Hasta La Vista, Gringos: Oliver Stone Goes South

Talk about verisimilitude! Oliver Stone’s first crack at capitalism run amok was Wall Street, in 1987. That hit film came out one year after Salvador, his feverish drama about a boozy photojournalist covering war-torn Central America. This month, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (read Kevin Courrier's review here), a sequel that’s also raking in big bucks at the box office, is hot on the heels of his 2009 examination of a region closer to the Equator than El Salvador: Latin America. South of the Border, a documentary, travels with him through six countries as he interviews democratically elected leaders whose left-leaning perspectives probably alarm the U.S. government.

A Comedy of Malice: David Fincher's The Social Network

David Fincher’s new movie, The Social Network, gives off an exhilarating buzz. With a tip-top script by Aaron Sorkin (The West Wing, Charlie Wilson’s War) that goes snap, crackle and pop, the picture has some of the razor-sharp timing of classic screwball comedy. But you’ll never make the mistake of confusing this movie for a romance. The Social Network – which is the story of Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) the billionaire founder of Facebook, the on-line social network that currently boasts over 500 million active users – is a movie about mercenary genius nerds. While the movie doesn’t celebrate their unethical guile, it does pretty far into the scheming brains of social outsiders who find devious ways to get on the inside. Just imagine Budd Schulberg’s What Makes Sammy Run? (1941) for the computer age.

Fincher and Sorkin aren’t out to make any claims about the value of Facebook; they’re more interested in the motivations of those who could have imagined it. Basing the story loosely on author Ben Mezrrich’s The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal (2009), the biggest irony Fincher and Sorkin present is how Zuckerberg, who had but one friend – his Facebook business partner, Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield) – and made many enemies (too numerous to count), could possibly set up such a social phenomenon. The irony is so rich and woven into the texture of the story that Fincher and Sorkin wisely let it simmer.

Looking Back: Summer Movies at the Rep Cinema

The advent of DVD has been a mixed blessing when it comes to the patterns of film releases at second run, or repertory theatres. Because the window from theatrical to DVD release has been consistently narrowing, the process of a movie going from first to second run has been accelerated as well. Most films, including hits like Inception, are getting to the reps a mere few months after they open commercially. The problem, however, is that with these quick DVD releases, films end up playing only one or two months at the rep house before they disappear for good. Most repertory cinemas are loath to screen a new film when it’s already on DVD, presuming (probably correctly) that too many patrons won’t want to see it on screen if they can rent it for less money at their video shop. All this serves as a prelude to my review of some summer movies that I caught at my local rep house, the venerable, 105 year old Bloor cinema, in September. One of those films, the disappointing The Kids Are All Right, was covered off by Critics at Large’s Susan Green. Here are four more films to consider (though one of them should be avoided) when they get to DVD. But if you can, try to see them on screen. That’s still the best way to appreciate movies.

Essential Cinema: Dreyer's La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc/The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)

As part of the grand opening of the TIFF/Bell Lightbox facility in Toronto, they compiled a list of the 100 most essential films of all time. Over the course of the next few months, these films will be screened in pristine prints, at one of their five cinemas. Screening tonight is the second showing of what I consider one of the greatest films ever made – and named number one on the Essential Cinema list – Carl Theodor Dreyer's La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928). But there is a caveat. The reason it became one of my favourite films is a bit convoluted.

Knocked Out Loaded: Neil Young’s Le Noise

Neil Young’s Le Noise is a centered, focused and authentic recording designed to both inspire and knock you on the head. Young has also knocked himself on the head. Le Noise features the kind of raw ambience that he hasn’t achieved since Ragged Glory (1990). And he’s served it up with some serious lyrical content. Young has had a career of tripping up his muse to continually stir up his creativity. In fact, looking over his long body of work, he’s spent decades shifting both his and our expectations of where he would go next. Freedom (1989), which contained electric and acoustic versions of “Rockin’ in the Free World,” dipped into a variety of musical styles. That album led unexpectantly to the quietly conceived best selling Harvest Moon three years later. Next, he rocked out with the members of Pearl Jam on Mirror Ball in 1995 before following that with the under-recognized country/roots record Silver & Gold (2000). Five years later, he returned with the beautifully rendered and reflective Prairie Wind.

Nowhere Land: "Heartbreak Hotel" and "There's a Place"

On the 40th Anniversary of the release of The Beatles' Let it Be album, here is a lengthy excerpt from my book Artificial Paradise: The Dark Side of The Beatles' Utopian Dream (Greenwood-Praeger, 2008):

When rock 'n' roll first began its promise was pretty basic: good times lay ahead. With that primary assurance, a captivating pact was also struck with listeners. The world was going to be a different place than it was today. As early as 1954, Bill Haley's simple pledge told us we'd find our freedom by putting our glad rags on and rocking around the clock. But the song did more than just rock around the clock. Youth riots broke out in movie houses after it was featured in the opening credits of The Blackboard Jungle (1955), an otherwise cautionary story about juvenile delinquency. In the same year as Bill Haley, The Penguins, a quietly graceful doo-wop group with ultimately only one hit up their sleeve, promised us a world of feasible pleasures when they asked us in "Earth Angel": Will you be mine? In answer, people danced with their hips moving just a little bit closer to their partners'. When Elvis Presley first decided to shake his hips on national television, nations of eager teenagers were given permission to do likewise -- and shake them they did.

Enigma: Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (Free Press, 2009)

After spending 14 years researching and writing Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (coming out in paperback in November 2010), Robin D. G. Kelley was probably surprised that the book received limited acclaim. As an academic whose written many books about the African-American experience (Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics and the Black Working Class), I believe Kelley wanted to get this story right by working hard at researching the details of Monk’s life from the time he was born until he died. But I think he would have been more successful if he approached the life of this groundbreaking jazz pianist through his art rather than as a subject for biographical study. Consequently, Kelley fails to generate enough critical ideas of his own other than what he learned from all of the facts, interviews and tapes that he accessed. Kelley’s impressions of Monk and his music become stifled in sluggish linguistics with only a few bright lights of analysis and opinion.

A Change Is Gonna Come: The Life and Music of Bettye LaVette

Imagine growing up with a jukebox and a future music legend in your living room. That was a typical evening in the childhood of Betty Haskins, who would go on to become acclaimed rhythm-and-blues singer Bettye LaVette. Employees at a General Motors factory, her parents moonlighted in the 1950s by selling barbecue sandwiches and corn liquor at their Michigan home. This attracted touring African-American gospel groups, such as the Blind Boys of Alabama and the Soul Stirrers, featuring a then-unknown vocalist named Sam Cooke. They could eat, drink and listen to tunes there; nightclubs were off limits for them during the era of segregation.

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.

The Gloriously Flawed Jane Tennison: Prime Suspect 1-7

Helen Mirren as Inspector Jane Tennison, in Prime Suspect 2 (1992).

It was with great sadness that I watched the last few minutes of Prime Suspect: The Final Act in 2007 because it meant that I would never again see any new material featuring the character of Jane Tennison – one of the finest character ever created for television. Now that the entire series has just been released as a DVD box set, it's a perfect time to look back at this landmark program. Over the course of 15 years (1992-2007), in seven miniseries, Helen Mirren played Tennison as a work-driven woman who pushed back societal barriers of sexism, misogyny and finally ageism to become a Detective Chief Inspector at a London police division. Later in the series, she became Deputy Superintendent in Manchester and finally ended up back in London. Unlike most shows that would be happy just dealing with the uplift of an independent woman proving her chops amongst the men, Tennison was a deeply flawed woman who paid an expensive price for her ambitions. Prime Suspect never condemned her for her drive, but rather looked compassionately at the high cost of it: failed relationships, alcoholism, unwanted pregnancies, ridicule, petty jealousy and loneliness.

Remembering Claude Chabrol: La Cérémonie

I’ve been thinking of Claude Chabrol ever since news of his death, at age 80, was announced about a week ago. And it occurred to me that like fellow New Wave filmmaker Eric Rohmer, who also died this year (but from the opposite end of the emotional spectrum), Chabrol successfully carved out his own specific niche in a corner of world cinema. Whereas Rohmer, like Mike Leigh, offered up generous portraits of (mostly) middle class people he liked very much, Chabrol used his cinematic canvas to excoriate those he didn’t like at all, namely the bourgeoisie from which he sprung. His films were almost always about the evils and wickedness emanating from the monied classes but he didn’t assail them in a simplistic manner nor did he pretend that the lower classes were paragons of virtue, either. Usually, the downtrodden ‘victims’ of the rich were able to match them when it came to guile and venality, perhaps never more so than in one of his best films, La Cérémonie (1995).

The Sum of its Parts: Contact's Five On One

Sometimes playing music isn’t about proving anything or making a social statement, it can just as much be about ebb and flow and being sensitive to the emotional nuances asked for by the composer. For jazz musicians, particularly as they age, it is less about ego and more about listening and contributing to the larger, musical picture. For Contact, a new band led by American Dave Liebman, the whole is definitely the sum of the parts.

Five On One is a new album of music featuring Liebman on soprano and tenor saxophones, John Abercrombie on guitar, Marc Copland on piano, Drew Gress on Bass and the remarkable Billy Hart on drums. Recorded in two days last January, Five On One is a sonic pleasure to the ears. The blend of sound is strong here because each musician is listening hard to what their fellow players are doing and having great ears, as I’ve written before, is the real key to making great music. The album opens with a very simple, yet direct 2-bar lick by Abercrombie called, "Sendup." But as usual (with the wry Abercrombie humour) the music is anything but parody. It’s a framework for the players to improvise and draw the listener in and it works immediately.

The Big C Gets a C+

It is no longer necessary to make the point that television is currently a lot better than film. TV series are drawing not only A-list actors (Glenn Close and William Hurt on Damages, Sally Field in Brothers and Sisters, Holly Hunter on Saving Grace, to list just a few), but also A-list directors (Agnieszka Holland has directed episodes of The Wire and Treme, and most recently, Martin Scorsese directed the pilot of the much-anticipated Boardwalk Empire, which premiered last night). Television has come a long way, and TV viewers are richer for it.

To a large degree, the increasing richness of television can be traced to its overall honesty – television’s willingness to show us things which are uncomfortable or ugly, and its ability to illuminate the details which make the lives of our favourite characters so intriguing. But there are shows with all the right ambition, shows which, despite their potential and intriguing subject matter, fail to live up to their own promise. The Big C is one of these shows.

The Fall and Rise of Jonathan Demme

Many fans of the works of Jonathan Demme think he made a major mistake when he directed his Academy-Award winning film The Silence of the Lambs (1981). Although the film was a huge hit and received critical acclaim, it was a step away from the type of funky, loose, music-filled films for which he had become known: Something Wild (1986), Married To The Mob (1988) and Melvin and Howard (1980), etc. Though I'm not among the naysayers (because I've always liked the picture), I appreciate their point of view. After Lambs' success, he got trapped in the world of 'prestige' pictures that seem aimed at garnering awards and attracting acclaim. Though a picture like the overly earnest Philadelphia (1993) won Oscars and was a hit at the box office, he went on to do the disastrous Beloved (1998) and the ridiculous remake of The Manchurian Candidate (2004). By embracing this type of film, he seemed to have lost that light touch (even in darker material like Something Wild) that made his earlier pictures so appealing.

Into the Deep End: Robert Plant’s Band of Joy

Band of Joy, Robert Plant’s highly anticipated new album, drops you into the deep end: a record that combines the swamp of Louisiana with the Celtic Highlands of Scotland. Produced by Plant and the ever-versatile Buddy Miller, Band of Joy is probably the best combination of musical colours Plant has used yet, surrounding him like a woolen blanket.

Originally, Band of Joy was the name of Plant’s first serious rock band and they were only together for a couple of years from 1966 to 1968. He was just 18 years of age when he fronted the group along with John Bonham on drums. He took Bonham to Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones and formed Led Zeppelin: a band that musically re-imagined the blues with close attention to their English folk roots. Both Plant and Page were able to absorb many musical forms and adapt them to Led Zeppelin. This record widens the musical pallete to include sounds that Led Zeppelin dare not tread: gospel, soul and country-blues.

Fizzle and Pop: Easy A

Emma Stone in Easy A (2010).

 

The filmmakers of Easy A have a clever idea working Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter into a comedy about the impact of high school gossip. But they don’t seem to know what to do with it. Clean-cut Olive Penderghast (Emma Stone) gets overheard saying that she recently lost her virginity (although she hadn’t) and, within hours, it’s all over school. Her reputation is both sullied and enhanced (depending on who you ask). But her false confession leads several boys (including a gay friend who desperately wants to be recognized as straight) to seek her out and pretend that they lost their virginity with her – they’re so desperate they even pay her. Before long, the benefits of being perceived as the school sex queen pale when she begins to resemble Hester Prynne (even leading to her affixing the scarlet ‘A’ to her clothing).

The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest: A Fully Satisfying Conclusion to Stieg Larsson's 'Millennium' Trilogy

The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest is the final book in Swedish writer Stieg Larsson’s ‘Millennium’ trilogy, after The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played with Fire. A finer, more satisfying dénouement to the mystery series would be hard to imagine.

Having now finished all three books, which revolve around Lisbeth Salander, an angry and highly antisocial young woman who has been horribly mistreated by the Swedish legal and medical systems, and her friend and protector, crusading investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist, I can only add more bouquets of effusive praise to what I wrote about the first two novels. Suffice it to say that the concluding ‘Millennium’ novel, in a series which had already managed to touch on everything from Sweden’s vicious sex trade to the country’s past flirtation with Nazism to the prevailing sexist atmosphere in most of that nation’s major institutions, among many other subjects, widens the scope even further by unveiling a political and constitutional scandal that makes Watergate look like a minor kerfuffle. (This is not a spoiler as much of this was revealed in the previous two books, particularly in The Girl Who Played With Fire). And The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest does all this without ever losing the thread of the unique, moving but unsentimental relationship between Salander and Blomkvist. It literally picks up minutes after the exciting conclusion of The Girl Who Played with Fire when – SPOILER ALERT – Salander confronts her vicious father, a Soviet double agent who defected to Sweden, with dire results. That confrontation rips the lid off many a long-held secret as the chickens -- namely, the revelations behind the myraid injustices endured by Salander -- finally come home to roost.

Learning to Fly: Peter Bogdanovich’s Runnin’ Down a Dream (2007)

Until I recently caught up with director Peter Bogdanovich’s highly engaging four-hour documentary Runnin’ Down a Dream (2007), I didn’t realize how much I had taken for granted my love of Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers. While I have collected and enjoyed Petty’s music for years, I’ve never taken the time to contemplate why his best songs (and there are many) have always brought me such happiness. What Runnin’ Down a Dream helped me realize is how Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers, for the last 33 years, have kept some of the idealistic dreams of the sixties alive. They didn’t, however, do it by showing a nostalgic reverence for the era and its music. Rather they captured the music’s urgency, its uncompromising demand for freedom which lies right at the heart of all rock & roll. Whether it’s in an anthem like “I Won’t Back Down,” plaintive ballads like “Southern Accents,” or a scorching rocker like “You Wreck Me,” Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers created an immediacy that made each song sound both fresh and fully alive with possibility. For those who remember the joy they felt when a great song came through their tiny earphone on their transistor radio, Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers brought that instant delight to the music they played.

An Actor's Life: Kevin McCarthy

“They're here already! You're next!”

Kevin McCarthy, who passed away on September 11th, was a journeyman actor who worked constantly from his uncredited debut in Winged Victory (1944) right up until earlier this year when, at the age of 96, he starred in the short film Drawback. He is and always will be best remembered for playing Dr. Miles Bennell in the original version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) for which the line quoted above is his best (and probably only) remembered line of dialogue. Journeyman actor he may have been, but his talent always shone through in whatever he did. A committed stage actor, his filmed credits were mostly guest shots on TV shows. His first was The Ford Theater Hour (1949), but many other shows he guested on from the 1960s through the 1990s are still remembered today: The Twilight Zone (1960), Ben Casey (1961), The Fugitive (1966), Burke's Law (1966), The Man From Uncle (1966), The Invaders (1967), Mission: Impossible (1971), Columbo (1973), Hawaii Five-O (1976), Flamingo Road (1980-1982 – he had a role for the show's entire run), Matlock (1989) and Murder, She Wrote (1992). There were dozens of others – shows you've heard of and ones nobody but agents and trivia buffs remember.

Attic of My Dreams: Richard Thompson's Dream Attic

Richard Thompson's Dream Attic calls up the familiar sounds of Fairport Convention: an eclectic mix of instruments with just enough American blues and Celtic jigs to compliment one another, and it’s probably no fluke. As a result, Thompson gives way to the ensemble rather than his extended guitar solos. (The band features Pete Zorn on flute, saxophone, mandolin and acoustic guitar. Joel Zifkin is prominent on violin and the rhythm section features electric bass player Taras Prodaniuk up front in the mix.)  As one of the most unique and interesting players in music, Thompson makes his short solos count within the context of the song. This is evident on "Demons In Her Dancing Shoes," a tightly arranged sea shanty about the girls of Chapel Street in London. Thompson does stretch out on the moody “Crimescene,” but it’s a short, pointed solo expressing the blood and darkness of a murder.