Off the Shelf: Life Is What Happens to You While You’re Busy Making Other Plans: House

The cast of House. From left: Omar Epps, Olivia Wilde, Robert Sean Leonard, Hugh Laurie, Lisa Edelstein, Jesse Spencer, Jennifer Morrison, Peter Jacobson. (Photo: Joe Viles/NBC.)

I despise prestige television. Art relies on limitations, and narrative is an architecture. Thirteen hours of a single story deprives you of both, and “fleshing out” each character’s backstory is just exploring so many blind alleys. No, give me episodic television anytime.

Off the Shelf: Sansho the Bailiff (1954)

Yoshiaki Hanayagi and Kinuyo Tanaka in Sansho the Bailiff (1954).

“A slave becoming a governor, that’s a true fairy tale!” – Sansho to Zushio in Sansho the Bailiff

Of the three filmmakers I think of as the supreme masters of Japanese cinema – Kenji Mizoguchi, Akira Kurosawa and Kon Ichikawa – Mizoguchi arrived and departed earliest. But even though he died of leukemia in 1956, at the age of 58, he had an amazing career that began in the silent era and produced 86 movies. (Nearly two-thirds of them have been lost.) Among his late pictures are several that may have been Japan’s first feminist movies: The Life of O-haru, Street of Shame and A Geisha, which deal candidly with traditional options for women at different points in Japanese society. But his signal qualities are his painterly style – no Japanese director has approached more closely, or more poignantly, the enchanted delicacy of Japanese prints – and his narrative sweep. The Mizoguchi movies I love best are like tales from The Arabian Nights: the erotic ghost story Ugetsu (1953), the dark Cinderella story The Princess Yang Kwei Fei (1955) and especially Sansho the Bailiff (1954), which is his masterpiece.

Off the Shelf: John Fawcett's Ginger Snaps (2000)

Katharine Isabelle and Emily Perkins in Ginger Snaps

John Fawcett's horror comedy Ginger Snaps has the good sense not to take itself too seriously. This low-budget Canadian feature, with a clever screenplay by Karen Walton, is essentially a prankish menstrual joke much like Brian De Palma's Carrie. Fifteen-year-old Brigitte Fitzgerald (Emily Perkins) and her sixteen-year-old sister, Ginger (Katharine Isabelle), are both outcasts who are preoccupied by death. Their self-styled Goth lifestyle is so gloomy that the only joy they experience is collaborating on a school project where they photograph a number of mock-suicide attempts. Brigitte and Ginger are not only sisters; they're spiritual twins who loathe their placid suburban environment. Yet they are both so tied to their deep blue forebodings that neither has had her period yet. They take refuge in life's shadows as a way of hiding from the light of their own femininity. The night Ginger finally gets "the curse" she also has the misfortune of being bitten by a werewolf. This horrific attack slowly transforms her into a lycanthrope herself. The joke, of course, is that puberty has not only turned her into a hot babe who draws all this attention from the guys; it's also transformed her into a voracious beast who is out for blood. "I've got this ache," she tells Brigitte, "and I thought it was for sex, but it's to tear everything to pieces." With the help of Sam (Kris Lemche), a local pot dealer and amateur botanist, Brigitte tries to bring her demon sister back from the brink.

Off the Shelf: Lunch with Charles (2001)

Theresa Lee and Nicholas Lea in Lunch with Charles.

Lunch with Charles is a relaxed and genial romantic comedy about a number of couples who begin to feel dislocated and dissatisfied with the lives and partners they've chosen. Making his feature film debut, writer-director Michael Parker sets in motion a charmingly low-key Feydeau-style farce that's sprinkled with granola and cured in heady coastal air. Set in British Columbia, a province most easterners wrongly assume to be catatonically relaxed, Lunch with Charles examines with a droll undercurrent a number of partners who fear they've lost the itch for love, but turn out to be anything but sedate. The movie puts these mismatched duos, who are from different cultures as well as different walks of life, on a collision course that leads them to question the choices they've made in their lives.

East End Identity Crisis: The Infidel (2010)

Archie Panjabi, Omid Djalili and Amit Shah in The Infidel (2010).

"Look not at what a man has done, but what he hopes to do."

– Mahmud's four-year-old daughter, in The Infidel.

The Infidel (2010) tells the story of Mahmud Nasir (played with grumpy charm by British comedian Omid Djalili), an East London British-Pakistani family man, who discovers upon the recent death of his mother that he was adopted and (to his dismay) that he was born Jewish. The resulting crisis of identity leads him to try to track down his birth parents, with the help of his equally ill-tempered American Jewish neighbour Lenny (Richard Schiff, of West Wing fame). At the same time, his moderate Muslim life is unsettled by the imminent visit of his son's future father-in-law, a hard-line Egyptian cleric named Arshad Al-Masri (played by Israeli actor Yigal Naor, HBO's House of Saddam), who is coming to make sure that his daughter's new family are, as Mahmud's precocious four-year-old daughter puts it, "Muslim enough." These twin pressures lead to a slapstick process by which Mahmud alternately tries on both identities, and finds that neither truly fits. It is an amusing – sometimes hilarious – fable, told with a gentle, prodding eye on hypocrisy and all the holier-than-thou ways we often police one another's behaviour without taking our own into account.

Produced in the UK on a small budget, The Infidel was directed by Josh Appignanesi (whose only other feature is 2005's haunting Jewish-themed Song of Songs) and written by David Baddiel. In 2010, the movie created some buzz at the Tribeca Film Festival and ultimately became a modest hit in theatres worldwide (even inspiring a 2015 Bollywood remake). In 2014, Baddiel launched a successful Kickstarter campaign to fund his own stage musical adaptation of the script, which would eventually premiere at London's Theatre Royal Stratford East replete with songs by Erran Baron Cohen. But it is the original film that bears revisiting, especially at the close of this dark year.

Off the Shelf: Bruce Cockburn's Inner City Front (1981)

Bruce Cockburn, 1972. (Photo: Ron Bull)

In 1970, Bruce Cockburn had launched his first solo album. On it, he happily celebrated the virtues of rural life. In the years to follow, as his records evolved, he even began to introduce jazz (Night Vision) and reggae rhythms (Dancing in the Dragon's Jaws). On his album covers, Cockburn was occasionally seen perched under a tree with his acoustic guitar and surrounded by a gentle sprinkling of snow, or maybe next to a warm fireplace, as he was on his third album, Sunwheel Dance. His songs were both poetic and spiritual – at times, even mystical – as he discovered Christianity, yet they were continuously evocative and sly glimmers of quiet intelligence sparkled through the lyrics. Until 1980, Bruce Cockburn seemed happy to continue personifying the quiet comforts of Canada’s untamed landscape. But then, one day…. he moved to Toronto. After some personal changes in his life, including a divorce, Bruce Cockburn came to the city and his music was transformed dramatically with a record called Inner City Front – the first album he’d produce himself. It was a full-out electric record featuring a full band rather than just some guest musicians. The music within the grooves of Inner City Front was also a hybrid of rock, jazz, electronica and reggae. There was only one ballad – and it was right at the end of the record. Inner City Front had signalled a shift in the life and art of one of Canada’s most original and gifted performers. And the album would provide the groundwork for many of the sophisticated pop songs that Bruce Cockburn would record during the Eighties.

Off the Shelf: Arthur Kent's Risk and Redemption (1996)

Like many television news viewers, I didn't truly become aware of journalist Arthur Kent until 1991 when he was ducking Saddam Hussein's explosive little presents over Dhahran during the first Gulf War. At that time, while decked out in his leather jacket, and his sweeping dark hair blowing in the night air, he emerged with the sexual panache of a movie star. He was America's own Mel Gibson from Peter Weir's The Year of Living Dangerously, caught in the hail of rocket fire, and barely letting it ruffle his locks. This striking image not only won him the moniker "Scud Stud" from female fans rooting for him all over North America, it also won him no end of grief when he refused to be NBC's answer to Geraldo Rivera.

The great story behind Arthur Kent's 1996 memoir, Risk and Redemption: Surviving the Network News Wars (Viking), is how a reputable correspondent, who covered some of the biggest news events in his era, was forced to take the NBC television network to court in a $25 million dollar defamation and fraud suit because the corporate climate of turning hard news into celebrity worship rendered him unable to do his job. But Arthur Kent was also caught in a profoundly ironic trap because it was becoming the "Scud Stud" that actually brought him to international prominence. Risk and Redemption is Kent's attempt to separate what makes a journalist from what makes a luminary. And although you come away from the book cheering Kent's integrity, intelligence and victory, there is still something romantically self-serving about it. He comes across as someone beyond the temptation of stardom – even though television news, the profession on he's chosen, invites it. The incongruity of how the image of the "Scud Stud" (which Kent himself created) shaped a network's perception of him as a journalist, and perhaps implicated him in their corporate plans, doesn't envelop the book as much as I hoped it would.

Off the Shelf: Julie Salamon's The Devil's Candy (1991)

Tom Hanks and Melanie Griffith in The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990).

"Brian De Palma walked right off a cliff when he made his version of the Tom Wolfe novel The Bonfire of the Vanities," wrote Pauline Kael in The New Yorker when the movie opened during the Christmas season of 1990. "It's ingenious; there's clever thinking behind it. And it's a fizzle...like a sci-fi version of a loud, over-bright screwball comedy." In The Devil's Candy: The Bonfire of the Vanities Goes to Hollywood, a fascinating and painfully comic account of the unmaking of a highly controversial book, Julie Salamon (a novelist who was once the film critic for the Wall Street Journal) traces those futile steps that led right up to the edge of that deadly cliff. With a perception that's both poignant and prescient, Salamon gives us a searing portrait of Hollywood studio bungling in the early Nineties. The Devil's Candy is about the desperate actions of Warner Brothers who were hungry for a huge hit – the devil's candy of the title. They took a scabrous best seller with politically volatile material, miscast it, and then hired Brian De Palma, a director known for his own satiric volatility, and essentially asked him to make a feel-good film out of a story about political greed and racism in the Eighties. The movie was both a critical and commercial disaster. Salamon, with a judicious wit, unravels bit-by-bit the cruel process of the whole debacle.

French Delights: Late August, Early September, The Lady and the Duke, 5 X 2, and The Taste of Others

While checking out some foreign films I needed for a course I was teaching, I realized once again how many movies that may have come and gone too quickly in the cinemas or did not play commercially there at all – can find a second life streaming, or on DVD. Despite downloading and streaming, however, I still prefer to find my movies the old fashioned way, on screen, or in the video store’s stacks. Here are four French films you ought to check out.

Off The Shelf: Tim Burton’s Ed Wood (1994)

Johnny Depp in Ed Wood (1994).

At the Star Wars Celebration press event this past weekend in Anaheim, a preteen kid stepped up to the mic to ask J.J. Abrams how to become a filmmaker. Abrams (doubtless sensing the same starry-eyed wonder in this kid that he must have felt while channeling his own idol, Spielberg, for his 2011 film Super 8) told him gently that he and his peers have access to technology and distribution platforms that never existed when he was that age, and that if you have a smartphone in your pocket then you already have far greater tools for moviemaking than he ever did. His advice was to use those tools, as often as possible, and to get your hands dirty making movies, no matter the result. Abrams’ apparent love for the art of spectacle – it’s what earned him a job directing a new Star Wars film, after all – would have made him right at home in cinema’s golden age, where he might have kept council with directors like Ed Wood. His advice certainly sounds like something straight from the famous cult filmmaker himself.

Best known for his 1959 disaster Plan 9 From Outer Space, Wood was a miserable failure as a Hollywood filmmaker, earning neither critical acclaim nor significant box office returns. His legacy as one of the worst directors of all time has led to a posthumous cult following, thanks to film buffs coming together to celebrate the indomitable spirit that kept Wood in the movie business despite bomb after insufferable bomb. Tim Burton’s 1994 biopic, named for the man himself, is celebratory too: a joyous examination of the passion for spectacle and wonder that endures behind the money-grubbing cynicism of the Hollywood we know. Ed Wood never had a smartphone, but that sure didn’t stop him from making movies.

Off the Shelf: The Deep End (2001)

The Deep End gives off a sweet malevolence; it softly seduces you even as it fills you with dread. Unlike some popular thrillers, The Deep End doesn't nudge you with mechanical scare tactics to provide tension. The picture is both intelligently suspenseful and an incongruously witty chamber drama. Scott McGehee and David Siegel, the co-writers and co-directors, quietly and shrewdly build our apprehension by having us slowly come to empathize with a main character who paves her road to hell with the best of intentions.

Tilda Swinton (I Am Love, The Grand Budapest Hotel) plays Margaret Hall, a lonely housewife in Lake Tahoe, who spends her days dutifully carrying out all those mundane domestic chores of motherhood. Her husband, meanwhile, is a naval officer who spends his days carrying out his duties at sea. In short time, though, Margaret finds herself at sea emotionally when she discovers that her eldest son, Beau (Jonathan Tucker), is gay. She also comes to see that his lover, Darby (Josh Lucas), is a rather disreputable character who might bring harm to her son. Margaret initially pleads with Darby to stay away from Beau, but he ignores her, and later makes a midnight creep from Reno to Lake Tahoe. When Beau gets into a skirmish with his lover on the family dock, Darby is accidently killed. In the morning, Margaret finds the body and assumes that her son has committed murder. While Beau has no knowledge of of what happened, Margaret does what any loving mother might do; she tries to clean up the mess and protect her family. Based on the little-known 1940s novel, The Blank Wall, by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding (which was also the source for Max Ophuls 1949 film noir, The Reckless Moment), The Deep End is largely anchored by Swinton's complexly layered performance.

The Dogs of Comedy: Revisiting Christopher Guest's Best in Show (2000)

When you're as sick as I was this past weekend, you find yourself craving comfort food of all sorts. For comfort comes not only from good hot soup, steamy liquids and plenty of sleep, but it also arrives in choices of films to watch. Rather than turn to the dramatically complex (though I did watch the extraordinary new Blu-ray restoration of the four hour and ten minute director's cut of Sergio Leone's gangster epic, Once Upon a Time in America, which I'll write about next week when I'm fully healthy), I look instead to comedy, the genre that helps us come to terms with pain and misery because we come to laugh at its absurdity. Christopher Guest's mock documentary Best in Show (2000) got the call this past weekend.

It's often been acknowledged – especially in ads – that dog owners not only have a lot in common with their pooches, they sometimes live their lives through them. You can usually size up a dog owner, too, just by watching the type of canine they have at the end of the leash. Dogs can either act out the most regal aspects of the owner's personality, or, as in the case of pit bulls, the owner's latent aggressions. In Best in Show, Christopher Guest satirizes this symbiotic and idiosyncratic alliance by casting it in the colourful arena of a dog show. Using the same spry ensemble of comic actors (Michael McKean, Parker Posey, Catherine O'Hara, Eugene Levy and Fred Willard) that he first worked with in his 1996 debut Waiting for Guffman, in Best in Show, they prove to be even more eccentric than their pets.

Off The Shelf: Insidious (2010) and The Conjuring (2013)

Rose Byrne in James Wan's Insidious (2010)

Before this week I only knew James Wan as the director of Saw (and producer of almost every one of its sequels), which didn’t exactly bode well for the rest of his filmography. Though Saw (2004) functioned as a mostly-effective mystery-horror yarn, the sequels quickly descended into exploitative dreck, bringing the term “torture porn” into our pop culture lexicon. Is that really an achievement to celebrate? I can’t say – but it did leave me unprepared for the quality of two of his more recent directorial efforts, Insidious (2010) and The Conjuring (2013), films that veer away from serial-killer mind games into supernatural territory.

Off the Shelf: Bring it On (2000)

Who would have thought that a film about competing cheerleading squads could be so much fun? Certainly not me. But Bring it On springs plenty of surprises. For one thing, it's not just another hormonal teen comedy about sex. It's also not another self-congratulatory jolt of testosterone about winning the big game. And even if the romantic parts of the story follow in the footsteps of already familiar formula, the picture has a tickling spirit that tweaks you on the nose. Director Peyton Reed and screenwriter Jessica Bendinger have put together an affectionate and cheerful look at what is often a catty and competitive sport without turning snide about it. The cheerleaders aren't bubble-headed conformists who fear losing status at the high school. Reed and Bendinger create instead a comic tapestry that dispenses with pom-pom-waving clichés. Bring it On shows the relationship the sport has to interpretive dance, swing, martial arts and even Busby Berkeley choreography. We can see how the standard cheerleading routines at school football and basketball games are only warmups for national competitions that are every bit as difficult as gymnastic events.

Off the Shelf: The Source (1999)

Watching Chuck Workman's impressionistic, stirring, and often quite entertaining documentary The Source, you'll certainly get a supple feeling for who, and what, the literary movement known as the Beats was to American life. While weaving together a dazzling collage of free-associating visuals and sounds, Workman aptly demonstrates that there is certainly no shortage of material – written, filmed, or recorded – on this group of socially radical writers. Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, in the late Forties, came to be the pioneers of this subterranean movement. Out of this material, The Source creates a wealth of associations about the Beats with the details – and incongruities – of their history lurking under the surface.

It was America's post-Second World War desire for calm and conformity that spawned the Beat Generation. These writers, as the official story goes, set out to break down the walls, shake up the straight world, and reject the spoils of American society. They wrote novels and books of poetry that shocked both the literary and the artistic world with explicit language, performed improvised readings that captured the bop rhythms of cool jazz, and lived lives of notorious excess. Novels like Kerouac's On the Road, Ginsberg's epic poem Howl, and Burroughs' The Soft Machine or Naked Lunch, ripped into the fabric of the staid Eisenhower Fifties. Yet this rebellious subculture, filled with individuals who laid claim to being desolate and underground dharma bums, also sought access to the mass culture. They wanted to be cool and hip, and to live out the mythology they helped create. The Source is a riff on their mythologized history. It's about how they created a movement, which became co-opted on television and in the movies, that would be the antecedent for Sixties counter-culture and, later, the music of such diverse bands as Soft Machine, Steely Dan, Sonic Youth and the head-butting poetry of Henry Rollins.

Off the Shelf: Croupier (1998)

When novels or movies delve into the intensely turbulent world of gambling, it's often from the point of view of the gambler. Which makes perfect sense, dramatically speaking, since it is the gambler who daringly tries to reinvent himself by risking everything. Quite simply these nervy, often unstable individuals, who have fascinated novelists from Dostoyevsky to Dick Francis, make great protagonists because they can feel like Charles Wells one minute and one of the walking dead in the next. There have been many good movies on the subject, too – Robert Altman's California Split (1974), Jacques Demy's Bay of Angels (1963), Albert Brooks's Lost in America (1985). All of them gleefully revel in showing just how giddy and precarious the lives of gamblers can be.

Rarely, though, do we see the perspective from the other side of the blackjack table. But director Mike Hodges's Croupier, a taut, tough-minded crime drama, with a razor sharp script by Paul Mayersberg (The Man Who Fell to Earth), shifts its focus from the guy betting the chips to the one dealing the cards. And the view, although radically different, is every bit as riveting. Where a gambler constantly flirts with the idea of losing control, the croupier always struggles with his ability to maintain it. Jack Manfred (Clive Owen) is just such a control freak. He's a budding writer in Britain whose first novel has just been rejected. While trying to come up with another idea for his publisher friend Giles (Nick Reding), Jack's estranged father calls from South Africa. He has a lead for a job as a croupier in a British casino. Jack, who was trained in the profession by his father years before, wants to escape his family past. but he also needs a job and a salary.

Off the Shelf: James Toback's Tyson (2008)

Boxer Mike Tyson didn’t have the rhythmic swing of Muhammad Ali, or the dazzling force of Joe Frazier – he was instead a powerfully built blunt instrument. But because of that imposing physique, it was assumed by some that Tyson was illiterate, that all he could do was fight. In his documentary film, Tyson, director James Toback (Fingers, Black and White) delivers a surprising and fascinating account of this troubled fighter’s life by allowing Mike Tyson to speak for himself. And it turns out, he is anything but illiterate. For the full length of the movie, Toback simply places Tyson in front of the camera and (with the occasional inclusion of archival footage), we hear the story from this troubled boxer first-hand  Toback's choice of subject is hardly surprising; he has always been something of an enigmatic and unpredictable talent himself. Most of his movies, good (Two Girls and a Guy) and bad (Harvard Man), approach movie-making as if they were tests of character, where his streaks of reckless improvisation could add this element of danger to the dramatic tension in the story. With Tyson, he sublimates his usual improvisational style and lets Mike Tyson seize the moment to nakedly reveal himself.

Off the Shelf: Jim McBride's The Big Easy

From time to time, I'll haul down a DVD from my collection, throw it into the player and see if it still holds up. In most cases, it's been years since I've seen it, tastes change and there is always the possibility that I'll go, 'what the heck was I thinking?' The last time I did that was in February 2010, a month after we launched Critics at Large, when I looked at Toby Hooper's delightfully bananacakes film Lifeforce (1985). This past weekend I pulled down another 1980s picture, one that I actually liked, not because it was catawampus, but because, except for the predictable cop plot, it was a good, adult character piece: Jim McBride's The Big Easy (1987).

Off the Shelf: Nine Queens, 3-Iron and Omagh

Given that it's a holiday weekend, our readers just might find more time to catch up on some movie watching. Rather than recommend some new titles, ones that will already be in demand at your better DVD stores, here are some perhaps less-in-demand foreign-language gems to cozy up to:

Nine Queens is a polished and vastly entertaining caper film that puts the sting back into the con. Argentinian director Fabian Bielinsky, in his award-winning feature debut, smoothly amuses the audience with a deftly elaborate shell game. He provides a divertingly sharp character study that cleverly examines the question of honour among thieves.

Juan (Gaston Pauls) is a small-time crook who gets caught conning a convenience store clerk. Marcos (Ricardo Darin), a big-time swindler, steps in to "arrest" him – with the hope of recruiting him for a bigger job. Soon Marcos's sister, Valeria (Leticia Bredice), contacts him from a luxury hotel where Juan and Marcos team up for a ruse to obtain a counterfeit collection of some extremely rare stamps known as the Nine Queens. Since they have a buyer already in mind, their plan seems airtight – until other scam artists and derailed strategies send their promising racket into comic episodes of misadventure.

Off the Shelf: Slither (2006)

Slither is the kind of grossly entertaining B-horror movie that gets you giggling right from the opening scene when a flaming alien-infested comet hurtles rapidly to Earth. (This chattering chunk of rock has the worst possible intentions when it arrives.) The biggest joke on the audience, though, is that when these critters finally get hatched, things get much worse than anyone could possibly imagine. Slither in quick order becomes horror trash without a trace of solemnity.

Set in the quiet rural town of Wheelsy, S.C., Grant (Michael Rooker of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer) is a strapping he-man who may be losing the affections of his generally devoted wife, Starla (Elizabeth Banks of The 40-Year-Old Virgin). While ruminating the state of his marriage late one night in the woods, Grant gets rudely invaded by a slithery slug-like creature. Before long, Grant begins mutating into a whole different species of he-man. He first impregnates a woman (who becomes a host for a litter of slimy beasts) and then later devours dogs and cattle. (These aliens come with a generous and purposeful appetite.) As Grant soon begins to resemble Jabba the Hut with a bad case of psoriasis, Nathan Fillion (the sardonic space captain from Joss Whedon's Firefly and Serenity) as the town police chief demonstrates some of the funniest straight-faced double-takes in movies while tackling both this mutant infestation and his hidden lust for Starla.