Igor's Boogie: The Rites of Stravinsky

It should come as no surprise that if any one composer could cause a riot, it would be Igor Stravinsky. Unpredictable in nature, and comparable in stature to painter Pablo Picasso, Stravinsky was an enigmatic figure who moved like a chameleon through the cultural world. He made his reputation with his erotically charged masterpieces The Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911), and The Rite of Spring (1913). Throughout these works, you could hear Stravinsky gradually forsaking the world of romanticism which would lead him to ultimately forge a new style of neoclassicism in 1920 with Pulcinella. Yet right at the moment when he was pioneering that phase of his musical career, he joined forces with his serialist adversaries, Anton Webern and Arnold Schoenberg, who had abandoned classicism altogether. "People always expect the wrong thing of me," Stravinsky once said. "They think they have pinned me down and then all of a sudden – au revoir!"

Born in St. Petersberg in 1882, Stravinsky had such a great aptitude for music that the colourful Russian composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov took him on as a pupil. In 1909, Russia's top impresario, Serge Diaghilev, heard two of Stravinsky's first compositions, Scherzo fantastique and Feu d'artifice, at a concert in St. Petersberg. He was so impressed that he commissioned Stravinsky to write a couple of numbers for a ballet he was producing. Out of that encounter came The Firebird which was an overnight success. While not as daring or innovative as his later ballet scores, The Firebird still had something more foreboding than the exotic colours of Rimsky-Korsakov. Diaghilev could hear immediately that Stravinsky's work had what author Joan Peyser in To Boulez and Beyond called "a latent barbarism." This "latent barbarism" would, of course, be even more explicit in his next work for Diaghlev titled Petrushka. This piece, with its polytonality and sharper rhythms, caused something of a small commotion.

On the Road to Nowhere: Sacha Baron Cohen’s The Dictator

Sacha Baron Cohen stars in The Dictator

How do you top outrageous, frequently brilliant films like Borat (2006) and Bruno (2009)? British actor Sacha Baron Cohen obviously faced that dilemma with his latest movie, The Dictator. His previous two movies already demonstrated – filtered through his boorish Kazakhstani character Borat, and flamboyant gay fashion journalist Bruno – the wide canvas of ignorance, racism, rampant political correctness and anti-gay prejudices and discomfort prevalent in America and the world. Yet, particularly in Borat, it also showcased the United States as a strangely accepting society, which bent over backwards to accept Borat’s odd, even disgusting behaviour, as just something he did that should be tolerated because his were cultural acts. The fact that Borat’s anti-Semitic rants were conducted in Hebrew (Cohen, of course is Jewish) just added to the subversive nature of his movie. And his blatant attempts to outrage, in person, Islamists and Orthodox Jews alike in Bruno testified to his physical courage, to go where few comedians/actor have ever gone before. Yet he also fit into the proud pantheon of gutsy Jewish comics, from the Marx Brothers to Lenny Bruce, who, in various ways, stormed the gates of propriety to expose the hypocrisy and intolerance lying inside.

In that light, Cohen has raised expectations in terms of subject matter and approach to controversial situations and material. Those hopes for an even harder-hitting film have been dashed with The Dictator, a mostly pallid comedy that does nothing new and, in fact, copies much of what has gone before.

Don't Fugeddaboutit: The World of a Jersey Shore Wordsmith

Author Gene Ritchings

Full disclosure: Gene Ritchings was our saving grace. In the late 1990s my Critics at Large colleague, Kevin Courrier, and I went down to New York City for ten days to research a book about NBC’s Law & Order. We’d gotten permission and a promise of access from the show’s creator, Dick Wolf, but that blessing did not necessarily mean instant acceptance in the Big Apple. We were interlopers who needed to conduct interviews that arguably might be more in-depth (and perhaps even invasive) than those done by the usual entertainment media briefly visiting the set.

Initially, the crew seemed to eye us with suspicion and the actors barely noticed our existence – until Ritchings, the production coordinator, took us under his wing. He also bent a few rules to help us navigate the bureaucracy and frenetic schedule that any TV series must establish to keep functioning. “We try to ward off the occasional feeling of being beleaguered and overextended and overworked because that’s the life we chose,” he said then. 

When the Real Pod People Intrude: Oliver Hirschbiegel's The Invasion

In my last post, I talked about the two-dozen plus DVDs I picked up for a buck each at the Rogers rental shutdown. As I stated, a few of the films I grabbed I assumed would be pieces o' crap, such as Oliver Hirschbiegel's The Invasion (2007 - starring Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig) which I had heard nothing but bad things about. It was the fourth version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, so I bought it for $1 to watch at some point just to complete the “collection.” So imagine my surprise when, except for the completely destroyed ending and idiotic bits here and there throughout the film, I found The Invasion well-acted, credibly made and far more pointed than I was expecting it to be.

In the first two versions, the invasion was literally a space-born spore that came to earth (never explained in the Don Siegel's effective 1956 version; carried to our planet on the solar winds in Philip Kaufman's brilliant 1978 version). Abel Ferrara's weak 1993 Body Snatchers also left it unclear where the spores came from, but suggested environmental problems – not space spores – on a military base caused the pods to evolve and take over people. In Hirschbiegel's version, spores have attached themselves to a returning space shuttle which experiences a catastrophic failure. When the shuttle breaks up on re-entry, it spreads the spores across the US (especially around Washington, DC, where most of the film is set) attached to the shuttle's wreckage. 

Weasels Ripped My Flesh: Josef Skvorecky's Headed for the Blues (1997)

Last winter when author Josef Skvorecky passed away, we didn't have room to post a proper obituary in Critics at Large. So I thought I'd take the opportunity today to perhaps address something of what his life meant to me through one of his later efforts, Headed for the Blues (1997). Headed for the Blues is actually divided into two books. Beginning with the memoir of the title, and written by the author while looking back at his homeland from his new one in Canada; it is followed by "The Tenor Saxophonist's Story," which consists of 10 short stories written between 1954 and 1956 while Skvorecky was still in Prague. The purpose here, no doubt, is to provide contrasting attitudes about the past – the place and people he left behind – through stories that capture all the reasons why he did depart.

Headed for the Blues examines why those reasons are never cut and dry. What Skvorecky demonstrates, with a cool irony and a sardonic grin, is that just because you leave the traumas of home behind, it doesn't mean that they still can't haunt you. During the opening few pages, Skvorecky confronts us with names, places and distant memories. Yet the story's not told in the chronological sequencing of a conventional remembrance. His thoughts pour out as if they'd been first blended in a Cuisinart. The narrative shifts back and forth through time, too, with sentences that run on as if the author wasn't sure he'd find enough breath to get the words out.

The urgency to speak – to find clarity or certainty – is deliberate, and the book's style, with its jazzy bounce and swing, carries the plot. While it takes a little time to get your bearings (because the rush of words leave you feeling the sensation of stemming a flood), the urgency has a point because this memoir from a Czech exile is an attempt to validate a life during a time of Stalinist repression. It's about how memories – and time itself – can lose its linear shape and meaning in a totalitarian society; a society where it becomes next to impossible to consolidate those memories when the government's role is to deny you the experience of them. Headed for the Blues also pulls the rug out from under all our efforts to find our roots because the story is infused with a homesickness borne out of unresolved efforts to define a home. To paraphrase blues singer Percy Mayfield, it's about being a stranger in your own hometown.

The Untimely Demise of Leap of Faith

Raúl Esparza and the cast of Leap of Faith (Photos by Joan Marcus)

On Sunday afternoon May 13th I saw what turned out to be the final performance of a vibrant new musical called Leap of Faith. Upon receiving a baffling (but hardly unprecedented) review by Ben Brantley in The New York Times that referred to it in the opening sentence as a black hole that sucks up everything that gets near it, the production began to bleed money. It did receive a nomination for the Best Musical Tony – normally a stopgap for failing shows; producers keep them open until after the awards in the hope that a prize or two might generate some activity at the box office. Here, though, there was no chance of that, since Leap of Faith received no other nominations -- not for the vivid Alan Mencken-Glenn Slater score, or Christopher Ashley’s direction, or Sergio Trujillo’s terrific choreography, or Robin Wagner’s handsome, ingenious set, or Donald Holder’s lighting or William Ivey Long’s costumes, and, most remarkably, not one single nomination for anyone in the amazingly talented cast. The Best Musical nod, then, was a slap in the face:  the subtext was “We don’t think there’s a single distinguished quality in this musical but there were only half a dozen new musicals this season and you’re not as bad as Bonnie and Clyde.” One wonders if the Tony voters actually went to see Leap of Faith at all or if they read Brantley and opted to stay home. If so, they missed a hell of a show.

Janus Cercone and Warren Leight adapted Leap of Faith from Cercone’s screenplay for the 1992 movie, starring Steve Martin and Debra Winger as a nickel-plated revivalist preacher and his partner in crime, the equally cynical young woman who manages his traveling Jesus circus. In both versions, the Reverend Jonas Nightingale (“Nightengale” in the movie), who’s on the run in other parts of Bible country for passing bad checks and other forms of fraud, decides to pitch his tent in a small Kansas town in the midst of a long drought that has devastated farms and – in the present-day stage edition – exacerbated an already woeful economy. Jonas’s agenda is to take advantage of the locals’ desperation and their need for some, any, brand of hope.  They expect him to heal their various kinds of wounds and to make it rain.  “The beauty part,” as Jonas (Raúl Esparza) explains to us at the beginning of act two, is that if no miracle transpires, “it’s on them:  they didn’t believe enough.”  The material is related to N. Richard Nash’s play The Rainmaker, where a charismatic young man not only promises rain but enchants a spinster who’s given up on the possibility of romance.  (Memorably, Burt Lancaster and Katharine Hepburn played those roles in the 1955 movie version of The Rainmaker, and Woody Harrelson and Jayne Atkinson brought new vitality to them in the 1999 Broadway revival.)  It’s even more closely linked to Meredith Willson’s The Music Man, where a con-man itinerant drummer named Harold Hill plans to rook the citizens of an Iowa town out of their money by convincing them that their children can only be saved from moral decrepitude by playing in a marching band – until the combination of a stiff-backed librarian and her lonely kid brother locate the heart he didn’t know he had.  The idea is the same in all three:  behind the phony show-biz hype lurks a touch of authenticity that hornswaggles even the hardest case. That would be Jonas, who is so unsettled when he manages to heal someone for real that his immediate response is anger, as if he’d been conned. The Rainmaker’s Starbuck, Harold Hill and Jonas are all variants on a classic American type, the magnetic swindler that Melville invented in The Confidence Man. These softer versions allow for a happy ending; if you wanted to take them into darker waters you’d end up with a tragic figure like O’Neill’s Hickey in The Iceman Cometh or an ironic one like Paul in John Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation, whose belief in his own con is a kind of schizophrenia.

Pathos With Laughs: David Storey's Home at Soulpepper

Maria Vacratsis, Michael Hanrahan, Oliver Dennis & Brenda Robins in Home (Photo by Cylla von Tiedemann)

Toronto's Soulpepper Theatre Company's nuanced staging of Home, written by the British playwright David Storey back in 1970, offers up a whole slew of meanings. The production conjures up different memories and notions of what a home is, but in this important play it’s also about belonging. They have resurrected an almost forgotten gem, a Broadway hit for two of England’s greatest actors, Ralph Richardson and John Gielgud, and their director, Lindsay Anderson, over forty years ago. This new version opens a door to a whole new perspective on the work without fear of expectation or comparison. For director Albert Schultz, Home is about the absence of family. The play features five characters who are only related only by the place in which they live – unfortunately it is an asylum for the mentally ill.

Home features a day in the life of five characters: three men and two women. Each character is flawed, but not so much to pose any danger to the other. Their behaviour is subtle and suggestive. While the women are tough and strong, the men are emotional wrecks who put on a brave face to disguise their inner pain. The men are played by Oliver Dennis as Jack and Michael Hanrahan as Harry. (Andre Sills plays Alfred, the body builder.) When the play begins, Harry and Jack meet outside in the very spare garden for sunlight and conversation. Ken MacKenzie’s minimalist set features a slowly moving film of clouds in the background while the action takes place downstage. Their talk might be full of wit as they carry on light conversation, but you never make the mistake of considering it lightweight. Each one tries to hide deeper feelings by using words to cover up what ails them. So topics like the weather, meal breaks and family make up their patter. The sad part is the fact that one day becomes like the next for these characters whose only relief comes in the form of reinvention or by changing their personal histories.

Talking Out of Turn #29: Leonard Cohen (1984)

Leonard Cohen

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.

When we spoke to poet and singer/songwriter Leonard Cohen, he had just come out of a relatively long period of contemplation that dated back to 1979. The culmination of that hermitage was a collection of prayers, psalms, meditations, and contemplative texts he wrote called Book of Mercy (McClelland & Stewart, 1984). Little did any of us know, perhaps not even Cohen himself, that shortly after the publication of this book, his music career would once again catapult him back into the larger public arena.

Neglected Gems #15: Palookaville (1995)

Palookaville, the title of the disarming first feature by Alan Taylor, refers to the generic state of existence shared by the three main characters. Russell (Vincent Gallo), Sid (William Forsythe) and Jerry (Adam Trese) are unemployed friends in their thirties – too old to be living the way they are, and painfully conscious of it. Russell boards with his family; he survives off the salary his brother-in-law (Gareth Williams), a cop, brings home. Russell’s girl, Laurie (Kim Dickens), lives next door, so he has to sneak through their bedroom windows to sleep with her. Sid’s wife left him ten years ago; he lives alone with her photo on the night table, and with his smelly dog. His phone is disconnected, his couch is repossessed, and he takes most of his dinners at Russell’s house (he’s a favorite of Russell’s mom’s). Jerry’s wife Betty (Lisa Gay Hamilton) works in a supermarket, where her manager paws her; when Jerry interrupts a groping session, he blows up and the boss retaliates by firing Betty. Furious, she makes Jerry go back and apologize so she can continue to support the family (they’ve got a baby).

A Lot to Be Grateful For: TV Viewers Get an Early Thanksgiving

The cast of Cougar Town

Last week’s episode of ABC’s Cougar Town opened with a scene with Jules (Courtney Cox), Laurie (Busy Philips) and Ellie (Christa Miller) suddenly wondering aloud why they didn’t get to celebrate Thanksgiving together this year. In fact, Cougar Town had an extended hiatus this year, after being bumped first from a September launch and pushed back even further in November in order to make room for some ABC’s new comedies. In the end, Cougar Town’s third season only premiered in mid-February – making a Thanksgiving or Christmas episode effectively impossible this year. Jules however offered a solution: they would celebrate Thanksgiving in May. The episode (titled “It’ll All Work Out") was one of the season's best, playing off the always surprisingly deep relationships that have developed among this handful of goofy characters, and highlighting everything that makes the show such a pleasure to watch. But more than that, it hit home for me.

May is traditionally the month when the networks firm up their schedules for the coming television season and the fates of the current shows are finally confirmed. Last year at this time, I was mourning NBC’s decision to cancel Outsourced, one of my favourite new comedies of the year. The year before, we lost Victor Fresca’s delightfully original Better Off Ted and Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse. And in May 2009, NBC announced it would not be renewing Life. For an avid TV fan, in short, May is rarely a good month. But for the past few weeks, I’ve been feeling something I don’t normally feel in the month of May: grateful. And so when Jules and the rest of the Cul-de-Sac Crew sat around the table last week and reflected on how much they have to be thankful for, it was hard for me not to join in.

Kitchen-Sink Gangsters: Down Terrace and London Boulevard

Robin and Robert Hil star in Down Terrace

As I said in my post last year about the death of the DVD rental shop, one thing I would miss was the habit of walking the aisles looking at all the titles and stumbling across a gem I'd never heard of. Then after reading the plot on the back of the box, I decided whether to take a flier and rent it. The Eclipse was one such gem I discovered this way, which I've already discussed here. Now, with the announcement three weeks ago that Rogers would no longer rent DVDs, that window of discovery, for me at least (there are no independent DVD rental shops in the city north of Toronto where I live), has now closed.

However, I had one final chance this past weekend that resulted in, if not huge dividends, at least some very pleasant surprises. Three weeks ago, after Rogers announced their decision, I ventured to our one-remaining store to see what deals I could get. All DVDs were listed as buy one get one free. So, I was able to pick up about 8 or 9 recent films, such as Hugo, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2012), A Dangerous Method, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, plus others, for about $7 each. Over the next two weeks, I went a couple of more times to see if the discount got greater. It had not. But this past Friday I decided to go one more time. The discount was now buying one get two free. They had been pretty picked over, but there were still a few things of interest, such as the three discs of Season Two of The Republic of Doyle. Then just as I was about to wrap it up, the manager came out and announced they had just been informed all DVDs were now $1 each. That changed things. I bought 27 movies. Timing is everything.

Neglected Gems #14: Impromptu (1991)

Hugh Grant as Chopin and Judy Davis as George Sands, in Impromptu

It was a brilliant stroke to cast Judy Davis as the nineteenth-century French novelist George Sand in the 1991 Impromptu. Resolutely bohemian and independent-minded, Sand, who wore suits, smoked cigars and took on a series of lovers, was such a proto-modernist figure that Davis’s very contemporariness – her driven moodiness and tremulous fervor, the eroticized fullness of her presence – seems jarringly right for this woman, as it did when she played a version of D.H. Lawrence’s wife Frieda in Kangaroo. Impromptu, written by Sarah Kernochan and directed by James Lapine (Kernochan’s husband), is a farce populated by celebrities – Sand, Chopin (Hugh Grant), Lizst (Julian Sands) and his mistress, Countess Marie d’Agoult (Bernadette Peters), the playwright Alfred de Musset (Mandy Patinkin) and the painter Eugène Delacroix (Ralph Brown). And Davis’s Sand, offering her love to Chopin with an extravagant combination of sensual abandon and religious devotion, is its emotional core. She hangs outside the closed door of the study where she first hears him play, transported in every fiber of her being; she crawls into his room through the window and lies on the rug, receiving his genius like holy water; she fixes her deep, deep blue eyes on the consumptive composer and begs him to take her strength, which she has too much of. As Davis plays her, this woman is utterly fantastic. Completely conscious, completely self-possessed, she plans every attack on Chopin’s resistance (he finds her terrifying, her finds her appalling). When she thinks he’s turned off by her masculine attire, she shocks everyone by appearing in an evening gown (in the colors of the Polish flag, as a tribute to his homeland). When Marie, scheming to win him herself, cunningly advises her to play the male aggressor and win him as if he were a woman, she shows up at his tailor’s. (Jenny Beavan designed the stunning costumes.) Davis reads Kernochan’s hilarious one-liners with the sureness of a first-rank classical comic actress. What makes her performance extraordinary, however, is the emotional intensity that braces Sand’s outlandish behavior. She can segue in and out of farce on a dime, but when she tells Chopin she loves him, thrusting herself forward as if she were bouncing off some centrifugal force that’s taken hold of her, there’s an ache in her voice and an ache in her wide, naked eyes.

Gatz: Borne Back Ceaselessly into the Past

The cast of Gatz (Scott Shepherd, centre). Photo by Joan Marcus

By the time I caught up with Gatz, the Elevator Repair Service’s staged reading of the entire text of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, a few weeks ago, it was in the midst of a second run at the Public Theatre in New York and it had been touring. Gatz, which began performances in 2010, has been an unqualified hit for the company (whose founder, John Collins, directed it); it’s won a raft of awards and on weekends audiences are still lining up in hope of cancellations. The play runs for six hours plus three intermissions, including a ninety-minute dinner break, so it’s a considerable commitment of time and energy. I was certainly glad I’d made the investment but I’m not entirely sure what it was I saw.

The setting, designed by Louisa Thompson, is a contemporary office, indifferently furnished. When the computer of one of the employees (Ben Williams, substituting at the performance I attended for the usual star, Scott Shepherd) stalls, he pulls a copy of Fitzgerald’s novel out of a drawer and begins to read it out loud, and though his reading is interrupted briefly by the passage of time (the day ends; he returns to the office at night and again the next day), it’s continuous. For a while he’s the only reader, taking not only the role of the narrator, Nick Carraway, but the other characters as well, but the positioning of some of his co-workers and the odd prop or gesture echoes the text in an almost offhand way, and eventually some of them join in. Eventually they take the other parts, usually acting them, off book while he remains a reader. However, when Jordan Baker (I saw Annie McNamara, standing in for Susie Sokol) -- the beautiful, confident golf pro whom Nick meets through his cousin Daisy Buchanan (Victoria Vazquez) and her husband Tom (Gary Wilmes) and falls into a romance with – confides in him the story of Daisy’s interrupted romance with the young soldier, bound for the Great War, who turns out to be Nick’s neighbor Jay Gatsby (Jim Fletcher), she reads it rather than acting it. And on the two occasions when Meyer Wolfsheim, Gatsby’s gangster associate (based on Arnold Rothstein, the man who fixed the 1919 World Series), turns up, he’s invisible; Nick reads his role like a stage manager going on for an ailing actor.

Canadian Music Man: Bernie Finkelstein's autobiography True North

To paraphrase Gordon Lightfoot, “There was a time in this fair land when the music did not run…” It was not “long before the white man and long before the wheel,” but it was long before Bernie Finkelstein, and “the green dark forest was…silent.” Then Bernie heard the music, and decided to do something about it.

He’s one of the Bernies. Alongside Bernie Fiedler and Bernie Solomon, the Bernies were big in Canadian music. Fiedler ran the Riverboat Coffeehouse, Solomon was a lawyer, and Finkelstein managed Bruce Cockburn and Murray McLauchlan (among others), and their collaboration put everything under one roof: artist management, concert promotion, a record company, music publishing and a concert venue. It was genius, except, as Bernie Finkelstein says in his book True North: A Life in the Music (McClelland & Stewart, 2012), “things in the music business are never straightforward. It’s not a business for the faint of heart.”

Hit Me With Music: The Soundtrack to Kevin MacDonald's Film Marley

"Hit me with music," is Bob Marley's triumphant call in the song, "Trenchtown Rock," heard on the soundtrack to Kevin MacDonald's documentary, Marley (Island/Tuff Gong, 2012). (The film recently debuted in Toronto on May 3rd as part of the Hot Docs Festival, while Marley himself died of cancer 31 years ago, yesterday.) One thing you can say about his music, too, which is chronicled on this two-CD set from the early, ska numbers of the 1960s ("Simmer Down" and "Small Axe") to the more popular works of the 1970s, ("One Love" and "Redemption Song"), is that it never seems to go out of style. Bob Marley's work has now transcended the artist who created it. According to his widow, Rita Marley, that's "because he put his all, his heart and soul and his life, into his music, this is why it has the opportunity and the authority to live after him."

Just Another Tired Action/Superhero Movie: Joss Whedon’s The Avengers

Coming out on the heels of his inventive horror movie The Cabin in the Woods, I’d certainly hoped that writer/director Joss Whedon (Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Serenity) would work his cinematic magic on The Avengers, the much-anticipated Marvel superhero movie which brings together various characters from the Marvel universe: Thor, Captain America, Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk among them, as the new crime fighting unit called The Avengers. Unfortunately, this latest superhero movie is just another tired, pedestrian film whose elaborate special effects pretty much bury anything original, witty or creative inherent in the material. In short, it’s the same old thing: an impersonal franchise movie with little entertainment on offer.

Neglected Gem #13: Alfonso Cuarón’s Great Expectations (1997)

Alfonso Cuarón’s 1997 Great Expectations transposes Dickens to contemporary America without violating the spirit of the original. This is the third movie version of the beloved novel: there was an unmemorable Hollywood adaptation in 1934 (with Jane Wyatt as Estella), and David Lean made a deservedly famous one in England in 1946, paring down the book’s nearly five hundred pages but remaining very faithful to the story. His edition, an exceedingly handsome, high-style rendering, is almost a model for how to adapt Dickens: he gets so close to the way the classic scenes in Great Expectations look and feel to a reader’s imagination that, if you saw his movie when you were young enough, you may no longer be able to distinguish between his setting of the graveyard opening or Pip’s first view of Miss Havisham’s mouse-eaten wedding cake and the one you first envisioned when you read the book. But there are other approaches to adapting literature, and it’s a pity that critics were so quick to either jump on Cuarón’s or dismiss it outright when it was released. It’s a stunner.

The screenwriter, Mitch Glazer, has a nutty accuracy about his Dickens. Back in the late eighties, he wrote Scrooged, the updated Christmas Carol built around Bill Murray as an ambitious, mean-spirited, workaholic TV-exec Scrooge, and none of the many other film and TV versions of the story, except perhaps for the one from the early fifties featuring Alastair Sim, deserves to be talked about in the same conversation. Glazer brought out the best in the director, Richard Donner, who dreamed up surprising images to match the wondrous script, but in Great Expectations his collaborator came equipped with his own magic touch. In his previous picture, A Little Princess, Cuarón fitted out Frances Hodgson Burnett’s celebrated children’s story with sections – a fable within a fable – from Hindu mythology. Great Expectations is even better.

Fringe: This is the Way the World Ends (Again)

David Noble, Joshua Jackson, and Anna Torv star in Fringe

I’ve been watching Fringe for years, even since it premiered on Fox in 2008, but I’ve never written about it. Now – with the fourth season finale set to air this Friday and with the recent surprise announcement of a fifth and final season – seems like an ideal time to weigh in on a show that has grown into the most consistently entertaining science fiction series currently on network television.

Fringe is essentially a sci-fi procedural that follows a small FBI team – Agent Olivia Dunham (Anna Torv), a civilian consultant Peter Bishop (Joshua Jackson, Dawson’s Creek), and his father, research scientist Dr. Walter Bishop (John Noble) – in their investigation of paranormal occurrences, which often turn out to be science experiments gone awry (the results of so-called “Fringe” science.) When Fringe premiered, the comparisons to X-Files were obvious: a Fox series involving two paranormal investigators working with the FBI tracking monsters or strange diseases every week, with a slowly burgeoning romantic tension between our lead characters. The superficial parallels were self-evident – and likely intentional on the part of Fringe’s creators J.J. Abrams, Alex Kurtzman, and Roberto Orci (all of whom also worked on Alias) – but it would be several seasons before Fringe would rightly earn the X-Files banner – learning all the right lessons from the earlier series, and even exceeding it in many ways.

What Is It Really Saying? Soulpepper Theatre Company's You Can't Take It with You

Less than half of the cast of Soulpepper's You Can't Take It With You (Photo: Cylla von Tiedemann)

Soulpepper Theatre Company's production of Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman's 75-year-old farcical play You Can't Take It With You is beautifully staged, immaculately acted and frequently one-liner funny.

But….

You knew there was a ‘but’ coming, didn't you? Director Joseph Ziegler has made a major blunder with his production. He took the material and played at face value what, in 2012, should have been processed through some sort of 21st century critical filter. Otherwise all he's doing is staging, at best, a dusty museum piece; or, at worst, a play that verges on being mildly racist. You Can’t Take it with You is more than just dated, it’s downright misguided. In 1936, when this Pulitzer Prize-winning play first hit Broadway, it was probably considered an entertaining piece of wish-fulfilling escapist fluff; something to pass the time during the latter stages of the Depression. Two years later, Frank Capra made it into a movie which went on to win the Oscar for Best Picture, and Capra won for Best Director. I remember seeing the film version many years ago, and finding it endearingly funny. Not so much now.

The Lyons: Lavin the Great

Linda Lavin and Dick Latessa stars in The Lyons

Linda Lavin is familiar to long-time TV buffs as the star of Alice (for ten years beginning in the mid-seventies, she played the waitress role Ellen Burstyn had created in the movie Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore) and as Peter Gallagher’s demanding Jewish mother, a recurring part on the appealing teen melodrama series The O.C. But New York theatre audiences know her as one of the great stage performers. Last season, in a revival of Donald Margulies’s Collected Stories, as a distinguished writer and N.Y.U. writing teacher who is betrayed by her most gifted student (Sarah Paulson), she gave the kind of performance that, in Broadway’s heyday, would have been legendary: you would have read about it in the columns of the prestigious New York theatre critics alongside the work of Alla Nazimova and Pauline Lord and Ethel Barrymore. I’ve seen only a handful of American actresses in a lifetime of New York theatregoing with Lavin’s stage technique and mesmerizing command; Blythe Danner has it, and Cherry Jones and Stockard Channing, and Donna Murphy in musicals, and after them the list starts to thin out. (There’s also Lily Tomlin, but her one-of-a-kind style and the genre she works in make her a special case.) Lavin suggests what Stella Adler might have been like in the Group Theatre productions of the 1930s – but that’s really a guess, based partly on the fact that Lavin’s combination of high-octane theatricality and emotional depth points toward the lineage of the Yiddish theatre (Adler’s father Jacob was a celebrated Yiddish actor and she got her early training working with him) and partly on the fact that the magnificent Clifford Odets parts Adler created, Bessie Berger in Awake and Sing! and Clara Gordon in Paradise Lost, could just as easily have been written for Lavin – and someone should be smart enough to let her play them. But Lavin’s also got a vaudevillian side. She’s got the force of a mature Shelley Winters (the Shelley Winters, that is, of Lolita and the Paul Mazursky pictures Blume in Love and Next Stop, Greenwich Village) and Kay Medford’s irony of Kay Medford, but she’s far more elegant than either of these women. I’d compare her to Gertrude Berg, the radio and early TV star (The Goldbergs), but that link doesn’t suggest the undercurrents of lunacy that you see in her current performance as Rita Lyons in the new Nicky Silver comedy The Lyons.