged as these – perhaps it’s an uneven contest.

Linda Celeste Sims in Journey. Photo by Andrew Eccles

Still, the choreography is no slouch. In places, it is intricate, delicate and filled with airy balances, as seen in Journey, created in 1958 by modern dance pioneer Joyce Trisler. On Thursday night, it was exquisitely performed by soloist Linda Celeste Sims (Sarah Davey performs it tonight). Along with Ailey, Trisler studied with Lester Horton whose technique of chest contractions and hip circles also informed the direction of Ailey’s choreography.

Elements of the Trisler work were repeated in Revelations, Ailey’s own work which followed.

Also on the two-hour program were two works by Battle himself, Takademe (1999), a humorous solo performed by Kirven James Boyd (Megan Jakel on alternate nights) to a percussive voice score by Sheila Chandra. The Hunt (2001) is a group piece for six bare-chested, bare-footed men in ankle grazing black skirts lined with red, the colour of intensity.

Set to a thrilling drum score by Les Tambours de Bronx, this all -male work was a tour-de-force of animal magnetism, aerobic tribal drive and chiselled strength: it showed wonderfully that the energy Battle is injecting into the Ailey troupe comes naturally – the man is a choreographic wonder.

His aim is to showcase the innate physicality of the dancer, what ultimately holds the audience mesmerized in an Alvin Ailey show. His emphasis on vigorous performance and individual talent (each dancer, despite a range of shapes and degrees of suppleness, comes off looking like a star) is his way of saying that, while the Ailey troupe has existed now for more than 50 years, it is by no means yesterday’s news.

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in Rennie Harris' Home. Photo by Paul Kolnik

The company more than ever has its groove back thanks in large part to works like Home, a hyper-kinetic pastiche of hip-hop moves, rapid-fire boxing foot drills and salsa combined with air-borne jumps and group dynamics that showed the company to be sharply on the cutting-edge of what’s hip, hot and happening in dance today. This fresh, new 2011 creation by Lorenzo Rennie Harris, the Philadelphia-born founder of Rennie Harris Puremovement (a hip-hop dance theatre company anointed with as many international awards as accolades, including the Herb Alpert Award for the Arts), features an ensemble of 14 dancers clad in street clothes and running shoes.

They are the so-called everyday interpreters of the raw, urban beat that lies at the heart of this work which, despite the colloquialisms of dress and movement, is actually a work about the spirit.

Propulsive movement drives the group onwards and upwards, like dancers at a rave. Their tirelessly moving bodies are illuminated by the sky blue and fire-red colours of Stephen Arnold’s lighting design, while around them swirls Dennis Ferrer and Raphael Xavier’s eclectic musical soundscape featuring a solitary voice cutting through the percussive beat, preaching repentance. One-by-one, individual dancers break away from the anonymous urban pack to raise a hand into the air, head bowed, as if heeding the call to prayer.

But it is their relentlessly rhythmic physicality which drives them toward ecstasy, a state of being transporting people out of themselves and closer to God. This reference to a higher (and more profound states of) being at the start of the program showed Battle to be something of a dance curator, astutely building a presentation of works that would build on and echo each other.

Renee Robinson, Constance Stamatiou, and Matthew Rushing in Revelations. Photo by Christopher Duggan

Certainly, the unique presentation of the spirit as presented in Home foreshadowed the religious themes to come at the end of the evening in Revelations, the company’s signature work which Ailey created in 1960 and which, all these years and countless performances later, still brings audience to their feet, clapping in time if not crying hallelujah along with the Negro spirituals at the core of this still luminescent piece.

Revelations had about it a sense of renewal; Nicola Cernovitch’s lighting seemed brighter. The women’s dresses in the Rocka My Soul number also appeared more sunshine yellow than before. A quick glance at the program conforms that, aha!, the costumes have recently been redesigned by Barbara Forbes. But also the dancing seemed more buoyant and alive; none of the dancers was alive when Revelations was first staged, and so they are all newcomers to a work that is a core part of the Ailey tradition, and yet they dance it as something fresh and new.

Watching them was a joy; the legacy lives on.

There Are No Happy Endings: Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close’s Feel Good 9/11 Spin

2012-02-03T12:00:00.003-05:00

Ten years after 9/11 and Hollywood filmmakers are still not sure how to handle cinematic depictions of the tragedy. They obviously and understandably won’t excuse the terrorists for their horrendous crimes. Nor will they blame the United States for what happened that fateful day as one ignorant Toronto film writer did when she wrote that America was both the victim and architect of 9/11. But they also can’t handle dealing with the raw emotions still evoked from that horrible day on Sept. 11, 2001. Excepting for United 93 (2006), Paul Greengrass’s emotionally powerful depiction of the occurrences on board one of the doomed flights, they’ve been content to stick to simple emotions such as were on display in Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center (2006). American independent filmmakers have been more forthright on the subject, but generally have used their platform rather myopically, either assailing supposed Islamophobia in the wake of 9/11 (Civic Duty, 2007) or to criticize American attitudes towards immigrants post 9/11 (The Visitor, 2007). None of the films on the subject, however, have tried to gloss over what happened then or put a positive spin on the tragedy, until now, with the unfortunate release of Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. And feel good movies about 9/11 are no more palatable or less offensive than feel good movies on the Holocaust like Life is Beautiful (1997) or The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2008).

The film, based on Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2005 novel of the same name, revolves around the precocious Oskar Schell (Thomas Horn, making his film debut), who cannot come to terms with the fact that his father Thomas (Tom Hanks) has died on 9/11, one of the thousands trapped in the World Trade Center buildings. To cope with his loss, and prompted by the accidental discovery of a key among his father’s possessions a year after 9/11, he determines that his dad has left him a clue, reminiscent of the scavenger hunts they used to conduct. With the name Black emblazoned on the key, he sets out to discover the person it belonged to, an odyssey that eventually results in a catharsis for the boy and the people he comes across in his hunt for the key’s owner.

Sandra Bullock and Thomas Horn in Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

Foer’s book, which I simply could not get into, was rife with stream of consciousness dialogue, experimental writing and off kilter techniques of the tiresome sort author Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse-Five, Breakfast of Champions) made a whole career out of purveying. It was a far cry from Foer’s fine 2002 debut Everything is Illuminated, which managed to bring a fresh, welcome eye to the theme of the Holocaust’s effect on the children of survivors. The film version of Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, though, could have used some experimentation, if only to distinguish it from the banal Hollywood norm. Instead, director Stephen Daldry (The Hours, The Reader), hardly a brilliant director, and writer Eric Roth (Forrest Gump, Munich), at his sappiest here, offer up a conventional, bathetic story, whose sole intent is to make the viewer shed a few tears and feel better after the credits have finished rolling. (It didn’t work on me, but I’d be lying if I said no one was sniffling at the public screening I attended. It’s hardly surprising that the movie garnered an Oscar nomination for Best Picture since, like Titanic and Shakespeare in Love, it’s the type of pap Hollywood likes so much.)

The movie is at its most sentimental when it brings in Max von Sydow (The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries), a mysterious old man known by the boy as The Renter, as he is renting a room from Oskar’s grandmother (Zoe Caldwell). Because of a trauma in his past, he cannot or will not talk, preferring to communicate by writing his words out in a notepad. (His trauma apparently – the film doesn’t state this outright – arose when, as a young child in Germany, his parents died when an Allied bomb hit their bomb shelter. But if so, the movie, seems, incredibly enough, to be equating innocent Americans during 9/11 and Germans in World War Two, who by and large elected and supported Hitler. They certainly weren’t innocent in the way we understand the term.) It’s a ridiculous part for the great von Sydow – though the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (The Oscar folk) didn’t think so, nominating him for Best Supporting Actor for the role – since it allows him little to do but grimace, smile and occasionally show exasperation with young Oskar, a reaction I can certainly relate to. No doubt, some will find Oskar to be an engaging sort, but to my mind this haranguing, annoying little twerp is the most irritating juvenile presence on screen since Jason Schwartzman’s comparable turn as Max Fischer in Wes Anderson’s off-putting Rushmore (1998). Of course, we’re supposed to excuse Oskar’s behaviour since he is hurting, but Horn, whose (possible) acting abilities are buried under the built-in histrionics of the part, wears out his welcome pretty fast. Oskar’s also not as smart as he’s purported to be since it never occurs to him that the Black he is trying to find, by looking up the hundreds of people listed under that name in the New York City area phone book, may not even be listed there or would have moved in the year since 9/11 occurred.

Max von Sydow and Thomas Horn

The movie also chooses to ignore reality when it allows Thomas, who is trying to reach his son (who had been sent home early from school), to leave six messages on the Schell’s answering machine even though it’s made clear when he calls his wife Linda (Sandra Bullock) beforehand at her place of work that he cannot stay on the line too long as he’s sharing a phone with many others trapped with him in the Tower. So how does he manage to call home a half dozen times in such a short period of time? This may seem like nit-picking on my part but if details like this bother me, it’s a sure sign that I’m not buying into the story laid out before me on screen. It doesn't help that the scenes of the panic and fear New Yorkers evinced on 9/11 lack the urgency that was evident in the television coverage we all saw that day.

All the film’s plot lines, from Thomas’ fateful phone calls, to the end result of Oskar’s scavenger hunt (the identity of the key’s owner leads to a particularly manipulative, sentimental conclusion), to a revelation about The Renter, all exist for one reason and one reason only, to have Oskar finally deal with his repressed feelings of pain and anger towards the loss of his dad and, not incidentally, to reconcile with his mother who’s he pushed away in the meantime. Life goes on in other words, and happy endings can still come true. Poor Sandra Bullock, if ever a role was a thankless one it’s this part. Viola Davis (The Help) and Jeffrey Wright (W., Source Code), as two of the people looked up by Oskar, can also legitimately complain about the paucity and thinness of their parts. Bullock, at least, offered an edgy performance in her last film, The Blind Side; Hanks (Cast Away, Saving Private Ryan) has long given up challenging himself or the viewer with shaded parts. Thomas is simply a nice guy and nothing more than that. Bullock is, however, allowed one honest scene when Oskar tells her he wishes she’d died in the Tower instead of Thomas. When her son apologizes for those hurtful words, she refuses to let him off the hook, as she knows he meant them, and, then adds that she wishes, too, that she had perished that day instead of her husband. It’s the sole moment in the film – and full credit to Bullock for pulling it off – that is authentic and sincere. (Alexandre Desplat, whose scores for The King’s Speech and the last two Harry Potter films were quite fine, lays on the syrup in Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.)

The 9/11 Memorial in New York City

It’s not that one can’t deal honestly with the emotional fallout of 9/11 and its permanent effect on those who were left to carry on when their loved ones died. TV’s Rescue Me, which ended its seventh and final season last fall in time for the 10th anniversary of 9/11, did just that, even as the series otherwise petered out to an unsatisfying conclusion. The comedy/drama about New York firefighter Tommy Gavin (Denis Leary) and his pals coping with the death of 343 of their own, including Tommy’s cousin Jimmy, always came back to 9/11, and what it meant to the survivors. (Leary actually lost a cousin and a close childhood friend in a devastating conflagration in 1999 that killed six firemen in his hometown of Worcester, Massachusetts.) The series ended on a painful, anguished note as those firefighters were honoured, and its final image was of the preparations of the 9/11 memorial, which was finally unveiled on September 11, 2011. Earlier in the season, Tommy reluctantly consenting to an interview about 9/11, lashes out at an asinine question from the interviewer, by emphatically declaring, “There are no happy endings.” (And though Rescue Me ended with a redemptive birth, as well as a significant death, it largely stayed loyal to that stark declaration.) Gavin’s comment is certainly a truthful one, even if the makers of Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close would falsely have you believe otherwise.

– Shlomo Schwartzberg is a film critic, teacher and arts journalist based in Toronto. He teaches regular courses at Ryerson University's LIFE Institute, where he just finished teaching a course on the work of Steven Spielberg. He will next be teaching a course there on the films of Sidney Lumet, beginning on Friday, Feb. 10, 2012.

Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate and the Death of the Auteur Theory

2012-02-02T12:00:00.028-05:00

The “pantheon” of worst films is usually topped by fare such as Edward D. Wood Jr’s Plan Nine From Outer Space (1959). No question. It is truly terrible. But naming a picture like that the “worst film ever made” is too easy. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel. The man had no talent so it was easy for him to make a truly awful movie. What I think should be considered when creating a list of the worst films ever made are the filmmaking skills and ambition of the director. Michael Cimino had both. His The Deer Hunter (1978) won the Oscar for Best Picture, and his debut, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974), was a quality character-driven action picture that starred Clint Eastwood and Jeff Bridges. The film he made after The Deer Hunter, Heaven’s Gate, gets my nomination for the worst film ever made because Cimino had talent and ambition. He was also (and still remains) a megalomaniac.

And just in case you think I’m now shooting fish in a barrel, labeling a film “the worst ever made” by jumping on the bandwagon of what everybody already knows, I was actually at the Toronto debut screening on November 20, 1980. Most people never saw the full version on the big screen since it was pulled from release after that evening and only briefly returned in a severely cut form (the long version is now on DVD; the short version is not). Going in, I knew very little about what had happened the night before at its world premiere in New York City (and the savage review it got from The New York Times critic Vincent Canby). Sure, I admit, I had heard a brief report on the radio that the screening had not gone well, but that was all I knew (remember, this was prior to texting and Google and we had to rely on newspapers, radio and TV). I thought little of the report since I preferred to make up my own mind.

I ended up at the screening because I was working as a film critic for the University of Toronto’s student newspaper, The Newspaper. In fact, a couple of years before, the first picture I ever reviewed for the paper was Cimino’s The Deer Hunter, so it seemed only natural that I review his follow up. My colleague film critic at the time was Atom Egoyan (later to be the director of Chloe, The Sweet Hereafter, and several others). Since he also wanted to see the film, and the ticket let two people in, he came with me.

Director Michael Cimino

The dearly loved, but now long-gone, palatial University Theatre was the venue. The place was packed with dignitaries, press and people involved in the film (the picture’s stars or those who had helped make the film). I don’t remember who made the introductions that night, but I do remember the moment when Michael Cimino was introduced. Atom and I were sitting on the floor level, ahead of the leading edge of the balcony. A spotlight went up to the first row of the balcony as we craned our necks to view this round-faced man with a mess of black hair, reluctantly peering over the balcony edge, barely raising his ass off the seat. That should have been a hint of what was to come. When the creator of a picture doesn’t want to be seen, you know something is amiss.

Then the picture began. Heaven’s Gate is supposedly based on a true story called The Johnson County War (which was the film’s original title). In the 1890s, cattle barons controlled vast swaths of the land in Wyoming. Much to their anger, thousands of immigrants from Europe were beginning to descend on this territory, setting up camps and supposedly rustling cattle to eat. The barons hired a group of thugs to kill the rustlers and intimidate the other settlers into submission, or, at least, run them off the property. After initial attacks, the settlers fought back. At least that’s what the film was supposed to be about.

What was on screen, all three hours and forty-one minutes of it, though was actually an incoherent mess with confusing scenes and incomprehensible dialogue. Thirty-two years later (I’ve never re-watched the film and never will), ‘what-the-fuck?’ scenes continue to stick out in my mind. In an endless prologue, our main characters (particularly Kris Kristofferson and John Hurt) are graduating from Harvard University. Joseph Cotton, as the head of the university, gives some sort of ‘you are the youth of tomorrow’ speech and then John Hurt, a drunk John Hurt (probably in real life, not just in character) gave a rambling valedictorian speech that amounted to gibberish. I remember I turned to Atom and said “what?” to which he just shrugged.

There is one very effective scene early in the picture (after the prologue) where Christopher Walken, who plays the head of the gang to stop the rustlers, comes across a small settlement of them. He then confronts one of their members and when provoked (attacked? I really don’t remember) he shoots one of the rustlers through their hung laundry. We see his body cast this long shadow across the sheet until his bullet penetrates both the shadow and the sheet killing the trespasser. It’s a powerfully evocative scene and probably the only one in the whole picture.

Heaven's Gate roller rink

As this endless dirge unspooled, Atom and I began doing something we had never done before (and I know I’ve not done since). We began to constantly lob what we thought were quiet quips back and forth about the film. I recall commenting to Atom, “What exactly is [singer] Ronnie Hawkins’ role in this?” To which he responded, “Beats me.” Hawkins appeared in scene after scene after scene and all I remember him doing is riding in circles on his horse periodically throwing dynamite at folks during the climactic battle. And if you think the title, Heaven’s Gate, has some significant meaning, think again. It is simply the name of a frontier roller rink (I’m not kidding). Midway through the film, Kristofferson and Isabelle Huppert go for a skate … a very long and pointless skate.

The picture finally ground to a halt almost four hours later with an epilogue, supposedly set years later. But how could you possibly tell? Kristofferson had shaved off his beard and he was now lolling on a yacht with some middle-aged woman (supposedly it was his moneyed girlfriend from the Harvard prologue who he returned to, I guess, after the calamity of the war). The lights came up and, without question, it was the quietest audience I’ve ever heard after the debut of a “major motion picture.” Usually there’s applause, or something, but this thing just ended. As Atom and I put on our coats, the man sitting in front of us turned around and said, “Congratulations on going to your first film ever. Some of us prefer quiet!” Clearly, Atom and my kibitzing had not been as quiet as we thought. I spotted Elwy Yost sitting a couple of rows away. He turned to his companion and said “my kingdom for a pair of scissors.” You know a picture is doomed when someone as forgiving of a film’s flaws as Elwy wants to cut it.

Atom bid me adieu and I started to head out, but first I needed to visit the washroom (it was a long film). The downstairs one had a big line-up, so I headed upstairs. Up there, the television media were hard at work interviewing cast members … er … well, interviewing Ronnie Hawkins because, as I was to discover later, he was the only one involved in the making of the film who had stayed around (Cimino had fled part way through the film and insisted on being immediately flown back to California, or so the story goes). I heard Hawkins say, “Yay, I was supposed to be on the picture a couple of weeks, but I spent seven months there. I almost got killed during that final battle scene when a pyrotechnic went off early. Not sure why I was there so long, but that was Michael.” After coming out of the washroom, I was buttonholed by Bob McAdorey, then the entertainment reporter for Global Television. I spoke to him briefly, telling him I‘d always found his reports entertaining. Obviously without any cast members to interview, he asked if I’d comment. They turned the camera on me and I said, “Well, it’s one of the best shot films I’ve ever seen, but the thing makes no sense whatsoever.” I guess they liked my comment because, not only did McAdorey use my clip on the next night’s Global newscast, but earlier in the morning, listening to CFNY-FM, I heard the audio portion of my comments on their news report.

Composer David Mansfield

There was one other thing I really liked about the film which I didn’t mention at the time because I didn’t think of it, and that was David Mansfield’s absolutely beautiful score. In fact, yesterday, I listened and enjoyed again two tracks from Mansfield’s music on an MP3 disc my Critics at Large colleague, Kevin Courrier, gave me a while back. Combining elements of Celtic music, eastern European and classic film score stylings, Mansfield created something that the picture most assuredly was not, a work of art. (Clearly, Mansfield is a masochist since he went on to score most of Cimono’s subsequent films, including the alarmingly racist Year of the Dragon.) There’s a Mini Masterpiece within Mediocre Movies moment late in Year of the the Dragon that I will write about soon.

Heaven’s Gate is one picture not deserving of a re-evaluation, or rationalizations that it is a flawed, misunderstood masterpiece (critics such as the late Robin Wood and David Thomson, who should know better, have attempted to do just that). Heaven’s Gate was insulting, vile, long-winded, pointless, and incomprehensible (in the real meaning of the word) plus a waste of time, money and effort. I also wasted almost four hours of the only life I will ever have watching this thing. But if you want the full account of this picture’s sordid story, find a copy of Final Cut by Steven Bach, the executive who green lit the picture (the documentary made about it, based on Bach’s book; it can be watched in eight parts on youtube).

As we all know now, the greatest catastrophe to come out of the disaster of Heaven’s Gate was the decline of the personal filmmaker in Hollywood. In the Seventies, directors with vision were able to work with large budgets for major studios on projects that mattered. In a fulfillment of what earlier became known as the auteur theory (a theory that believed that certain quality filmmakers were the true authors of a film), this view ignored the fact that filmmaking is a collaborative medium instead focusing solely on the director. The problem with this is that while it’s true that certain filmmakers have a recognizable style, or themes they prefer to explore, they need producers and other collaborators to provide boundaries for them to work within. The proponents of this theory also often say that the auteur’s bad movies are deserving of praise. This led to some filmmakers, such as Cimino, buying into this worshipfulness. Egos became as inflated as budgets, plus giving them a sense of entitlement and grand ambition that took them miles beyond their abilities. Ironically, Heaven’s Gate ruined it for filmmakers who truly had vision and were making interesting pictures. After Cimino’s folly, studios rarely permitted filmmakers to have the free reign they had prior to this debacle.

The decline in the type of films that excited myself and other critics (such as Kevin Courrier, Susan Green, Shlomo Schwartzberg and Steve Vineberg), who got our start in the mid- to late-‘70s, with pictures like The Godfather, The Conversation, Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Carrie, The Last Picture Show, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Philip Kaufman’s version), saw a huge decline from Heaven’s Gate forward, because risky films were far less likely to get any studio backing. This remains generally true to this day as studio flacks keep a tighter and tighter leash on talented filmmakers (Kaufman, De Palma and Bogdanovich haven’t made a picture in years; Coppola’s quality run is long over; Scorsese’s output, until this year’s terrific Hugo, had become more and more impersonal), and yet they still let incompetent hacks, like Joel Schumacher (Phantom of the Opera – 2004; Trespass – 2011), continue to make meaningless pulp that frequently cost way more than Heaven’s Gate did (it cost $36 million in 1980 – a great deal of money then). Why? Because they know these directors will make uncomplicated films on schedule, on budget and do it exactly the way the studio suits want it done. That is the true downside of Heaven’s Gate’s failure.

Talents like David Fincher (Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Social Network) still do sneak through, but the golden goose has been cooked and left to dry in the sun. When the executives allowed Michael Cimono a free hand to make whatever picture he wanted, the American film renaissance ended, and I was there on the night the decline began.

Still Alive and Well: Leonard Cohen's Old Ideas

2012-02-01T12:00:00.002-05:00

One warm evening in the spring of 2008, I filed into the Sony Centre in downtown Toronto where you could feel in this company of strangers a communal certainty that what we were about to witness was something captivating. Moments later, garbed in a grey suit and fedora, a Canadian legend took the stage. The applause only ceased when the opening chords of “Dance Me To The End of Love” wafted over us. So began our intimate three-hour encounter with the Canadian icon Leonard Cohen. Like many of his recordings, the performance was simple but urbane; humble but iconic; mournful but beautiful; thus making each detail unforgettable.

Several years after that epic world tour, in his 77th year, Cohen returned to the studio. The result is Old Ideas (Sony Music Canada., 2012) the twelfth studio album in his 44 year career and the first since Dear Heather in 2004. Living off of the vivid memory of that evening almost four years ago, the announcement of Old Ideas was a warm welcome. The album itself proof that Cohen’s artistic crux is still aglow in his twilight years. A Montreal native, Cohen was a published poet before his twentieth birthday. His poetic and literary accomplishments, which also include two novels that capture the quintessential melancholy of CanLit, might have established his foundation, but it is through song, however, that he became immortalized.

One of Cohen's greatest strengths has been his ability to articulate the most indescribable micro-emotions, those fleeting feelings that can only be diagnosed during our most intimate contemplations of spiritualism, mortality, and sex. In Old Ideas, these motifs are still present, but they have further matured and been reshaped. The essence of his familiar themes of religion, loss, failure, and life however remain. Devoted followers will instantly hear their familiar professor from the opening lines of the first track, "Going Home": “I’d love to speak with Leonard / He’s a sportsman and a Shepard / He’s a lazy bastard living in a suit.”

Leonard Cohen on stage in 2009

Songs like "Show Me The Place" and "Crazy to Love" can still fill you with a special delight as he allows himself to be tortured by those deeper longings brought on by regret. (It also confirms that, in those areas, there’s no hope for the rest of us.) A specialist in failed romance, Cohen chronicles how crazy we have to be to fall in love: “Had to go crazy to love you / Had to let everything fall / Had to be people I hated / Had to be no one at all.” With those profound statements – “Crazy has places to hide / That are deeper than any goodbye” – the songwriter reminds his listeners of every heartache past.

While Cohen has confirmed numerous times through interviews and on stage that old age has cured his depression, the souvenir regret and missed opportunities is still evident in the work. Remorse and isolation still weave through the tapestry of the rhythmic single "The Darkness." The references to solitude make the album reminiscent to his 2001 collaboration with Sharon Robinson, Ten New Songs. The sound of the album stays true to form. The elements of jazz, gospel, folk, and Americana alternate throughout Old Ideas. Cohen’s growling baritone delivers the lines with more conviction than any melodious cover artist ever could. The grittiness is eloquently accented with angelic hums from his female backing singers and the subtlety of the arrangements.

Leonard Cohen is undoubtedly one tough act to follow. It’s nearly impossible to rival the rawness heard in "I’m Your Man"; to reach the poignancy of "Who By Fire" or "Anthem"; to duplicate the cynicism of "The Future"; to summon the anguish in "Famous Blue Raincoat" or "Coming Back to You." Old Ideas presents an even more somber and cultivated Cohen. Rooted in his mastery and liberated by emotion, Leonard Cohen has still got it.

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

Talking Out of Turn #27: Christopher Dewdney (1984/87/88)

2012-01-31T12:00:00.008-05:00

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.

One section of the book dealt with Occupying the Margins, a chapter that examined the role of marginal art on eighties culture. By the Eighties, contemporary composers like Philip Glass, R. Murray Schafer and John Cage had already made a significant impact in pop circles with the help of David Bowie, Brian Eno and The Talking Heads. There were also sound poets like Bob Cobbing and bill bissett who expanded the notion of what was considered verse. While Canadian writer Christopher Dewdney is not a sound poet, he does look at language the way a geologist might examine layers of rock. Being the son of the renowned archaeologist, Selwyn Dewdney, none of this should perhaps come as a surprise. But throughout the Eighties, Christopher Dewdney shifted between works of non-fiction (The Immaculate Perception, 1986) , fiction and poetry (Radiant Inventory, 1988). Since we talked frequently during the decade and covered most of those books, I've fused together three excerpts from those talks into one post.

kc: Most people who turn to poetry often study or read it. You didn't. You studied things like geology and neurology instead.

Christopher Dewdney

cd: That's right. I didn't read other poets. In fact, I did my first book, Golders Green (1971), before I'd been influenced by any other writers. For me, poetry is a very strange area. It's like a Twilight Zone in which other kinds of fields can impinge. You can do things in poetry that you can't do in astrophysics or paleontology – two areas that I'm really interested in. Poetry is a very flexible but intelligent discipline. So I can do all of the things I want to do, plus exercise all my freedoms with poetry.

kc: Did getting interested in poetry though seem like a strange leap to make?

cd: (laughs) You know, last year I came to the realization that I have been publishing for over a decade. This is amazing. How did this happen? I really don't know. Since my policy is to never make a decision and to just let things happen, poetry fell within that policy. It just happened. As a result, I've become passionately in love with it. But it was nothing that I made a conscious decision to do.

kc: Might it have then been the scientist in you, someone who goes to the source of things, that fed your passion for language?

cd: To me, language is more than just a vehicle for meaning. It can become a form in itself, a harmony, a music. And there is a science to it, too. There's also an art to science and that's my favourite part of science. I go to those areas that are off the deep end, where we're lost and swimming over our heads, while at the same time possessing a blueprint for order that we hold in front of us like a compass. Then we can hold up this blueprint and say, "Ah, there's a black hole here in front of us." That's the common area that I find interesting in both science and poetry.

kc: Would you say then that there's a science of linguistics?

Dewdney reading from Demon Pond

cd: Yes. In fact, the science of the way words are put together is very interesting to me - especially because of its implications with brain structure. In that way, I can analyze language right down to morphemic levels. There is a real symbiosis between science and poetry. It's who I am and it's not an attitude that I've developed. Science is an extension of our perceptual systems.

kc: Speaking of perceptual systems, your book, The Immaculate Perception, takes us right into the brain.

cd: Yes. It really does deal with the brain, the neurological basis of perception, dream and language. And also, at the end, gets into some social and anthropological posits, or insights, which deal with the city and hormones; and this idea of erotic advertising as a manipulation of the hormones of a municipal area like Toronto or Edmonton. And I didn't know whether to describe this book as poetry, psychology, neurology, or philosophy. It really does cross over into a lot of zones. It's an interdisciplinary work, and it's scientifically true. So if you are a neurologist, or an anthropologist, I think you will find it congruent with your work.

kc: Your work actually brings together those two supposedly opposite sides: spirituality and science. Scientists often claim that spiritualism is mere superstition that can't be proven. Spiritualists claim that science is just cold materialism. You seem to start with the facts and then try to bring those two sides together.

cd: That's very true. The two are fused in my mind. For me, science is a way of describing the world. I guess, in a funny sense, it is my religion. But the odd thing about science is that it scares off people because they feel that it demystifies things. All it does, though, is explain things relative to it. Yet, ultimately, everything is still an absolute mystery. What I think we want is an explanation of miracle. And what The Immaculate Perception addresses is that people have been using superstition, or certain types of low-grade mysticism, as a way of deriving miracle in their lives. And yet we are surrounded by a miraculous matrix. Just to exist every second is a miraculous thing. That's what this book is about – demystify everything – and to apprehend the miraculous in the everyday. If we go back to the Big Bang theory of the universe, there is that moment – no matter how much you explain – of beginning. It's an indefinite zone of before, which is a concept outside of our ability to comprehend. And, if anything, that's close to the experience of God, or close enough for me (laughs).

kc: Let's talk about some of those areas in the deep end of the imagination that you mentioned a few moments ago. The book is filled with poignant points. I want to just read some of them and get your reaction.

cd: Okay.

kc: "Consciousness is a set of footprints in the snow which stop and then retrace themselves."

cd: (Pauses) That has something to do with the invisibility of consciousness. If you were looking at something that was conscious, like a human being, you would see them do things as if they were behaving under the influence of an invisible force. That is the effect of consciousness on nonliving things. Footprints in the snow are the only evidence of somebody having an idea, then they stop, and we retrace their footprints. In Kenya, one of the Leakeys discovered the footprints of a Homo Erectus – actually a mother and a father – and the footprints were going through ash obviously after a volcano eruption. You can see the mother's footsteps stop short of the father's where she obviously turned to the left to look over the horizon. They've been left perfectly imprinted for over two million years, and you can see the effect of consciousness on those footprints.

kc: "Consciousness is an end to the means." Then later in the book you say, "An end means to the."

cd: (Laughs) Alright, now you've thrown down the gauntlet! We are used to looking at consciousness as a way of getting things and as almost a technological acquisition. It's treated like a tool to do something. When I say it's an end to the means, I'm saying that consciousness is an end to all striving. To exist in a pure state of consciousness, is to see all striving. It's a Buddhistic thing, really. Half of the fun is getting there. An infinite part of the fun is getting there.

kc: In your book, Radiant Inventory, you have a wonderful line, "Now that I'm open, I can't be closed again." It suggests that once you've come through innocence, you can't go back again.

cd: For me, it's reminiscent of this graffiti I saw on a real estate sign recently. It said, "For my lady, keep her in my wound." It was really reminiscent of Arthurian legends. You know, the idea of the Grail and the King who had a wound that would never close. There is a wound of knowledge where once you know something, you can't come back from that knowledge. It's particularly true of psychological knowledge, but it's also true of having loved and having lost at love. It opens up a wound of sensitivity like acquiring a new perceptual organ. And once you become sensitized you can never become desensitized.

kc: You seem to regard language as a perceptual tool to investigate phenomenon.

cd: Yeah. It's a perceptual tool that keeps track of the way things change. And language changes you – that's the curious thing – and you don't so much use it, as much as it uses you. It pulls you behind, drags you around, and makes you do funny things.

A Spook in Afghanistan: Blood and Gifts

2012-01-30T12:00:00.000-05:00

Jeremy Davidson, Gabriel Ruiz and Jefferson Mays in Blood and Gifts at Lincoln Center

The compelling Blood and Gifts, by the American playwright J.T. Rogers, focuses on the relationship between Afghanistan and the United States between 1981 and 1991. The protagonist is Jim Warnock, a thirty-something CIA operative based over the border in Pakistan, whose assignment is to supervise the covert arming of Afghan resistance fighters. His official liaison with themujahideen is the ISI, Pakistan’s intelligence agency, which – for political reasons of their own – has jockeyed successfully for control of the distribution of American aid and has chosen to back the most extreme of the Afghan fighters, the violent right-wing Islamist Hekmatyar. But Warnock reaches out to one of the other commanders, Abdullah Khan, taking clandestine road trips into the mountains where Khan and his men are camped out and funneling weapons his way (as well as boom boxes and rock ‘n’ roll for Khan’s impetuous young second-in-command, Saeed) in exchange for intel.

It’s a dense, savvy play, a hard-boiled political drama with an emotional center: the friendship between Warnock and Khan, whose life Warnock saves by getting him medical assistance after he’s shot and whom Warnock eventually brings to Washington in 1985 (at the top of act two) as a PR ploy to secure Senate support for his cause, i.e., more funds for weaponry. Rogers is appropriately cynical about the political landscape against which the Afghan struggle to oust the Soviets takes place, where you practically need a chart to keep all the agendas of all the constituencies straight. The other main characters are Warnock’s MI6 counterpart, Simon Craig, and his opposite number in the KGB, Dmitri Gromov, both of whom have been in Pakistan considerably longer than he has. The most important supporting characters are Colonel Afridi, the slippery ISI director, and (in the Washington scenes) Warnock’s boss, Walter Barnes, who guarantees him the enhanced support he seeks for Khan only on the condition that Jim, who has finally secured a reassignment to the States, return to Pakistan (where his successor has been a disaster). But Rogers isn’t cynical about Warnock, a decent man whose commitment to his mission is genuine – and who strives to remain loyal to it, to play fair with Abdullah while negotiating Washington politics and trying (and usually failing) to balance a marriage to a woman stateside with whom he wants to start a family. Jim received his political education in Iran, and he’s still bitter about the grim fate of his in-country agents after the CIA pulled out. Rogers manages the tricky feat of making Warnock’s gung-ho dedication sympathetic while pointing out its limitations – the ways in which it makes even this smart, sharp-eyed operative naïve. The play’s major strength is that while obviously we’re meant to hear Warnock, Craig and Gromov as spokesmen for their countries’ political positions, it never reduces them; they’re fully drawn characters whose humanity and the wisdom accumulated with whose experience sometimes places them in private conflict with those positions. So the play, which also keeps us in constant touch with the real costs in violence of the Afghan resistance fight, isn’t a docudrama but a tragedy.

Jeremy Davidson (centre). Photo by Sara Krulwich.

Bartlett Sher helmed the excellent production of Blood and Gifts that closed earlier this month at the intimate Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center, and featured particularly strong performances by Bernard White as Abdullah and Michael Aronov as Gromov and a wonderful portrayal of Craig by Jefferson Mays. Mays was the sole actor in the skillful ensemble whom a faithful New York theatergoer was sure to recognize (from I Am My Own Wife, Pygmalion opposite Claire Danes, Journey’s End and other shows). Craig has been on this beat a long time: he recognizes all the various sorts of corruption trembling beneath the diplomatic surface. Though he feels simpatico with Warnock, he’s weary of his country’s constantly being in the shadow of the U.S. big guns – and of the way Afridi (Gabriel Ruiz), who understands that it’s the Americans and not the Brits he has to impress, tends to use him as a whipping boy. And his own marriage is faltering under the weight of his extended absences from his wife. Simon’s time in Pakistan has made him thinner rather than thicker skinned; the trajectory of the character is toward a kind of breakdown in the second act. It’s the kind of role the British character actor Michael Hordern used to be so brilliant at in seventies and eighties movies, and Mays does it full justice. The only member of the cast who doesn’t hit the mark is Jeremy Davidson as Warnock. Davidson is perfectly convincing in his recurring role as a CIA handler on the TV series Pan Am but here he’s mannered and stiff and can’t get any of his lines to sound authentic.

As a playwright drawn to layered political settings, Rogers writes with admirable narrative precision and straightforwardness. This is the only one of his handful of plays I’ve seen, but I read The Overwhelming, which is about Rwanda, and though the style is familiar and the script contains many of the same virtues, it’s not as good as Blood and Gifts. This is the kind of bracing political play that doesn’t get written very often; it doesn’t fall into the usual traps (sentimentality at one end of the spectrum, caricature at the other). When you leave the theater, you feel clear-headed.

– 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.

Where the Wild Things Are: Battling Beasts on the Big Screen

2012-01-29T12:00:00.000-05:00

The Grey certainly is a far cry from Never Cry Wolf. In the new thriller, the CGI and animatronic canis lupus creatures are preternaturally immense, relentless carnivores with an appetite for human flesh. The earlier film by Carroll Ballard, which came out in 1983 and was adapted from Farley Mowat’s wonderful 1963 book of the same title, makes the case that wolves feed primarily on rodents. Both movies are in the Arctic adventure genre. The chief distinction may be that the older story is about man learning to understand and coexist with nature while the current release depicts man versus nature in a bloody mismatch.

Yet The Grey, which stars Liam Neeson as the alpha male among a pack of survivors stranded in the vast Alaskan tundra after their transport plane crashes, is a surprisingly meditative saga. As they try to elude the snarling predators by trekking through deep snow without weapons, these guys somehow find time to debate whether or not there is a God. If the answer is yes, we see little evidence that a supreme being is on their side. In addition to the threat of territorial wolves, the men are just as likely to face doom in the form of hypoxia, storms, heights and river rapids amid the beautifully photographed (by Masanobu Takayanagi) vistas of British Columbia, standing in for America’s largest and least populated state.

The characters, whose numbers dwindle, begin as blue-collar workers at a remote petroleum pipeline operation. In voice-over narration, Ottway (Neeson) explains that his job as a sharpshooter is to protect them from local marauding mammals, including bears. But when not sadly remembering a wife who’s now gone (Anne Openshaw in flashbacks), he describes his current situation in the midst of colleagues deemed “drifters, fugitives, ex-cons and assholes.” Although that’s the supposedly motley crew with him aboard the aircraft that never makes it back to civilization, as the movie progresses they emerge as interesting, complex individuals. Maybe they’re just working for Big Oil at an inhospitable locale because employment is so scarce in the Lower 48 these days.

Dallas Roberts, Dermot Mulroney, Liam Neesen & Nonso Anozie

Talget (Dermot Mulroney) comes across as a bespectacled nerd and loving father of a young daughter. Hendrik (Dallas Roberts) is perceptive, compassionate and brave. The cynical Diaz (Frank Grillo) has a chip on his shoulder and a prison tattoo on his neck that reads “no mas.” That’s Spanish for “no more” but, of course, he will endure a lot more before the 117-minute film is over. Burke (Nonso Anozie), the only African-American in the bunch, develops some dire health issues. Flannery (Joe Anderson) is a talkative neo-hippie. Lewenden (James Badge Dale) isn’t around long enough to register much of a personality. Awoo!

The script that Ian Mackenzie Jeffers co-wrote with director Joe Carnahan (The A-Team, an execrable 2010 remake) wisely balances macho with meaning. When Diaz proclaims, “We’re the animals!” to boast about the rare defeat and devouring of a single wolf, it’s clear the viewer will muse: ”Well, yes, but that won’t do you much good without claws and exceedingly sharp teeth in a dog-eat-dog wilderness.” Bravado is pointless in such a harsh environment, where even strategic thinking – Get to the tree line! Build a fire! – only goes so far. The furry non-Homo sapiens, at least as they’re portrayed here, are equally calculating. During the meal of stringy roast wolf, Henrik demonstrates a wee bit of comic relief when he quips: “I’m actually a cat person.” Me, too, especially after witnessing the damage that can be done by the biological ancestors of today’s domesticated dogs.

Ottway senses that the ability to face death with philosophical grace is the ultimate defense against the world’s random cruelty. This loner who starts out feeling suicidal becomes a life-affirming warrior even as he peers into the seemingly inevitable abyss. Neeson’s recent roles as an action hero (The A-Team, Taken in 2008, the awful Clash of the Titans in 2010, and Unknown in 2011) have been far more superficial. He’s an actor with the necessary gravitas for The Grey, playing a pragmatic dude whose brains and sensitivity outclass his brawn. Goodbye “Release the Kraken!” Hello, Nobody Dances with Wolves.

The Frank: Seth MacFarlane's Music is Better Than Words

2012-01-28T12:00:00.002-05:00

At Capitol Records, the Neumann U47 microphone is known as "The Frank" because it was used to record the voice of Frank Sinatra during the 1950s. For Seth MacFarlane, creator of Family Guy and an out-of-the-closet crooner, "The Frank" symbolizes the passion he feels for the music of an era that featured the kind of orchestral arrangements that put Sinatra on the musical map.

Music Is Better Than Words (Universal Republic, 2011) is Seth MacFarlane's auspicious debut on CD. The album is a throwback to a time when vocalists literally sang with the orchestra in the same studio. Sinatra's Capitol recordings in particular captured an emotional dynamic that distinguished them from just about everything else in music. This was partly due to their technical achievements. But it was also due to the arrangements and the close proximity of the vocalist with the band. MacFarlane's record is not a tribute per se, but an attempt to capture the sound and energy of Sinatra's recordings. That's a worthy goal, but it's only as valuable as the music we hear. On Music Is Better Than Words, we hear it.

Joel McNeely arranged and conducted the fine orchestra behind MacFarlane, knowing full well the advantage of having the vocalist in the same room as the band. What that does, for one thing, is give you time to rehearse, and it gives you the chance to capture a moment on tape, which can't be reproduced with digital looping. The past few years we have seen the rise of singers recording separately from an orchestra, in some cases a continent apart. For example, Barbra Streisand recorded Love Is The Answer in the studio with a quartet. The orchestra was added later. We know this because she issued both versions on a deluxe edition in 2009. But I prefer the small group recordings for their intimacy. Otherwise, the orchestra sounds "added" and inflexible because they're playing against a finished recording. They can't make any changes to the vocalist either and have to assume an emotional posture that simply fills the space rather than compliments the singer. Clearly, the better choice is to record in the same room at the same time. MacFarlane was recorded using "The Frank" in the Hollywood studios at Capitol where some of the greats, such as Sinatra and Cole, preceded him.

MacFarlane in studio with mic

Which brings me to the larger question regarding the neo-trad pop singers of the past ten years, namely, Michael Bublé.

It's easy to contrast the work of Michael Bublé to this so-called traditional pop music made famous by Sinatra and Cole. The trouble with Bublé's recordings is the familiarity of the phrasing and arrangements. Bublé's got chops and a whole lot of swing, but his albums sound contrived. To my ears, they mimic the traditional pop sound instead of re-inventing it. I prefer music, in any form, that takes risks and surprises me. Bublé does neither.

MacFarlane, on the other hand, challenges my familiarity with the songs and arrangements by offering an album whose intention is to capture the sound of the Fifties as heard in the present. So what we're hearing is more than just a recreation. This is one of the interesting things about Jill Barber's work. She writes original songs in the style of the era so they stand on their own.

Music Is Better Than Words is a pleasant, often beautifully rendered album. The arrangements have charm, grace and solid dynamics. The playing is pitch-perfect and remarkably fresh to the ear. MacFarlane's voice is up-front, in front of the band, and his warm baritone is free of excessive vibrato. He sings everything straight and lets the words and notes float through the air. Clearly, his intention is to make a great sound.

Frank Sinatra in studio with mic

The strongest tracks are "Laura," "It's Easy To Remember," "You and I," and the title track, "Music Is Better Than Words." There are some drawbacks. Unfortunately Alan Broadbent's piano solo is buried on "Laura." Hoagy Carmichael's "Two Sleepy People" features a duet with Norah Jones, but I'm not convinced they shared a studio to record it. I would have prefered a duet version of "Something Good" from The Sound of Music, one of my favourites from the musical.

MacFarlane and McNeely, who composed music for American Dad!, should also be complimented on the song selection. I was only familiar with half the tunes, so it was nice to discover "It's Anybody's Spring" by Jimmy Van Heusen and Johnny Burke. "Nine O'clock" by Bob Merrill and "The Sadder But Wiser Girl" from The Music Man by Meredith Willson.

MacFarlane's album did reasonably well last year, peaking at No. 2 on the Billboard Jazz Chart. It barely made a dent on the pop charts (#111), but this is 2011, not 1958. Nevertheless, the Grammy Awards have added his album to the list of nominees for Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album, which Tony Bennett has ruled as a legitimate category for many years. This time MacFarlane is up against Bennett, Barbra Streisand, Harry Connick Jr. and the ubiquitous, Susan Boyle. In spite of a solid effort, Bennett will get the trophy simply because he went to Number 1 and out-sold everybody in the category.

– John Corcelli is a musician and broadcaster. 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.

Departures and Arrivals: Watching Movies on Airplanes

2012-01-27T12:00:00.003-05:00

Due to a family emergency, I recently spent the equivalent of 34 hours in the air flying overseas to Goa, India and back. Fortunately, I have no fear of flying, but when you spend that much time in airplanes there is only so much sleeping and reading that you can do. I’ve never been one to stare off into space during air journeys, so I watched a lot of movies. Jet Airways, an Indian-based airline, is a very modern service with comfortable seats, good service and individual seat-back video screens. They offer a full array of movies from Hollywood and Bollywood. I’ve never been that much of a Bollywood fan, so I really wasn’t in the mood for those long films with the out-of-the-blue ubiquitous dancing and singing scenes – don’t get me wrong, I’ve seen some of the pictures and have liked them, but there’s only one I can hands down recommend, even though it is over three hours long: Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995), directed by Adiya Chopra and starring Bollywood’s Tom Cruise, Shahrukh Khan – so I brought up the list of Hollywood films. There were a lot.

In the past year, I’ve really have been remiss in seeing the new offerings out of Hollywood (I'm told I haven't missed much), so this journey became an ideal opportunity to catch up on some films I’d intended to see, but never got around to them. Little did I know until I got home that the pictures I watched actually fit two themes that reflected both my journey to Goa and back. The films on offer ranged from ‘70s classics, Chinatown, to hits from 2011 such as Dolphin’s Tale and Puss in Boots. There is a certain restlessness when you are stuck on an airplane, so as I flipped through the list, I ticked off a few I was interested in seeing. The only thing I knew was that I didn’t want to watch anything I’d already seen (bye bye, Chinatown). So I settled in to watch a number of films, some that both Shlomo and Susan reviewed in Critics at Large when they were first released.

Ciarán Hinds and Helen Mirren in The Debt

Since I’ve long admired the work of both Helen Mirren and Ciarán Hinds, the first film I decided to watch was The Debt (2011). It dealt with how the past haunts the present. The Debt is essentially a memory piece. Told in flashback, it examines the truth behind a 1965 mission conducted by three members of Israel’s Intelligence Service, Mossad, to kidnap and return to justice a Josef Mengele-like Nazi doctor. They were supposed to bring the doctor back from East Germany to stand trial in the Israel. Things went wrong and the doctor was killed, or so the three agent's story went. “Present day” in the film’s timeline is 1997. In this current era, a book has been written by the daughter of one of the mission’s members, and a secret they buried for over 30 years is in danger of coming to light. Helen Mirren, Ciarán Hinds and Tom Wilkinson play the agents in the current era; Jessica Chastain (eight films in 2011 alone, including The Tree of Life), Sam Worthington (Avatar) and Marton Csokas (Kingdom of Heaven), play them in the flashback. The core mystery is revealed at about the half-way point, but skip ahead if you don’t want to know. The doctor was in fact not shot. He escaped and could still be alive. The three agents have lived with the guilt of their lie since 1965 and now it is coming back to bite them on the ass just as they are being celebrated for eliminating a Nazi monster.

Next, I chose Rise of the Planet of the Apes. It deals with how messing with medical science, even if done for good reasons, can have devastating consequences. In an effort to combat the ageing process and reverse the horrors of Alzheimer’s disease, a dedicated scientist, Will Rodman (James Franco), creates a virus that, in tests, increases the intelligence in some apes. After a few days, just as his breakthrough is to be heralded, one ape goes on a rampage and has to be killed. They mistakenly believed that the virus was responsible, so the research institute's head orders all the other apes killed. In actuality, the rampaging ape had secretly given birth and her mothering instincts clicked in causing her to lash out and protect her child. The child received the virus in utero and rapidly shows signs of high intelligence. Rodman steals the baby ape and samples of the virus. We discover why he’s so anxious to get the virus to work; his father, Charles Rodman (John Lithgow), a talented scientist and musician, is fading away from Alzheimer’s. Will takes a risk, injects his father with the virus and Charles life-ending disease is reversed – for a few months at least. During this time, Charles and the ape he’s named Caesar (well-played in performance capture by Andy Sirkus) bond. When Charles’ dementia begins to return (because his body finds a way to reassert itself and unfortunately fight the positive influence of the virus), Caesar becomes very protective of him. One day, in his confused state, Charles tries to drive his neighbour’s car. The enraged neighbour attacks Charles; Caesar attacks the neighbour. Caesar is put into a wildlife preserve (a very bad wildlife preserve with evil keepers) from where he and the other apes with him, will finally ‘rise.’

John Lithgow and Caesar in Rise of the Planet of the Apes

I found the film entertaining (though airplane copies of movies always cut out violence, so all the action was oddly truncated), but in the days that followed, what I realized I was actually reacting to was the Lithgow subplot. Though my family member who was very ill did not have Alzheimer’s, he had been seriously restricted from three strokes over the last decade and now was stricken with pneumonia. To witness this once-vibrant man decline over the last decade, I understood Will Rodman’s attempts to push back the ravages of time. Eventually, we cannot succeed, but we never stop trying.

There were two more films I tried to watch, Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion (2011) and Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive (2011), but in the case of the Soderbergh, I hastily shut it down the second I saw Gwyneth Paltrow’s character suffer and die in a hospital. That struck way too close to home and I remember thinking “what am I thinking? I don’t want to watch that right now.” And Drive? Perhaps it has promise (Ryan Gosling’s watchful performance as The Driver seemed interesting and to see Albert Brooks play a villain could have been fun), but unfortunately it was one of those murmured dialogue movies, so even when I tried to push the headset practically through the side of my head to hear what they were saying, with a jet engine screaming away right near me, it was almost impossible, so I gave up.

After sleeping for a bit (on the way there I was just too restless to sleep much), and reading for an hour, I flipped through the list again to find something else to watch. I finally picked In Time (2011). Probably the only reason I decided to watch it was that author Harlan Ellison had launched, and then withdrew, a lawsuit last fall against the filmmakers (including writer/director Andrew Niccol, who had helmed the underrated Lord of War). Ellison believed they had borrowed too much from his short story, “’Repent Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman.” Ellison had been right before (he successfully sued James Cameron over The Terminator, and also the creators of the pilot for a short-lived TV series, Future Cop), but this time he changed his mind after seeing the picture. The plot of In Time? In the 22nd century, people are genetically altered so that they stop ageing at 25, but once they turn 25, they have to earn more time in order to keep living. If they allow the time (which is indicated by a counting-down numerical clock on their arm) to run out they are instantly killed. Everything costs time. A cup of coffee is 2 hours; to move into the inner city where the elite live costs anything from a few months to several years. You can earn time through work, gambling, illegal means or you can exchange it with whomever you wish. This is a great premise for a film, and its star, Justin Timberlake, has shown he can do more than sing (see The Social Network), but he’s no action actor. The filmmakers play with the Bonnie and Clyde notion a bit with Amanda Seyfried as the Bonnie to Timberlake's Clyde, but it's not enough. The acting is generally weak throughout including a surprisingly bad Vincent Kartheiser (Pete Campbell in Mad Men) and a very ordinary Seyfried. But there is one truly moving sequence. In fact, it probably belongs in my Mini Masterpieces Within Mediocre Movies pantheon.

People who live in the lower strata of society, including Timberlake and his mother played by Olivia Wilde (yup, it sure gets disconcerting when one twentysomething actor calls another twentysomething actress “Mom”), have it the worst. They have limited resources to gain extra time, so must constantly live on the edge of extinction. One evening, with her time on her arm running dangerously low, she heads home from work hoping to meet up with her son. She approaches the bus only to be told she doesn’t have enough time for the ride. She’s forced to walk, or rather run because unless she can get to her son, who can transfer a bit of his time to her, she will die. Timberlake is waiting for her bus, but when she isn’t on it he begins to worry and starts out on foot towards her. As her timer clicks remorselessly down, she sees him. They run for each other and just as their fingers are about to touch her time hits zero, her head snaps back and she collapses dead on the pavement. It’s a wonderfully staged sequence and I cannot think of a better metaphor for the things we do to keep the loved ones in our life as long as we can.

It was only once I got off the airplane back in Toronto that I realized, in retrospect, all the movies I saw on the way there, dealt with how time so often runs out before we can finish the things we want to do or to say the things we need to say. I didn’t pick any of these films consciously. I cannot say any of these are great movies, but I think on a subconscious level my brain pushed me towards films that looked at either how the past can remain unresolved or how time is not, contrary to The Rolling Stones, on our side (perhaps that's why I stopped watching Drive as it didn't fit, and Contagion was too obvious).

Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill in Moneyball

If during the trip there I picked movies that examined how time plays with our lives, on the way back, with my family member still seriously ill, but remarkably seemingly on the road to some sort of unexpected recovery, I found myself once again facing a long flight. After I slept for four hours (the plane from Bombay to Brussels did not leave until 3AM, plus I had a 10-hour layer over in Bombay after getting off the plane from Goa), I awakened, tried to sleep more, but then gave up. I again flipped through the films available. Except for one picture, which I’d not been in the mood for on the way there (not sure why not, but perhaps my brain had decided it wasn’t ‘about time’ enough), there didn’t seem to be much I wanted to see, but I still couldn’t sleep, didn’t want to read, so I had to watch something. Moneyball (2011) was the one film I’d passed on that I wanted to see, so I decided on the return to start there. The film was about second, if not third chances. And as it turned out, every film I picked, again without thinking about it, dealt with variations on second or third chances.

The Oscar-nominated Moneyball is the real life tale of Billy Beane (Brad Pitt), the General Manager of the small-market American League baseball team the Oakland As. In 2001, Beane put together a team that managed to make it into the playoffs, but were quickly eliminated in the first round. In the off season, he loses three key players, meaning their chance of returning to the playoffs is slim because they have no money to replace the lost players. Until that is he meets number whiz Peter Brand (Jonah Hill). Hill proves to Beane that he can build a winning team with lesser-known players because, though they may not be Hall of Famers, they all have the ability to get on base in a remarkably consistent manner. It fails at first because many, including the team's manager, Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman), don't buy in. Beane seems to be headed for a colossal failure until he forces Howe's hand to play the players as he and Brand have determined (including a broken-down catcher who has been turned into the first baseman) are best. What is also at play here, as we discover in flashback, is that Beane had been drafted in the first round when he was a young player only to have completely failed to live up to expectations. So this gambit became a way to redeem himself if only in his own eyes.

The picture is very good, and Pitt essays the role well. And as with all the best films about baseball (particularly the great Bull Durham), it's not really about baseball, but the lives of the people who happen to work in the world of professional ball.

Steve Carell and Ryan Gosling in Crazy, Stupid, Love

The other two films were really not good: Crazy, Stupid, Love. (2011) and The Devil Wears Prada (2006). Crazy, Stupid is about a long-married couple (Steve Carrell and Julianne Moore) who seem headed for divorce court because Moore has admitted to an affair and Carrell has lost his spark. Enter Jacob Palmer (Ryan Gosling, again), a Lothario who has no problem attracting the ladies, who decides to take Carrell's Cal Weaver under his wing and teach him the techniques to bed many women. Things go wrong. Gosling is very good at the start, but as my colleague, Shlomo Schwartzberg, said in his astute review last year, the script neuters him about halfway through as the picture becomes more and more conventional. Prada is loosely based on the exploits of Lauren Weisburger who got caught up in the world of Vogue magazine and its fierce, draconian managing editor, Anna Wintour. In the film, Vogue is fictionalized as Runway magazine and Wintour as Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep), with Weisburger morphed into Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway). Prada is the usual redemptive nonsense about how Sachs almost loses her soul trying to fit into a world she really doesn't belong (High Fashion and their magazines). With the help of a good man, and a fine but brief bit where Streep's Priestly drops her mask and reveals some of her true self to Sachs, Sachs recovers her soul and is reborn.

All three films are, as I mentioned, about second chances. And as I returned from Goa, my family member had been given a second chance himself. His struggles were titanic compared to the little problems in these films, but something drew me to them. It was almost like these pictures were laid in front of me as a way to come to terms myself with the struggles my family member faced.

Long journeys are often good for allowing time to reflect on what lies ahead or what you just experienced. Sometimes you need to do the work on your own, but sometimes a few good (and sometimes just adequate) movies can help you along your path. The 12-odd hours I spent watching films during that long 34 in the air sure helped me, unconsciously, come to terms with what I had to face and then what I had just experienced. That is sometimes the power and magic of even the most indifferent motion picture.

It’s In The Mail…: Recent CDs

2012-01-26T12:00:00.004-05:00

Someone recently asked me about a comment I made in a previous review. In a rant about Bob Dylan, I let slip that sometimes it’s hard to listen to some of the music that people send me to review. I remarked something about how I had to force myself to listen to some of it. I still stand by that remark; sometimes it is hard. You really want to dig the new Little Willies CD (which I bought on Friday and haven’t even put into the CD player yet), but then there’s that large stack of CDs that other people have sent me for review. “I’d better get on it,” I think. So, today, I’m going to go through the last batch of CDs that have come in, and tell you exactly what I think about them.

Jim Allchin

Jim Allchin is a blues guitar player with a PhD in Computer Science. He used to work for Microsoft, but since 2009 he’s been a full-time musician. His new CD is called Overclocked and has 13 original blues and a cover design that celebrates his Fender Stratocaster. The guitar is celebrated throughout, in fact right from the very start of the title track you get the idea that this guy is a ‘guitar-player’! “Overclocked” is an IT term for souping up a computer to run faster than its original design. This can lead to burnout, and in Allchin’s hands the Strat does nearly melt. He calms down a bit for “Willow Tree” but only in relation to the sizzle of the first track. Over a solid rhythm section Allchin’s guitar is the star, and his lead vocals are serviceable. Keely Whitney takes over lead vocals on a two sultry numbers.

Gayke Ackroyd

Gayle Ackroyd lives in Guelph, Ontario where she gives music lessons when she’s not playing with her band. Give It All You Got arrived after an e-mail from a songwriting friend of mine who asked if I would consider reviewing an album by a friend of his. Hmmm. I said, “Sure.” Trouble is, now I have to do something about it. This is one of those albums where you listen and think that there’s nothing really wrong with it, but you’re just not sure why you want to listen to the whole thing. The band is good, they find the groove and hold on, but Ms Ackroyd’s vocals are just a bit soft. The whole impression is one of blandness. I can imagine sitting in a bar sipping a Guinness while they play and being able to carry on a conversation with no difficulty. And there’s a place for that, but when I finished this album I kept thinking that the best song was the last one … and it’s “Keep On Running” which was already done so brilliantly by Spencer Davis Group with Stevie Winwood singing. Overall, it just didn’t do it for me.

Casey Abrams

Casey Abrams is a Boston-based singer-songwriter who describes his new album as “a shoebox full of pictures and stories – summer afternoon postcards, sprawling stormy-night creepers, sad and rainy letters and bright, sunny country-road racers.” And that may not be hyperbole. Casey had read a review I wrote and sent me an e-mail asking if I’d listen to his album. I agreed, and when it arrived I dropped Oh, You Kid on the pile. When I finally got around to it, I was surprised by the sound. It came without the standard one-sheet, so I had to search the web for information about him. Turns out this is his third album and it’s produced by John Simon who had such a hand in shaping classic albums for The Band and Simon & Garfunkel. In fact, this one reminds me a bit of John Simon’s first solo album. It’s not afraid to take chances. There are echoes of The Beatles in the orchestration on the first cut, “Ghost Story,” and hints of a lifetime of listening to American music throughout the album’s dozen songs. Some dandy picking and Abrams’ pleasant tenor on a collection of catchy tunes makes this one a pleasure to listen to.

Oliver Schroer was a Canadian fiddler and composer who passed away in 2008. His indefatigable spirit and devotion to his music are shown by the number of albums that have been released since his death. He recorded with a variety of artists from Jimmy Webb to Great Big Sea. This most recent release is a duet recording from 2007, with Scottish singer/flautist Nuala Kennedy. Titled Enthralled, the album is a celebration of the interplay between the two artists, and the feeling they had for each other. It is essentially an instrumental piece, fiddle and flute, with piano, bass and accordion joining in at various points. This Celtic music is not the sort of thing I would ever choose to listen to, but I can certainly appreciate the skill of the players. There is, for me, a sameness to it all. Not unlike a soundtrack for a series of films, the pieces begin, create a mood, tell a story, and then moves on to the next one. The flute and fiddle interweave with the supporting instruments seamlessly evoking images hinted at by the titles: “Flowers,” “Healing,” “Miao, Miao,” “The Books in My Library” or “The Whispering Wind” are just a few examples of the directions this music takes.

This brings us to a 3-disc set by another Canadian act, The Cowboy Junkies. They have been releasing what they call The Nomad Series one disc at a time for over a year. You can find them at their website, and each one is a different ball game. They claim that “the idea was born in the tumult of a perfect storm of ideas, influences, inspirations and timing.” Partly to test their newly launched website, partly in response to a series of four paintings by Enrique Martinez Celaya (which serve as the CD covers), and partly because the band had so many ideas, the series is a mixed bag. The first disc, which appeared in June 2010, is subtitled Renmin Park and is a song cycle inspired by guitarist Michael Timmins’ three month visit to China. Disc two (from February 2011) is a collection of songs written by Vic Chestnutt called Demons. The most recent release is Sing In My Meadow which is described as “an album of Acid Blues.” The fourth disc is promised for any time now (Feb. 23rd), and will be songs the band has been playing live for awhile combined with songs yet to be written.

The “Acid Blues” are not unlike the “acid folk” of Tom Wilson’s band Lee Harvey Osmond (LHO). Not surprising, therefore, Margo and Michael Timmins both contributed to LHO’s A Quiet Evil. The sound on Sing In My Meadow is loud, heavy, and psychedelic. The guitar of Michael Timmins and guest Jeff Bird’s mandolin are on opposite channels, while Margo’s vocals swirl hauntingly over the solid bottom end provided by Alan Anton’s drums and Peter Timmins’ bass. The sound on Demons is not far removed from this Acid Blues model, or at least the album starts off that way. The loud guitars and heavy beat introduce Chestnutt’s “Wrong Piano.” There is an abundance of guests on Demons, including mandolinist Jeff Bird, as well as Joby Baker on keyboards, Dave Henry (cello), Tania Elizabeth (fiddle), Aaron Goldstein (guitar) and a handful of horn players. Chestnutt had a long relationship with the Cowboy Junkies, even appearing with them on 2007’s Trinity Revisited where they re-recorded the album that made them famous. Here they pay tribute to him as a songwriter, and a friend. It works because they treat his quirky songs in their own unique way. The first album of the Nomads series is perhaps the oddest. Renmin Park begins with what sounds like a radio broadcast of the band's music which then blends into some Chinese music and then an acoustic guitar strummed quietly. Margo’s ethereal voice describes the “ducklings gobbling bread” and quickly paints a picture of a place that is at once exotic and yet familiar. The supporting musicians this time feature a few Chinese folk playing instruments like the erhu (spike fiddle) and pipa (a Chinese lute). As always though, where the Timminses are involved, the sound is relaxed, at an easy pace, focused on Margo’s voice, and Michael’s guitar.

So, why do I have to push myself to listen to the music that drops through the mail slot? Because it’s not always like this. Often there are CDs of someone singing from the Great American Songbook accompanying themselves on the ukulele, or noodling pianists trapped by their dark moods. I have no idea of just how many Celtic bands there are, or singer-songwriters, or blues guitarists, and the harpists, the soloists … the people just like me who have a guitar and a MacBook with Garage Band installed. I was surprised by Jim Allchin; it's too bad I didn’t like Gayle Ackroyd’s album; I was bowled over by Casey Abrams; I wish I appreciated Schroer and Kennedy more. I wonder how often I’ll be drawn back to the spooky world of the Cowboy Junkies.

In the last year I’ve been truly captivated by only one or two things. I cannot stop playing Paul Simon’s So Beautiful or So What but nobody asked me to write about that. That’s why we do it though. That’s why we listen. We know that in that pile there will be something new that will captivate us, bring us back to it time and time again. Like Casey Abrams or … maybe there will be something in this new package the postman just dropped off. I’ll be in touch.

FX's Archer: Adult Comedy, Shaken and Stirred

2012-01-25T12:00:00.005-05:00

Everyone who watches television has shows they feel guilty about enjoying. I will admit (now, hesitantly) to having watched Charmed and Smallville, with their more and more implausible storylines and often painfully awkward acting, to their respectively bitter ends, with a lot of ambivalence and often very little pleasure. Sometimes (like Cougar Town) guilty pleasures quickly make good for themselves, and that nascent guilt fades completely into unequivocal love. And sometimes a show which begins as a guilty pleasure never really changes at all, and you just have to confess that you’ve been an idiot all along. For me, right now, Archer – FX’s raunchy animated spy comedy – is that show. I watched Archer for an entire season before telling anyone how much I genuinely loved it, convinced (I now believe) that somehow my enjoyment of a very adult-oriented cartoon – full of dark humour and unabashed raunchiness – revealed something discomforting about my own sensibilities. It could take years of expensive psychoanalysis before I know what was really going on, but now, with the recent premiere of the show’s third season – and with FX Canada hopefully soon making the show available to my friends and colleagues north of the border – it’s time for me to weigh in publically on what may be the funniest half hour currently airing on television.

Jessica Walter, in the Archer studio

With some of television’s best voice talent – H. Jon Benjamin (Bob’s Burgers), Jessica Walter (Arrested Development), and Aisha Tyler (The Talk) – and created by Adam Reed, an animation veteran previously most famous for his Adult Swim collaborations with animator Matt Thompson on the Cartoon Network, Archer is one of the richest shows on television in concept, vision, and execution. While Reed’s past work on Adult Swim (Sealab 2021, Frisky Dingo) was very funny (and very strange) in its own ways, Archer represents an enormous leap in both writing and style. The action takes place at the International Secret Intelligence Service (ISIS) – a cash-strapped boutique spy agency run by Malory Archer (Walters). The spy at the centre of the agency is Malory’s son, Sterling Archer (Benjamin) – codenamed Duchess (after Malory’s perhaps too-beloved and dearly departed dog) – an oversexed, emotionally stunted, but supremely self-possessed secret agent with mommy-issues and a near obsessive fixation on black turtlenecks. Archer is known, or at least calls himself, "the world's most dangerous spy,” which seems to be less a description of his spy skills than a nod to the fact that foes and friends alike come out of the other side of his missions a little worse for wear. He has a bad habit of inadvertently crippling, maiming, and often killing his allies. His much more skilled partner is Lana Kane (Tyler), a fearless and beautiful female agent who also happens to be his ex-girlfriend.

Set in a deliberately indeterminate and impossible era, Archer seems contemporary as far as pop culture is concerned, but still somehow exists in the middle of the Cold War. The Russians and the KGB are the baddies, and the Middle East is nowhere in sight, but storylines involving affirmative action, energy conservation, and sexual harassment complaints seem to place it in our own time. Cars and clothing reference the 60s and 70s, but everyone carries a cell-phone with picture and video capabilities. In the end, it all becomes just another part of the sheer fun of it all. And there’s a lot of fun to be had.

The rest of the spy team include Cyril (Chris Parnell, Saturday Night Live), a fastidious comptroller who handles the agency’s ever-shrinking funds; Cheryl (Judy Greer, Arrested Development), Malory’s near useless secretary with secret familial wealth and a taste for erotic asphyxiation; Pam (comedian Amber Nash), a desperately and often voraciously omnisexual HR director. Each of these regular characters (and many of the recurring ones as well) have been given backstories; and the show has a commitment to plot and character continuity that would rival any live-action series. But for all the office comedy elements – and some of the shows funniest, most on-point moments are often interpersonal or bureaucratic – the show is still at heart a spy thriller. There are lengthy scenes of real action that can compete with any live-action show: ticking bombs aboard luxury Zeppelins, motorcycles racing through the French countryside, snowmobiles whipping dangerously through the Alps, and nail-biting scenes with our heroes hanging by a thin rope from escaping helicopters, and all of which are both thrilling to behold and side-splittingly funny.

H. Jon Benjamin as Sterling Archer and Aisha Tyler as Lana Kane

In addition to the depth of the characters and the hilarious (and sometime horrifying) adventures that they engage in, Archer is simply a visually stunning show. The animation process, which combines 3-D modeling for the environments and sets with almost photorealistic animation of the human figures, is as beautiful as the show is profane. The contrast between the sometimes crude sexuality and cringe-inducing violence and the gorgeous visuals mirrors the shows ability to alternate effortlessly between high and low comedy. Characters are just as likely to toss out a reference to Bartleby, the Scrivener as they are to a song from the Top Gun soundtrack. (Cross your fingers for a Kenny Loggins cameo in a future episode!)

Despite the Cold War-era spy action and James Bond invocations, Archer’s most significant forbearer lies outside of both animation and spy stories: Arrested Development. While the presence of Arrested Development actors Walter and Greer (and a recurring guest role for Jeffrey Tambor as the head of a competing and much more successful spy agency, an on-again off-again love interest for Malory, and possibly Archer’s biological father) might make the association plain enough, the real influence lies in Archer's writing and the nature of its comedy. Not since Arrested Development have I seen such practiced and hilarious application of repetition and continuity in a comedy. Phrases and situations play out across multiple episodes, and each time the jokes grow funnier and funnier. And with the brilliant guest appearance of Burt Reynolds in last week’s third season premiere, the show is clearly primed to stay on track.

You can watch Archer on Thursday nights on FX. Previous seasons are available on DVD. And take my word on it: the guilt subsides quickly.

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

Deadheads: Carol Brightman's Sweet Chaos: The Grateful Dead's American Adventure (1999)

2012-01-24T14:22:00.004-05:00

Back in 1995 when Jerry Garcia, the co-founder and resident guru of the Grateful Dead, died of a heart attack, Elvis Costello, one of the early progenitors of punk, made a curious comment. "I think it's harder for people who don't subscribe to the cultural phenomenon of the Dead to appreciate some of the quality of the songs," Costello told Rolling Stone. "If somebody else were to take 'Stella Blue,' say, and record it like Mel Torme would record it, you would hear what a beautiful song it was." To some, Costello should be someone who represents a full rejection of the hippie ethos that the Dead were part of, but his remark has an interesting way of cutting through the patina of our musical prejudices. Stripped of their cultural and mythical baggage, the Grateful Dead's songs might actually stand up as some beautifully composed pieces.

I never bought into the phenomenon of the Dead, or the trappings of the Dead worshipers (known affectionately, or derisively, as 'Deadheads') who followed the band from town to town. But I certainly loved some of their music, many of those songs (like "Ripple" or "Ship of Fools") asked us to share their quest for community, which they sought with a true sense of commitment while adding a healthy respect for tradition. I also sometimes heard risk in their music, a dare to go further than their fans might allow. (That risk though had its pitfalls. Performing live the band could either take you soaring into endless waves of cascading melodies or simply bore you blind.) Few have ever made clear why the Grateful Dead had (and, I suppose, continues to have) a lasting appeal, but Carol Brightman's Sweet Chaos: The Grateful Dead's American Adventure, written in 1999, does. Her book provides a fascinating examination of the times of the Grateful Dead, and answers pertinent questions as to how and why the Dead outlived the doomed counter-culture of the Sixties.

Brightman, the author of Writing Dangerously: Mary McCarthy and Her World and Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, is a former Sixties activist who provides not only a detailed history of the band, but also of the period that spawned them. And she fills the book with little ironies. The first being that the Dead, along with the counterculture itself, grew out of the LSD experiments of Ken Kesey in the Bay area during the early Sixties – despite, as Brightman notes, the fact that LSD was initially a product of CIA experiments used to determine the drug's effectiveness in mind-controlling experiments. According to Brightman, the CIA was also involved in drug distribution to rock shows which they hoped would render the youth revolution docile.

If the counterculture was riddled with contradictions such as this, incongruities that would later destroy it, she suggests the Dead's "introversion in matters both musical and political contributed in no small way to their holding power." It was even LSD that made possible the Grateful Dead's early sound, an odd mix of blues, jug band and psychedelia. In short time, as Brightman suggests, the band drew a collection of stoned cadres under their spell. Yet the group's idealistic spirit differed somewhat from what The Beatles had represented to youth culture. If The Beatles sang that any time at all, I'll be there, the Dead declared that when life looked like easy street, there was danger at your door. So Brightman sums up their appeal to the counterculture in Sweet Chaos as clearly being about a band that "tapped a free-floating yearning in its vast audiences to shake off their anonymity." She goes on to say that their audience wanted "to be loved for themselves alone, for their differences, the differentness each one felt all the more keenly for being surrounded by people who looked just like them."

The Grateful Dead

Because the group chose chaos as a form to embrace, the tumult of the Vietnam years, the civil rights struggles, and the repressive burdens of the Nixon Seventies didn't silence them or their fans. Part of what makes Sweet Chaos so delicately affecting is how Brightman seeks meaning in the Dead's community as a way to make sense of the dissolution of her generation's own political passions. What she gets from the Dead's chief lyricist Robert Hunter is that the Dead survived its long years because they honoured "American culture, and what we find good in it." The radicals, Hunter told her, were basically Marxists who "had a script, and anything that furthered that script was allowable, including unethical and immoral actions."

author Carol Brightman

Of course, the Dead would itself fall victim to drug abuse at the moment of their greatest commercial success in the Eighties with the hit song "Touch of Grey." Death would also stalk the group as if it were laying claim to their name. Besides Garcia, co-founder Ron "Pigpen" McKernan died early on of cirrhosis of the liver in 1973, while every keyboard player save Bruce Horsnby, their last one, went to spirit. Despite this, the Grateful Dead had a longer shelf life than many might have thought possible, or even hoped for. And if, as Carol Brightman points out, the Sixties radicals retreated into private life, the Deadheads and their heroes continued to dream of a new cosmic order.

Sweet Chaos is perfumed in both affection and regret as it examines the unfulfilled dreams of a generation, the regret coming from confronting the price you pay for trying to keep those hopes alive.While the book may be examining the past, it also keeps faith with the present. Considering the quixotic quest of those people who recently occupied parks and streets to bring attention to a world where expedience ruled over being an accountable citizen, Sweet Chaos still reaches out into an uncertain future.

– Kevin Courrier is a writer/broadcaster, film critic, teacher and author (Artificial Paradise: The Dark Side of The Beatles' Utopian Dream). His forthcoming book is Reflections in the Hall of Mirrors: American Movies and the Politics of Idealism. In January 2012, at the Miles Nidal Centre JCC in Toronto, Courrier begins a lecture series (film clips included) based on Reflections. Check their schedule. 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.

Coriolanus: The Indomitable Roman

2012-01-23T12:00:00.002-05:00

In his directorial debut, Coriolanus, Ralph Fiennes shows a genuine conceptual talent. He’s made a modern-dress version of Shakespeare’s Roman tragedy, with the title character (played by Fiennes himself), a general in Marine camouflage gear who starts off by defeating the neighboring Volscians, waging an Iraq-style war shot with hand-held cameras. (John Logan, whose credits include Gladiator, Hugo and the stage play Red, wrote the screenplay.) The cinematographer is Barry Ackroyd, and these early sequences are reminiscent of his best-known assignment, The Hurt Locker, with their dusty, metallic lime greens and their kinetic, you-are-there camerawork. Fiennes sets the scenes with TV news headlines and, in one particularly witty episode, he and Logan translate an exchange among Romans about Coriolanus as a Frontline-style debate. When Coriolanus returns from the war, the tribunes who plot his downfall are a pair of smug suits (James Nesbitt and Paul Jesson) who manipulate the Roman people so craftily that instead of being elected consul he’s exiled; his aristocratic pride, which prevents him from abasing himself to them – he won’t show them his battle wounds – is interpreted as proof that he doesn’t prize the good of the populace above his own selfish concerns. In the movie he comes from a distinguished military family: his bellicose mother Volumnia (Vanessa Redgrave), who boasts that she’d rather lose eleven sons in battle than have one behave like a coward, attends his welcome-home reception uniformed like a WAC.

Coriolanus is one of the plays in which Shakespeare addresses the fickleness of mobs – Julius Caesar and to a lesser extent Timon of Athens are the others – and they’re notoriously tough to pull off. The crowd scenes in Coriolanus, like the ones in Julius Caesar, are more theoretical than dramatic; even though you know that Shakespeare’s right about mobs, it’s hard to buy the moment when a line or two from a charismatic speaker, or even Marc Antony’s oration, sways the Romans to flip their sympathies. It’s even harder to render scenes like these convincing on a big screen when the style you’ve chosen is documentary realism, but Fiennes makes an honorable try. The main problem with the movie is that it lacks tonal variety, a flaw Fiennes and Logan have inherited from the text. Fascinating as it is, with extraordinary scenes and a couple of memorable characters (Coriolanus and Volumnia), Coriolanus must be Shakespeare’s most somber tragedy; even Timon contains more humor, though it’s bitter and caustic. And once the title character, stung to fury by his treatment at the hands of the Romans, defects to the Volscians and allies himself with their leader, Aufidius (Gerard Butler, in a surprisingly believable performance), and the filmmakers have run out of visual invention, the movie slips into an undifferentiated grayness.

Gerard Butler & Ralph Fienne in Coriolanus

But it certainly has its virtues, including the performances of Redgrave and Brian Cox as Coriolanus’s friend, the senator Menenius, who stands by him and strives in vain to teach him enough political savvy to rescue his position with the Romans. Cox gets Menenius’s practiced- politician side: the authority, the easy intimacy, the quick, charismatic smile, the ingratiating style that works on all generations. But his affection for Coriolanus and his family is sincere, and we can see that his friend’s inability to kiss up – the very thing Menenius manages with so little strain – and the way he’s misinterpreted as a result saddens Menenius deeply. (Logan gives him a tragic ending – he slashes his wrists when Coriolanus joins the enemy – that isn’t in Shakespeare’s text.) It’s a performance of tremendous warmth and skill. Redgrave’s Volumnia is elegantly understated, which makes the violence and jingoism in her words all the more unsettling. Unlike her son, Volumnia has a sense of diplomacy, but she also has a capacity for anger and a steep backbone that make sense of the blood line. It’s a frighteningly convincing piece of acting. When Coriolanus joins the Volscians, we see his mother and his wife Virgilia (Jessica Chastain) watching the news on television, and as Redgrave’s Volumnia takes in her son’s radical actions, we can read both horror and comprehension in her silence. We don’t read much on Chastain’s face, though; it’s not a very revealing performance. Chastain has won a great deal of praise -- and a National Society of Film Critics Award -- for the range of work she’s done in supporting roles over the past year, but I don’t think it’s all been equally effective. (Her best, I’d say, was in Take Shelter.) Her early scenes in Coriolanus suggest that Virgilia may feel conflicted about her husband’s commitment to playing a warrior’s part, but that idea gets lost and you don’t have much sense of her in the second half of the movie. (To be fair, the role is underwritten.)

Fiennes is perfectly cast as a man whose uncompromising nature amounts almost to arrogance – too perfectly, perhaps. He’s very effective but rather icy, even in the scene where his emotions are touched by the pleas of his mother and his wife and his little boy (dressed as a miniature soldier) beg him to return to Rome. Fiennes has an unyielding quality as an actor; he’s best in movies where the repellent quality of his characters is a starting point for either fascination (Schindler’s List, his small role in The Good Thief) or a journey to an unlikely redemption (The End of the Affair). He’s a superb technician; he handles the verse here expertly. But you may not be able to get much farther than admiration for him, and I suspect that Coriolanus can’t work if you don’t feel some sympathy for the way in which this man is flayed alive by his own indomitability. I saw the Canadian actor Colm Feore in the part once, and he made it resonate; Robert Ryan, who played it famously at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Connecticut in the Sixties, must have been amazing. Fiennes doesn’t have the vulnerability for tragedy.

– 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.

Black and White and Red: A Tale of Combat Togetherness

2012-01-22T12:00:00.001-05:00

Terrence Howard and Cuba Gooding Jr. in Red Tails

The homophobia, racism, misogyny and pure backwardness among Republican candidates hoping to relocate to the White House is beyond shocking. Even crazier than Rick Santorum’s desire to ban all forms of contraception is the pledge by Newt Gingrich, who calls Barack Obama a “food stamp president,” to make poor black children clean bathrooms in their schools. He alleges they have no work ethic, so his solution involves abolishing child labor laws and paying slave wages (about 60 cents an hour!) to kids as young as nine for janitorial duty.

In Red Tails, a passion project for more than 20 years from executive producer George Lucas, some presumably poor black kids in the mid-20th century skip toilet patrol but grow up to become brave ace pilots during World War II. The film is a fictionalized account of the real-life 332nd Fighter Group of the Tuskegee Airmen, who trained at a similarly named school in Alabama and served in the segregated U.S. Army Air Corps. Almost seven decades later, the genius behind the Star Wars franchise had to finance the new movie himself – at least $58 million – because Hollywood studios feared a predominantly African-American cast would limit box-office success.

In tribute to the courage of Lucas and especially of the true Tuskegee heroes, I wish I could report that Red Tails is a masterpiece. But the script by John Ridley and Aaron McGruder (Boondocks) relies on wooden, cliched dialogue and characters, all seemingly straight out of 1940s B-movies about combat: There’s the wise-cracking chief mechanic (Andre Royo) with his cap turned sideways; a religious fellow (Marcus T. Paulk) who carries a card for good luck that depicts a black Jesus; the 332nd’s never-less-than-wise Major Colonel Emanuel Stance (Cuba Gooding Jr.) always puffing on a big Meerschaum pipe like General Douglas MacArthur; and the insidious German Luftwaffe commander who instructs his forces to “Show no mercy!” What? Were these Nazis liable to show mercy if not told otherwise?

David Oyelowo asJoe “Lightning” Little

All the actors, in fact, are relegated to tired retro types with nicknames: Nate Parker plays Captain Marty “Easy” Julian, who drinks too much; David Oyelowo appears as Joe “Lightning” Little, a rambunctious pilot regularly grandstanding against orders; Tristan Wilds is Ray “Junior” Gannon, an eager flyboy pleading to stay even when his eyesight is impaired after being wounded in a mission (“I’d rather be dead than on the ground!”). The stiffest performance comes from Terrence Howard, as Colonel A.J. Bullard, whose military posture is undeterred by the unabashed bigotry of his white superiors. Two of those superior officers are small roles unmemorably inhabited by Bryan Cranston and Gerald McRaney.

The dogfight scenes that ought to make up for a lackluster story look like video games with a Star Wars panache. A feature directorial debut for Antony Hemingway, Red Tails has a title that refers to the hue these servicemen painted parts of their planes. At first, they are given old, barely functional aircraft from “Uncle Sam’s junk heap,” as someone in the film says, and not really allowed to fully participate in the war. Their main responsibility is to protect the bombers flown by whites. By going rogue, Lightning periodically manages to destroy Nazi armament trains and battleships, but he’s reprimanded. At an all-Negro base in Italy, they gripe about their second-class status. Back home, newspapers run stories insinuating that “the Tuskegee experiment” has failed because blacks aren’t up to the task. “You’re colored men in a white man’s army,” Stance proclaims at one point as if they – and we – don’t already know that. This is the beginning of a predictable, requisite pep talk.

Meanwhile, at the Pentagon, Bullard convinces the brass to supply up-to-date P-51 Mustangs with which to counter the German Messerschmitts. “We have a right to fight for our country, the same as any other men,” he contends. Maybe, but they sure don’t have a right to buy drinks in the local officer’s club, which Lightning boldly enters and where a Caucasian soldier shouts at him: “Go home, nigger!” The lad would probably not be safe going home if the lovely Italian girl he’s been romancing, Sofia (Daniela Ruah), agrees to his proposal. At that time, mixed marriages are outlawed in many states with Jim Crow laws.

The film’s most interesting development is the tension between Bullard, who believes that slow and steady wins the racial race, and Lightning, a sort of hotblooded militant. Unfortunately, Hemingway and company do not explore this idea in any depth. The classic Martin Luther King-Malcolm X divide remains unexamined. Once Hitler is defeated, it will be another decade before the civil rights movement starts up and the military won’t be desegregated until 1948, thanks to Harry Truman. If Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich or any of the other current bigots had been president then, blacks might still be in symbolic chains. And forced to spend their childhoods mopping school toilets.

– 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.

Out From The Fringes: Soulpepper's Kim's Convenience

2012-01-21T12:20:00.002-05:00

Janet (Esther Jun) and Appa (Paul Sun-Hyung Lee)

A good friend of mine once invited me to a play because she needed to see some “life.” And to her, theatre was all about “life.” Kim’s Convenience, a new Canadian play about a Korean family in Toronto, is certainly full of “life.”

Written by Ins Choi, Kim's Convenience, which debuted at Toronto’s Soulpepper Theatre Company on Thursday, is the story of the Kim family led by patriarch Appa, his wife Umma and their children, Jung and Janet. Appa originally left South Korea and immigrated to Canada with his wife and unborn son and they open a convenience store. In a poignant and funny interlude in the middle of the play, Appa, played by Paul Sun-Hyung Lee, and Umma, played by Jean Yoon, perform a memory scene under spotlight. They recall looking at the convenience store with great hope and so they try to come up with a name. (By the time they settle on Kim’s Convenience, Appa has considered several names including “Kim Horton’s.”) This scene, which resonates in the play, is a beautiful distillation of the dream every new Canadian hopes for in making a better life in a new land.

Kim’s Convenience is about the first generation Korean immigrant. Mr. Kim reflects the drive, intelligence and passion of owning his own business, and the play is based on writer Ins Choi’s own family. Choi’s father ran the store during the day while taking English classes at night. His mother took care of him and his two sisters while living above the store. Choi’s roots were in the west end of Toronto in suburbia. Kim’s Convenience takes place in Regent Park, a downtown neighbourhood in transition, as condos begin to replace low-income housing. Consequently, the play looks and feels authentic.

Jung (Ins Choi)

The crux of the story is the generational divide between the parents and the children. The parents are strict and want their children to take over the store but the kids have other interests completely removed from the business. Janet (Esther Jun) wants to be a photographer. Her brother Jung (Choi) is the lost son who had an argument with his father forcing him to leave years earlier. In the play, we learn that they haven’t spoken to one another in a long time; one as stubborn as the other. But the play is totally centered around Appa (Mr. Kim) played by Paul Sun-Hyung Lee. Lee’s performance takes on a caustic shape almost from the get-go. Since English is his second language, Choi has written the character to speak with a very heavy accent in point form style. Mr. Kim is a likable guy in spite of his edginess and I would have liked more quieter, intimate scenes between him and his family. But Mr. Kim has a business to run while stopping thieves and calling the police for illegally parked cars. His belligerent style wasn’t too overbearing considering he’s on stage for most of the 85-minute duration.

Nevertheless, the climatic scene when Jung returns to see his father for the first time in years was too stiff. In it, Jung answers a series of questions that he calls the “Korean” test where Appa throws out a series of dates and numbers as Jung tells him why they are important facts about Korea. It’s a well-written scene, but the characters were stuck too far apart for the exchange, barely moving. Now, distance usually means tension between two characters when they face off against one another. But it doesn't work here because Jung is trying to reconnect to his father at this important moment, not staying further away. In other words, the action doesn't suit the text. And it's a sign that this new play is still a work in progress.

Jean Yoon (Umma) and Paul Sun-Hyung Lee (Appa)

Last summer, it debuted during the Toronto Fringe Festival to great acclaim. I didn’t see that version, but I know the Fringe productions, as a rule, are efforts to find their shape at the best of times. Part of the charm of going to the Fringe Festival is to see new, underdeveloped work. That said, this play was pretty tight dramatically, with a solid, cliché-free script. Most of the cast members were in the original version last summer, so they were grounded, fully realized performances. Esther Jun plays Janet with confidence and gusto. Her moments verbally sparring with Appa make for a strong opening. Ins Choi, who plays Jung, is well mannered and gaining our empathy for having a lousy job and volatile relationship with his father. Clearly he wants to reconnect with his old man. His scene with Umma, (Yoon) in the church that brought us the background to his troubled life, is special.

As the first original Canadian play ever produced by Soulpepper, Kim’s Convenience still has some rough edges. This flaw was revealed by the awkwardness of one scene featuring Cle Bennett as Alex, one of 4 characters he played during the night. Alex is the tough kid who grows up and becomes a police officer. He was Jung’s best friend in high school, and came to the store because Mr. Kim dialed 911 to have an illegally parked car removed. Alex becomes smitten with Janet, now 30, who used to hang out with them as a 10-year-old. This relationship sets up a scene of farcical proportions between Appa and Alex, as the proud storeowner tries to make him propose to his daughter, by literally twisting his arm. While this move may have worked in the context of a Fringe play, where mistakes are forgiven, this professional production needs a better treatment.

Nevertheless, Kim’s Convenience proves it is possible to see a play directly reflecting the contemporary Canadian experience. It’s the story of a Korean family, but it could easily be the story of any European or Asian family’s transition to a new culture. Since 1970, Canada’s so-called multi-cultural society has been under a microscope, because it too, like the play, is a work in progress. Immigration policy has shaped the urban centers of this country more than any other government program, making Canada one of the most diverse societies in the world. Kim’s Convenience offers audiences a chance to understand the diversity of Toronto, the complexity of adjusting to a new society and the importance of family.

Kim’s Convenience runs until February 11th at Soulpepper.

- John Corcelli is a writer, theatre director and broadcaster. 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.

A Separation: Marriage and Divorce – Iranian Style

2012-01-20T12:00:00.008-05:00

Iran may be a fundamentalist totalitarian regime, but many of Iran’s filmmakers are among the world’s best at exposing the deficiencies and flaws of their country on film. Their exposés have to survive state censorship, police harassment, the banning of their work and, sometimes, as in the case of leading director Jafar Panahi (The White Balloon, Offside) even being sentenced to jail. Panahi is serving six years (and is banned for 20 years from making films) just for standing up for his beliefs. I am not altogether convinced that this isn’t something of a shell game on the part of the Iranian regime, which may ban or censor their indigenous cinema at home but seem, suspiciously, to be unable to ever prevent those movies from showing abroad at film festivals and in Western commercial release. (Panahi’s latest movie This is Not a Film was even made while he was under house arrest and facing possible jail time.) The fact that some Iranian films, such as those of now exiled Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf (A Moment of Innocence, Gabbeh) have a French distributor does mean that these films have a life beyond the reach of the censor, which perhaps explains why those movies were shown in 1997 in political arch-enemy Israel’s Jerusalem International Film Festival, to acclaim locally and anger at home.(I attended that festival and was more than a little taken aback when I saw those movies listed in the festival guide.) Makhmalbaf himself indicated in a letter to the Iranian press that the showings in Israel had been approved by government officials, which, if true, was an interesting development in the otherwise fractious Iranian-Israeli relationship. Notably, Iran’s best known filmmaker, Abbas Kiarostami (Taste of Cherry, Certified Copy), whose films are generally apolitical, runs into fewer problems with the authorities than any of his other famous cohorts.

Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation, which just won the Golden Globe award for Best Foreign Language Film, and in 2011 picked up the Silver Bear, the top prize at the Berlin Film Festival, differs somewhat from his country’s norm in that he was able to make his movie without any government funding at all. Thus he could avoid the trap of having to sneak his critiques into his film, and was also able to attack the religious character of the state more forthrightly than any filmmaker before him. He was still banned, temporarily, from making his movie after he publicly voiced support for Makhmalbaf and the imprisoned Panahi, statements for which he later apologized, perhaps only so he could get his film completed. (Interestingly, it's very likely that A Separation, Iran's submission for Academy Award recognition, will be competing against Israel's Oscar entry, Joseph Cedar's religiously themed Footnote, for the Best Foreign Language Film award next month in Hollywood.)

Peyman Moaadi and Ali-Asghar Shahbazi

Melding the powerful drama of Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage (1973) with a provocative Rashomon-like storyline, A Separation, which Farhadi produced, wrote and directed, begins in a judge’s office as separated couple Nader (Peyman Moaadi) and Simin (Leila Hatami) make their case for custody of their eleven year old daughter Termeh (Sarina Farhadi). Simin wants to take the girl abroad (the film implies that Simin’s not Iranian-born and, perhaps, particularly unable to deal with the societal restrictions women face in the strictly religious Iranian Republic) but Nader refuses to consider that option, as he feels obligated to take care of his Alzheimer’s’ afflicted father (Ali-Asghar Shahbazi). That decision has prompted Simin to ask for a divorce, even though, as she puts it, her husband is a ‘decent’ man. But the disinterested magistrate denies that request, forcing her to stay in Tehran, and move in with her parents while Termeh stays with Nader. It’s when Simin helps arrange for a caretaker – a young, pious and poor woman, Razieh (Sareh Bayat) – to help Nader’s father that things escalate. A succession of events sees Nader throw Razieh out of his home, only to be blamed later on for her miscarriage, caused she says when she fell down the stairs. Did he cause it, did he even know she was pregnant? A Separation is full of hidden secrets, withheld information and a couple at the centre of it all who no longer know how to communicate with each other, if they ever did at all.

What’s always stood out in Iranian cinema is how the portrait of life in Iran, and especially in Tehran, the big city, is so much like our Western norm, yet significantly different, too. (The mullahs in Iran would cringe at the former statement and some have decried A Separation as proffering a false picture of the country.) Panahi’s debut film The White Balloon (1995), in which a little girl gets lost in the urban jungle of Tehran, paints a world where children are ignored, immigrants are viewed with suspicion and people fail to listen to each other. Sound familiar? But Panahi’s later films, such as The Circle (2000) and Offside (2006) are explicit broadsides launched at the state; the former depicting a severely circumscribed world where women have virtually no rights that are not granted them by men, the latter a lighter (and subtler) look at the lengths young women, who are rabid soccer fans, will go to to see a World Cup qualifying match when their gender is not allowed into the stadium. And Panahi’s Crimson Gold (2003), a film inspired by Taxi Driver (1976) and replicating much of its plot line, has a disturbing scene, one among many, where the cops raid a private party where men and women are illegally mixing. (The strictest interpretations of Islam prohibit women from interacting with any men they are not married or related to, a point of view it shares with the haradem, the most Orthodox of Jews.)

Shahab Hosseini (centre) in a scene from A Separation

A Separation also connects to and deviates from our Western way of life. Nader doesn’t get any financial help from the government to help take care of his father and thus tries to get hired help on the cheap. Any social safety net existing in Iran is frayed, almost to the breaking point. Yet when Razieh finds that the old man has soiled himself, she is compelled to call a religious expert to get permission to interact with him in an intimate manner by removing his clothes. She’s given dispensation to do so but later on claims that she wasn’t allowed to do so religiously, though she did so anyway. Religion in A Separation can be used cynically to suit one’s own ends and needs. Again, as in Judaism, Islamic religious ‘experts’ can contradict each other and regularly do so – Iran allows women to drive cars, whjle Saudi Arabia, with an even stricter religious dictum holding sway, does not – so Razieh’s claim is accepted at face value.

The holy Qu’ran, startlingly, is almost wielded as weapon in the film, to be used to settle arguments or disparage another’s religious beliefs or imply a lack thereof. There’s a whiff of fascism in the way Razieh’s intolerant husband Hojuat (Shahab Hosseini), in particular, tries to imply that Nader and Simin aren’t sufficiently religious, i.e. moral. You can almost feel the secret police ready to pounce and haul the disbelievers away, except you also get the sense that those expected to enforce religious conformity or at least ensure that no rules are broken – the judiciary, the constabulary – don’t feel very passionate about the subject, either. That a bit of Simin’s hair is frequently visible under her hijab testifies to the laxness surrounding current religious observance as displayed in Iranian cinema. I think it’s also looser than in any other Iranian movies I’ve seen, though, of course, in private Iranian women often don’t wear any religious items of clothing at all. That’s a fact of life that cinema in Iran dare not depict, at least not yet.

Other aspects of A Separation are more universal. Both the secular Nader and the hot-headed, unemployed, religious Houjat are quite paternalistic, forcing their wives to sneak around behind their backs – Razieh doesn’t tell Houjat that she’s taken on the caretaker job – and, more crucially, hold back information their men ought to know, if only to help tamp down the angry emotions that are pitting them at each other’s throats. There’s a violent incident in the film that shook me because I’ve never seen violence depicted so directly before in Iranian cinema – not even in Crimson Gold, which was more oblique.

While some pieces of the puzzle surrounding the fight between Nader and Razieh are eventually unveiled, putting new spins on what we thought we knew, other ambiguities, such as the specific reasons that Nader and Simin’s marriage has fallen apart, are not. That’s refreshing and pleasingly open-ended, and even morally challenging. It also makes up for the movie’s occasional contrivances, such as Razieh’s continuing to work for Nader after she quits the first day. The meshing of the main story and the breakup of the marriage, which brackets the beginning and end of the movie, and its devastating effect on the child caught in the middle, doesn’t quite coalesce either, though the films’ actors are all superb. But if Farhadi doesn’t quite display the easy directorial confidence of a Panahi, or a Makhmalbaf, and if the film feels overly planned and laid out at times, his peek behind the curtain of a society and country we don’t know all that well offers fascinating and provocative pleasures nonetheless.

– Shlomo Schwartzberg is a film critic, teacher and arts journalist based in Toronto. He teaches regular courses at Ryerson University's LIFE Institute, where he just finished teaching a course on the work of Steven Spielberg. He will next be teaching a course there on the films of Sidney Lumet, beginning on Friday, Feb. 10, 2012.

BBC's The Hour: A Period Drama Whose Time has Come

2012-01-19T15:00:00.003-05:00

Ben Whishaw stars in The Hour on BBC

In the years before the US dominated the international scene, and decades before Jack Bauer started putting severed heads in bowling bags, a ripping spy story could be told without suitcase nukes and hacksaws. Giving us a glimpse into the early days of BBC television, at its heart BBC’s The Hour (broadcast by the BBC in the UK this past summer, by BBC America in the US this fall, and now available on Netflix in Canada) is just such an old-fashioned spy drama – complete with government operatives in identical trench coats, tapped telephones, and messages hidden in crossword puzzles.

Period dramas – and British period dramas especially – used to have a very particular reputation on this side of the ocean. In the years before premium cable, discerning television viewers could reliably turn to PBS and its stable of British dramas: Upstairs, Downstairs; The Jewel in the Crown; Brideshead Revisited; any of a number of adaptations of Pride and Prejudice. (And even as recently as this past fall, PBS has a well-justified hit with its broadcast of ITV’s Downton Abbey.) But however entertaining and distracting, one thing period dramas rarely have been is topical. If anything The Hour – despite the action taking place well over 50 years ago – may well suffer from too much topicality. Against the backdrop of a waning superpower trying to shore up its influence in a volatile Middle East with an unpopular and arguably illegal war, domestic journalists accused of unpatriotic activity for questioning a sitting government, a culture of suspicion and surveillance of average citizens, a lesser show than The Hour might almost buckle beneath the weight of its relevance. But it never does. With one short six-episode season under its belt, and a second season on its way in 2012, The Hour is a charming and eminently watchable drama told with understated production design, unassuming sexual tension, minimal but effective violence, and an ensemble of compelling characters.

Romola Garai and Ben Whishaw

Set in 1956 in BBC’s historic Lime Grove Studios, The Hour essentially tells the story of the birth of a new kind of television news magazine. When we meet our team – Freddie (Ben Whishaw, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer), a brash young reporter; Bel (Romola Garai, Atonement), a rising news producer; and Clarence (Anton Lesser), a veteran newsman – television news in the UK is still in its infancy. Still largely beholden to the newsreel culture of the last decade, TV news magazines consisted mainly of new copy being read over footage of debutantes, garden parties, and celebrity weddings. But all that is about the change. Tasked with producing a new weekly current affairs programme, the three are joined by the new show’s front man and host, Hector Madden (played with cadish glee by Dominic West, The Wire), an untested talent who gets the job because of his connections and social position. As the news heats up locally with the untimely death of old friend of Freddie’s and internationally with Egypt’s nationalization of the Suez Canal and populist uprisings in Hungary, a smoldering romantic triangle soon develops between Bel, Freddie, and Hector. In only a few episodes, the series does an amazing job of balancing its three dramatic storylines (the romance, the journalistic struggles, and the Cold War intrigue) in a way that keeps its viewers continually interested.

Created and written by screenwriter Abi Morgan (Shame, The Iron Lady), The Hour clearly draws a lot of its inspiration from the real-life story of Panorama, BBC’s groundbreaking TV news magazine which premiered in late 1953. Panorama (with its legendary host David Dimbleby, and producer Grace Wyndham Goldie) actually made its name with the same two stories that dominate the first season of The Hour – the uprising in Hungary and the Suez crisis of 1956. The real-life show, like its fictional counterpart, also went head to head against the so-called “14-day rule”, an agreement between the BBC and British government which stipulated that nothing currently under debate in Parliament could be discussed on television for two weeks. Panorama controversially got around the rule by reporting on the international reaction to the crisis – a decision mirrored by the actions of our heroes in The Hour.

Dominic West as Hector Madden

In this age of Mad Men and Boardwalk Empire, it isn’t all that surprising that a period drama can be so gripping. But the fact is that The Hour has learned the right lessons from its American cousins, both from their triumphs and from their failures. The Hour is less concerned with authentic clothing and hair styles than with telling a good story with fleshed out characters. Freddie, our main protagonist, is a young reporter who (despite a substantial ego) somehow believes himself to be almost invisible, and thereby invulnerable. These illusions are shattered, slowly but decisively, by the middle of this first short season. While the relationship between Freddie and Bel drives the story (and their playful Tracy-Hepburn dynamic is the emotional spine of the narrative), and West’s evolving characterization of Hector Madden is a continually pleasant surprise, Anton Lesser’s Clarence Fendley might be the quiet hero of the piece. As the veteran newsman in charge of these young rebels, Clarence knows better how to play this game, but as the stakes keep rising, he too finds himself out of his depth.

It is, in the end, a very British story. Class and social status are apparent in almost every on-screen relationship, and the newsroom setting turns out be ideally suited to witness what will turn out to be Britain’s final days as a world superpower. (The Suez Crisis will ultimately culminate in the resignation of British Prime Minister Anthony Eden in January 1957.) But it is still as much a story of today as of yesterday, and when a character reports on the US condemnation of a joint British/French military action as violating international law, a contemporary viewer will suffer an ironic shudder of familiarity.

The Hour is great television by any standard (British or otherwise). Find it on DVD or on Netflix, and don’t make any plans for the weekend: it wouldn’t surprise me if you ended up watching it all in one sitting.

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

These Guys Are Pigs: Men Who Dance

2012-01-18T15:00:00.002-05:00

George Stamos and Dany Desjardins at the Dancemakers Studio

Exploring the animal within is one way of describing what’s going on in Liklik Pik, a 60-minute multi-media work by Montreal-based choreographer and dancer George Stamos.

In particular, it’s his inner pig which appears most to fascinate Stamos who, together with dancing partner Dany Desjardins, wears a pig mask as part of his exploration of the complex relationship between humans and animals.

The piece, which debuted Tuesday night as part of the TwoByFour festival of original duets which Dancemakers is presenting at its Centre of Creation studios inside Toronto’s Distillery District through to the end of the month, also uses grunting and snorting as well as the childhood ditty, This Little Piggy Went to Market (spoken here in snippets of French), to cement the pig as the work’s totemic theme.

But such literalness aside, Liklik Pik (the title appears derived from the Tok Pisin language of Papua, New Guinea, in which pik is the word for "pig") also works on a level of poetic association, using voice narration, repetitive movement, music, ambient sound and video projection to present the multidimensional bond with a disarming level of success.

Humans co-exist with animals, as Stamos demonstrates charmingly when he and Desjardins speak nostalgically of all the pets they’ve ever had. But animals exist also within humans in the form of certain so-called lower life behaviours which Stamos, a graduate of The School for New Dance Development in Amsterdam, investigates while undulating his crotch in a polyester suit, the unofficial uniform of the lounge lizard.

Photo by Johnny Ranger

In this sweaty romp of a work, these animal tendencies are sometimes presented playfully, such as when Stamos halts the on-stage action to wipe his brow and breathlessly chat up the audience about the latest eating trends within his own gay community. With Desjardins, he then serves up platters of freshly baked cupcakes – vanilla and chocolate – encouraging the audience to scarf them back as they listen to him drone on about clubbing in New York and the latest fad for nudity in contemporary dance, which he threatens to emulate with a striptease that ends with his underwear.

Here, Stamos is having the audience on, and it is a clever bit of sabotage in that it not only breaks down the proverbial fourth wall but clears the way for the action which follows, much of it disturbingly bestial as when one of dancers (pig masked again) simulates urinating on the other lying like a dog on the floor: humans become animals through a loss of moral direction, a loss of civilized control.

This message is scarily amplified in an earlier segment in which Stamos and Desjardins roll in synch on the floor to the taped voice of a radio announcer describing last summer’s scientific feat of 150 human-animal hybrid embryos grown in British laboratories. This part of the show is fact, not fiction, and it instantly sends a shiver down the spine of those who, just moments ago, were merrily munching on cake in the front row.

Stamos and Desjardins then flesh out the analogy further, walking on all fours and slyly encircling each other like predators in hunt of prey. It’s a deadly serious game. And it makes for terrific theatre. With Liklik Pik, Stamos effectively holds up a mirror to society to reflect the beast coiled within, waiting to attack.Oink to that.

– Deirdre Kelly is a journalist (The Globe and Mail) and internationally recognized dance critic. She is also the author of the national best-selling memoir, Paris Times Eight (Greystone Books/Douglas & McIntyre). Visit her website for more information, http://www.deirdrekelly.com. On January 28, 4pm, Deirdre will interview Anthropologie merchandise manager Aaron Hoey live on stage at the Interior Design Show IDS 12 in Toronto; on January 29, she will emcee the Amici Ensemble’s show, Fashionista: Fashion as Art, at Toronto’s Glenn Gould Studio, starting at 3pm.

Childhood’s End: Criterion’s The Complete Jean Vigo

2012-01-17T12:00:00.074-05:00

Shame on those who, during their puberty, murdered the person they might have become.
- Jean Vigo, Towards a Social Cinema.

In Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris (1972), a movie about the collapse of the conventional romantic paradigm, there’s a particularly haunting moment midway through when Jeanne (Maria Schneider) and her fiancé Tom (Jean-Pierre Léaud), who is making a film about their courtship and marriage, meet at a waterside dock so that he can propose to her on camera. As they debate back and forth about whether they will, or whether they won’t, he puts a life buoy over her head and pins her arms. He traps her in what looks like a huge wedding ring. But she quickly dispenses with it and chucks it into the water below. As it sinks to the bottom of the sea, we can read the name L’Atalante on the buoy. Aside from making a direct reference to the final (and only) feature film in the terribly brief career of French director Jean Vigo, Bertolucci is also paying tribute to the sad passing of the romantic stirrings of our youth, of a childhood’s end; while keeping faith with that carnal appetite that made Jean Vigo a patron saint for the New Wave that Bertolucci was once part of in the early Sixties.

The Criterion Collection, in their own significant way of honoring the work of Jean Vigo, has recently released a sumptuous DVD package of his complete work.The discs as well include a number of invaluable supplementary materials, all proving that Vigo was indeed one of the most instinctually radical of film directors until his tragic death from tuberculosis at the age of 29 in 1934. In just under three hour of film footage (three shorts and one feature), Jean Vigo becomes before our eyes this luminously idealistic figure, a Byronic pop artist, who set out to preserve the innocent rebellion of childhood. The anarchistic and zealous pining for transcendence from authoritarian rule and dogma brought forth in Vigo a vivacious need to celebrate pure freedom; expressed not only in the content of his movies, but also in his flamboyant expressiveness, an expressiveness that echoed the spontaneity of true invention. While his work shares some of the revolutionary fervor found in the early Russian cinema, it does so without the latter’s schematic design. To experience Vigo is to feel instead like a balloon caught up in a quick breeze and pulled into states of elation that make sensual desire palpable.

Jean Vigo

Vigo’s impetuous and tragic life was equaled by no one except maybe actor James Dean in the Fifties. While both became iconic figures of youthful revolt and romantic allure, Vigo is James Dean without the crippling neurosis, the brooding contortions. If Dean was, in truth, a rebel with a cause – a need to be loved and accepted – Vigo was the rebel without one. He became what French film director Jacques Rivette called “an incessant improvisation of the universe, a perpetual and calm and self-assured creation of the world.” In The Complete Jean Vigo, we watch a young artist discover the playful child in himself until the sojourn ends with L’Atalante, where he seeks ways to preserve that playful child in an adult world with adult emotions and adult circumstances.

His journey begins with the short À propos de Nice (1930), a documentary that’s both an impish poetic montage and a political and social commentary. Vigo examines the milieu of Nice while various people find escapist ways to entertain themselves. As the middle-class goes through their daily routines, the underclass struggles to survive. Vigo once described the film as “a way of life…put on trial…the last gasps of a society so lost in its escapism that it sickens you and makes you sympathetic to a revolutionary solution.” While it may well have sickened Vigo, the movie doesn’t wear the hair-shirt of the rhetoric that he wrote about it. À propos de Nice is actually more playfully mocking than a call to arms about Nice's social iniquities during the late Twenties. By employing quick cuts, slow motion and lap dissolves, Vigo contrasts class conflict in the film without imposing ideology onto the material. Vigo’s “revolutionary solution,” as he would demonstrate in his later films, was more innocent than violent, expressed with an anger that never gutted his idealism but enhanced it. À propos de Nice was financed by a dowry from his father-in-law and the project brought him into collaboration with cinematographer Boris Kaufman who would work with Vigo until the end. (Kaufman would also continue his aesthetic for the commonplace by later shooting Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront and Sidney Lumet’s 12 Angry Men.)

À propos de Nice

Jean Vigo’s second film, Taris, roi de l'eau (1931), wasn't made with the freedom he enjoyed on À propos de Nice, but was a commissioned work for Gaumont Studios about the champion French swimmer Jean Taris. Although Vigo disowned most of the picture (some of which was shot by others including Jean Renoir), it still has some beautifully startling sequences. While the first part is largely a demonstration of Taris’s techniques, Vigo in the second half liberates Taris from formal instruction so that we catch him swimming freely, as if he were a fish fresh off the hook. In the end, putting Taris in a bowler hat and long coat, the cheeky Vigo has the French hero appearing to walk on water (many years before Hal Ashby would invoke the image – more literally and unimaginatively – with Chauncey Gardner in Being There).

Jean Vigo shooting Taris

The movie that brought a memorable notoriety to Vigo’s career, of course, was Zéro de conduite (1933), a short lyrical comedy/drama that depicts the repressive and rigid educational system in France at a boarding school. It ends with an insurrection by the young students. The picture not only drew extensively on Vigo’s own experiences at a boarding school, but perhaps also on more troubling family history. His father, Miguel Almereyda (whose namesake filmmaker Michael Almereyda, the talented director of Nadja and Hamlet, writes a perceptive essay on Jean Vigo in the Criterion booklet) was an anarchist who led a mutiny among French soldiers during the Great War and was later imprisoned. While there, he died under mysterious circumstances, as his son got bounced from one institution to another, always under an assumed name. Zéro de conduite can be seen as a vivid tribute to the values of his father (even perhaps paying homage to the motto of Jean’s paternal grandfather who told him, “I protect the weakest”). But rather than face prison for this jubilant expression of anarchist spirit, Vigo saw his film banned. (Zéro wasn’t publically screened until after the Liberation in February 1946.)

The pillow fight in Zero

The pleasure the movie takes in celebrating the young charges tweaking the status quo is as innocently liberating as watching The Beatles do the same thing years later in Richard Lester’s A Hard Day’s Night. Which makes it hard to imagine anyone getting incensed enough to censor its release except that the movie mocks everything sacred about French society. Zéro demonstrates such an infectious love of inventiveness – from Vigo’s tribute to Chaplin (where actor Jean Dasté, who would next play the groom in L’Atalante, as their daydreaming schoolmaster entertains them with his Little Tramp impersonations) – to the dreamy pillow fight that invokes the snowball fight that opens Abel Gance’s 1927 epic Napoleon.

Zéro de conduite clearly influenced François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, which was also a memoir that served as a manifesto against school authorities (even quoting some of Zéro's scenes), as well as Lindsay Anderson’s incendiary If… But Anderson’s film only superficially resembles Vigo's. In If…, the teachers are not the comic buffoons, the straw dogs of Vigo’s playful scorn, but much more violently realistic. The insurrection in Zéro is also filled with the vibrancy of a united student spirit where they seek to escape the structured world they are trapped in. (When the students protest their unappetizing lunch with taunting chants, they realize the cook is the mother of one of their own, so they stop chanting and comfort him.) But Anderson’s If… churlishly turns many of the students into carbon copies of the very people they’re rebelling against. In the end, If…is like Orwell’s Animal Farm stripped of its satire.

The 400 Blows

If Zéro de conduite carried the soul of what would later inspire the French New Wave of the early Sixties, it was Vigo’s L’Atalante (1934) that gave the movement its form and purpose. Considered by many to be one of the greatest cinematic works, L’Atalante began ironically with Vigo inheriting a project that he feared would put constraints on his freedom. What developed instead was an emotionally expansive work where Vigo took a conventional story by Jean Guinée and created a startlingly original tone poem to the fragility of romantic bonding. (When critic James Agee saw the film, he wrote, “It’s as if he had invented the wheel.”)

The basic story is about Jean (Jean Dasté), the captain of the canal barge L’Atalante, who has come ashore to a French provincial town to marry Juliette (Dita Parlo), even though they have barely met. From the opening shots, L’Atalante uses a discontinuous editing style depicting the varied reactions in the town that Godard would later borrow for Breathless. After the couple spends their honeymoon on the water doing barge deliveries, tensions arise because instead of seeing the world, Juliette is only getting glimpses of shorelines. There is also the presence of the cat loving Pere Jules (Michel Simon), a salty tattooed sailor, a man of the world, whom Juliette is both repelled by and attracted to. After Jean goes into a jealous rage over them talking in the quarters, they finally arrive in Paris where the couple embark to a music hall for relief. When a street merchant flirts with Juliette, however, he entices her away from a life on the sea to the bright lights of Paris. Frustrated, Jean soon abandons her.

The rest of the movie is about the anguish they experience at being apart and then their eventual reconciliation. But L’Atalante is more about moods than plot. Maurice Jaubert’s exquisitively inventive score not only embroiders the ups and downs of the couple’s married life (especially in an achingly erotic scene where the estranged couple dream of each other from their different beds), it becomes a key part of the story that brings them back together. (For those with a savvy ear for film music, you might recall that Truffaut lifted the same Jaubert music from the erotic dream sequence for his The Story of Adele H, another film about obsessive desire.)

In L’Atalante, Vigo freely uses and invents techniques best suited to his particular vision. There are practically no words to describe the sheer incongruous beauty of Juliette, in her bright white wedding dress, walking across the long barge under the night sky. The view of the anarchic cats scattering across the barge seem now like a foretelling of that great cat lover Chris Marker (Sans Soleil), the French film essayist who would inherit the libertarian leftist spirit of Vigo rather than his particular style.

By calling L’Atalante an ‘adult’ film, it does not diminish the young man’s spirit that informed it. In essence, the picture is a full examination of how one desperately tries to keep the ideals of love, with its zeal for adventure and mystery alive in a world that can take it all away. For Vigo, tragically, it was all taken away during his lifetime. First, the distributors cut the running time down to an hour to make it appeal to a popular audience. (They also changed the title to the ridiculous The Passing Barge, the title of a pop song that they also added to the picture.) Vigo would die shortly after this calamitous release. Over the years, though, the picture recovered. It was first restored in 1990 to 89 minutes thanks to a pristine copy being found in the archives of the Italian State broadcasting company. The new Criterion version is a new restoration with the crispest print I've seen yet.

Jean Daste and Dita Parlo in L'Atalante

Writing about Vigo in his book The Films in My Life, Truffaut spoke as an abiding spirit. “Like all artists, filmmakers search for realism in the sense that they search for their own reality, and they are generally tormented by the chasm between their aspirations and what they have actually produced, between life as they feel it and what they have managed to reproduce of it.” For Jean Vigo, time didn’t allow time for any chasm to exist, but he did turn torment into pleasure, real into the surreal, and in one short breath of life, brought us a vision of unbridled cinematic freedom.

***The Complete Jean Vigo contains a two-disc set with new high-definition digital restorations of his four films with wonderfully detailed commentary by Michael Temple, the author of Jean Vigo. The supplementary disc features a short excerpt on Vigo from a 1964 French television series on French directors. There's also a fascinating conversation with both François Truffaut and Eric Rohmer on L'Atalante from a 1968 television program. Michel Gondry provides a touching animated short tribute to the director. But the most invaluable extra is a 2001 documentary by film restorer and historian Bernard Eisenschitz which examines the various restorations of L'Atalante which includes fascinating rushes from the shoot including Jean Vigo directing the actors. There's also a 2001 video interview with Georgian-French director Otar Iosseliani on Vigo.

– Kevin Courrier is a writer/broadcaster, film critic, teacher and author (Artificial Paradise: The Dark Side of The Beatles' Utopian Dream). His forthcoming book is Reflections in the Hall of Mirrors: American Movies and the Politics of Idealism. In January 2012, at the Miles Nidal Centre JCC in Toronto, Courrier begins a lecture series (film clips included) based on Reflections. Check their schedule. 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.

Lit Wit: Theresa Rebeck's Seminar

2012-01-16T12:00:00.000-05:00

Hamish Linklater, Alan Rickman, Jerry O'Connell, Lily Rabe & Hettienne Park in Seminar. (Photo: Jeremy Daniel)

Theresa Rebeck’s Seminar, currently on Broadway, is a hard-boiled comedy about literary life that trades on our fantasies about writers in a highly entertaining fashion. Four aspiring twenty-something writers meet weekly in an Upper West Side apartment to show their work to a celebrated editor and get his response. Kate (Lily Rabe), a Bennington grad from a blue-chip background, is renting the luxurious venue, with its Hudson River view, from her father for an unheard-of low price. (One of her peers describes her lifestyle as “socialism for the rich.”) Douglas (Jerry O’Connell), an insufferable self-promoter with connections, has just returned from Yaddo, the artists’ colony, where he honed a story that’s under consideration at The New Yorker. Izzy (Hettienne Park) puts sex front and center in her work – she claims it’s the most important element in fiction – and flaunts her own sexuality, though the fact that she’s still living with her parents undercuts the daring of her forays into the adult world. The only member of the quartet without a whiff of privilege is Kate’s friend Martin (Hamish Linklater), who moves into her apartment early in the play because he’s being evicted from his own. Leonard (Alan Rickman), a rude, profanely sardonic, self-styled-hipster narcissist whom they’ve hired at an exorbitant fee, tears into their submissions, dismissing Kate’s after the first sentence as lethally boring and tempering his praise for Douglas’s accomplished style with a slam at his quickness to pander to his readers. (He calls him a whore and recommends he move to Hollywood.) And as he does so, he exposes their fragile egos, their terrors (week after week, Martin declines to pass over any of his own novel for Leonard’s inspection), their jealousies (Kate has a crush on Martin and resents the attention he pays to Izzy, who seduces him effortlessly), and the lengths to which their increasing desperation in this competitive literary hothouse atmosphere drives them.

Rebeck, an NYPD Blue alum with an impressive number of produced plays, has written the kind of glittering comic dialogue that used to be a mainstay during Broadway’s golden age (the twenties and thirties) but that you almost never run into these days. When you do encounter a playwright who knows how to turn a line, like Stephen Karam, whose Sons of the Prophet received excessively laudatory notices both in Boston last season and in New York this season, his or her talent is usually better suited to TV sitcoms than to the stage. Seminar, by contrast, is a sustained piece of writing: it’s well structured, and it gets funnier as it goes on. And Sam Gold’s brisk, impeccably acted production gives the play an ideal showcase. Rickman imports his trademark world-weary wit, dry and scalding. He’s like a Noël Coward character for a post-modern world, proud of how life has flayed him, still capable of aiming a razor insult with deadly accuracy. Rickman makes droning an art – his wound-up tirades are feats of vocal calisthenics. He’s such a master of British stage technique that you wonder if four young American actors (actually, O’Connell will be 38 next month, but he has no trouble pulling off a character who’s probably a decade younger) can hold their own with him. But they’re all terrific. Rabe, whose scratched alto suggests a gin-soaked version of Margaret Sullavan, gives a performance of extraordinary skill. She’s especially good in the second half, when Kate, who’s been crippled by a neurotic tendency to hang back, is motivated by her anger (at both Leonard and Martin, for their different sorts of rejection) to turn calculating and imaginative. Rabe, the daughter of the playwright David Rabe and the late actress Jill Clayburgh, was a splendid Portia opposite Al Pacino in last season’s brilliant revival of The Merchant of Venice, but she’s even more impressive here. The other performer worth singling out is Linklater, whose wry readings are sometimes deadpan and at other times pop like champagne corks.

Jerry O'Connell as Douglas and Lily Rabe as Kate (Photo: Jeremy Daniel)

The play is great fun, and the fact that you don’t believe a word of it isn’t a shortcoming. After all, who believes a word of The Front Page or Once in a Lifetime, the two best hard-boiled comedies ever brought to the stage? Unlike those, however, Seminar has a core of sentimentality – and that is a problem in this genre, which is cynical and satirical in tone and professes a jaded, uncompromising vision of the world. The play seems to be set up to skewer Leonard, to repay him for the viciousness of insults passing as criticism, for his cavalier attitude toward these students, for his high-handedness and casual sexism. He praises Izzy, who turns him on, but he tells Kate to write like a man, not a silly schoolgirl. Kate, devastated by Leonard’s criticism of a story she’s labored over for six years, tells him she’s withdrawing from the group and volunteers a friend of hers to replace her, offering up the beginning of a memoir he’s sent her. The writer is a cross-dressing Chicano coke dealer – a preposterous notion that’s right up Leonard’s alley: he’s just returned from a trip to Serbia, where his exposure to what he calls “the most terrifying nihilism the world has ever known” has given his machismo a solid work-out. In fact, the Chicano memoirist is Kate’s invention, and the prose, which Leonard gets excited over, is her own. Then Martin uncovers a story in Leonard’s past that explains why he stopped writing and became an editor: an undergraduate he was teaching exposed him as a plagiarist. But Rebeck backs down. It turns out that Leonard is a gifted writer whose career was sandbagged by a lie (he didn’t plagiarize the student’s work), that he’s dedicated to using his cachet to help these literary hopefuls, and that his radar for both good and bad prose is unerring. He isn’t fooled by Kate’s trick: he knows the faux memoir is hers, but he also knows that the lean, vibrant writing in it is infinitely superior to the dead horse she’s been flogging for half a dozen years. And he rescues Martin, who turns out to be the most talented of them all. Seminar is very amusing but it substitutes a more superficial kind of satisfaction for the kick it promises. The wind-up could have been written by Douglas.

– 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.

The Lady’s Mettle: A Memory of Maggie

2012-01-15T12:00:00.002-05:00

Meryl Streep stars as Margaret Thatcher in Iron Lady

In the early 1980s two Brits at The Socialist Worker newspaper designed an immense movie poster for a faux updated version of Gone With the Wind. Instead of Vivien Leigh in the arms of Clark Gable, the image depicted Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher being carried by President Ronald Reagan under the promo “The most EXPLOSIVE love story ever.” At the bottom, another tagline: “She promised to follow him to the end of the earth. He promised to organise it!” The context was that this dynamic trans-Atlantic duo had been pushing humankind to the brink of nuclear annihilation. The symbolic Doomsday Clock maintained by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists ticked dangerously close at eight minutes to midnight.

Dialogue in The Iron Lady, however, never seems to include the word “nuclear” and Ronnie appears as a mere Post-it note rather than a poster in the examination of the Maggie’s career. There’s one brief snippet of them dancing together. Much of late 20th-century history, in fact, flies by as a footnote to her magnificent obsession: the belief that, in a time of rampant misogyny and sharp class distinctions, a woman from humble circumstances could remake a rather liberal society into an ultra-conservative empire. After knee-capping the trade unions at home, Thatcher turns her attention to empire in 1982 by ordering the United Kingdom to wage war against Argentina over control of the Falklands – a chain of islands located just off the coast of South America, almost 8,000 miles from London.

Jim Broadbent and Meryl Streep as the Thatchers

But The Iron Lady spends most of its 105 minutes inside the deteriorating brain of the protagonist, played with great intelligence and a convincing British accent by Meryl Streep. Suffering from dementia, the contemporary character conjures up hallucinations of her husband Denis (Jim Broadbent), who has been dead since 2003 – the same year Reagan passed away. No wonder she imagines him still by her side. Always clowning around, Denis apparently had the sense of humor that she lacks and was the only living soul able to get her to loosen up a bit.

Perhaps Maggie’s personality deficit is due to growing up as a girl (Alexandra Roach) who’s something of an outsider and a misfit in the village where her father Alfred Roberts (Iain Glen) is a grocer, a Methodist preacher and one-term mayor. The precise reason is never explained. Is it envy or outrage for daring to be different? She no doubt becomes more advanced than most of her hometown peers in terms of education, training at university as a chemist and a barrister.

Later, we witness Thatcher alienating others either with her imperious temperament and right-wing certainty or the fact that political aspirations are only supposed to be appropriate for men. This is the film’s inherent paradox: Should viewers be reviled by her hard-hearted ideology or feel compassion for her protofeminist struggle? It’s like asking us to admire the equally stubborn Condoleezza Rice as an example of tolerance in a party, the Republicans, that invariably plays the race card during elections. Similar to Clint Eastwood’s recent sympathetic profile of J. Edgar Hoover in J. Edgar, Iron Lady screenwriter Abi Morgan (Shame, 2011) and director Phyllida Lloyd (Mama Mia!, 2008) seem to think someone with essentially fascist instincts offers a fascinating contradiction for cinematic purposes. Audiences probably would not buy tickets if these people were presented as thoroughly villainous – and exploring complexity is a must, of course – but that doesn’t mean it’s OK to soft-pedal the damage they cause.

Specific details of the damage Thatcher wreaked on the country are not in evidence, as opposed to the endlessly intimate details provided from her domestic existence. Instead, a panorama of misery is revealed in swift, broad strokes: IRA bombings! Rioting miners! Imprisoned Irish hunger-strikers allowed to die! The surge of patriotism that follows victory in the Falklands! Massive unemployment! The 99 percent is seen only in fast-moving archival footage – even the millionaires whiz by.

Richard E. Grant (center) as Michael Haseltine

While never clearly identified as individuals, Thatcher’s associates, including Deputy Prime Minister Geoffrey Howe (Anthony Head) and Defence Secretary Michael Haseltine (Richard E. Grant), tend to be caricatures. The Labour Party fares no better. Maybe the intention is satire when cabinet ministers and MPs scurry around like gerbils. We’re left to wonder if all these guys really could have been utter twits in real life. When she ultimately starts belittling everyone who has been loyal to her, behavior that leads to a downfall from the pinnacle of power, it’s difficult to comprehend why because those characters are so sketchily drawn.

Then again, might Thatcher’s contempt be a clue about the coming cognitive disorder, which is known to provoke hostility? That’s as much a mystery as why she’s semi-estranged from her mother in early scenes and later from her adult son Mark. Only his twin sister, Carol (Olivia Colman) remains close to elderly Maggie at the end, if you don’t count the ever-present specter of Denis. The public no longer recognizes her on the street a decade after she leaves office, though there’s a possibility the nation would prefer to forget

Some of the most interesting sequences take place when advisors prepping her for a run at 10 Downing Street decide an extreme makeover is required. Thatcher’s dowdy clothing, matronly hairstyle and shrill voice are replaced by fashionable-for-their-day outfits, a snappier ‘do and deeper vocals. Her steely will remains the same, with the motto “We shall never waver.” (There was to be no wavering on her anti-immigration and pro-South African apartheid stances, or deregulation and privatization policies – none of which surfaces in the biopic.) She’s called a monster as the economy collapses and spending is severely cut, but rules for almost 12 years.

Her make-believe Rhett Butler from the fake Gone with the Wind enjoyed a parallel stay in the White House, coincidentally ending up with Alzheimer’s disease to match Thatcher’s dementia. Both gone from power for more than two decades, luckily they didn’t destroy the planet in their wake. The Iron Lady never does justice to how close they may have come.

Throwing Down the Gauntlet – The Battle of the Five Spot: Ornette Coleman and the New York Jazz Field

2012-01-14T12:00:00.042-05:00

In the late Fifties, Ornette Coleman, a Texas-born saxophone player who would eventually sojourn to L.A., took a leap into space with a quartet that completely abandoned form when they played jazz. With drummer Billy Higgins, Walter Norris on piano and Don Cherry playing trumpet, The Ornette Coleman Quartet first shook up the jazz world with the aptly titled Something Else!!! The Music of Ornette Coleman (1958). But, by the next LP, when Coleman released The Shape of Jazz to Come, adding Charlie Haden on bass, his blues-based harmonically free improvisations dramatically opened up a whole new direction for the music.

When Coleman then appeared at the Five Spot nightclub in New York in the early winter, he inspired a small riot among jazz artists and critics. This 1959 skirmish would in many ways resemble the much larger one Igor Stravinsky had instigated in 1913 with his radical ballet score Le Sacre du Printemps. Why the commotion? By abandoning harmony on The Shape of Jazz to Come, Coleman had sought rhythm the way abstract expressionist painters went after sensation; that is, through dazzling speed. At the Five Spot, therefore, his melodies were experienced by the audience as if they were swirling in a musical maze, driven by an acceleration of tempo, which challenged these stunned listeners to follow along as he gleefully rejected jazz's adherence to strict time. "It was like I was E.T. or something, just dropped in from the moon," Coleman later recalled.

How Ornette Coleman achieved this extraterrestrial status at the Five Spot is part of the thought-provoking and highly readable The Battle of the Five Spot: Ornette Coleman and the New York Jazz Field (Mercury Press/Teksteditions, 2011). Musician, jazz critic and author David Lee builds a cogently argued study that not only reveals how pivotal Coleman's appearance was in the post-bop jazz world following the death of Charlie Parker, but how his rejection by some surprising jazz artists (Miles Davis) and his acceptance by others in the classical world (Leonard Bernstein) began a lively debate that tackled the long argued hierarchic perception of high and low culture. Essentially Lee, who formerly worked with Coda magazine, asserts that Coleman's performance at the club touched a raw nerve that sparked a quest to define where jazz sat in the world of artistic value. "The declarations of critics that jazz was indeed a 'high art' carried no weight in the milieu where the musicians actually earned their livelihoods," Lee writes. "The music was still played in venues where it needed to turn a profit, in ticket sales or both. The sophisticated vocal and instrumental techniques, original concepts and emotional expressiveness so praised by critics had to be conveyed in a form that would not distract an audience that had paid to drink, dance and socialize."

But Lee goes even further in his analysis of the music beyond its milieu and into the high and low conflicts within the jazz community itself. Rather than merely position Coleman as the hip radical up against the status quo, Lee draws on the work of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu who wrote about artistic "fields," in order to illuminate the complexities of the battleground. Bourdieu described fields as "an independent social universe with its own laws of functioning." Within that universe "members clash and compete for dominance, define themselves (and may even depend for their livelihoods) on the amount of cultural capital they possess, and are defined by other members according to the amount of cultural capital...they have accumulated." In this quest for status, jazz sought to position itself as America's classical music as a means to earn legitimacy as an art form. But with acquired status always comes strict rules and a social positioning that can't be questioned. Coleman's stint at the Five Spot essentially accomplished what critic Steve Huey once described as "a watershed event in the genesis of avant-garde jazz, profoundly steering its future course and throwing down a gauntlet that some still haven't come to grips with."

The Battle of the Five Spot comes to grip with it all. David Lee does this first by addressing the problem of identity and the representation of jazz as a black American art. In a culture where European traditions still "carried the greatest cultural currency," Lee claims the problem was compounded in America "by the speed with which white musicians appropriated new approaches and new techniques as quickly as black musicians could introduce them." Beginning with the Original Dixieland Jazz Band in the 1920s, Paul Whiteman in the Thirties, and Benny Goodman in the Forties, "white artists won popular success by presenting styles, compositions and arrangements that originated with black artists who were themselves chronically marginalized by the music industry." Within the bitterness of that conflict, the greatest black jazz artists immediately sought ranking and position in the music's history. Which is why, upon hearing Coleman's bold attempt to seek of his own voice, the black jazz elite such as Miles Davis would call Coleman "all screwed up inside." Roy Eldridge would say that Coleman was "putting everybody on." Red Garland, speaking as if his pockets had been picked, claimed that "nothing's happening...Coleman is faking it." Drummer Max Roach, one of the great progenitors of be-bop, was so angry he followed Coleman into the kitchen of the Five Spot and punched him in the mouth. (Still not satisfied, Roach later "harangued him from the street outside his apartment.")

Although The Battle of the Five Spot began as a master's thesis David Lee wrote at McMaster University, the slim volume runs a clear thread through the music's history without the garble of academic abstractions. Not only does he clearly account for the necessity of Ornette Coleman's stand for what he claimed as a free music, Lee also illustrates how Coleman was "the last avant-gardist to make it into the jazz canon before the Marsalis/Crouch neo-cons bricked up the entrance." Lee asserts quite convincingly that Ornette Coleman's work was a "segue between jazz's traditional song forms and much wider horizons of sound - a transition that by no means did everyone want to make." Unlike those who felt that Coleman's music was "angry and divisive," Lee proves that "in reality it was, and is, generous and inclusive." For next decade after Coleman's debut at the Five Spot, jazz would continue to find its innovators. The music would also eventually find its respectability and status. In finding it, though, The Battle of the Five Spot shows us how the art might have lost a larger war when it rejected Ornette Coleman. By finally becoming acceptable, jazz eventually lost its ability to cause any riots.

– Kevin Courrier is a writer/broadcaster, film critic, teacher and author (Artificial Paradise: The Dark Side of The Beatles' Utopian Dream). His forthcoming book is Reflections in the Hall of Mirrors: American Movies and the Politics of Idealism. In January 2012, at the Miles Nidal Centre JCC in Toronto, Courrier will be doing a lecture series (film clips included) based on Reflections. Check their schedule in December. 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 Gothic Shadow – Bob Douglas's That Line of Darkness: The Shadow of Dracula and the Great War

2012-01-13T12:00:00.085-05:00

When people talk about 'gothic' culture today it could apply to pretty much anything with dark clothes, dark hair and pale skin. Author and historian Bob Douglas, on the other hand, has a deeper awareness of the true origins of the Gothic tradition. He has written about that tradition, as well, in a fascinating study titled That Line of Darkness: The Shadow of Dracula and the Great War (Encompass Editions, 2011). In the book, Douglas uses the Gothic literary conventions – especially those contained in Bram Stoker's Dracula – as a means to understanding the late 19th Century and the early 20th Century, right through to and including World War One. Douglas's full study doesn't stop with the Great War; however, he is currently working on a second volume that covers both the Nazi and Stalinist era up until the post 9/11 culture.

James FitzGerald, the author of the award-winning memoir What Disturbs Our Blood (who we interviewed last year) aptly writes about That Line of Darkness that "Douglas reminds us, with erudite, page-turning prose, how life is forever imitating art. Forbidden, atavistic desires lurk under the thin skin of our civilization, and with equal parts horror and fascination, we are transfixed." Douglas has himself been transfixed by this project. Since 1998, when it began as a study of art in ten different historical periods, the book soon became what is now an epic and engrossing historical study of how the demonization of the other and blood purification became a compelling metaphor that continues to haunt the culture. Bob Douglas, whose website is http://www.thatlineofdarkness.com, will be giving a talk on Thursday January 26, 7PM to 8:15 at Palmerston Library two blocks west of Bathurst just off Bloor St. Recently, he had a few minutes to talk to us as well about the project.

dc: The term ‘gothic’ gets used with some frequency today. Since your book That Line of Darkness is an examination of the Gothic tradition, how would you personally define it?

bd: The traditional Gothic is usually associated with certain tropes or images: the haunted house, the crumbling castle, premature burials, madness and disease. I think, though, that the Gothic can be best defined by its transgressive nature, crossing the line that explains its appeal and at the same time its horror. The Gothic invariably involves blurring the boundaries between life and death; as a result, a supernatural or preternatural element then pervades the form. The political and social anxieties of the period, too, are frequently worked into the Gothic genre, but they are camouflaged. This challenges the reader to look beyond its entertainment value.

The original cover of Bram Stoker's Dracula

dc: What led you to using the Gothic tradition – especially expressed in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray – as a lens to peer into the Victorian/Edwardian society?

bd: The late Victorian/Edwardian period is interesting because Britain was the flagship of modernity in terms of industrial productivity, including the new technologies as well as scientific work. I focus however on Charles Darwin and the host of thinkers that were influenced by him, not the scientist of evolution but one whose work provoked fears of devolution. Despite that period's achievements, its scholars and pundits were often preoccupied by fears that society was regressing. In their own different ways, those three novels do explore those fears. Dracula ostensibly charts the conflict between the representatives of modernity and a vampire that epitomizes the primitive. But Stoker's great strength is to show us how this particular binary distinction dissolves – even though modernity appears to win out in the end. But just. Stevenson's novella explores the primitive that resides within a respectable pillar of Victorian society. In Dorian Gray, Wilde introduces a preternatural element into what initially appears to be a comedy-of-manners novel. And he does that to critique a common Victorian assumption about physiognomy; that is, that criminality can be read on the features of the body.

dc: How did the Gothic conventions come to define that society?

bd: One of the most important Gothic conventions was the demonization of the other. In this period, the other included the feared underclass, the serial killer, the Irish, the proto-feminist, the foreigner and the homosexual; in other words, anyone who did not keep his private life locked away in a closet. Another but related convention was the double, or doppelganger, which undercut the idea that the other was not like us. The obsession in Dracula with blood purity actually parallels the eugenics campaign in the period that attempted to address the widespread fear that the "best people" were not marrying and reproducing while the profligate poor were over breeding and threatening the stability of society.

author Bob Douglas

dc: You’ve divided That Line of Darkness into four parts which culminates with an examination of World War One. Can you describe how you developed the focus for your study?

bd: The first three parts of the book that focus on class, gender relations and particularly the issue of manliness respectively provide the context for understanding the Great War. In the fourth part, I rely on Gothic conventions – the other, the double, blood purity and the uncanny – to interpret the War. This last element, so present in Gothic novels manifested itself in reality in the war itself.

William Rivers

dc: When you do discuss the Great War you abandon the Gothic connections for long stretches to examine the destructive power of the war. Were there aspects of that destruction that fell from that Gothic view?

bd: What I think is unique in my treatment of the Great War is that instead of drawing upon literary texts, the war itself becomes the text. The demonization of the other is abundantly evident in the war propaganda. British combatants in the trenches regarded their German counterparts more as doppelgangers; they reserved their deepest hostility toward chauvinistic civilians. The blurring of boundaries between life and death is present in the trenches, in the nightmares and hallucinations of shell-shocked soldiers and in the spiritualism practiced by civilians who were overwhelmed by the death of so many of their sons and loved ones. Psychic vampirism, which I explore in Trilby in Part One, is the dynamic that operated between many physicians and the damaged soldiers in both England and Germany. The psychotherapy that William Rivers conducted with Siegfried Sassoon was atypical.

dc: That Line of Darkness is actually one part of a two-part study. What will the second volume examine?

bd: The second volume will follow the mode established in Part Four of the first volume by filtering through a Gothic lens the Soviet Union during the Revolutionary and the Stalin eras, Nazi Germany and Modern America, especially after 9/11.

Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series

dc: Since That Line of Darkness uses art and literature working in tandem with politics and history, how important is art to understanding the forces that make up our social order?

bd: Art in its various expressions provides documentation and depth to a historical era that I believe enriches our understanding of it. Art has the potential to cause us to pause and reflect on the multiplicity and ambiguity of the meaning inherent in the subject under examination.

dc: What do you feel is the greatest appeal of the Gothic that accounts for its lasting presence in the culture?

bd: The Gothic is constantly being re-imagined and adapted to appeal to new generations of readers and viewers. It mutates into other genres, too, like science and fiction and the political thriller. Currently, some vampires are domesticated and do not need to feed off human flesh. Others like the primeval villain in Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian are more in the spirit of Stoker's Dracula. The Gothic will always express our fears but can also give voice to our aspirations. The tremendous appeal of the Twilight series among young people plays to the fears of aging and mortality; yet its message to teenagers to avoid premarital sex might give comfort to their parents.