Advocacy and Accuracy: Kirby Dick's The Hunting Ground

A scene from Kirby Dick's The Hunting Ground.

“Despite significant progress over the last few years, too many woman and men on and off college campuses are still victims of sexual abuse.”

– Vice President Joe Biden at the 2015 Academy Awards 

The persuasive power of advocacy journalism and documentaries is undeniable, but they have their detractors in large part because they offer viewers only one perspective or one that is not even-handed. Think of the conversation around An Inconvenient Truth, Davis Guggenheim’s 2006 Oscar-winning film about Al Gore's efforts to explain global warning. Yet Guggenheim’s recent foray, He Named Me Malala, is an inspiring portrait of the Pakistani teenager and 2014 Nobel Peace Prize, Malala Yousafzai, which I expect has few detractors, at least in the West. Or consider the highly popular Making of a Murderer, the Netflix series that revisits and forcibly challenges a decade-old murder conviction. This documentary series, reminiscent of Errol Morris’ 1988 pioneering The Thin Blue Line has elicited viewers’ visceral outrage about the original conviction. Although the filmmakers have been generally praised for their muckraking efforts, a few critics, notably Kathryn Schulz writing in The New Yorker, persuasively provides a counter argument.

A similar controversy has been stirred by the incendiary The Hunting Ground about the prevalence of sexual assault on American campuses and the apparent indifference of university administrators in addressing the complaints of the victims. Writer-director Kirby Dick and producer Amy Ziering, who previously collaborated on the documentaries Outrage, about homophobia among American political elites, and The Invisible War, about sexual assault and its cover up in the military, do provide a disturbing picture of a serious problem. If seen in isolation from the critical responses to the film, most viewers likely will be enraged by what has been occurring on American campuses as portrayed in The Hunting Ground.

First-Person Hitler: Look Who's Back

Franziska Wulf and Oliver Masucci in Look Who's Back, currently streaming on Netflix.

“In the year 2014, if someone comes to the central square in Bayreuth [Germany] pretending to be Hitler and if that is tolerated by the general public, then I have to say: that is bad for Germany…"

– an unnamed German citizen, in an unscripted scene from Look Who's Back

"I can work with this."

– "Adolf Hitler" in Look Who's Back

 
In 2012, author Timur Vermes' comic novel Er ist wieder da (He is Back, in English) was published in Germany, and it quickly became a bestseller. The satirical story, told from the point of view of Adolf Hitler, describes the unlikely scenario of Hitler suddenly returning to modern-day Germany (then 2011), becoming a YouTube sensation, and eventually, in the book's final pages, mobilizing his fame to return to politics. The book was translated into English in 2014 by Jamie Bulloch as Look Who's Back (MacLehose Press). Last year, the novel was adapted into a film by German filmmaker David Wnendt (Wetlands, 2013). Three weeks ago, the English-subtitled version of Look Who's Back appeared on Netflix.

Reading Look Who's Back in English is a strange experience. Despite its controversial protagonist, its true subject matter is our own times, the cult of celebrity, and of course the state and self-understanding of contemporary Germany. The English-language translation helpfully includes an appendix that offers non-German readers a crib sheet on the lesser-known Nazis whose names appear in the book, a primer on German political parties and their acronyms, and some background on popular German TV personalities. Though most of the references will still fail to resonate for those of us who aren't current on German chat shows and comedians, we still share enough of the world for most of Vermes' satire to land. In the novel, everyone responds to "Hitler" as if he himself were the satirist, a bold comedian taking broad swipes at culture at large – a truth teller, a Method comic with a square mustache and a Nazi uniform. As a character and a narrator, Vermes' Hitler is a man who knows fully who he is and what he believes and seems utterly unable to dissemble – but no-one he who hears him takes him at his word. Instead, it is received as brilliant and pointed cultural critique, and he is eventually embraced by politicians and people of all political (and non-political) stripes. No-one takes Hitler seriously, it is implied, because no-one seems to take themselves very seriously.

Neglected Gem # 92: And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself (2003)

Antonio Banderas, Matt Day, Carl Dillard and Eion Bailey in And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself (2003).

The HBO movie And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself is a satirical comedy that the writer, Larry Gelbart, built up from an oddball historical footnote: in 1914 Pancho Villa invited Mutual Films to send their star director, D.W. Griffith, to Mexico to film the revolution. In his tabloids, William Randolph Hearst was editorializing fervently against Villa’s uprising, so Villa hoped that he could counter his bad press by going Hollywood – or at least Fort Lee, New Jersey, which in 1914 was where American movies were being made. I have no idea how faithful Gelbart is to the facts (a prefatory note tells us, “The improbability of events depicted in this film is the surest indication that they actually did occur”), but he landed on an irresistible subject and the movie, directed by Bruce Beresford, is terrific. In it, Antonio Banderas gives a sly and exuberant performance as Villa – it’s an ideal role for him – and the talented young actor Eion Bailey (who later played a major role in Band of Brothers and recurring roles on ER and Ray Donovan) is Frank Thayer, whom Harry Aitken (Jim Broadbent), the head of Mutual, sends down instead because Griffith’s too busy. The movie is shaped as Thayer’s coming of age: he falls in love with the revolution, becomes Villa’s buddy and romanticizes him, and then he has to acknowledge the more unpleasant truths about him. He even gets the girl – the actress Teddy Sampson (Alexa Davalos), who appears in the movie he makes about Villa. Dramatically, Gelbart and Beresford need Thayer to filter Villa’s actions, which are complicated and sometimes contradictory. But though Bailey is very good and his story is interesting in its own right, it’s Banderas’s Villa who mesmerizes the camera and claims ownership of the movie. Beresford shores up the two leading men with a colorful supporting cast: Broadbent, Michael McKean as William Christy Cabanne, who takes over from Thayer and makes a commercial seven-reeler about Villa, and Kyle Chandler as Raoul Walsh, who stars in it; Saul Rubinek as Villa’s American liaison; Colm Feore as Griffith; Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Anthony Stewart Head as William Benton, a rich Englishman whose Mexican ranch Villa bleeds of its cattle (and then shoots Benton when he objects); and especially Alan Arkin as Sam Drebben, a Bronx-Jewish mobster who goes to battle with Villa. Arkin’s performance, gruff and robust and hilarious, ranks with the blistering comic work he did in the seventies in movies like Hearts of the West, Rafferty and the Gold Dust Twins, The Seven-Per-Cent Solution and The In-Laws.

Podcast: Interview with Robert Moog (1986)

Inventor Robert "Bob" Moog. (Photo courtesy of The Bob Moog Foundation)

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show On the Arts, at CJRT-FM (today Jazz 91.1) 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 1986, one of those interviews was with engineer Robert Moog, inventor of the Moog synthesizer and pioneer of electronic music. He passed away in August 2005, at the age of 71.

– Kevin Courrier.

Here is the full interview with Robert Moog as it aired on CJRT-FM in 1986.

Swords, Sorcery, & Social Justice – The Huntsman: Winter's War

Emily Blunt (left) and Charlize Theron in The Huntsman: Winter's War.

Watching The Huntsman: Winter’s War, a sequel to a fantasy retelling of Snow White that I never bothered to see, I got the distinct impression that I was watching something made for someone else. The elaborate costuming, hammy overacting, and romantic subplots should have been clues, but all it took was a cursory scan of the audience filing out of the cinema afterward for me to finally realize who that “someone else” was. I was surrounded by my comrades, my kin, my counterparts in the endorsement of shlocky fantasy cinema: female nerds.

I make the distinction from any other brand of nerd simply because I believe – at least in terms of what our modern theatres have to offer – that they’re an ill-served subset of our culture. Examples of enjoyable fantasy cinema aimed at a female audience are few and far between, and I think that’s deplorable. For every big-budget adolescent male power fantasy, from Hercules to Gods of Egypt, there’s a pathetic Mortal Instruments or a forgotten Beautiful Creatures, like stringy bones tossed to a starving dog. Our culture gives these dedicated dorks no real choice: they can enjoy, despite themselves, the male-dominated films that are given reasonable budgets and good marketing, or they can settle for the scraps left over. Many girls adore Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films – mostly because they’re excellent – but they do so in spite of the trilogy’s almost medieval lack of female representation. Really, there’s no reason we can’t incorporate elements that are relatable to women into these crappy fantasy films, is there? This isn’t the nineties anymore, when Happy Meals were as segregated as the two halves of the dance floor at a Hasidic wedding. Everyone deserves a trashterpiece now and again, right?

Constructing Musicals: Jack Viertel’s The Secret Life of the American Musical

Cast of Fiddler on the Roof on Broadway, 1977. (Photo: Bobby Bank)

Jack Viertel’s new book The Secret Life of the American Musical (Sarah Crichton Books) is a gift for those of us who love musical theatre; I read it over just a couple of days and would have devoured it in a single sitting if time had allowed. Viertel, a one-time dramaturg, drama critic and arts editor who is now, among many other accomplishments, the artistic director of City Center’s Encores! series, has taught musical theatre at NYU’s Tisch School for the last ten years, and this volume emerged from his classes as well as from his extensive experience with musicals over the past three decades. I suspect it would be impossible to find anyone who knows more about the subject, and in The Secret Life of the American Musical he offers a comprehensive master class in how good musicals are constructed. Even for those of us who have seen and listened to hundreds of musicals, the book is a series of revelations – mostly because of his method of juxtaposing shows that are vastly different in style, tone and subject matter to show how the same principles operate across the spectrum.

Off the Shelf: John Gregory Dunne's Monster (1997)

When studying film in college during the Seventies, I read critical books that were about the themes, issues and the craft of movie-making. But by the Eighties and Nineties, most of the books I encountered – good ones, I'll admit – like Final Cut (about the Heaven's Gate disaster), Outrageous Conduct (about the Twilight Zone tragedy) and The Devil's Candy (about The Bonfire of the Vanities fiasco) were more about the failure of the American movie industry. (Ironically, most made for more compelling drama than the films that inspired them.) Now it would be tempting to add John Gregory Dunne's Monster (Random House, 1997) to this ignominious list, but for the fact that it is not much more interesting than the movie that spawned it. Monster initially reads as an absorbing and a painfully comic tale that pits the creative writer, with his unreasonable demands, against the corporate system, one that produces inhabitants who wear pinstripe suits with suspenders, slick their hair back with grease and have Perrier breath. But the book loses its nerve part way through and turns pretty schizoid. If the first half of Monster suggests how Hollywood's corporate brass turn writers into cookie-cutters, by the end, Dunne is practically providing trays to put the cookies on.

Able Archer: How Comedies Mature (or, at least, Age Gracefully)

The seventh season of FX's Archer premiered on March 31st.

I’ve spent approximately 30 hours of my life watching a goofy cartoon about a super-spy’s ridiculous adventures. That might seem like a waste, were it not for the fact that, as it progresses through its seventh season, the FX comedy Archer remains one of the funniest things on TV. In its most recent seasons, that’s been a function of its willingness to significantly tweak – I won’t say reinvent, because it remains fundamentally the same show – its basic formula to stay fresh. It’s a reminder of how even shows that are light, trifling entertainment (and it’s no disparagement to Archer to call it that) can find ways to develop and even, in their way, grow.

As Mark Clamen’s 2012 review of the show for this site indicates, Archer isn’t exactly highbrow. It’s frequently violent and crude (albeit loaded with surprisingly intelligent references, a trademark of creator Adam Reed’s work). While it functions as a satire of the James Bond franchise and all of the hyper-masculine trappings that go with it, it’s still often gleefully immature and politically incorrect. It’s also a great showcase for the voice-acting talents of a number of underappreciated actors, including H. Jon Benjamin in the title role of secret agent Sterling Archer, Aisha Tyler as his long-suffering girlfriend Lana, and Jessica Walter as his mother (she’s essentially reprising her role from Arrested Development here, but she does it so well that it doesn’t matter). Perhaps the best example of how Reed understands how to utilize his talent is his use of Judy Greer, who’s so well-known for playing second bananas that she’s gamely made fun of herself for it. In Archer, she gets a chance to shed that bland persona, playing the deeply demented Cheryl (or Carol, or any of a variety of other names), a role that provides some of the strangest, and occasionally most disturbing, jokes on the show.

Time's Marrow: Anthony Hamilton's What I'm Feelin'

Anthony Hamilton newest album is What I'm Feelin'. (Photo: LaVan Anderson)

We are pleased to welcome Dylan Hicks as a guest contributor to Critics at Large.

Late last year, R&B singer Anthony Hamilton enjoyed some internet attention for gospel, doo wop, and other old-school rejiggerings of Drake’s “Hotline Bling,” Silentó’s “Watch Me (Whip/Nae Nae),” and 2 Chainz’s “Watch Out.” The videos, showing Hamilton performing either with his road band or a cappella with his background singers, the HamilTones, were as much settings as covers, or at least the lyrics were often loosed altogether from their original musical contexts. Links were no doubt prodded in part by the comedy of anachronism, and as such the interpretations were related to novelty groups like Big Daddy, who in the eighties and nineties covered then-current hits in fifties styles. But Hamilton's spirit was of continuity rather than incongruity, with his message being that music, particularly in the hands of virtuoso vocalists, is endlessly malleable because – in some essential, time-blurring way – it’s all the same stuff. A similar spirit pervades Hamilton’s albums, including the just-released What I’m Feelin’ (RCA Records). His music is frequently referential but not retrogressive, steeped in the past but not wistful for it.

Alien Conspiracy: Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt’s Season Two

Ellie Kemper in Netflix's Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.

Dear Reader,

By the time you are reading this, I will have finished the recently released second season of Netflix’s Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. I may also have won the lottery, or gotten dressed – perhaps even both. Whatever the case, it’s important to note that, at the time of my writing, I have only seen ten out of this season’s thirteen episodes that follow on the success of the 2015 Netflix exclusive series written by Tina Fey and Robert Carlock (30 Rock, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot). At this juncture, season two’s stage appears to be set and its various storylines are careening toward a conclusion. While I’m open to the unlikely possibility that the next three episodes could upend everything I thought I knew about Kimmy Schmidt, the recurring themes evident in this season have led me to a bold and all-encompassing conclusion: Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, at its core, is a story about aliens.

Blended Sound: Lola by Carrie Rodriguez

Carrie Rodriguez's new album, Lola, was released by Luz Records in February.

If it’s right to judge a book by its cover, then perhaps it’s right to judge an album by the musicians who play on it. That’s probably an unfair assessment but I think Carrie Rodriguez can make a case for her new album, Lola (Luz Records). Her new record features a band called The Sacred Hearts – featuring guitarist Bill Frisell, Viktor Kraus on bass, Brannen Temple on drums, David Pulkingham on nylon string and electric guitars, and Luke Jacobs on lap & pedal steel guitars. Raul Malo, the leader of The Mavericks, sings a lovely duet with Rodriguez on track one, and Max Baca, founder of the Grammy Award-winning band called, Los Texmaniacs, plays on the last two cuts. It’s a group that has a fully informed country sound, with enough Mexican influence to make it special. The record was recorded in Austin, Texas, and it sounds like they left the door to the studio open to get that mystical part of the world into the room.

The Ascent of Man-Cub: Jon Favreau’s The Jungle Book

Mowgli (Neel Sethi) and Baloo (voiced by Bill Murray) in Jon Favreau’s The Jungle Book.

I don’t understand Hollywood’s obsession with realism. I mean, I understand it mechanically – as our capacity to create more detailed visual effects grows with technology, so does our desire to push the envelope and chase that ethereal “photo-realistic” carrot – but realism in film is so often employed with little regard for the tone, style, or intent of a particular story. The examples are far too numerous to name, but it’s everywhere if you pay attention. (This obsession is shared by the gaming industry, too, whose foamy-mouthed quest for ever more ridiculously detailed visuals has been leaving smart and satisfying game design in the dust for decades.) Jon Favreau’s mega-budget amalgamation of Disney’s 1967 animated Jungle Book feature and the original writings of Rudyard Kipling was immediately off-putting for this reason: this is a fairy tale, heavy on whimsy and light on subtext, about a boy raised by wolves who is mentored by a panther and sings with a bear. Why did it need to look so realistic? Why did we need another version of this story with Avatar-esque visual fidelity and what seems like a tenth of the style or charm? You painstakingly animate an incredibly convincing CGI jungle cat and then manipulate his mouth to match Ben Kingsley’s voice work and, instead of being wowed by the verisimilitude, my brain plummets straight into the uncanny valley. Did we learn nothing from Babe?

I suppose all the more kudos are due to Favreau and his band of intrepid visual effects artists, because his Jungle Book – while never shrugging off the weird tonal clash between the realism of the visuals and the whimsy of the story – is engrossing, charming, and utterly gorgeous. I frequently forgot that I was looking at a young actor (Neel Sethi) clambering around on a green-screen sound stage; the computer-generated flora and the fauna that occupy it are that instantly convincing, and Sethi, who plays Mowgli with perfectly charismatic precociousness, plays off his CGI counterparts with natural ease. The Jungle Book, more than any film I’ve ever seen (yes, including Avatar), deserves to be seen in 3D – Favreau uses it far more to add depth to the frame and fill his environments with detail and life than to indulge in gimmicks and have things poke through the fourth wall at you. The illusion, as tenuous as it might seem from the outside, is rarely shattered while you’re in the theatre. It’s a remarkable achievement in technical effects.

Arnold Wesker (1932-2016)

Playwright Arnold Wesker (1932-2016) at the Durham Book Festival in 2008. (Photo: Simon James)

The angry young man movement, which attacked England’s obstinacy about holding onto its vision of itself as an empire after the Second World War and quarreled with the bourgeois gentility of the mid-century English drama, detonated the British theatre in the mid-1950s. But except for John Osborne, whose Look Back in Anger and The Entertainer are still performed as Tony Richardson’s film versions continue to represent the exciting early years of the English New Wave, the playwrights who came out of that movement have mostly been forgotten. One of them, Arnold Wesker, died last week at the age of eighty-three. His output included fifty plays as well as fiction, poetry, essays and memoirs, but only in the first five years of his theatrical career did he write plays – five of them – that made both critics and audiences sit up and take notice – though unlike Osborne’s plays or Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey, they never developed lives beyond English shores. They were The Kitchen (1957), which the National Theatre revived in 2011, Chips with Everything (1962), and – book-ended by these two – the plays known as “the Wesker trilogy,” Chicken Soup with Barley (1958), Roots (1959) and I’m Talking About Jerusalem (1960).

The trilogy – in particular the first and third plays – is about the golden promise of socialism and how its true believers handle the fallout when, inevitably, it smashes up against the realities of the world. Political idealism is a great subject, yet only a handful of playwrights have chosen to dramatize it since Sophocles in Antigone. Clifford Odets took up the challenge in Awake and Sing! and Paradise Lost, both written in 1935, and John Guare in his Lydie Breeze plays in 1982, and more recently it’s provided one of the themes for Richard Nelson’s Apple family plays (which were written to coincide with significant American political moments) and Temple by the talented young English playwright Steve Waters. The Wesker trilogy is a kind of British equivalent to the Odets plays, and just as Odets found his home with the Group Theatre, the Wesker plays were produced at the Royal Court, the heart and soul of the angry young man movement.

Podcast: Interview with Frank Oz (1986)

Audrey II and Rick Moranis in a scene from Frank Oz's Little Shop Of Horrors (1986)

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show On the Arts, at CJRT-FM (today Jazz 91.1) 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 1986, one of those interviews was with director Franz Oz, who was in Toronto promoting his musical comedy Little Shop Of Horrors, a film featuring Rick Moranis, Steve Martin, and a 15-foot-tall talking plant. At the time, he would have been better known for his work with Jim Henson, voicing Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear, and Animal on The Muppet Show and Cookie Monster, Grover, and Bert on Sesame Street. Little Shop of Horrors was Oz's first feature film that didn't involve Henson.

– Kevin Courrier.

Here is the full interview with Frank Oz as it aired on CJRT-FM in 1986.

The Political and the Personal: The Crime Novels of Todd Babiak

Author Todd Babiak.

The political and the personal underpin and course through Todd Babiak’s harrowing sometimes violent Come Barbarians and its sequel, Son of France (HarperCollins 2016). A former Albertan journalist and the author of light social satire novels, Babiak, after having read the oeuvre of John le Carré and a smattering of Graham Greene, turned to the crime/thriller genre without sacrificing the quality writing of his earlier literary works. Like his protagonist, Christopher Kruse, Babiak moved with his family to southern France. Like Kruse, Babiak learned early the art of self-defence and became a security agent who in the course of his work needed to “hurt” people. But now with a family, Babiak jettisoned that life, but draws upon that personal experience to create Kruse, his most rounded character. During the year in France, he absorbed its ultra-nationalist politics that provides the backdrop for both of these compelling thrillers.

When Two Become Two: Netflix's Love

Gillian Jacobs and Paul Rust in Love, currently streaming on Netflix.

 This review contains spoilers for the first season of Love. 

Netflix is positioning itself to become the go-to venue for down-to-earth stories of modern, urban love. In November, they gave us Asiz Ansari's poignant and personal Master of None, and in February they premiered Love – starring comedian Paul Rust and Gillian Jacobs (Community). Surface similarities aside (both depict Millennial-aged characters and their struggles for love and money, with pointed reflections on dating in the era of Facebook and texting, and a surprising number of key scenes which take place around craft service tables), Love quickly distinguishes itself from its onscreen neighbour with its psychological nuance and its dogged willingness to let its characters make poor and morally problematic decisions.

Co-created by co-star Rust, former Girls-writer Lesley Arfin, and Judd Apatow (Freaks and Geeks, Knocked Up), Love is neither a straightforward romantic comedy nor an "anti-rom-com" in the fashion of FX's You're the Worst or the Apatow-directedTrainwreck. ( As I wrote in my review of the FX comedy back in 2014, the thing about anti-rom-coms is that, for better or for worse, they almost always end up being rom-coms.) In contrast, Love is more interested in being real than in being subversive.

Reanimating a Beloved Corpse: Burr Steers’ Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

Lily James as Miss Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

There are so many times in my life where I wish I had a time machine. It would have a vast array of applications, both big and small, from correcting gaffs in my own life (looking at you, English degree) to visiting some of history’s greatest moments. Today, I would like a time machine so I can visit Jane Austen around 1814 and inform her of her looming 2016 screenwriting credit for Burr Steers’ Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. There would be lots of explaining to do:

–  "... so because of this ‘public domain’ idea, in 202 years you're going to be credited as a writer on a zombie movie."
– “Why are they called ‘zombies?”
– “I think it’s a Haitian voodoo thing!”
– “And they eat brains? Why brains?”
– “I… ah… you know, I don’t know, Jane. It’s canon. I’m sure it’s on the Wikipedia page.”
– “Should I have included zombies in the original?”
– “No. Definitely not.”

As a fellow spinster writer, I feel a kind of kinship with Jane Austen. I’d like to think she’d be pleasantly amused by this news – more so, I’m sure, with the assurance that the reviews aren’t great and yet not a single critic faults her for the film’s problems. It’s almost as if she wrote all the good parts of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies’s screenplay and somehow we all know it.

Going Dark: The Choices Narrow as Another Video Store Closes in Toronto

Happier days at Queen Video in Toronto.

The recent closing of the flagship store of Queen Video in Toronto, after nearly thirty-five years in business, was illuminating on so many levels, from what it augured for the future of film viewing at home to what people were most interested in snapping up as the store sold off most of its 50,000 titles (some were transferred to the still-existing Queen Video outlet, further north in the city). As I picked through the detritus of what was still left on the premises on Queen Video’s last day, after a 23-day sell off of stock when DVDs were down to $1 a pop, I was saddened that another great rental outlet was closing even and, more significantly, aware of what that closing actually meant.

Cooder-White-Skaggs at Toronto's Massey Hall (April 11, 2016)

Ricky Skaggs, Mark Fain, Sharon White, Joachim Cooder & Ry Cooder in NYC in Nov. 2015. (Photo: Chad Batka)

There was something going on at Massey Hall in Toronto last night – something physical, and something decidedly spiritual. It wasn’t your ordinary concert. Although Massey Hall has hosted more than its share of special shows, there was something different about this one. Everyone knew it. The anticipation ran high. My friends on Facebook were posting last week about how excited they were, how they felt "like 12-year-olds waiting for Christmas." When I sat down in my seat you could hear folks all ‘round talking about how they had been counting down the days. Then, at 8:00 on the dot, as is customary at this hallowed hall, Ricky Skaggs, his wife Sharon White, and Ryland P. Cooder came onto the stage. They were followed by Ry’s son Joachim, Sharon’s sister Cheryl, their dad Buck White and Ricky’s longtime bandmate Mark Fain. It was truly a family affair.

Cagney: Dancin’ Fool

Josh Walden, Robert Creighton and Jeremy Benton in Cagney. (Photo: Carol Rosegg)

Jimmy Cagney was one of the spryest and most distinctive dancers ever to make movies, but only a fraction of his dozens and dozens of Hollywood pictures showed off that particular corner of his super-size talent. He made six musicals in all, and only two are well known: Yankee Doodle Dandy, for which he won the 1942 Oscar for his portrayal of George M. Cohan, a vaudevillian from a theatrical family who became the first American-born purveyor of musical comedy, and the 1955 bio of Ruth Etting, Love Me or Leave Me, in which Doris Day gets all the numbers and Cagney plays (memorably) her gangster boyfriend, Martin Snyder. TCM junkies who have toted up hours watching the Busby Berkeley spectaculars from the thirties are familiar with Footlight Parade (1933). Cagney plays a producer-director of elaborate curtain-raisers for talkies who has to step in at the eleventh hour for a drunken actor to perform the ineffable “Shanghai Lil” opposite Ruby Keeler, bafflingly cast as a Chinese waterfront barfly who’s remained true to her wandering sailor beau. Like several of Cagney’s numbers in Yankee Doodle Dandy (“You’re a Grand Old Flag,” “Give My Regards to Broadway” and the title song), “Shanghai Lil” is a high point in American film musical history, mostly because of his contribution. Cagney had a long movie career, but it’s a pity he didn’t get to star in more musicals. In my personal pantheon of film-musical performances, his George M. Cohan sits right at the top, next to Barbra Streisand’s as Fanny Brice – another musical-theatre icon from the early twentieth century – in Funny Girl. What the two portrayals have in common is that, unlike in more recent dramatizations of musicians, neither star makes an effort to mask his or her patented style or explosive personality to sound like the real-life character.

The off-Broadway show Cagney (at the Westside Theatre) isn’t a compendium of moments from the handful of Cagney musicals, though it does include “Grand Old Flag,” “Yankee Doodle Dandy” and a medley of other songs from Yankee Doodle Dandy presented in the context of a World War II USO tour. It’s a new musical bio with its own original score, like Funny Girl or The Will Rogers Follies, and it doesn’t expend much time on Cagney’s movie musicals. Footlight Parade doesn’t merit a mention; aside from Yankee Doodle Dandy, only The Seven Little Foys – a 1955 Bob Hope movie in which Cagney made a cameo appearance as Cohan – shows up. But since Cagney is a musical, and Robert Creighton, who plays him (and who worked on the music and lyrics with Christopher McGovern), is a song and dance man, it’s Cagney the dancer we have in our heads when we leave the theatre. The choreographer Joshua Bergasse has recreated some of Cagney’s routines and invented others, and the six-member ensemble includes three superb male dancers: Creighton, Jeremy Benton as Hope and Josh Walden as Cagney’s brother Bill. (The others are all perfectly proficient, but Bergasse has built the choreography around these three.)

Beauty in a Box: Ballet Jörgen’s The Sleeping Beauty

Saniya Abilmajineva and the dancers of Ballet Jörgen in The Sleeping Beauty. (Photo: Lawrence Ho)

Watching Ballet Jörgen’s new production of The Sleeping Beauty in Toronto recently brought to mind IKEA, an association prompted by artistic director Bengt Jörgen’s Swedish heritage and the fact that his version of the mother of all classical ballets is compact and collapsible, much like a BJURSTA extendable table. Though inspired by Marius Petipa’s original 1890 choreography and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s majestic score (heard on tape), Jörgen has broken free of constraints imposed by tradition, slashing scenes (like the longer than long Prologue) and condensing the usual three acts into a quick paced two. But smaller doesn’t mean less. Camillia Koo’s spare but effective sets and costumes sparkle under Rebecca Picherack’s honeyed lighting design, and while there are just over 40 dancers (the 22-member ensemble augmented by 24 children and youth recruited from local dance schools), the impression is of an engagingly unified and committed ensemble performing with the vigour and professionalism of a full-sized company. At the centre of it all is a sparkling ballerina by the name of Saniya Abilmajineva whose brilliant command of technique and playful elegance made this version of The Sleeping Beauty something of a revelation.

Hunger Games and Franchise Blues

Jennifer Lawrence in The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2.

Some spoilers for films in The Hunger Games franchise follow. 

One of the many results of being a new parent is that your attempts to keep up with popular culture quickly fall by the wayside, and so it was only when The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2 came out on DVD that I was able to see the culmination of one of the more unique film franchises in recent years. I’ve had mixed feelings about the earlier movies, as well as the young adult novels on which they’re based, but the way in which this particular franchise came to a close intrigues me, because it strikes me as something of a rebuke to the model on which big-budget, multi-part movies of its ilk are constructed.

Snyder Shrugged: The Disturbing Politics of the Cape and Cowl

Henry Cavill as Superman in Zack Snyder's Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.

I recently learned that Zack Snyder, director of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, is intending on pursuing a remake of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead once he’s done with all this comic book nonsense. In a recent interview for The Hollywood Reporter, he says:

"I have been working on The Fountainhead. I've always felt like The Fountainhead was such a thesis on the creative process and what it is to create something."

This revelation – that Snyder, director of highly politicized comic-book films like his adaptations of Frank Miller’s 300 (2006) and Alan Moore’s Watchmen (2009), was an admirer of Ayn Rand’s work – surprised very few people. This little tidbit was, in fact, the final piece of a puzzle we’ve collectively been trying to solve for a decade now: the key to understanding Snyder’s distinctly… personal approach to filmmaking.

A Clearly Marked Trail: The First Episode of The Path

Michelle Monaghan and Aaron Paul in The Path.

“In the beginning, I sort of just made up stuff,” said The Path’s showrunner, Jessica Goldberg, in a Decider.com interview about the invention of the TV show’s fictionalized religion, Meyerism. A hodgepodge of various religions and belief systems, Meyerism is at the heart of the drama in the Goldberg’s first television series which launched Wednesday April 6th on Hulu. While American Hulu subscribers can take in all 10 episodes of The Path right away, here in Canada we’re forced to walk the sacred ancient path of weekly installments. The series’ pilot, “What the Fire Throws,” aired last Thursday April 7th on Showcase and will be followed by tonight’s second episode titled, “The Era of the Ladder.” While the pilot was amusing enough, Goldberg’s aforementioned approach to screenwriting shows in this largely predictable first episode.

Dori Freeman's Debut Album: Beautiful and Honest

With so much music being released, it’s refreshing to hear someone truly stand out from the crowded world. Dori Freeman, a new singer-songwriter from Virginia, has recently released her self-titled debut album on Free Dirt Records – and I can’t enough of it. Ten tracks adorn the record that is a cross between the subtle sounds of Peggy Lee and the edgy timbre of Patsy Cline, but instead of imitation we have an album of Chamber Country: quiet, soft and introspective but still full of engaging stories and a deep understanding of its musical roots.

Freeman was born in Galax, Virginia, a town in the Appalachian Mountains. Her extended family has a rich association with mountain music, so much so that the Freemans own a shop along the state heritage trail, aka Crocked Road, where travellers seek out genuine original music from Appalachia. It’s also far away from the horrible commercial sounds of “new country” which percolate out of Nashville. Even though she’s 24 years of age, you can hear the ghosts of American music past delighting on every note she sings. Her voice and her thoughtful song writing impressed Teddy Thompson so much he agreed to produce her first record without hesitation, “I didn’t really do anything other than put a microphone in front of her,” he told No Depression magazine. Thompson also sings on three tracks – “Where I Stood”, “Any Wonder” and “A Song for Paul” – which stand out for their harmonies and silky instrumentation.

It’s Just Something He Does: Midnight Special

Michael Shannon, with Jaeden Lieberher, in Midnight Special. (Photo: Ben Rothstein)

We’re all aware of the writer’s maxim that says it’s a terrible faux-pas to have characters telling each other things they already know, as a means of getting this information to the audience. Hollywood seems to employ this clumsy tactic too often, as if paranoid that audiences will stand up and walk out if plot details and character motivations – especially in a genre film context, where weird shit happens all the time – aren’t spoon-fed explicitly to them. Writer-director Jeff Nichols (Take Shelter) seems to have crafted Midnight Special as a fierce rebellion against this dumbing-down of popular cinema. This is a science fiction story about a father and son that traffics in emotion, not exposition, and it’s all the richer for it.

Not Buying It: Blackbird and The Humans

Jeff Daniels and Michelle Williams in David Harrower's Blackbird. (Photo: Sara Krulwich)

In David Harrower’s Blackbird, which has opened on Broadway in a new revival, Una, a young woman in her twenties, tracks down Ray, with whom she had an affair when she was twelve and he was forty. Fifteen years have passed; he is working in another city, under another name, having reconstituted his life after spending three and a half years in prison. Their end-of-the-workday conversation in the garbage-strewn staff break room of the company where he works comprises almost the entire play (which runs approximately an hour and a half, without intermission). Harrower’s Scottish, and the play premiered at the Edinburgh International Festival in 2005 before opening in the West End, where it won the Olivier Award for Best New Play, and on Broadway in 2007, with Jeff Daniels as Ray and Alison Pill as Una. I saw the original New York production, and except for Daniels’ gripping portrayal of Ray I didn’t care for it. It seemed to me to be an unnuanced depiction of pedophilia with a heroine whose justified fury at the adult man who slept with her when she was on the cusp of adolescence represents the second way in which he’s managed to wreck her existence: he can go on with his life but she can’t get over what he did to her. That is, it felt like a familiar kind of social problem play that takes a stand no one could possibly dispute – a drama that flatters the audience for its right-mindedness.

Tensions between History and Film: Trumbo

Bryan Cranston as Dalton Trumbo in Trumbo.

Before a scene is shot, a screenplay is necessary. The screenwriter may draw upon his own imagination as well as other source material, as does John McNamara in Trumbo. But therein also lies a major problem: McNamara conveys skewed or caricatured portraits of gossip columnist, Hedda Hopper, actors John Wayne and Edgar G. Robinson, but also relies substantially on Bruce Cook’s hagiographic 1977 biography Trumbo (reissued in 2015), a source that the screenwriter acknowledges having read ten times. Cook did extensive interviews, including with Dalton Trumbo himself, to write primarily about his personal life and professional career as Hollywood’s highest-paid screenwriter before the blacklist. During those repressive times, he peddled scripts to small independent companies and then used a “front” who pretended to be the writer. Two of his scripts, for which he could not be credited, won Oscars.

Unfortunately, Dalton Trumbo’s politics is given short shrift in Cook’s biography, a major flaw that is reflected in the film, given that Trumbo’s politics is the driving force behind making the film. As a result, Jay Roach has directed a simplistic, superficial and curiously apolitical biopic – notwithstanding a few heated exchanges about labour strikes in the film industry and Trumbo handing out leaflets – that drains the historical setting from 1946 until the early 1960s of any real context. I say curious because his earlier effort, Game Change, a television movie about John McCain’s disastrous decision to choose Sarah Palin as his 2008 running mate, is an insightful political film and vastly superior to this mediocre and occasionally embarrassing, puerile production. The blacklist that deprived hundreds of Hollywood personalities of their jobs polarized Americans. Roach’s Trumbo has replicated that polarization – some critics calling it a “thoughtful account” and a “sobering true event” while others have dismissed it as a “whitewash.” Unfortunately, I must side with the latter assessment, but for different reasons.

Fearless Satire: The Criterion Blu-ray Release of The Manchurian Candidate (1962)

Frank Sinatra and Janet Leigh in John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate (1962).

(Spoiler alert: This article discusses plot details that The Manchurian Candidate keeps hidden until quite late in the narrative. Though they are quite famous, if you don’t know them you might prefer to see the movie first and encounter the revelations with all the suspense and surprise that the 1962 audience would have experienced.)

Political conspiracy thrillers flourished during the early days of the Cold War and especially during the Korean War. Generally their heroes were pure-hearted Federal agents who succeeded in stemming the insidious behavior of Communist infiltrators, icy devils with no more dimensions than the Nazis bad guys Hollywood had featured just a few years earlier. The exception was Leo McCarey’s notorious and distasteful 1952 My Son John, in which the Commie is a young American man (Robert Walker) who comes home to give the commencement speech at his old high school and alarms his mother (Helen Hayes) by mocking his parents’ patriotism and refusing to attend church with them. He is also clearly gay, though the movie doesn’t say so explicitly; you deduce it from the flourishes in Walker’s performance, which are recycled from the truly splendid one he gave the year before in Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train. The idea seems to be some debased version of the Renaissance notion about the clustering of vices in a corrupted personality. In the great Jacobean tragedy The Changeling by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley, when the husband of the protagonist realizes she’s a murderess and her partner in crime calls her a whore, the husband replies, “It could not choose but follow.” More specifically in My Son John, the un-American elements in John’s behavior – cynicism, atheism, homosexuality – all point to his being under the influence of a foreign power.

Estranged: Schitt's Creek and Baskets

Catherine O’Hara, Annie Murphy, Eugene Levy, and Daniel Levy in Schitt's Creek.

Schitt’s Creek (stylized as Schitt$ Creek), a CBC sitcom airing in the U.S. on the Pop network, is in its second season; Baskets, on FX, has just ended its first. Both are comedies of estrangement centering on dysfunctional families, and both show a desire to dig – patiently, obliquely, as if with a jailhouse spoon – toward the human parts of obtuse or abrasive characters. Despite being resistant to quick affinity or effortless love, each has been renewed for another year. That’s a fine thing: there are audiences out here for them, and everyone deserves a chance to find each other.