The Playboy of the Western World and The Apple Cart: Flying High at the Shaw

Marla McLean and Qasim Khan in The Playboy of the Western World. (Photo: Emily Cooper)

In the preface to his 1907 masterpiece The Playboy of the Western World, the Irish playwright John Millington Synge writes, “On the stage one must have reality and one must have joy . . . In a good play every speech should be as fully flavoured as a nut or apple . . .” This dictum explains the play’s unusual style and texture, realism folded in with folk-fable imagination and humor and language so musical that it sings in your ears even when you’re just reading the text. Synge claims that he owes both the wildness of the narrative and the richness of the vernacular to his close attention to the way rural working-class Irish people speak (or did around the turn of the twentieth century).

Stabbed in the Heart: The Twilight Saga (2008-2012)

Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart in Twilight (2008).

I confess: I too used to shit freely on Twilight (2008). What started changing my mind is the excellent work of its two leads, Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson, in their work after Twilight, though never again together after their breakup. This, and not my internalized misogyny against media embraced by teenage girls, is the angle from which I have approached these films, based on the four novels by Stephenie Meyer. And they're fascinating.

The Best of CAL 2017

Critics at Large Summer Meeting, August 4/17 (l.to r. Kevin Courrier, Danny McMurray, Steve Vineberg, Devin McKinney, Justin Cummings, Bob Douglas and Mark Clamen)

Back in January 2010, David Churchill, Shlomo Schwartzberg and I came up with the idea of Critics At Large. We envisioned a daily online arts journal that would provide for us the freedom to write – a freedom we were beginning to lose working in magazines and newspapers. Growing rapidly tired of plying our trade in a field where desperate careerism was taking the place of collegiality and editors were beginning to reward expedience, we wanted to remain more true to the pleasures of critical writing. We also wanted to discover what kind of reader we could cultivate and who they might turn out to be. Over the last eight years, many things changed in both our writing and in our audience. For one thing, Critics At Large became less a haven for frustrated writers and more an accomodating home for a diverse and hopeful group who saw the magazine as a possibility. We began attracting a motley crew from various backgrounds who helped change Critics at Large for the better. A number of men and women, young and old, experienced and not, came to shape our identity rather than take on the one we already had. Along that path, we also attracted veteran arts critics who wanted to continue to address the work that inspired them, but we also drew inexperienced writers trying to find the true value of having a voice to speak with. When I read individual pieces each day, I marvel at the sheer range of material and the keen passion each writer brings to their subject. As for our readers, not only have they been rapidly growing, but the diversity of opinion in the magazine has helped us reach out to a much wider audience.What became most important for me, as one of its co-founders, was watching Critics At Large grow beyond my own expectations into a continually morphing organism that embraces the freedom our writers bring to it. For those who believe that arts criticism isn't about having the right opinion, but instead is a means by which the writer and reader mutually discover their own personal relationship to the arts, I think we are succeeding in getting there. As a way to celebrate that goal, and, I suppose, to amply demonstrate it, here is a look back at some of my own favourite pieces from 2017. They aren't presented in any order of preference. Rather than commenting on the writer and their work, I've selected specific quotes that I think best reflects their value to me as critics. As I continue on as editor, writer, and reader, I can truly say that I'm proud to call them colleagues.

Kevin Courrier
Editor-in-Chief
Critics At Large

Princes, Let Sleeping Beauty Sleep: Passengers

Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence in Passengers.

Passengers, written by Jon Spaihts and directed by Morten Tyldum, isn’t a very good sci-fi film. It’s also not a very good romance. It touches on thought-provoking themes that it doesn’t bother to explore, it wastes some lovely production design (and some talented leads) on a tepid story, and it squanders numerous opportunities to surprise and thrill its audience. Moreover, whatever improvements might have been made that could have coaxed out the film’s true potential, they would all be for naught, thanks to a single terrible decision that lies at the story’s core, poisoning the whole movie from the inside out.

Retro Fever: Kung Fury vs. Turbo Kid

Triceracop and David Sandberg in Kung Fury.

Get ready for the understatement of the week: popular media sure loves the 1980s right now. When studios aren’t scrambling to remake anything from the Reagan era with even the barest semblance of name recognition (I’m still holding out for the gritty reboot of Teddy Ruxpin, personally), everyone from video game developers to fashion designers to amateur filmmakers are appropriating the loud, garish, neon-and-pastel synthpop aesthetic of the late 80s and early 90s, because people seem to be lapping it up, so why not? This is a strange phenomenon whose causes have doubtless been explicated elsewhere far more expertly than I ever could – all I know is, I look around at popular media these days and it’s one of the most common tropes I recognize. Films like Kung Fury and Turbo Kid almost seem like inevitabilities in this climate.

The Price of Truth: Kill the Messenger

Jeremy Renner as Gary Webb in Kill the Messenger

If last summer’s scenes from Ferguson, M.O. – the corpse of a black man lying in the street; cops armoured up like special forces; residents rioting in a failed neighborhood – drew our outrage, they didn’t earn our surprise. The whole affair was just yet another installment of the forces of law and order versus America’s poor and marginalized – those pictures could have been L.A. in the wake of Rodney King, or the whole country after the killing of Dr. King. With Kill the Messenger, director Michael Cuesta shines the spotlight on a particularly appalling chapter of this saga, telling the story of Gary Webb, a former reporter for the San Jose Mercury News. America’s “War on Drugs” ranks as one of its most self-destructive and inept policies in history; through it, criminal law has led to social engineering, as entire urban enclaves have crumbled due to the cycling of its young men of color in and out of prison on possession charges. Through Webb, Cuesta revisits an even darker wrinkle in this narrative. But what starts out as a moderately compelling investigative thriller turns into an even more thoughtful, ruminative portrait of a crusading reporter, his private battles, and what it means to have integrity.

Supermassive: Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar

Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, and David Gyasi in Interstellar

I might not be the best person to review Interstellar. I'm fascinated by our universe and deeply moved by its scope and mystery. I think most people, if they take the time to look up from their smartphones into the sky, also know this special feeling of humility and wonder – I simply tend to indulge in it more often. So I am sorely tempted to heap platitudes and justification upon Chris Nolan’s latest (and arguably greatest) effort, because – while hardly a perfect movie – I think its power to remind us of these feelings can be understood by anyone. So meet me halfway: check your cynicism at the door, and I'll do my best to abandon purple prose for sober consideration.

A Formula Film with a Human Face: The Criterion Collection Release of Lawrence Kasdan's The Big Chill

When Lawrence Kasdan's The Big Chill came out back in 1983, it was understandable (especially if you were a political activist in the Sixties) if you found yourself appalled at just how glib and superficial the whole treatment of the period was. In it, a group of former college radicals gather for a weekend when one of their former comrades, Alex, who has lost his way, commits suicide. As they bury him, they dredge up the good ol' days and reflect on what has happened to each of them since. This would have been perfectly compelling if The Big Chill had believably suggested that any one of these people were ever once radical, let alone political activists. The level of ease they reach together in that South Carolina home, even when they rub each other the wrong way, doesn't take into consideration the uneasy course the country has taken since they last took up sides against it. The group seems more caught up in what middle-age and their choice of occupation has done to them rather than what has happened to the United States by 1983.

For a movie supposedly about the politics of a turbulent period, there is little to find that's political in it. With no sense of what happened in the land between their time as committed activists and now, there's not even a comprehension of how some of the counter-culture (especially the Weathermen) began turning criminal, even psychopathic, like the political revolutionaries in Dostoyevsky's The Possessed, or the bombers in Jean-Luc Godard's prescient La Chinoise (1967), as the decade drew to a close. The shootings at Kent State and Jackson State in the early Seventies are never alluded to on this mournful weekend, and the picture never once mentions a President. The country itself is what ends up missing-in-action in The Big Chill. For all their former activism, and their engagement in the world, the collective gathered here are only interested in their state of mind and their own well-being rather than the state of the country. You're never convinced that this group was ever made up of idealists who, by the Eighties, turned into narcissists. They suggest instead refugees from one of Werner Erhard's human potential encounter groups rather than anyone who did time in the SDS. Despite the death of one of their own, which provides the very title of the picture, there is little in the way of a chill in the air considering where America actually was when the film came out.

Cabaret: The Crooked Frame in “The Attack on Modern Art in Germany 1937”

Alan Cumming in the 1998 production of Cabaret.

Indulge me in serving up what might appear as an improbable conceit: that the current New York production of Sam Mendes’s Cabaret, that (as I write) is in previews on Broadway, could have been included in the Degenerate Art Exhibition of avant-garde paintings and sculptures on display uptown at the Neue Galerie. The Mendes production is a revival of his own 1998 reinterpretation of the 1966 Harold Prince Broadway blockbuster and the 1972 celebrated Bob Fosse film, all of which are loosely based on Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories and his experiences in Berlin during the early 1930s when he befriended a cabaret singer who became the inspiration for Sally Bowles. If Prince and, to a greater extent, Fosse’s glossy sheen and honky-tonk gaiety were inspired by the garishly-coloured and provocative subject matter depicted in the paintings of George Grosz, Otto Dix, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Max Beckmann, Mendes offers a grungier, economically desperate and grimmer look. Both the characters and the set – the Kit Kat Klub alternates with a dowdy rooming house without any evidence of conspicuous wealth – communicate a sense of impending danger, false hope, resignation and the threat of radical change that will forever alter their lives and designate the cabaret as degenerate just like the modernist artworks that provided some of the cinematographic cornucopia in the Fosse film.

Live Wires: Showtime's Masters of Sex

Michael Sheen as Dr. William Masters and Lizzy Caplan as Virginia Johnson in Showtime’s Masters of Sex

Michael Sheen doesn’t have the world-beaters’ charisma or the easy, sexy charm that people associate with movie stars. He’s certainly a skillful actor, though, and he’s had the luck to be cast in a string of projects, written by Peter Morgan – Stephen Frears’ The Deal and The Queen, in both of which he portrayed Tony Blair, and as David Frost in Ron Howard’s Frost/Nixon. In both films, Sheen played strivers, men whose sheer ambition helped them overcome their limitations and essential mediocrity. These were important men roles that didn’t call for star magnetism, but instead for an actor’s ability to illuminate what might elevate a man who wouldn’t stand out in a crowd to the top of his field. Sheen has another role like that in Showtime’s Masters of Sex, which is the best new TV series of the fall season, by a pretty generous margin.

40 More Years: "Our Nixon," and Everybody's

A scene from Penny Lane's Our Nixon

I’m not the best person to pass critical judgment on the virtues and defects of Penny Lane’s documentary Our Nixon, which was largely cobbled together out of hundreds of reels of home-movie footage shot during the Nixon presidency by H. R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, and Nixon’s special assistant, Dwight Chapin. (Haldeman was especially renowned as an amateur movie historian during his time as part of Nixon’s inner circle; a handful of his home movie footage was included in the 1995 CD-ROM edition of his published White House diaries.) Lane’s intention seems to be to invite audiences to re-examine their preconceived image of Nixon by seeing him, in unguarded, “personal” moments, as a human being, while including just enough of the larger context – in the form of TV interviews with Nixon’s abettors and enablers and snippets of the Watergate tapes – to remind us just who it is we’re watching. It’s not easy to get a clear emotional read on how the director feels about any of what she presents, but I’m guessing that, when she chose her title, she didn’t intend to remind anyone of the title that was given to Hans-Jurgen Sybergerg’s epic experimental film when it opened in the U. S. in 1980: Our Hitler.

Celebrities

John Logan's Peter and Alice, designed by Christopher Oram (Photo by Johan Persson)

John Logan’s Peter and Alice, which just concluded a run in London’s West End, spins out of a fact he gleaned from a biography of Alice Liddell Hargreaves, the inspiration for Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. In 1932, Hargreaves was invited to open a centenary celebration of Carroll at the Bumpus Bookshop in London, where she was accompanied by Peter Llewelyn Davies, the model for James Barrie’s Peter Pan. “I wondered what they said to each other,” Logan writes in the epigraph to the published script. What he’s come up to answer his own question is a sort of fantasia – part biography, part imagination; part surrealist, part absurdist. The bookstore back room where Alice (Dame Judi Dench) and Peter (Ben Whishaw) are waiting to be introduced out front flies up to reveal a series of two-dimensional drops (beautifully designed by Christopher Oram) that emulate the famous John Tenniel and Arthur Rackham illustrations for the original stories. Here Peter and Alice interact with their fictional counterparts (Olly Alexander and Ruby Bentall) as well as with Carroll (a.k.a. Reverend Charles Dodgson (Nicholas Farrell) and Barrie (Derek Riddell).

Not Worth the Price: Admission

Tina Fey, Nat Wolff and Paul Rudd in Admission

As lamentable as most American cinema is these days, I think that the comedy genre has fared the worst of all in Hollywood. That’s mainly because while horror and science fiction movies rarely suggest quality in the first place, comedy films always hold out great promise of screen success, because there is no shortage of talented comedic actors (Ben Stiller, Steve Carell, Jason Segel, Owen Wilson, Cameron Diaz) around and some dramatic actors who display a flair for it (Ryan Gosling, Kristin Bell, Johnny Depp). And while a few quality comedies like Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004), Wedding Crashers (2005) and I Love You, Man (2009) occasionally pop up, by and large the movies that result, from the frantic, tiresome likes of The Hangover (2009) and Bridesmaids (2011) to the missed opportunities of Seeking A Friend For the End of the World (2012) and Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008) to the outright disasters of Get Him to the Greek (2010), Grown Ups (2010) and Pineapple Express (2008), are wretched and unfunny. (I actually pointed out how consistently bad American film comedy was in a post from September 2010; clearly, nothing has changed in the interim.) And if they’re not outright failures, sometimes the films, like Crazy, Stupid, Love. (2011) or Date Night (2010), are merely fitfully amusing. The latter is the most evident trait of Admission, which strands skilled movie newcomers like Tina Fey and Paul Rudd, as well as veterans like Lily Tomlin and Wallace Shawn in an underdone, predictable and, finally sappy comedy that betrays the promise of its main concept.

The Amazing Spider-Man: Adolescent Hero

Andrew Garfield stars in The Amazing Spider-Man

As Peter Parker in The Amazing Spider-Man, Andrew Garfield wears his sensitivities – crippled pride, a sense of abandonment, guilt and anger, and especially romantic fervency – like open wounds.  You don’t wonder that the leading jock bully at his high school, Flash (Chris Zylka), targets Peter:  emotionally he’s the perfect punching bag.  Peter’s parents (played, in flashbacks, by Campbell Scott and Embeth Davidtz), a distinguished geneticist and his wife, were killed in a suspicious plane crash when Peter was a little boy, and though the uncle and aunt who raised him (Martin Sheen and Sally Field) have worked hard to give him both a loving upbringing and a strong moral foundation, his orphaned state has left him incomplete, and you can see it in his face, which is pocked with anxiety and etched with loneliness. Garfield is gifted but he hasn’t always been used well:  neither Never Let Me Go nor Red Riding Trilogy did a thing for him, and he was all wrong as Biff Loman in the Mike Nichols revival of Death of a Salesman last season – and when he isn’t cast right he goes phony.  But he showed a talent for mining adolescent feelings in The Social Network, and as Peter, a genius loser in whom a bite from a genetically enhanced spider in the lab of his dad’s old partner, Curt Connors (Rhys Ifans), releases both a physical prowess he never dreamed of possessing and an accompanying sexual confidence, he’s magnificent.  Garfield locates the vulnerabilities of an ostracized teenage boy with unerring precision and then uses the fantasy narrative to build on them – and employs his gangly body to suggest at first awkwardness, isolation and masochism and then athleticism and physical invention.  One friend made a brilliant comparison between Garfield and the young Anthony Perkins of Friendly Persuasion and Fear Strikes Out, and I can’t think of an actor since Perkins who’s been able to go quite so far with the bruised emotional palette of a young man who feels way too much.

Martin Sheen, Sally Field and Andrew Garfield

I had a wonderful time at this latest Spider-Man picture, which was directed by Marc Webb (500 Days of Summer), but I don’t understand the Beatles-vs.-Stones arguments it seems to have generated. Many fans of it feel compelled to put down the Sam Raimi Spider-Man trilogy, while many Raimi apologists pronounce it extraneous because it replays much of the plot of the 2002 Spider-Man. Both positions seem silly to me. Raimi’s movies were steeped in comic-book mythology and his visual style was ideal for the material; Spider-Man 2 in particular contained sequences (like the one in which Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man stops a subway train from falling into space and the grateful passengers reciprocate by succoring his exhausted body) in which the pop imagery had an almost miraculous emotional resonance, the way it does in the 1976 King Kong and in Tim Burton’s Batman – the only two comic-book movies I can think of that are even better.  Wittily, in Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2 the sticky webs Parker generated stood in for his sexual coming of age, simultaneously confusing and embarrassing and powerful.  The scenes between Maguire and Kirsten Dunst as Mary Jane Watson came straight out of romantic comedy.  Spider-Man 3 was an amalgam of mostly lousy ideas, but it was the kind of mistake almost every franchise makes at least once; it showed, perhaps, that Raimi had outgrown the series, but I don’t think he should be crucified for it.  The Amazing Spider-Man, which was designed by J. Michael Riva and shot by John Schwartzman, looks lovely, and the action sequences are very entertaining, but Webb doesn’t have Raimi’s consistency at creating marvelous images, and there’s no controlling metaphor. Moreover the villain isn't very interesting. It's Connors who is emotionally scarred from having been born without his right arm and obsessed with fixing human weaknesses, including his own. Under the effects of a serum he develops from mutant lizards using Dr. Parker's research (which Peter finds and makes available to him), he turns into a giant reptile. The best thing about the Lizard is his look: the artists who designed him had the cleverness to make him look like something the great special effects wizard Ray Harryhausen might have come up with.  (When the Lizard chases Peter down at school, bursting out of the sewers through a toilet in the boys’ bathroom, fans of TV’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer may remember how much more effective the Sunnydale High School graduation scene was, where the Mayor transformed himself into a huge, voracious snake.)  But playing opposite the disarming Emma Stone (as Gwen Stacy, Peter’s classmate and the daughter of the chief of police), who has crack comic timing and a voice like a hollowed-out bubble, Garfield is able to paint a portrait of an adolescent hero that both goes deeper than the Raimi-Maguire Parker and spans a broader spectrum.

When Movies Still Mattered: 1970s American Cinema

Al Pacino and Marlon Brando in The Godfather

Years ago, I remember watching Rancho Deluxe (1975) – a modern day comedy western starring Jeff Bridges and Sam Waterston – and marveling how this rather middling, but entertaining, Hollywood movie was still smart, adult and honest. In fact, even a second-tier movie, such as Rancho Deluxe, from 1970s American cinema (the last Golden Age of American movies) was considerably more worthwhile than almost anything coming out from Hollywood, or American independent cinema, in the 21st century. As I prepare to teach a course on this decade in cinema history, it’s worth speculating on why movies turned out so consistently good and gratifying during that time.

Much has already been written, and showcased, about the era in documentaries such as Easy Rider, Raging Bulls (2002, based on Peter Biskind’s provocative 1998 book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and Rock N’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood) and A Decade Under the Influence (2003). Both looked at how the younger set of Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma, Peter Bogdanovich, Francis Ford Coppola and Steven Spielberg, as well as their elders Robert Altman (who didn’t begin his movie career until he was in his 40s) and Paul Mazursky were given the filmmaking reins in a failing and geriatric Hollywood that was out of touch with '60s American culture. Fearing complete failure, the ageing Hollywood had no choice but to take chances with whom it allowed to make movies. Also remarked upon was how a new breed of (often identifiably ethnic) actors and actresses (ordinary looking folk, and not gorgeous looking movie stars: Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman, Barbra Streisand, Jack Nicholson) were allowed to play front and centre in movies that worked off of their eccentricities and plain appearances. But I’d argue that the dominant factor in why the movies were so good and relevant in the '70s was trust. The studio executives generally trusted (to a point) that these maverick moviemakers would still make films that had cachet and appeal and, more significantly, audiences could be expected to follow them in whatever endeavours they undertook in that regard. (The '30 and '40s movies, the last Golden Age before the '70s, did the same in an assumption of literacy on the part of the filmgoing audiences.)

Talking Out of Turn #28: Oliver Stone (1986)

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 taking 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.

film director and screenwriter Oliver Stone

One chapter, titled The Ghosts of Vietnam, features interviews with a variety of authors (Robert Stone, Brian Fawcett) and filmmakers (Louis Malle, Robert Altman) who dealt in their work with various aspects of the legacy of the Vietnam War and how it was felt in the Eighties. The American obsession with Latin and South America during the Reagan years seemed to be an ill-advised attempt to exorcise the ghosts of the earlier conflict. One filmmaker who has continually dealt with the legacy of Vietnam and the Sixties in general is Oliver Stone. Although Stone began a profitable career as a screenwriter (Midnight Express, Scarface, The Year of the Dragon) when we met he had just written and directed a low-budget drama called Salvador, with James Woods as print correspondent Richard Boyle. In fact, by the time Salvador finally found release, Stone had already completed his Vietnam War drama Platoon which dealt with his own personal experiences in the Vietnam War.

A Little Daylight: Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris

Woody Allen’s latest comedy, Midnight in Paris, which opened this year’s Cannes Film Festival, is a moderately entertaining and somewhat imaginative lark of a movie. If that sounds like a lukewarm recommendation, bear in mind that most of Allen’s output in the last decade and a half, including Everyone Says I Love You (1996), Deconstructing Harry (1997), Celebrity (1998), Hollywood Ending (2002), Anything Else (2003), Match Point (2005), Scoop (2006), Whatever Works (2009) and You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010), has been negligible, if not contemptuous and utterly fake. (The last Allen movie that fully impressed me was 1992's fine Husbands and Wives. That one's nearly 20 years old!)  At least, this time around, Allen has fashioned a film that has a modicum of wit, a smidgen of style and, only occasionally mind you, a bit of thought. Considering how he’s been generally going through the motions in recent years, I’ll take what I can get.

The movie’s opening is even different than Allen’s usual, predictable and bland norm. Instead of an old standard playing over the credits, on a black background, Midnight in Paris begins with a montage of the City of Light’s most famous landmarks: the Eiffel Tower, Arc de Triomphe, Versailles, etc. Then, while the opening credits run, we hear the plaintive voice of actor Owen Wilson (Meet the Parents, Wedding Crashers), as screenwriter Gil Pender. Pender, accompanying his putative in-laws on a business trip to Paris, and with his fiancée Inez (Rachel McAdams) in tow, wants to leave his stifling Hollywood career, rewriting action flicks, behind and become a ‘real writer.’ And where better to do that than in Paris? But what Pender – who has penned his first novel but hasn’t shown the draft to anyone – really wants is to be an author in the Paris of the 1920s, when famous expatriates like writers Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, filmmaker Luis Buñuel and others made the city their home away from home. One night, strolling along the city streets, an old fashioned car pulls up, just at the stroke of midnight. Pender gets in and, voila, he’s exactly where he wants to be, the glamorous Paris of his dreams.

Solitary Man: The Crucible of Michael Douglas

Glenn Close and Michael Douglas in Fatal Attraction.

For most of his movie career, Michael Douglas has built his box office success as the everyman who always gets his way – even when he loses. Whether he's playing a financial sleaze in Wall Street (1987), or the cocky adventurer in Romancing the Stone (1984), Douglas always finds a way to lure the audience to his side. But it's not because he has the suave romantic allure of an Errol Flynn, or that he plays creepy in the appealingly baroque style of James Woods, or performs in the high-wire theatrics of Nicolas Cage. Douglas builds his appeal by turning the everyman into a solitary man. His pictures almost always feature him as the sharp cookie who has everything, a loving family in Fatal Attraction (1987) and Disclosure (1994), or the financial world at his beck and call in Wall Street, but somebody is always out to take it all away. Even though he has put the wheels in motion towards his own destruction, he becomes exonerated as the victim of forces beyond his control. Perhaps that's the key to the appeal of these movies; the mass audience is never asked to wonder what Michael Douglas has done to earn all this grief.

Snoozer - Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps

I doubt if there could be a timelier sequel, given the recent economic meltdown, than Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. But timing is pretty much all it has on its side. Director Oliver Stone returns to the Machiavellian world of high financing that he first examined in Wall Street (1987), but the new picture is enervating and more dramatically conflicted than the original. It’s a snoozer.

Stone had a huge hit with Wall Street, and not just because it neatly reflected the yuppie obsession with junk bonds and insider trading. In his previous films (and screenplays), Stone revealed a split personality. Pictures like Salvador (1986) and Platoon (1986) may have shown Stone to possess a more left-wing perspective on American foreign policy, but the guy who also wrote Midnight Express (1978) and Year of the Dragon (1985) seemed to simultaneously hold some of the same right-wing macho attitudes of John Milius. That split added tension to Salvador (still his best movie) and most of Platoon, but in Wall Street, Oliver Stone smoothed over the cracks in his polemics. He created an American fascist of the financial world in Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas), an amoral predator, who wrecks companies to score millions as easily as a child dissembles building blocks. But Stone took it an extra step: He cleverly turned his adversary into an appealing character, a reflection of himself, by having his critiques of capitalism cozily couched in Gekko’s swagger. That’s why Wall Street became such a big success with Michael Douglas earning for him an Oscar.