One Step Beyond: Matthew Chapman's The Ledge

The image of a man standing on the edge of building, contemplating taking his life, is one that has appeared repeatedly in film and TV shows over the decades (including the recent Season Two finale of the terrific BBC series, Sherlock). Most of these stories, with suicidal characters driven by personal or financial despair, almost always feature a cop or social worker trying to talk the person down. But what if the individual is not on that ledge of their own accord, but pressured to be there by a third party? What if they are told that they must jump by 12 noon – or someone else will die in their stead? Would you jump to save that person, or would self-interest kick in? Such is the premise of Matthew Chapman's intriguing 2011 movie The Ledge (not to be confused with Asger Leth's 2012 Man on a Ledge).

This is one of those films I picked up for $1 this past spring when my local Rogers' video store shutdown. (I had watched the trailer at the start of another movie and was intrigued by the premise.) The cast looked promising too, with Terrance Howard as the cop, Hollis Lucetti, trying to talk the guy down; and Liv Tyler as Shana Harris, the object of the jumper's affection. The jumper is Gavin Nichols, played by Charlie Hunnam, a British actor (doing American here – the film takes place in Baton Rouge, Louisiana) unknown to me though he is one of the main stars on FX's Sons of Anarchy. Patrick Wilson (A Gifted Man, Watchmen) as Joe Harris (Shana's cuckolded husband) is the one who made sure Nichols stood on that ledge. But let me rewind the story here (because that is what the picture does). It starts with Nichols stepping out on the ledge and a short time later Lucetti appears to try to talk him out of it. Lucetti has his own issues (he thinks his children are not his) which is established in a short prologue before Nichols takes his ledge stroll. Lucetti is also surprised at how casual Nichols is, not conforming to the usual attitude of the despair-filled would-be jumper. So he intuits that Nichols is not there of his own accord. Nichols soon cops to this, telling Lucetti that he has been told he must jump by noon or someone else dies (it is 10:30AM according to a large clock across the way). He then tells Lucetti his story.

Off the Shelf: Don Hannah's The Wise and Foolish Virgins (1998)

When first reading playwright Don Hannah's terrific debut novel, The Wise and Foolish Virgins (Random House, 1998), I was immediately reminded of a scene from Michael Tolkin's provocative film, The Rapture (1991), where a born again Christian tells a convert who is having her doubts about her faith that all she has to do is let God forgive her. But the convert then answers back, "Yes, but who forgives God?" In his movie, Tolkin's point is that if we look for signs of God's perfection in the world, and in ourselves, and we find instead something less noble and unholy, how do we reconcile ourselves with God? In The Wise and Foolish Virgins, a group of individuals try to seek out the sacred but are continually forced to confront the profane.

The story takes place in Membartouche, a fictional small town in New Brunswick which seems quaint, but in reality it is teeming with frustrated individuals who feel at the short end of life's very fickle stick. Sandy Whyte, a repressed homosexual, is a pillar of the local church who has suffered humiliation and tries to take refuge in Bach and the religious hymns of his childhood. But his obsession with beauty takes an ugly turn when he kidnaps and holds hostage a young boy whom he worships. Gloria is Sandy's cleaning lady, a woman once ridiculed for having laid eyes on the Virgin Mary as a child, who has a family reunion dinner in honour of her gay brother Raymond, a man dying of AIDS, which stirs up her family's concealed hostilities. Annette is a pregnant teenager who desires an abortion, but when she accidently informs Margaret, a fundamentalist Christian at a right-to-life hotline, Margaret makes it her mission to convince Annette to keep her child. But we quickly come to realize that Margaret's efforts aren't based so much on her religious beliefs, or any altruistic motives, they come instead from a desire in her to transcend her own memories of the horrible sexual abuse she suffered as a young girl.

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.

Stand and Deliver: Soulpepper's Production of David Mamet's Speed-the-Plow

Ari Cohen & Jordan Pettle star in Soulpepper's production of Speed-The-Plow (Photo: Cylla von Tiedemann)

“They’re only words; unless it’s true” – Charles (Speed-The-Plow)

Toronto’s Soulpepper Theatre Company obviously loves the words of David Mamet. They've already produced a first-rate Oleanna and a solid Glengarry Glen Ross in recent years, proving the American playwright’s work is still relevant. Speed-The-Plow can now be added to that list of productions Soulpepper does with great energy and efficiency. Mamet’s plays feature smart, fast-talking characters with razor sharp wit and a focused point of view. In Speed-the-Plow, which debuted in 1988, we get a layered work that’s about loyalty, personal integrity and morality set in the one place that least values those attributes: Hollywood. In Soulpepper’s efficient and uncluttered production, we’re given just the right amount of hope to believe that Hollywood is still about making good films, regardless of the ego-driven executives who produce them.

The play opens with the main characters, Bobby Gould (Ari Cohen) and Charlie Fox (Jordan Peddle), agreeing to produce a movie that will put “asses in seats” and provide them with enough money “to piss on.” Gould was recently promoted in the fictional studio, to produce movies with a budget under 30 million dollars. Fox, who’s worked for Gould for over ten years, is the highly ambitious junior looking to join the Hollywood elite with the new film. Cohen and Peddle work extremely well together bashing each other with pseudo-compliments and the kind of “buddy-buddy” language Hollywood-types like to speak. Both actors relish the language and their timing is excellent. At no point in the play did I ever doubt their strong relationship.

It’s About You (or is it about John Mellencamp? Or is it about Kurt Markus?)

John Mellencamp in a scene from It's About You

On John Mellencamp’s most recent tour, the “opening act” was an edited-down version of the film It's About You. I didn’t see the tour when it played near here because ticket prices were pricey. This is an ongoing problem: Premium prices put some artists beyond the reach of their fans. I had only recently joined the throngs of Americans (and Canadians) who list John Mellencamp as one of the favourites. Johnny Cash, for instance, called him “one of the 10-best songwriters working today” (or, at least that’s the story filmmaker Kurt Markus tells, quoting bassist Dave Roe who heard it from the Man in Black himself). I wish that Markus had got Roe to tell that story on film!

It’s About You was released on Blu-Ray and DVD last week, and it makes a tidy little package. Only 80 minutes long and shot on super8 by photographer Kurt Markus and his son Ian, and then processed to look aged, it is a thing of beauty for those viewers who like raw and intimate studies. It’s like looking into a personal photo album, but with live action and music added. There are moments when there is no light in the room, as producer T-Bone Burnett closes the drapes in the Sun Studio. But Markus keeps the camera rolling anyway to capture pixels moving amongst darkness but no subject to be clearly seen. As frustrating as that might be to the viewer in one way, it is a moment of clarity in another. Mellencamp’s guitar and voice become central, and the moving pixels simply accompany the song. Then the curtains open and there he is.

Peter and the Starcatcher: Handmade Vaudeville

Christian Borle (far right) and the cast of Peter and the Starcatcher (All photos by  Sara Krulwich)

The entrancing Peter and the Starcatcher, adapted by Rick Elice from the Dave Barry-Ridley Pearson novel, is an origin story for James Barrie’s Peter Pan, just as the blockbuster musical Wicked imagines the origins of the two witches in The Wizard of Oz. The complicated plot, which is set out quickly in the opening minutes (you have to listen sharply), involves two ships, the Neverland and the Wasp. The first carries a trio of orphans who are, unbeknownst to them, due to be sold into slavery, as well as Molly (Celia Keenan-Bolger), the feisty, adventure-loving daughter of Lord Aster (Rick Holmes), who is on the second ship, discharging a mission for Queen Victoria to hurl a trunk full of “star stuff” – highly dangerous stardust (its ability to make wishes come true can transform ambitious men and women into tyrants) – into the world’s oldest active volcano. (The writers were obviously thinking of The Lord of the Rings.) Molly, trained by her father to be a starcatcher, befriends the most sensitive of the orphans, a nameless lad (Adam Chanler-Berat) who doesn’t trust adults – in his experience, they always lie – yet cherishes a dream of home and mother. It is only in the second act, when the action moves to an island, that he acquires the name Peter Pan (first Peter and then Pan). Here he tangles with the pirate known as Black Stache (Christian Borle), before he’s become Captain Hook. You recognize other elements of the Barrie tale: Smee (Kevin Del Aguila) is Stache’s inseparable second-in-command, there’s a ticking crocodile, and the Indians are islanders called Mollusks. Nana the dog has her counterpart in Molly’s nanny, Mrs. Bumbrake (played in drag by Arnie Burton), who speaks in stiff-upper-lip English clichés and wears her hair in a bun that looks oddly like a dog’s ear.

Batman: The Brave and the Bold – Let Fly the Hammers of Justice!

Batman and Plastic Man battle some super-intelligent apes in Batman: The Brave and the Bold.

Batman has long been my favourite superhero. And I’m not alone: Hollywood has long favoured the Caped Crusader – giving us a half dozen major motion pictures in the past two decades alone. In five days, the long-awaited conclusion of Christopher Nolan’s brilliantly intense, philosophical Batman trilogy, The Dark Knight Rises, will open in theatres worldwide. But Batman’s life on the small screen has been just as varied. Beginning with the famously campy Adam West series in the mid-sixties, and reaching perhaps its zenith with the classic Batman: The Animated Series (1992-1995), Bruce Wayne and his alter-ego Batman have been a television staple for more than four decades. Last August, the more recent Batman: The Brave and the Bold ended its three-season run on the Cartoon Network – but I confess that it was only over the past few weeks that I finally gave the series a real look. And with Nolan’s sure-to-be blockbuster movie waiting in the wings, this is as good a time as any to let you know why you should check it too.

Based on the long-running DC comic series of the same name, The Brave and the Bold is unique among the many Batman titles in that it specifically focuses on Batman teaming up with other heroes of the DC universe. The animated series follows this same mandate, bringing Batman together with one or more other costumed heroes in his famous battle against villainy and evil in all their incarnations. But Batman: The Brave and the Bold (hereafter BtBatB) was unique in another way, in that it controversially marked a return to the lighter, more tongue-in-cheek Batman stories of an earlier generation. It’s brighter in tone, snappier in dialogue, and unapologetically cartoonish in its animation style. And truth be told, in 2008 when I dutifully tuned in for its premiere episode, I hated it. 

Critics at Large Podcast #1: Philip Kaufman's Hemingway & Gellhorn

Nicole Kidman and Clive Owen star in Hemingway & Gellhorn

SeanRasmussen · Critics at Large Episode 1: Hemingway and Gellhorn

(Note: If the player doesn't appear for you above, you can also listen to the podcast here.)

During the 1980s, Critics at Large’s Kevin Courrier worked as assistant producer and co-host of the radio show On the Arts at CJRT-FM (now JAZZ 91-FM) in Toronto. Between 1987 and 1989, Critics at Large’s David Churchill was asked by Kevin to join him on the show to review the current cinema. During that era, one of the filmmakers who had a major impact on both critics was Philip Kaufman, director of such superior films as Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), The Right Stuff (1983), The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988), and others. So, when Kaufman’s first new work in eight years, Hemingway & Gellhorn, debuted this past May on HBO, they thought it might be time to temporarily resurrect their radio review segment with Critics at Large’s first podcast.

Hemingway & Gellhorn tells the story of the tempestuous relationship between author Ernest Hemingway and war correspondent Martha Gellhorn as they fall in love during the Spanish Civil War, and then tear each other apart in the years that followed.

The podcast was produced by Sean Rasmussen.

– Kevin Courrier is a writer/broadcaster, film critic, teacher and author (Dangerous Kitchen: The Subversive World of Zappa). His forthcoming book is Reflections in the Hall of Mirrors: American Movies and the Politics of Idealism. With John Corcelli, Courrier is currently working on another radio documentary for CBC Radio's Inside the Music called The Other Me: The Avant-Garde Music of Paul McCartney.


 

– David Churchill is a critic and author of the novel The Empire of Death. You can read an excerpt here. Or go to http://www.wordplaysalon.com for more information (where you can order the book, but only in traditional form!). And yes, he’s begun the long and arduous task of writing his second novel.

  

Beyond Precious: Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom

Kara Hayward and Jared Gilman in Moonrise Kingdom

Having just finished teaching a course on the great American cinema of the ‘70s, and spending weeks immersed in fine films by directors at their creative peaks (Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, Brian De Palma, Hal Ashby, Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman and many others), it was something of a rude jolt to be brought back to earth having to deal with the generally underwhelming current crop of American directors. While Spielberg, De Palma and Scorsese are still around and often doing good work – creatively Coppola is missing in action – there are only a handful of relevant moviemakers (David Fincher, Curtis Hanson) from the next generation who make movies that speak to the way we live today. And when you’ve tasted the highs of The Godfather, Taxi Driver, Nashville or Shampoo, why would you want to make time for the enervated films of Kelly Reichardt (Old Joy, Meek’s Cutoff), the scattershot ones of Paul Thomas Anderson (Magnolia, There Will Be Blood) or the contemptuous movies of Todd Solondz (Welcome to the Dollhouse, Life During Wartime)? But of all the annoying/irritating minor talents being unduly praised to the skies, usually only by certain film critics, none is likely more of a chore to sit through than Wes Anderson. His latest movie, Moonrise Kingdom, is really more of the same: a hermetic, arid, mindless film that defies you to truly care about anything that’s happening on screen.

If you had to pick one word to define his films, such as Rushmore (1998), The Royal Tanenbaums (2001) and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004), it would be precious. Not in the very valuable meaning of the word, but in the affectedly dainty or over-refined definition. With the exception of his debut movie, the sweet, likeable Bottle Rocket (1996), Anderson’s films are enshrined baubles that may look pretty – he doesn’t stint on the art direction – but beyond surface appearances have little of value on offer.

Talking Out of Turn #30: Douglas Adams (1987)

author Douglas Adams

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 executive producer of On the Arts

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 I interviewed author Douglas Adams in 1987, who knew that, besides his vastly eclectic interests, he would also be something of a pioneer in technological innovation with his fascination for Apple Macintosh computers. He saw the decade as a launching pad for a number of technological feats which would bear fruit in the years to come. Adams, who died suddenly of a heart attack in 2001, had an equally diverse career as an English writer, dramatist (which included being a script editor of Doctor Who) and a humourist. Most people know him as the author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a best selling 'trilogy' of five books (selling over 15 million copies), which began as a BBC Radio comedy in 1978. (His contributions to British radio are commemorated in The Radio Academy's Hall of Fame.)

The day he came in to talk, he had just written Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency which he described as a "thumping good detective-ghost-horror-who-dunnit-time travel-romantic-musical-comedy-epic." In Adams' hands, Gently is not your typical private detective. He's more interested in quantum mechanics, conjuring tricks and consuming pizza than fiddling with fingerprint powder; a "Holistic Detective" who believes in the "fundamental interconnectedness of all things." (The book was followed by a sequel The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul in 1988. He began working on another novel, The Salmon of Doubt, but he died before completing it.) Naturally with someone whose interests are so vast, we began our interview discussing obsessions.

The Divided Self in the Divided Country: Three portraits of Israel

Miriam Weissenstein and her grandson Ben, in Life in Stills

We are pleased to welcome Barbara Shainbaum as a guest contributor to Critics at Large.

Themes of the divided self in the divided country, reflecting different sides of the Israeli psyche, surfaced in three thought-provoking documentaries shown at this year’s Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Film Festival and the Toronto Jewish Film Festival.

It was, actually, another Hot Docs film, All Divided Selves that set up the framework for me. Scottish filmmaker Luke Fowler’s experimental, fractured, but at times brilliant, archival collage examined Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing and his landmark book, The Divided Self, that theorized insanity could be understood as a reaction to a self that is split. Schizophrenia was viewed as a result of wrestling with two identities – one defined for us by our families, and the other, our true identity, as experienced by ourselves. When both aspects of the self clash, internal fracturing occurs, causing a divide. This phenomenon can also happen to countries and cultures, in this case, Israel, a country split by grappling with issues of identity and memory.

Beyond the Pose: Alex Katz Prints at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston

"Self-Portrait," Alex Katz, 1978. Aquatint.

Alex Katz is probably best known as the master of the cool pose.  His close-cropped portraits of family and friends, with their bright, flat hues and glints of sunlight, tap into the glamorous simplicity of billboard advertisements and the allure of movie stills, both of which were aggressively visible when Katz burst onto the New York art scene in the early 1960s.  Alex Katz Prints at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, jointly organized with Vienna’s Albertina and on view through July 29, opens with a witty self-portrait in which the artist appears in a snappy white jacket like a Hollywood movie star sporting one of those vague, effortless million dollar smiles.  The thing is, when you get close to the prints, you don’t see the master of cool at all: you see a man with an unquenchable thirst for the substance of beauty, vitality and allure that realistic images can both fleetingly disclose and at the same time never quite contain.  The delicious contradiction of his work – intimacy and impersonality, quietism and desire – is all there in the sensuality of his technique, and the MFA’s enjoyably overstuffed retrospective allows you to get a glimpse of the dynamic fusion within the cool, deliberate Pop Art style.  (No reproduction will show it to you in quite this way.)  The disappointment is that beyond putting the art on the walls the curators don’t give you much to go on in looking beyond the surface.

Playwrights of Promise: Lucy Boyle and Mike Bartlett

Heather Lind & Blythe Danner in The Blue Deep

In The Blue Deep, which just concluded a two-week run at the Williamstown Theatre Festival, Blythe Danner plays Grace, a recent widow whose daughter Lila (Heather Lind) comes for an unannounced visit to their country house in Sag Harbor after walking out on her boy friend in L.A. Grace, who runs an art gallery in Manhattan, is impatient with Lila’s tentative, waffling lifestyle – she hasn’t settled on a career – but the real conflict between them turns out to be over their responses to Lila’s father Bill’s cancer and eventual death. Throughout his illness Grace determined to remain upbeat, while Lila’s grief (in Grace’s opinion) paralyzed her and made her unhelpful, and now Lila insists on dwelling on her sadness rather than moving ahead. However, the truth is that the loss of her husband has so devastated Grace that she’s terrified to think about him; it’s a hole in the middle of her life that she keeps circling, pretending it isn’t there while she’s struggling to avoid being sucked into it. It’s the blue deep.

The Newsroom: Aaron Sorkin Speaks Truth to Stupid

Jeff Daniels, Dev Patel, Sam Waterston and Emily Mortimer in The Newsroom, on HBO

Contains minor spoilers for the first episode of The Newsroom.

Tonight the third episode of The Newsroom, Aaron Sorkin’s new workplace drama, airs on HBO, and it pains me to admit that I’m not really looking forward to it. When the series – which is set in the anguished world of TV news production, and boasts an impressive ensemble cast including Jeff Daniels, Emily Mortimer, and Sam Waterston – premiered two weeks ago, I tuned in with cautious optimism.

On the plus side, the pilot episode marked Sorkin’s return to series television after five long years, since the final episode of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip aired on NBC in 2007. On the negative side, well,  Studio 60: a series which, like The Newsroom, came with a great cast (in that case Matthew Perry and Bradley Whitford), a promising premise, and great expectations. Sure, the show had intelligent characters, and the mile-a-minute dialogue that Sorkin so brilliantly employed in his two previous critically-acclaimed shows Sports Night and The West Wing, but Studio 60 quickly became bogged down by Sorkin’s own ambitions. By mid-season, the show’s big ideas about America’s so-called “culture wars” began to dwarf the characters and story, and more often than not its speeches felt like Aaron Sorkin debating Aaron Sorkin: staged political dialogues, voiced by Hollywood actors. It was smart, funny, and looked and sounded great, but it grew progressively more tiresome, until I began to look forward to its inevitable cancellation.

But in the years since Studio 60’s cancellation, Sorkin has more than proven he’s still got chops, with three Academy Award-nominated screenplays for Charlie Wilson’s War (2007), The Social Network (2010) and Moneyball (2011), winning the Oscar for The Social Network.  Hence my tempered expectations for The Newsroom. Unfortunately, my ambivalence was more than validated by the first two (of ten) episodes. In the end, The Newsroom seems to be a kind of beautiful mess – but a mess nonetheless.

You've Got a Friend: Carole King’s Surprisingly Intimate Autobiography, A Natural Woman

Carole King was born in 1942. While she was still in high school she began writing songs for Don Kirschner’s company Aldon Music. By the time she was 17, she was married to her songwriting partner Gerry Goffin and commuting back and forth from Brooklyn to Manhattan to take her place in front of a piano in order to provide catchy melodies for Gerry’s lyrics. Together they wrote hits for Dusty Springfield, Little Eva, The Four Seasons, and Aretha Franklin. And that was just her first marriage!

King’s autobiography, A Natural Woman, is written in a free-flowing chatty style. You immediately feel that she is speaking directly to you. Her voice is warmer and friendlier than that of some would-be storytellers, and the reader is drawn right into Carole King’s world. As you read, you sometimes wonder at her naivete, and then marvel at her toughness. She seems to wander into relationships accidentally, and she never hesitates to share all the intimate details either. She holds nothing back about her various marriages. Her second one to musician Charles Larkey fell apart due to “disparate schedules,” but the third short-term marriage was a particularly devastating time.

Much Ado: Stratford Festival’s Much Ado About Nothing

Ben Carlson and Deborah Hay in Much Ado About Nothing at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival

I usually shy away from productions of Shakespeare that transpose the original Elizabethan setting to something contemporary or even exotic. And don’t even get me started on cross-dressing versions of King Lear or Hamlet. I mean, why bother? I understand the need for relevancy. But to my mind Shakespeare doesn’t need improving. If he did, his works wouldn’t have lasted more than 500 years. They are perfect specimens of the English language, timeless works of art that are also time capsules capturing the spirit and values of Renaissance England, Shakespeare’s own epoch. And so I found myself frowning when, during a recent visit to Canada’s Stratford Shakespeare Festival, I began reading director Christopher Newton’s program notes for Much Ado About Nothing which is at the Festival Theatre through to Oct. 27. In those notes, Newton (formerly of the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake) happily declared his love of Brazil, circa 1889, the year the country’s last emperor, Dom Pedro II, abdicated and was forced into exile. Say what? Rhapsodizing about palm trees and sandy beaches, anti-slavery laws and samba schools, Newton went on to say that Brazil was where he had decided to place his version of Much Ado About Nothing, larding it with sexy mulatos. I thought, get me outta here. I seriously considered making a run for it, and was already contemplating how I could leap over the row of sensible shoes (a bus full of senior citizens had decamped on the Festival Theatre for the night) in which I was planted, dead in the middle, without causing alarm. But then the lights dimmed low and there I was, bound for Brazil by way of Elizabethan England, certain I would hate every minute of the bumpy ride.

But surprise, surprise. When the action began, bathed in the honey-coloured tones of Robert Thomson’s South American-inspired lighting design, I felt myself yielding to Newton’s Portuguese-inflected staging, like a corsage orchid to the sun. Also inviting was Santo Loquasto’s late 19th-century Brazilian villa set design, dominated by an interior sweeping staircase with Azulejos floor tiles, a setting that felt warm, intimate and seductive. I was already happy to be spending time there. Its sun-kissed colours were a balm on the eyes. It didn’t take long to see that the relaxed vibe of the visual design suited a play that, while bracketed by images of war, is preoccupied with finding peace. I felt myself relax in the presence of this oasis of calm. It was obviously that Newton was not as wilfully contrarian as I had first suspected. He was definitely onto something. 

New Life: Pat Metheny Unity Band

Named after a small church near his hometown in Missouri, guitarist Pat Metheny’s new recording, Pat Metheny Unity Band (Nonesuch 2012), offers jazz fans a welcome change in musical direction for one of the most popular musicians in the world today. With all new compositions and a new band to play them (Chris Potter, Antonio Sanchez and Ben Williams), this quartet, whose playing time has been relatively short, the Unity Band sounds remarkably fresh, innovative and tight. (The band was formed this past winter to record this album.) The collective experience of each member has clearly lifted the whole group and while their debut album isn't particularly stellar, it captures a band that can only get better with time.

Thirty years ago Metheny released an album simply titled 80/81 (ECM, 1982) featuring veteran tenor sax man Dewey Redman, father of the very talented Joshua Redman, and the late Michael Brecker. That record explored Metheny’s interest in a traditional jazz quartet of bass, drums, guitar and saxophone. To Metheny, it was always a musical choice to play outside the traditional quartet setting. Consequently, the instrumentation of most of his groups since then has not featured a horn player on the front line. The difference this time was the addition of horn player Chris Potter. Potter has led his own bands over the years but has been particularly good with Dave Holland’s small groups for the past ten. On this record he brings everything to the music with solid playing on every cut, especially “Breakdealer,” which closes the album. But like any jazz recording that captures a moment in time, in this case February of 2012 when it was laid down, as the band tours and continues to play, the music will definitely get better. Metheny certainly knows how to pick ‘em!

A Refreshing Sample: The Drunkard’s Walk by Leonard Mlodinow

If you remember anything about high school statistics or probability, some of this book should feel familiar. Whether this familiarity is a fond nostalgia or a kind of nervous queasiness comes down a matter of individual experience. Yet whether you hunger for a greater exploration of practical math, or tend to have difficulty stomaching it, The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives is worth a try.

The eponymous metaphor of The Drunkard’s Walk refers to “a mathematical term describing random motion,” covering everything from the skittish dance of subatomic particles to the jolting and jarring of unexpected career paths. This exploratory explanation of chance comes to us from Leonard Mlodinow, a physicist whose random life experiences include lecturing at Caltech, co-authoring two books with Stephen Hawking, and writing for Star Trek: The Next Generation. With the goal of conveying the influence and chaotic beauty of randomness to those of us without such backgrounds, Mlodinow samples a wide range of mathly problems and their unexpected solutions. He shows us how the laws of mathematics permeate every aspect of our lives, touching on the predictable topics (sports, stocks, and surveys) and the not-quite-so-predictable (seances, online dating, McDonald’s).  This mix of subjects keeps each chapter unique, while Mlodinow’s writing manages to flow despite the periodic awkward transition or stilted paragraph.

Film Festival Openers: It’s All About Setting the Tone

I was Director of Programming of the Toronto Jewish Film Festival from 1996-2004 and much emphasis was always placed on picking the right film to open the festival. We were unique among Jewish film festivals, and most film festivals, in fact, in that as often as not we chose a documentary instead of a feature film to launch the event. I’ve since left the TJFF, but I’m always intrigued with what films get picked to open film festivals since in many ways that choice can influence the reaction of audiences to everything that follows and, if you pick a dud, set a negative tone that could impact adversely on your event. Two recent film festival openers, while not badly chosen, exemplify the dilemma of making the best possible choice in the films available for exhibition.

Birthing Pains: Danny Boyle's Frankenstein

Back on April 4, 2011, David Churchill reviewed the National Theatre's production of Frankenstein for Critics at Large. A little over a year later, Steve Vineberg revisits the production for a second opinion.

The National Theatre’s mounting of Frankenstein, an adaptation of the Mary Shelley novel by Nick Dear and directed by filmmaker Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire), was a hot ticket in London last year, and the HD transcription was popular enough for NT Live to bring it back for a second engagement a few weeks ago. There’s a casting gimmick: the two stars, Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller, switch off in the roles of Victor Frankenstein and the Creature – just as Philip Seymour Hoffman and John C. Reilly did in the last Broadway revival of Sam Shepard’s True West. In an interview that prefaces the HD screening, Boyle explains that the double casting is meant to comment on the relationship between the two characters. But that’s nonsense: creator and creation aren’t interchangeable, and Frankenstein and the Creature aren’t alter egos in the sense that the two brothers in True West (who trade places in the narrative) are. The Creature is Frankenstein’s Adam, or if you’re looking for a theatrical parallel, he’s to Frankenstein as Caliban is to Prospero in The Tempest.