Cowardly Bravery: Robert Zemeckis' Flight

I have very mixed feelings about Robert Zemeckis' (Back to the Future, Cast Away) return to live-action film-making after 12 years away making his trilogy of motion-capture (mo-cap) films – The Polar Express (2004), Beowulf (2007) and A Christmas Carol (2009). Mixed feelings – not because I miss the fact he abandoned it for so long (although frankly, I never understood his obsession with mo-cap even though I'm one of the few people I know who actually likes his dead-eyed “village of the damned” movie The Polar Express) – because his return to live-action film-making is such a mixed bag.

In the first few seconds of his new movie, Flight, Zemeckis makes sure we understand that he's abandoning “cartoons,” and PG ratings of any sort. Denzel Washington plays “Whip” Whitacker, an airline pilot of many years and our first shot of him is as he awakens with a hangover. A buck-naked airline attendant rolls out of bed beside him and she heads to the washroom (you can hear her peeing in the background). His cell phone rings. He picks up and immediately begins an argument with his ex-wife. During the conversation, he drinks the remnants of a bottle of beer, and he liberally drops F-bombs left, right and centre. The airline attendant, Katerina (Nadine Velazquez), returns from the loo, smokes the remainder of a joint and lets him know they are due at the airport within the hour to work on a flight from Orlando to Atlanta. He mumbles assent, does a line of cocaine and, with the soundtrack playing Joe Cocker’s cover of Traffic’s “Feelin’ Alright,” he dresses and heads to the airport: The confident cock of the walk.

We are barely four minutes into the film.

The Sessions & Midnight’s Children: Intimate Drama Surpasses Epic Tale

Helen Hunt and John Hawkes in The Sessions

Hollywood has always liked the inspirational saga, usually involving perpetually losing sports teams coming from behind to capture a championship or a teacher turning things around at a troubled, dysfunctional school. Ben Lewin’s The Sessions is a little different. It’s the true story of a man, afflicted by polio when he was young, who decides to lose his virginity as an adult, by hiring a sex surrogate no less. Fortunately what sounds like a potentially tasteless sex farce or would be in certain hands is actually a touching drama about two people whose intimate interactions change each other’s lives for the better. And for once the kudos about the skilled acting on tap in a movie is true.

The film, an American independent production but one tailor-made for Hollywood which picked it up for distribution, begins with Mark O’Brien (John Hawkes, Deadwood, Winter’s Bone), who is featured as the subject of a news report that shows him receiving his journalism degree despite his handicap. It then picks his life up in 1989 Berkeley, California, as he's being wheeled around in an iron lung, which is his home for most of the day. But Mark, who is also a poet, is determined to experience sex, first falling in love with one of his nurses, who flees when he tells of his feelings. He then decides to ask advice of Father Brendan (William H. Macy), his friendly local priest, who gives him the go-ahead for pursuing carnal pleasures. Mark then reaches out to sex surrogate Cheryl Cohen Greene (Helen Hunt, Mad About You, A Good Woman) who offers him six sessions in order so he may both consummate the act and, more importantly, learn to be good at pleasing a woman. Most of the film centers on their sessions and how they get to know each other both in and outside the bedroom.

Post-Halloween Neglected Gem #27: Parents (1989)

Bob Balaban moved from character actor to director with this little-seen 1989 movie, which shares a DVD with a 1990 thriller called Fear. Parents is post-David Lynch, with visual references to Eraserhead and Blue Velvet and soundtrack references to Eraserhead and The Elephant Man. It’s sensationally funny and creepy. The movie is a black-comic nightmare of growing up in middle America in the 1950s. The talented young actor Bryan Madorsky, who has enormous brown eyes, a serpentine neck, and a gaunt face that bulges above his ears, plays Michael Laemle, a Massachusetts kid who hates the Indiana suburb his family has moved to. He feels alienated in his new class (his weary teacher, wittily played by Kathryn Grody, barely submerges her disdain and condescension in pseudo-sweet commonplaces) and frightened by his sprawling split-level home, with its stucco fireplace, its deck, its barbecue, its unfamiliar “dark places.” (The art director, Andris Hausmanis, has given Balaban a real fifties special: the wall hangings – Eisenhower-era exotica – brought back my own childhood as powerfully as the recordings on the soundtrack, which include “Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White,” “Purple People Eater,” and Dean Martin’s “Memories Are Made of This.”) Michael’s dad, Nick (Randy Quaid), tells him that the only dark place he has to be careful of is his head. Beefy Nick, who looks Brobdingnagian next to Michael, doesn’t dig this skinny, meek kid, who always seems to be watching him with a mixture of curiosity and dread, and who has begun to shy away from eating the juicy red meat Nick broils on his barbecue and his wife Lily (Mary Beth Hurt) fries up on her stove. Nick can’t figure out how he and Lily could have produced this weirdo.

Phoenix Descending: The Young and the Restless and the Doomed

River Phoenix (1970-1993)

As a starstruck little girl, I experienced a broken heart when 24-year-old James Dean died in an automobile accident on September 30, 1955. From that day on, I began each entry in my diary with “Dear Jimmy.” A somewhat similar sadness took hold when drugs claimed the life of 23-year-old River Phoenix on Halloween 1993. But in starstruck adulthood, I no longer kept a diary with which to deny the untimely deaths of sensitive young actors.

Like Dean, Phoenix projected vulnerability, intensity and an edgy sense of potential self-destruction in his films. These qualities, which graced them both with a charisma lacking in most of their otherwise talented Hollywood peers, almost made tragedy seem inevitable. From a troubled adolescent in Stand by Me (1986) to the anguished son of fugitive parents in Running on Empty (1988), Phoenix brought that special something to the screen. In director Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho (1991), he portrays a character with narcolepsy. Never very lively while awake, he abruptly falls asleep anywhere, anytime – much like a junkie nodding out. It’s an uncanny performance in a strange movie based on Shakespeare’s Henry IV.

We Created a Monster: James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931)

It’s been over 80 years since Frankenstein (1931) was unleashed upon the world and I have sad news for you: James Whale’s film isn't scary. I'm sure it was frightening at some point in time but that ship has sailed and we’re left with a once-feared monster that we now embrace with open arms. Frankenstein would not have survived in its popularity were it just a great horror movie. What sets this film (and its immediate sequel 1935’s Bride Of Frankenstein) apart from the rest is the care Whale attached to the details of every frame. This was and always will be a work of art. Stories, such as that of a crazed doctor creating life from death, just aren't shared like this anymore.

With great skill and humour, Whale treated the film stock as if it were his canvas; his own laboratory. The monster’s make-up by Jack Pierce is iconic in its simplicity, sketching stitches and brushing bolts to craft a beautiful monstrosity played by the then-unknown Boris Karloff. The sets are meticulously detailed with matchstick forests, laboratories of smoke and mirrors, castles and graveyards filled with twisted architecture; all warmed by harsh shadows and painted backdrops that appear like moving expressionist paintings.

Revivals, Part I: Cyrano de Bergerac & An Enemy of the People

 Douglas Hodge and Clémence Poésy star in Cyrano de Bergerac

Many famous actors have had their fling at playing Edmond Rostand’s hero Cyrano de Bergerac, but the best one I’ve ever seen, hands down, is Christopher Plummer in the 1973 Broadway musical Cyrano. In his second go-round with the role – he’d sampled it as a young actor at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Canada, the same season he played Hamlet – he was mesmerizing, and hilarious. (Runner-up would be a tie between José Ferrer in the 1950 film version and Steve Martin in the updated 1987 movie Roxanne, which is my favorite version of the material.) The most recent Broadway Cyranos have been disappointments: first Kevin Kline in 2007 and now the British actor Douglas Hodge, in the new production at the Roundabout. Kline made the bizarre choice to underplay the role of the seventeenth-century wit, poet and soldier, who, feeling he can’t court the girl he adores, his cousin Roxane, because of the size of his nose, provides her handsome suitor Christian with the words to win her heart. The flamboyant Cyrano is surely one part you should never underplay. Hodge doesn’t make that mistake, and physically, at least, he meets the challenges of the character’s celebrated panache, especially in the first-act scene where he engages in swordplay with the disdainful Valvert (Samuel Roukin) while he composes a poem. (He completes the last line as he deals his opponent the triumphal thrust.) It’s Hodges’s vocal work that comes considerably short of the mark. He does well with the famous speech to the dullard Valvert, anticipating the swordfight, in which he demonstrates a dozen ways in which a man of imagination might approach the matter of insulting his nose. Hodge has a voice like scraped stone, and he knows how to use it cleverly. But this Cyrano is rendered in verse, yet Hodge insists on playing against the meter. Worse, he has a fondness for delivering his lines in a sentimental tremolo that cuts Cyrano’s romantic stoicism. He doesn’t appear to have understood the character – or else (as I suspect) he’s simply indulging himself.

Celebrating 20 Years: In Conversation With George Randolph, Founder of Toronto's Randolph Academy For the Performing Arts

George Randolph with David Mirvish

Chances are, if you’ve gone to the theatre anywhere in North America lately, you’ve witnessed something of the Randolph Academy for the Performing Arts in action. Since its founding in a Toronto church basement 20 years ago, the performing arts school has produced two generations of theatre professionals modeled after the old Hollywood tradition of the Triple Threat – that is, a performer who, in equal measure, can sing, dance and act. First coined by the likes of Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney when they were kids performing in musicals some 70-years ago, the Triple Threat was a relatively unused term in Canada until George Randolph, an American-born hoofer, came to Toronto to literally shake things up. Trained at Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, the former dancer with Les Ballets Jazz de Montreal arrived in Toronto in the 1980s at time when the city was being transformed into Broadway North. The big shows of the Great White Way were then crossing the border in record numbers, lured by local theatre impresarios like Garth Drabinsky and Ed Mirvish. Audiences were hungry for them, but the country didn’t have the manpower to sustain them. Theatre professionals here were either dancers or singer or actors. Rarely were they all three at once. They hadn’t had the training. Spying an opportunity, Randolph threw himself headlong into the void, eventually creating a signature Triple Threat program that is today the envy of much of the theatre world as he explained recently in conversation with Deirdre Kelly. Read on to find out how the Randolph Academy started and where it’s going next.

Notes and Frames: The Neglected Art of Film Music

If you ask most people, they'll tell you that they never notice the music in a film. Many will even go so far as to tell you that if they did notice it, it meant that it was likely bad music. Even classical composers, who should be the film composer's most obvious supporter, generally dismiss film music as 'hack work.' It's a thankless job, they'll say, especially since it's commonly believed a good score can never save a bad picture. How can an art form British composer Ralph Vaughn Williams once described as "containing possibilities for the combination of the arts such as Wagner never dreamed of" end up so demeaned? Especially since music and movies have been intrinsically linked since the silent era. While there's no simple answer to that question, it's possible that since the motion picture has always been a popular art form and not regarded as one of the High Arts, the use of classical music (a High Art form) has been perceived by some as a form of sacrilege. Yet despite the class snobbery, what is clear is that the movies have always needed and desired music as some part of the storytelling.

The Big Questions: Walter Mosley’s The Right Mistake

Last week on Metro Morning, CBC Radio’s Toronto morning show, host Matt Galloway talked about a place he likes to go to get his hair cut. If memory serves, he said it is called Not Just A Haircut. What he said he liked to do was go in for a haircut, and then just hang out for two hours after and participate in the wide-ranging conversations that spring up. Sometimes, he said, it is simple things like the news of the day, or recent sporting events, but other times it takes on a more philosophical bent. His comments got me thinking about a book I read recently by Walter Mosley, a favourite writer of mine who’s best known for his Easy Rawlins series of character-driven mystery novels, including Devil in a Blue Dress (1990) which was made into a criminally underrated Denzel Washington film expertly directed by Carl Franklin in 1995. The novel, The Right Mistake (2008), is the third in a series of novels (though the first two – Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned (1997) and Walkin’ the Dog (1999) – were actually interlinked short stories rather than novels, per se) featuring ex-con Socrates Fortlow. (Laurence Fishburne played Fortlow in a 1998 HBO TV-movie of Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned.) Fortlow lives in the tough region of Los Angeles called Watts. He  is a reforming violent man (‘reforming’, since, like an alcoholic, you are never completely ‘cured’ of violence) who spent almost half his life in prison for crimes he freely admitted he committed, including rape and murder. Violence is never far from his mind, but nor is redemption, forgiveness and reform, and not necessarily just for him.

Dousing the Fire Within: Oslo, August 31st

Anders Danielsen Lie and Malin Crépin in Oslo, August 31st

The gifted Norwegian filmmaker Joachim Trier may feel that he was born half a century too late. Both his features – Reprise, from 2006, and this year’s Oslo, August 31st – have the literate sensibility and allusive narrative approach of French New Wave movies, and they even draw on some of the same cinematic vocabulary. His subject matter is the young Oslo intelligentsia. The two protagonists of Reprise are writers who are best of friends but also competitors; while one (Espen Klouman-Hoiner) has already had critical success, the career of the other (Anders Danielsen Lie) has been sidelined by a nervous breakdown. The hero of Oslo, August 31st is Anders (Lie), a writer and heroin addict who has been living in a rehab facility outside the city. The movie chronicles the last day of his life, when he ventures into Oslo for an interview at a magazine, briefly re-enters his old social circle, and – inevitably – commits suicide with a drug overdose.

Trier and his co-writer, Eskil Vogt (who also collaborated on the screenplay of Reprise), work from Pierre Drieu La Rochelle’s novel Le Feu Follet, which also furnished the source material for Louis Malle’s 1963 film of the same name (known on this side of the Atlantic as The Fire Within). Malle’s version is about an alcoholic returning to his old Paris haunts before ending his life, and though it’s an adaptation of a French novel, in feeling it comes uncannily close to F. Scott Fitzgerald, especially his great short story "Babylon Revisited." Oslo, August 31st alters the aura by substituting a contemporary northern European milieu for Paris in the middle of the last century, but it’s a plausible switch. Like Malle’s hero (and Fitzgerald’s), Anders returns to a scene that has become poisonous to him, both because he has become the subject of his old companions’ gossip and because he can’t indulge safely in even the lightest partying without endangering his sobriety. Most of them have moved on from the excesses of their youth in any case. His best friend, Thomas (Hans Olav Brenner), is holding down a university teaching job and raising a child with his wife Rebecca (Ingrid Olava). When Anders drops in on a thirtieth birthday fête for Mirjam (Kjaersti Odden Skjeldal), with whom he once had a fling, he feels alienated from his former crowd. Their jokes about his behavior on one besotted occasion or another unsettle him, and when he tries to make friends with another young man who once made a play for his girl friend, the stranger’s bitter, insulting retort wounds him.

In the Shadow of Sgt. Pepper: We're Only in it for the Money

Last summer, I wrote in Critics at Large about how The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper album, a lovely, masterful avant-garde pop confection, also represented a magical retreat from a counter-culture that was on the verge of turning dark and violent. Before that darkness fully overshadowed the utopian spirit of that record, though, many of The Beatles' contemporaries made valiant attempts to duplicate the wizardry of Sgt. Pepper, as if they were trying to decode a secret language. In 1968, for instance, The Zombies ("Time of the Season") matched some of Pepper's technical innovations while adding some rich textures of their own on the exquisite Odyssey and Oracle (which was also recorded, like Pepper, at Abbey Road Studios). The Moody Blues' Days of Future Passed (1967) developed precisely in the spirit of Sgt. Pepper. The album, which yielded two hit songs, "Tuesday Afternoon" and "Nights in White Satin," was conceived as a song cycle that spanned an entire day – from sunrise to evening – where every song provided a unique perspective from each member of the group. Days of Future Passed was an evocation of a pastoral mystical innocence worthy of poet William Wordsworth in the age of psychedelia.

The Rolling Stones' Their Satanic Majesties Request

The Rolling Stones, a mere six months after Pepper, would concoct their own psychedelic conceit, Their Satanic Majesties Request, where they abandoned their R&B roots for exotic Indian rhythms, sound collages, and music hall pastiches. But because of their bad boy image, the record felt fake (despite its devious title) with its half-hearted flower power sentiments. There were many other lesser, now forgotten groups, who attempted to capture Sgt. Pepper's lightning in a bottle. One American artist who did respond to the seismic impact of Pepper, but didn't buy into the hippie ethos that blossomed out of The Beatles' landmark recording was Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention. This Los Angeles band, who coined themselves "the ugly reminder," may have had long hair but they didn't even come close to resembling the pretty groups sprouting up like flowers in a magical garden.

To paraphrase critic Nik Cohen, The Mothers suggested a band of motorcycle outlaws out to pillage your home and kidnap your daughter – though they were more likely to play her Igor Stravinsky (or maybe "Louie Louie") rather than sexually ravage her. Dan Sullivan in The New York Times once pointed up the significant discrepancy between The Mothers and The Beatles. "The most striking difference between [The Beatles and The Mothers of Invention] is not in their work but in their approach to their work – The Beatles' desire to please an audience versus The Mothers' basic distrust of one." Sgt. Pepper had celebrated the romantic ideal, offering the possibility that love could transcend all of our problems. But Zappa, who had already been railing against the 19th Century Romantic tradition of music, perceived something sinister lurking beneath the flowers, beads, and incense burning. Zappa saw the very concept of flower power evolving into nothing less than a successful fad. So on his 1968 album, We're Only in it for the Money, he decided to go after the fad rather than The Beatles' music. "Sgt. Pepper was okay," Zappa remarked to critic Kurt Loder in 1988. "But the whole aroma of what The Beatles were was something that never caught my fancy. I got the impression from what was going on at the time that they were only in it for the money – and that was a pretty unpopular view to hold."

He may have had a point. Contrary to the more generous ideals attached to the group, The Beatles' career was more often than not preoccupied by the power of money. By 1968, film critic Pauline Kael even shared some of Zappa's distrust when she reviewed the animated film Yellow Submarine. She felt that the problem of commerce undermined The Beatles' image, which by that time, began to change in the wake of all the promotional marketing tie-ins associated with the movie. "Wasn't all this supposed to be what The Beatles were against?" Kael asked. "There's something depressing about seeing yesterday's outlaw idols of the teenagers become a quartet of Pollyannas for the wholesome family trade." Yet, even as early as 1965, when interviewed by Playboy, John Lennon sarcastically remarked that they were moneymakers first and entertainers second. It was this particular aura that Zappa countered on his record.

For Good or Ill, What Might Have Been: Jeff Greenfield's Then Everything Changed

 "President Robert Kennedy", speaking on August 3, 1969

As a lifelong science fiction buff I must confess that my favourite sub-genre in the field is the alternate-history novel. Likely stemming from my interest in history and its many ramifications (I have a minor degree in it, to go with my major in Political Science) I’ve always been gripped by stories of the Nazis winning the Second World War – being Jewish makes that one more understandable, of course – or of the South triumphing in the US Civil War, among many other tropes. (Clearly I'm not alone, as these two “alternate realities” are the ones that have appeared most often in alt history novels.) That’s because, in my view, history can turn on a dime and one deviation from the norm can trigger any number of side effects or alternate history scenarios, which is absolutely compelling to someone who also likes reading SF as much as I do. (Imagine if Archduke Ferdinand had not been assassinated when he was; or if Adolf Hitler had not attacked the Soviet Union when he did, to name two of the most obvious examples of history changed by one specific action.) And now that the pivotal crucial American presidential election is merely two weeks away, it’s worth examining Jeff Greenfield’s latest book, Then Everything Changed: Stunning Alternate Histories of American Politics: JFK, RFK, Carter, Ford, Reagan (G.P. Putnam and Sons, 2011) for a fresh take on the what-if basis of alternate history.

Greenfield’s book differs in significant ways from such classics as Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, or more recently Philip Roth’s (not quite classic) The Plot Against America – alternate American histories revolving around aspects of a different WWII timeline – in that Greenfield is not a fiction writer, but a political reporter who’s long toiled for television news, covering all the vagaries of American politics. So his book brings a more grounded, perhaps less fanciful look at a particularly pertinent present-day subject: the character of the man who would become President of the United States, or more specifically an imagining of a world where different men became President or were either catapulted into office earlier than expected or won elections that they lost in real life. The results of his literary musings are both fascinating and thought-provoking.

Living in the 21st Century: Now or Later and If There Is I Haven’t Found It Yet

Tom Nelis and Grant MacDermott in Now or Later, at the Huntington in Boston. (Photo by Paul Marotta)

In Christopher Shinn’s Now or Later, currently on view in Boston in a production by the Huntington Theatre Company, the new president-elect of the United States (Tom Nelis) awaits what seems sure to be a victory in the 2008 presidential election. (He’s a Democrat but he isn’t a black man.) The play doesn’t focus on the presidency, though, but on the repercussions when first photos and then footage of his Ivy League son John (Grant MacDermott) cutting up at an off-campus costume party are leaked on the Internet. In the photos John is dressed as Mohammed and his best friend Matt (Michael Goldsmith) – who is sharing a hotel suite with John outside D.C. as the election results roll in – as a fundamentalist preacher whom John’s father, to John’s irritation, has collaborated with on a media event in the course of his campaign. The Mohammed costume is meant as a comment on the hypocrisy of the Muslim woman throwing the party. In class she accused John of racial intolerance because he didn’t think the students who’d put up cartoons of Mohammed around campus should be charged with hate speech and expelled. Yet in John’s view she’s a hypocrite who sees no contradiction between her unbending stance on how those whose objections to her buttoned-up religion should be handled and her willingness to stage a party where the guests cavort in various states of undress. The footage (which John was too hammered at the party to remember) displays him simulating oral sex on Matt. John is gay, but that’s not the issue for his father and his cohorts – though it is for John, who finds the attitude of all fundamentalist religion toward homosexuality intolerable.

The Right Stuff: Felix Baumgartner's Supersonic Jump From Near Space – October 14, 2012

Felix Baumgartner about to step into the void (Photo by Jay Nemeth)

"I know the whole world is watching now, and I wish the whole world could see what I can see: sometimes you have to go up really high to see how small you are."
                 –Felix Baumgartner, October 14, 2012, seconds before he jumped from 128,000 feet

Some weeks back, I wrote about Philippe Petite and Nik Wallenda, two high-wire walkers whose exploits had inspired me. I thought their achievements – walking between the two World Trade Centers in 1974, and walking across Niagara Falls this past summer, respectively – were awe-inspiring. Little did I know that some short months later, Felix Baumgartner, an Austrian pilot and BASE-jump specialist, would trump that in an earth-shattering, perhaps game-changing manner.

As a child, I was completely obsessed with space travel. Like so many people of my generation, I grew while attempts were being made during the Cold War to be the first man on the moon. All the lead up to that event occupied many of my waking hours (though some of it happened before I was four years old): Russia's Yuri Gagarin being the first man in space; Alan Shepard, the first American; Russian Alexey Leonov becoming the first man to walk in space; followed by Ed White, who performed the longest walk in space at the time; the tragic deaths of White, Gus Grissom and Roger Chaffee in Apollo 1; then there was Apollos 7 through 10 that proved man could go to the moon and back.

As for Apollo 11 – July 20, 1969. Nothing more need be said.

Then followed the successful Apollos 12, 14, 15, 16 and 17. The near disaster of Apollo 13, and the herculean effort it took to get the men back alive. I remember mourning the demise of the moon landings, but became excited again when the shuttle missions started in April 1981. After a time, it too became all a little blasé because our astronauts and cosmonauts became, seemingly, little more than transport truck drivers in low-space orbit.

Frustrating & Fascinating: Pete Townshend’s Who Am I

It all started when I was about 14 or 15. My grandmother would travel to the USA for a couple of days to a bowling tournament, and upon her return would bring me a souvenir. This time, she arrived with an LP. It was called Happy Jack and it advertised on the back, “If you like this record you’re sure to enjoy these other Decca artists,” with pictures of Len Barry and Rick Nelson. Now, I mean no disrespect to the singers of “1, 2, 3” and “Traveling Man,” but they were no match for “A Quick One While He’s Away.” I became a fan of the Who immediately. They sang about stuff that mattered to me. They weren’t the walrus, they had “Pictures of Lily” under their bed. Me too! He spoke for my generation. I bought everything The Who released: singles, albums, rock operas, movie soundtracks, and books. I read Pete Townshend’s book of short stories, Horse’s Neck, and the interviews he gave to Rolling Stone (when it was the only place to find interviews with musicians). Now, years later, I awaited the arrival of Townshend’s autobiography with fierce anticipation. He had announced that he was writing it nearly twenty years ago. Could it possibly have taken that long? “It will have all the answers,” I thought. It doesn’t. But it sure asks a lot of questions.

Flights of Fancy – Flight: Volume One

A panel from "Maiden Voyage" by Kazu Kibuishi (collected in Flight, Volume One)

One of the greatest joys of the web is that it provides unprecedented access to art. The range and scale of projects online grows daily, and artists who might otherwise have been unable or unwilling to start out in print now have new options. Some seem content to stay and play in the digital space, while others can build their online reputation into a means to rise in the print world. Such was the case for the artists and writers of Flight: Volume One. Editor Kazu Kibuishi has amassed a wide range of art styles, stories, and characters, if a slightly smaller range of quality. The volume showcases twenty-two young comic artists, all early in their careers in 2004 when it went to print. While 'flight' is not always explicitly featured in the stories, themes of childhood, adventure, and fantastical whimsy pervade each one.

Hallucinatory Suspense: Brian De Palma's The Fury

Brian De Palma is hands down the most disreputable great American director. Sam Peckinpah got his due after he died; the movies that earned him the sobriquet “Bloody Sam” – not meant as a compliment – are now recognized as the work of a genius. But De Palma has always worked very differently from Peckinpah, burrowing slyly beneath the bristling, profane surface of pop. When he found his style in the late seventies and early eighties in movies like Carrie, The Fury, Dressed to Kill and Blow Out, his brash, dirty humor and his fascination with the tools of film exploitation alienated people (critics more than audiences: Carrie and Dressed to Kill were big hits) who couldn’t see that he was using those tools as a starting-off point. They missed it even when he announced his intentions at the outset of Blow Out: filming a parody of a sexy teen horror movie, a more sexually explicit version of something like Halloween, to fake out audiences and then cutting it off to segue into a political conspiracy thriller with the film-within-the-film’s sound man (John Travolta) as the protagonist. I think Blow Out is a masterpiece, but it wasn’t just misunderstood when it came out in 1981; it was willfully misunderstood. When I wrote in The Stanford Daily that it was one of the best political movies ever made by an American, I got incredulous letters from readers who denied there was a shred of politics in it – even though it’s about the assassination of a gubernatorial candidate, it contains allusions to Chappaquiddick and a character modeled on G. Gordon Liddy, it climaxes on an invented Philadelphia holiday called Liberty Day, and it’s color-coded in red, white and blue

You’d think that in an era when Quentin Tarantino and Sam Raimi are taken seriously as filmmakers, De Palma might catch a break for his pop sensibility, but Tarantino and Raimi don’t operate in the most dangerous area of violence, where it intersects with sexuality. Even Hitchcock didn’t. Except in Vertigo, which is a romantic melodrama – a genre De Palma essayed only once, in Obsession, and couldn’t get into – the sexual material in his movies is only there to play with us, lure us in so he can swap it for violence: Robert Walker coming on to Farley Granger in the opening scene of Strangers on a Train, Tony Perkins peeping at Janet Leigh in the shower in Psycho. (Spielberg takes a leaf from Hitchcock’s book, of course, in the opening of Jaws, where we’re led to think that the wasted kid on the beach is going to get laid in the water by the girl with the come-hither eyes, but the only orgasm is the bloody thrashing in the water as she’s scissored by the shark.) De Palma’s bravado in taking Hitchcock tropes into the truly forbidden places Hitchcock wasn’t interested in – the way he riffs on the Psycho shower scene as a way of exploring adolescent sexuality in the opening minutes of Carrie and middle-aged sexual longing and disappointment in the first scene of Dressed to Kill – branded him as everything from a misogynist to a plagiarist. It was fruitless to point out that artists have always built on each other’s work and that there are fewer portraits of female sexuality more sympathetic than these two pictures. In 1987, when he filmed David Rabe’s dramatization of the Daniel Lang New Yorker article, “Casualties of War,” about the rape and murder of a Vietnamese teenager by some American G.I.s, he came up with perhaps the most compassionate and devastating movie ever made about what happens to women in a war zone. His detractors, apparently confusing the film with its subject matter, called it pornographic.

Setting the Barre High: Ballet Jörgen's Swan Lake

Ballet Jörgen's Swan Lake (Photo: Kevin Vagg)

Bengt Jörgen has done a good thing. His new production of Swan Lake represents a breakthrough for his tiny Ballet Jörgen classical dance company, this year celebrating its 25th anniversary. The story, presenting some novel twists on the original 19th century plot involving a maiden transformed at night into a swan, flows seamlessly from start to finish. The choreography – using a traditional vocabulary stripped of pretence to allow for heightened clarity of movement – simply sparkles. By tackling Swan Lake – the soufflé of the ballet world – the Swedish-born ex National Ballet of Canada dancer shows with justifiable pride just how far his Toronto-based troupe has progressed since its origins in 1987 as an outlet for his dance-making talents.

Jörgen’s economically minded production – 23 dancers as opposed to more than double the bodies that usually make up a ballet company – benefits not just his Toronto-based dance troupe, the small ballet company that could, but also Canada as a whole, at least where classical dance is concerned. 

Featuring a multitasking set design by Cammelia Koo, and no-frill white Swan costumes by Robert Doyle, this Swan Lake is meant to continue that company tradition. It has been designed to travel. In November, the company launches a gruelling cross-Canada tour that will take Swan Lake to both major and minor cities across the country for the rest of this year, and well into next. (Go to www.balletjorgen.ca for the touring schedule.) Jörgen’s version of the dance classic is the one many Canadians will now be exposed to – another good thing.

Play, Unwind and Repeat: Elizabeth Shepherd’s Rewind

Before anyone carps about my lack of credentials, let me be explicit: I have no formal musical knowledge. I simply like what I like and appreciate what brings pleasure to my ears. Any attempts to impress on the basis of harmony, composition and clever arrangement are generally lost on me. What authority have I to review a jazz album, then? Ostensibly, I have none. But I’m remarkably similar to many of the consumers browsing HMV or surfing iTunes; I’m looking for an opportunity to escape the banality of life through something beautiful. So I hope most readers will find value in the words that follow. To you true jazz connoisseurs, I do apologize.

In the world of popular music, it seems all you need is a pretty face, appealing voice and good connections to be successful. Here, Elizabeth Shepherd’s handsome looks, classic voice and original recordings are an anomaly. Many fans were surprised to hear that her most recent album Rewind is, according to Shepherd herself, a collection of “songs that I have learned and loved and [that have] grown with me over the years.” In other words, it’s a cover album. However, Shepherd also promises to “treat them with my own sound to make them fully mine.” She succeeds.

New American Plays: Good People and The Motherfucker with the Hat

Nancy E. Carroll, Karen MacDonald, and Johanna Day in Good People (Photo: T. Charles Erickson)

In their Boston premieres I caught up to two worthwhile American plays I missed last season in New York. Good People is the latest by David Lindsay-Abaire, best known for Rabbit Hole – to date the only one of his works that has been made into a movie. Rabbit Hole focuses on a couple who are trying to handle life after the death, in a car accident, of their little boy. It’s one of those dramas (the Barbara Hershey-Geoffrey Rush plot in the fine Australian film Lantana is another) about the tension that the loss of a child creates between parents who mourn differently. (Both plays owe a debt to the great Robert Frost poem “Home Burial.”) I thought the play was banal but effective, and it felt authentic – as if it had come out of someone’s actual experience. The most surprising development, the friendship that grows up between the child’s mother and the teenager who, through no fault of his own, killed the boy on the road was the aspect of the narrative that worked the best, though in truth I believed in all of the relationships. But on stage the real show was Cynthia Nixon, who used that razor’s-edge anger she’s so brilliant at to illuminate the way a perceptive, intelligent woman deals with an unimaginable loss. The movie version was well done, too, but if you’d seen Nixon on stage you felt a void in the center because Nicole Kidman, who has a tendency to soften her characters, took over the part.