Tribute to David: John Corcelli

David Churchill (1959-2013)

Given the sad passing of our friend and colleague David Churchill, we've decided to honour him in a manner totally fitting to our memory of him. Since he was such a strong advocate of Critics at Large from the beginning, he was quick to initiate ideas. One thing he was quite fond of were omnibus projects like the Remembering 9/11 collection (which led to our first e-book) and the Titanic 100th Anniversary commemoration. Therefore, we felt strongly that we could best salute our late columnist by creating an Omnibus of David. From April 16 until April 24, we plan to publish – daily – the best of David Churchill as chosen by our writers.

Today's piece is from John Corcelli.

– The Editors at Critics at Large.

“One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain.”
– B. Marley

I met David around 1987 at radio station CJRT-FM (Toronto) through Kevin Courrier who introduced me to his new broadcast partner for movie reviews. We hit it off immediately and I always looked forward to seeing him every week when he came into the studio.

David was (and remains for me) an enthusiastic lover of the arts and in particular music. When I was asked to join Critics At Large, that was co-founded by David, I quickly took the music portfolio with the understanding that I could also write about theatre and the occasional book if it struck my fancy. (Although all of us agreed that we could write about music if we contacted each other to avoid duplication.) Music is my religion and I jumped at the chance to write about it.

In 2011, I had planned to write about Kate Bush's album 50 Words for Snow (EMI), her second release of that year. David contacted me before it came out expressing a keen interest in reviewing it, so once a copy came into my possession, I happily sent it to him, knowing he'd probably write a better review than I.

What follows is David's over-the-top enthusiasm for the album and the artist, Kate Bush. Unlike me, David never failed to get personal with his comments. I would never call any record a "masterpiece" fearing an unauthorized commercial quotation appearing in an ad. My approach is to appreciate the work from afar. Not David. His unbridled support for 50 Words for Snow as a fan is nicely balanced in his review as he maintains his distance just enough to offer his insight into the album and its creator.

– John Corcelli is a music critic, broadcast/producer, musician and member of the Festival Winds Orchestra.

Tribute to David: Shlomo Schwartzberg

David Churchill (1959-2013)

Given the sad passing of our friend and colleague David Churchill, we've decided to honour him in a manner totally fitting to our memory of him. Since he was such a strong advocate of Critics at Large from the beginning, he was quick to initiate ideas. One thing he was quite fond of were omnibus projects like the Remembering 9/11 collection (which led to our first e-book) and the Titanic 100th Anniversary commemoration. Therefore, we felt strongly that we could best salute our late columnist by creating an Omnibus of David. From April 16 until April 24, we plan to publish – daily – the best of David Churchill as chosen by our writers.

Today's piece is from Shlomo Schwartzberg.

– The Editors at Critics at Large.

I’ve known David for many years but it’s only in the last five years or so that we became good friends. He kindly called me in Montreal when I was sitting Shiva for my father – my first inkling that he considered me a friend and not just someone he was friendly with, which he was. But it was Critics at Large that actually brought us closer and allowed me to get to know the David that we are honouring on the site this week. Reading David’s posts introduced me to a passionate and opinionated critic who personified what Critics at Large was all about: views that go against the popular grain, that argue cogently for what one believes in and which demonstrate a concern with the issues of the outside world.

Last year, David also became my regular editor on the site, offering much support for me, a writer who often doubted himself when finishing a piece. He didn’t say everything I wrote was terrific, his favourite adjective for my output, but often enough so I felt better afterwards about what I’d written. I also got to know David better through his curiosity and interest in subjects (the FIFA World Cup™, the British car show Top Gear) I would normally not care a whit about, though we also shared a similar passion for the writer Harlan Ellison, with David contributing a nice addendum to the piece I had written. He was much better at putting his personal views and life experiences into his writing then I was, which was a revelatory approach that journalism school said I should never do.

But David was much more than a good, smart editor. He was so empathetic when someone close to me faced a terrible illness, even showing genuine concern for my situation on the greatest night of his life, his book launch for The Empire of Death. That ability to reach out to someone else at such a crucial time when you could be easily forgiven for thinking only of yourself was a mark of what distinguished David and made so many love him. I’ll remember him for his kindness and for the honesty with which he approached me and my work. We often discussed writing and what we expected of it – David, too, had had a time when he didn’t much like doing it – and while I still have difficulty writing I think David (and our Critics at Large colleague and friend Kevin Courrier, too) taught me, at least, to value what I have to say. I will always be grateful for that. In the way he conducted himself, personally and professionally, David Churchill came across as a real mensch, which is Yiddish for a person of integrity and honor, a description which defines him perfectly. I've chosen David’s impassioned, powerful piece assailing Nicholson Baker’s pacifist but immoral book Human Smoke for displaying what I value most about Critics at Large and David Churchill, a courage to dissent from fashionable thinking, a complexity of view that didn't fit neatly into that political box marked Right or Left and, finally, a well-argued, well-written case for something he deeply believed and a passionate response to someone who vexed him tremendously. We’ll miss your trenchant, critical voice. David. Rest in peace, my friend.

– Shlomo Schwartzberg is a film critic, teacher and arts journalist based in Toronto. He teaches regular film courses at Ryerson University’s LIFE Institute. He has just concluded his course, What Makes a Movie Great?. Beginning on May 3 he will be offering one on science fiction movies and television.

Tribute to David: Deirdre Kelly

David Churchill (1959-2013)

Given the sad passing of our friend and colleague David Churchill, we've decided to honour him in a manner totally fitting to our memory of him. Since he was such a strong advocate of Critics at Large from the beginning, he was quick to initiate ideas. One thing he was quite fond of were omnibus projects like the Remembering 9/11 collection (which led to our first e-book) and the Titanic 100th Anniversary commemoration. Therefore, we felt strongly that we could best salute our late columnist by creating an Omnibus of David. From April 16 until April 24, we plan to publish – daily – the best of David Churchill as chosen by our writers. 

Today's piece is from Deirdre Kelly.

– The Editors at Critics at Large.

I just re-read David Churchill’s zinger of a piece detailing his enduring affection and indebtedness to the late great American film critic Pauline Kael, and admit I several times worried I wouldn’t get through it.

Not because it isn’t cogent: David, whom I met at university, should have been on the inter-college debating team because he has always known how to build and lob a fire bomb of an argument. I was reading him and hanging on every word, convinced that other critics who denounce Kael are doing it for their own self-aggrandizement and are missing the point, as David says, of her commitment to speak the truth. David never did mince words.

And it wasn’t because it isn’t expertly written: David writes the way he talks, with a rat-a-tat clarity and intensity of focus that is by turns profound and funny, with lots of the personal invested in what he is saying. We met in Professor Cameron Tolton’s history of cinema class and both of us were undergraduates also keenly interested in writing criticism. David went to The Newspaper to write on film; I ended up at The Varsity where I wrote on dance and, well, I am getting way from myself again. It’s the reason I had difficulty reading the piece all the way through:

I am bereft.

While reading his heartfelt tribute to a critic who inspired him to become a critic in the first place – he pronounces it strongly here – I kept hearing his voice, and seeing the flash of his eyes as he grew passionate in defence of no holds barred arts criticism. What really mattered to him.

His references to his past at the University of Toronto, where I met him all those years ago, not able not to notice him for the way he used to bound up in class, hurling facts at our only somewhat bemused professor to show off his encyclopaedic grasp of pop culture when he was just 19 and fresh out of Bracebridge (“Bracebridge?” I remember exclaiming, dumbfounded at the thought. “But there’s but one movie theatre in that town. How do you know so much?” He never did tell me.) – they made me so deeply sad again for his recent and sudden parting. I could barely see the words from behind my veil of tears.

Davis had always been so forceful, and I truly had believed him when he told me he was going to defeat the cancer that took him – really, the only thing ever capable of stopping his voice. And so my lingering shock at his departure.

He was electric as an eel: brilliant, and just as quick. I already acutely feel the loss of his energy. Since learning the news of his passing I have felt plunged in darkness. I mourn my friend, and the passing of time, of course. I long again for those galvanizing days back on campus, shot through with lightening bolts of discovery, when we both were bursting with ideas and enthusiasm and nothing, simply nothing, would ever stand in our way.

I am reminded of that fervour we once shared when I read David say in his one-two-punch homage to Pauline Kael, quoting New York Times critic A. O. Scott, “She will not lead you to correct positions, but she is an example of the right way to do criticism, which is with everything you have.”

David then goes on to explain how that example made him the critic he in turn became: opinionated, impassioned, memorable.

“Write from the heart. That is what I learned from Kael from reading her and [from] that conversation I had 30+ years ago,” he says.

“I have never tried to imitate her style (who could?), but I have tried to make the personal public as she often did. Bring your guts, your life, and your point-of view into everything you write.”

Oh how sorely I shall miss that spirit.

– Deirdre Kelly is a journalist (The Globe and Mail) and internationally recognized dance critic. Her first book, Paris Times Eight, is a national best-seller. Her new book, Ballerina: Sex, Scandal and Suffering Behind the Symbol of Perfection, has just been published by Greystone Books (D&M Books). Check out www.deirdrekelly.com for book and event updates.

Tribute to David: Bob Douglas

David Churchill (1959-2013)

Given the sad passing of our friend and colleague David Churchill, we've decided to honour him in a manner totally fitting to our memory of him. Since he was such a strong advocate of Critics at Large from the beginning, he was quick to initiate ideas. One thing he was quite fond of were omnibus projects like the Remembering 9/11 collection (which led to our first e-book) and the Titanic 100th Anniversary commemoration. Therefore, we felt strongly that we could best salute our late columnist by creating an Omnibus of David. From April 16 until April 24, we plan to publish – daily – the best of David Churchill as chosen by our writers.

Today's piece is from Bob Douglas.

– The Editors at Critics at Large.

I met David Churchill when we both played Sunday softball games about thirty years ago. He was reviewing films with Kevin Courrier at CJRT-FM, and because the radio team needed more players, I was invited to participate. Even then his enthusiasm made him a powerful presence. After the team disbanded about five years later, I had no contact with David until 2011 when I contacted him shortly before my first volume was to be published. He had self-published his novel, The Empire of Death, and I was interested in the ways he promoted it. He was most generous with his time and support for my book. After it was published, he conducted an interview with me that was posted in Critics at Large. When I posted my initial piece in January 2013, he was the first person to welcome me aboard with a wonderful email. Unfortunately, it was about that time that he became ill and we had little future contact. Had David lived, I am certain we would have had many lively exchanges and some disagreements. With his passing what I will most remember and treasure was his generous spirit.

When Kevin invited the writers at Critics at Large to choose one of David’s pieces and to write an introduction, I read back over his pieces and was impressed by the wide range of his interests – film, television, theatre, politics and books – and the infectious brio that infused what he liked and the mocking disdain for what he abhorred. Since we both shared a passion for the Bernie Gunther novels of Philip Kerr, I decided to choose one of these reviews.

David Churchill took great delight in writing about the Bernie Gunther novels of Philip Kerr. He wrote three reviews of this series for Critics at Large. Although we did not always agree – he was far more critical of Prague Fatale – you always knew where David stood and his reasons for taking that critical stance. What David understood most about Kerr’s novels was that plot was always secondary to atmospherics and character. David keenly appreciated the research that Kerr undertook whether the novel focused on Nazi Germany or Batista’s Cuba. Although we learn about the texture and mood of the eras that Kerr is writing about, perhaps even more important is the character of Bernie Gunther himself. Gunther possesses an idiosyncratic moral code reflective of the times, where one does not hesitate to lie, cheat and murder in order to survive. David seemed to savour Gunther’s world-weary cynicism, his way with alluring women and the basic noir elements of Kerr’s novels. As a tribute to David, I am reposting his review of Field Grey.

– Bob Douglas is a teacher and author. His second volume to That Line of Darkness: The Shadow of Dracula and the Great War (Encompass Editions, 2011), titled That Line of Darkness: Vol. II The Gothic from Lenin to bin Laden, is available now. For more information, please visit www.thatlineofdarkness.com.

Tribute to David: Tina Libhart

David Churchill (1959-2013)

Given the sad passing of our friend and colleague David Churchill, we've decided to honour him in a manner totally fitting to our memory of him. Since he was such a strong advocate of Critics at Large from the beginning, he was quick to initiate ideas. One thing he was quite fond of were omnibus projects like the Remembering 9/11 collection (which led to our first e-book) and the Titanic 100th Anniversary commemoration. Therefore, we felt strongly that we could best salute our late columnist by creating an Omnibus of David.

From April 16 until April 24, we plan to publish – daily – the best of David Churchill as chosen by our writers. The only exception we made was the inclusion of Tina Libhart, a fan of the site from Waco, Texas, who also became David's friend when he wrote about the television series, Endgame. Her piece begins our week of tributes.

– The Editors at Critics at Large.

There once was a little Canadian TV show called Endgame. It ran 13 episodes during hockey season in 2011. Although I am a native Texan, even I knew that was a death sentence for a TV show – no matter how brilliant or unique it was in a sea of formulaic programming and plastic characters. Despite the odds, a few fans from all over the world rallied to save this show. We started a petition, a Facebook page, and a Twitter campaign trying to get someone, somewhere to hear our outcry of injustice at the cancellation. While we made a bit of a ripple and got some exposure, we were not successful in getting our beloved Arkady Balagan back into the Huxley Hotel.

However, one of the most amazing things happened to me as a result of this little cancelled Canadian TV show; I met David Churchill. I had written something brilliant on the Save Endgame Facebook page about why I loved the show, and he messaged me to tell me he enjoyed it. He then told me he was writing a piece about the show for Critics at Large and asked if he could mention my involvement in the campaign. I immediately became a follower of 'CAL' and was also privileged to meet Kevin Courrier as a result of my friendship with David.

The last time David and I chatted was March 16, 2013. He and his wife Rose were in Florida, and his last words to me were, “Love back at ya. Just about to shut down, so hope to talk soon.” When Kevin wrote me on Saturday regarding David’s passing, I could not breathe. The three of us had talked about them coming to visit me in Texas once David had kicked cancer’s ass. So I am saddened there will be no more chats on Facebook with him, and I will never again get excited to see him online or read his newest blog post on 'CAL.' Moreover, I am gutted that we will never meet in person, I will never hear his laugh, and I will never embrace my friend or look into his eyes or hear him say my name.

David Churchill believed in me. He encouraged me. He inspired me with his brilliance and awed me with his positivity. He deemed me an honorary Canadian and made me feel like I mattered during a time in my life when I desperately needed it. Therefore to be asked by my friend Kevin to participate in this tribute to our friend is indeed an honour (I spelled that like a real Canadian should!).

Kevin suggested the article about Endgame as the one I should use, and I could not have agreed with him more. This is the one where I first learned just how good of a writer David Churchill was. If you read his words, you will find for yourself that the world has lost an incredible writer and an even greater man. However, I take comfort in the fact his genius will live on here and in all of his writings, and his spirit will forever remain a part of those of us who were lucky enough to be loved by him.  

– Tina Libhart is a guest contributor from Texas, who was introduced to Critics at Large by David Churchill. She is a former English major, teacher, and public relations goddess, who now writes when the mood strikes on her blog Verbalizations and Such.

Lucky Guy: Trying to Resurrect the Newspaper Play

Tom Hanks and Courtney B. Vance in Lucky Guy (Photo by Joan Marcus)

The posthumous Broadway production of Nora Ephron’s play Lucky Guy is handsomely staged by George C. Wolfe, against stylish sets by David Rockwell, and it generates considerable energy. It’s a newspaper play, a rousing genre that now, in the twilight of print journalism, rarely gets tapped by playwrights or screenwriters. (Probably the most recent newspaper movie was Hollywood’s 2009 version of the British TV miniseries State of Play; the last one I can recall before that is The Paper, made a decade and a half earlier, in which the columnist played by Randy Quaid is a fictionalized version of McAlary.) Ephron’s subject is the life and career of Mike McAlary (Tom Hanks, making his Broadway debut), who wrote mostly for The New York Daily News in the eighties and nineties. He rose to prominence when he covered the poisoned Tylenol story in 1985 – which he caught by chance because it broke on a Friday night and everyone else in the newsroom was eager to get home for the weekend – won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the brutalizing of Abner Louima by racist cops, and died of cancer at forty-one. Except for the Julia Child section of Julie & Julia, I was never hot on Ephron’s screenplays, but she came up as a reporter, and for a little while you hope that Lucky Guy, with its speedy tempo and its colorful collection of cheerfully profane newsroom characters, might turn out to be a good entertainment. But it’s barely even a play.

The Biggest Secret: Jake Arnott’s The House Of Rumour

The House of Rumour (New Harvest/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 448 pp.) is the seventh and most ambitious novel by Jake Arnott, an English writer of what some call “faction” – fiction constructed around real people and events, some famed, others obscure. Engrossing as pure story, the novel is also an education, as the broad outlines of World War II and the ensuing half-century are reconfigured in and by the voices of people whose split decisions nudged the levers of history, or whose visionary hunches foretold its outcomes. The blurbs draw comparisons with Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (at the high end) and Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (at the low); reading the novel, I thought of Robert Anton Wilson (especially Masks of the Illuminati, which germinates from similar principles), James Ellroy (American Tabloid, in its interconnections and narrative density), Thomas Harris (canny prose incorporating deep research into language, history, art, science), and David Thomson (Suspects and Silver Light, novels built from the secret parts of familiar, albeit fictional, lives).

The House of Rumour begins and ends with Larry Zagorsky, a minor pulp science fiction writer, living in Los Angeles just before Pearl Harbor, who joins the Mañana Literary Society, described as “the closest thing to a salon that science fiction had at that time.” The Society is unofficially chaired by future SF giant Robert Heinlein; among its members are Anthony Boucher, mystery writer and editor, and L. Ron Hubbard, another pulp workhorse, not yet the creator of Scientology. Also in the Society orbit is Jack Parsons, a charismatic genius researching solid fuel for the newly established CalTech Jet Propulsion Labs – as well as a practitioner of ritual magic and priest of the Ordo Templi Orientis cult. Parsons, like the Mañana Literary Society, actually existed; and if, like me, you hadn't known that, you have plenty to discover as the novel veers back and forth in time, its speculative web drawing in wartime spy capers and UFOs, gender and sexuality, prophecy and the occult, how James Bond was created, and why Rudolf Hess flew to Scotland. 

Eytan Fox’s Yossi: Modest Israeli Sequel Touches the Heart

Note: this review contains spoilers.

A friend once pointed out he gains a much better understanding of the complexities of Israeli society through the prism of the works of director Eytan Fox, Israel’s best filmmaker. That’s because many of Fox’s movies tackle and pull off the tough feat of actually juggling the myriad strains of that fascinating country. Those films have ranged from The Bubble (2006), a sobering look at the seemingly endless Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as filtered through a love affair between two men, personifying each side to Walk on Water (2004), a powerful examination of German-Jewish and gay-straight relations as showcased through the experiences of a burnt out Mossad operative. But some of Fox’ movies are smaller scaled, none more so than his 2002 movie Yossi & Jagger, which was the first of his films to make an international splash.

The American Absurdism of Carl Stalling

When it came to writing music for animated cartoons, Carl Stalling wrote some of the most outrageously impudent material heard this side of Spike Jones. Thanks to Stalling, it wasn't unusual in a Looney Tunes or Merrie Melodies cartoon to hear a happy collision of bassoons, trombone slides, mysterioso strings, violin glissandos and his memorable "boinnngg!" sound created on the electric guitar. Together, these instruments created a bold, anarchic sound for some of the wittiest and purest examples of American absurdism.

In his Memoirs of a Useless Man, the Venetian dramatist Carlo Gozzi said that "dramatic fables" should contain "the great magic of seduction that creates an enchanted illusion of making the impossible appear as truth to the mind and spirit of the spectators." This idea probably best describes the ultimate goal of animation. Even more than dramatic realism, the cartoon demands a suspension of disbelief. And if music is essential to movie drama, it is no less a significant component in animation. As Roy Prendergast accurately pointed out in Film Music: A Neglected Art, the element of exaggeration in cartoons already had its antecedent in the 18th Century comic operas of Carlo Gozzi and others (like Mozart). The rapid, almost frantic rhythm of opera buffa demanded that the music keep pace with the action. This is no less true of animation. Most North American animators looked to the 20th Century neoclassic style already heard in contemporary artists like Igor Stravinsky rather than the 19th Century romanticism preferred by most Hollywood composers. "In dramatic films of the 1930s and '40s the chromaticism of the nineteenth century was appropriate because of the music's tendency to de-emphasize small-scale musical events, thereby drawing the listener's attention to a large sense of movement," Prendergast writes. "Cartoons, on the other hand, are usually nothing less than frantic movement consisting of a series of small-scale events, and the music in cartoons plays at least an equal role with the animation and story in establishing the humourous success of events."

Nothing but Vacancy: Room 237

“I’m not saying we didn’t go to the moon. I’m just saying that what we saw [of the moon landing] was faked, and that it was faked by Stanley Kubrick.”

– some lunatic in Rodney Ascher’s documentary Room 237

In 1980, Stanley Kubrick released his first film in five years, a horror movie based on Stephen King’s bestselling novel The Shining. At some point in the late ‘60s, Kubrick entered a phase in his career where every new project was a huge effort, drawn out over several massively hyped years, to top everything he’d done before, and everything that anyone in movies, and maybe popular culture itself, had done in that vein before. So, just as Dr. Strangelove was taken for the ultimate black comedy of the anti-nukes, antiwar era, and 2001: A Space Odyssey the ultimate sci-fi head trip, and The Shining’s immediate predecessor, Barry Lyndon, was supposed to be the most painterly, lavishly costumey costume drama of all time, The Shining arrived in theaters with the expectation that it would be the greatest horror movie ever made; anything else would be a letdown. The early returns pointed to it being a letdown.

Not Worth the Price: Admission

Tina Fey, Nat Wolff and Paul Rudd in Admission

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

Sex, Lies, and Videotape: La Ronde in Toronto

Maev Beaty and Mike Ross in Soulpepper's adaptation of La Ronde (All photos by Cylla von Tiedemann)

Dedicated, with love, to the dear memory of David Churchill

Arthur Schnitzler wrote the play known as La Ronde in 1897 but it would be many years before it was staged, and even then it was considered a scandal. Originally written in German under the tile Reigen, a word like the French La Ronde meaning a dance in the round, it concerns 10 characters engaged in 10 distinct but intertwined acts of erotic coupling. In 1900, Schnitzler printed it as a text for friends and close associates, aware that his subject matter was risqué for the time. In 1903, it was printed for general circulation but was banned for the first time by censors a year later. The play wasn’t strictly about sex, but about how sex cut across social barriers, linking people from different backgrounds. The setting was fin-de-siècle Vienna and while affairs among members of the various social strata took place, the citizenry didn’t want this open secret openly aired.

In December 1920, a brave staging of the play took place in Germany followed by another, in February 1921, in Vienna. Both events were greeted by near universal outrage. The play sparked near riots in the theatres where they were staged. The attacks escalated into virulent anti-Semitism targeted at Schnitzler who was publicly denounced as a Jewish pornographer who later went to court to defend himself against charges of immorality. He eventually withdrew the play from the public.

Much Ado About Nothing and Romantic Comedy

Maggie Siff and Jonathan Cake in Much Ado About Nothing, at the Duke on 42nd Street (Photo: Richard Perry)

Ben Jonson wrote satirical comedies, Shakespeare romantic ones – and then, later in his career, the two plays that scholars have categorized as problem comedies, Measure for Measure and All’s Well That Ends Well. Of his romantic comedies, Twelfth Night runs deepest, but Much Ado About Nothing has been the most influential. Almost the entire history of Hollywood romantic comedy, beginning with the first screwball comedy, Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night, in 1934, flows from its font. These movies were the consequence of the newly enforced Production Code, which forbade the hero and heroine of a romance to jump in bed together before marriage without tragic consequences (invariably for the woman). The Hays Code office, as it was popularly known, sought to neuter romance, but screwball comedy came up with a formula that kept it sexy as well as witty. The protagonists begin as adversaries – like Peter Warne (Clark Gable) and Ellie Andrews (Claudette Colbert) in It Happened One Night – distanced by both class and temperament, yet we can feel the sexual chemistry between them. Each has to learn to get past first impressions as well as to compromise, to come halfway toward the other. Their reward is a happy ending in each other’s arms, when, to use screenwriter Robert Riskin’s metaphor in Capra’s picture, the Walls of Jericho (blankets on a clothesline) erected to keep them discreetly separate from each other in a series of motel rooms come down after the hero and heroine are safely wed.

Art Without Heart: Sam Shepard’s True West

Stuart Hughes and Mike Ross in True West (All photos by Cylla von Tiedemann)

Caution: Spoilers are included.

True West by Sam Shepard is considered one of the great American plays reflecting the country’s changing idealism in the late 1970s. For the playwright, you could say the American Dream never existed in the first place, especially with Shepard having struggled with the family farm and a father who drank too much. Shepard’s life is perhaps best seen as one that was, paraphrasing Richard Gilman on the movie American Graffiti, “only tougher, shrewder, more seeded with intimations of catastrophe in the midst of swagger.”  True West, written in 1980, was Shepard’s seventh play and it’s considered a work that intentionally looks at the clash of one idealistic man against his wayward, independent brother. The dramatic conceit is to use the strained relationship of two brothers, Austin and Lee, as a political and social device offering Shepard’s commentary on the false underpinnings of American culture. After seeing True West you immediately see the author’s disenchantment. It’s an edgy play that wears its political heart on its proverbial sleeve.

Toronto’s Soulpepper production, which opened April 3rd, is adorned with that edginess from start to finish. Right from the opening lines to the dramatic standoff between the brothers, played by Stuart Hughes (Lee) and Mike Ross (Austin), the masculine swagger rarely lets up. On this point, director Nancy Palk and the cast understand Shepard, his point-of-view and his social commentary. It’s also a production that easily finds the black humour of the playwright, which is almost absurdist in its evolution during the course of the play’s 90-plus minutes. Stuart Hughes is marvellous as Lee, the older, pragmatic and slightly reckless brother. Austin is the younger, straight-laced member of the family who’s working on a screenplay for a Hollywood movie. He’s left the distractions of Los Angeles and settled into his mother’s suburban house in central California. She’s on vacation in Alaska asking her youngest son to look after the plants while she’s away. Lee shows up, unexpectedly, after spending a long time in the desert. “I been spendin’ a lot a time on the desert…had me a Pit Bull there for a while but I lost him.” He barely accounts for himself in the story and his vagueness adds colour to his mysterious character.

David Churchill 1959 - 2013

David Churchill (1959-2013)

It is with great sadness and deepest regret that we inform our readers that our dear friend, colleague and co-founder at Critics at Large, David Churchill, passed away from battling cancer on Friday, April 5th with family and friends surrounding him. We plan a later tribute to our valued columnist in the near future. But we honour David today by giving him today's slot. Since one of his favourite shows, Mad Men, is about to start its sixth season tomorrow evening, we repost his wrap-up of Season Five.

When Passion Overwhelms Skill: Season Five of Mad Men

Caution. Many, many spoilers are included.

I had a friend in university who wanted to be a writer. His eventual degree was in English (I don't remember which area he concentrated on). He did all the right things to become a writer. He wrote stories and plays; he was a consistent member of a writer's group. It was his passion. There was only one problem: The things he was really good at, his greatest skills, had nothing to do with writing. Economics and Math were his strengths, ironically, the areas he had no passion for. (He took a course on each subject in his first year and received very good marks – he never took another class in those fields.) Now the thing he had nothing but passion for? He was okay at it; but if I'm being honest, he was missing three key ingredients to be a great, or even good writer: sweat, skill and imagination.

One of the main themes of the just-wrapped Season Five of Matthew Weiner's Mad Men was about examining characters who pursued their passion at the expense of their skills. There were other ideas percolating away below the surface, but this was the major thrust that Weiner pursued in what I think is the strongest season in the series since the first. In the show, it wasn't always career choices; sometimes it was cringe-worthy wrong personal decisions that more than one character made which often led to disaster, or at the very least, a life-changing experience. Though I will occasionally discuss individual episodes (especially those that were great or bad), I'm more interested here in dissecting how Weiner developed his season-long theme through individual characters.

Neglected Gem #40: Joe Gould’s Secret (2000)

Stanley Tucci and Ian Holm star in Joe Gould's Secret

Joe Gould’s Secret (2000) tells the oddball story of how, in 1950, New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell (played by Stanley Tucci, who also directed) finds his muse, an alcoholic, half-mad Greenwich Village eccentric named Joe Gould (Ian Holm) who lives off the generosity of his friends – and off panhandling in the streets and in restaurants – while he claims to be completing a book, an oral history of the world that he refers to as “the O.H.” It reportedly exists in a series of notebooks that Gould deposits all over town, entrusting them to his supporters – like Max Gordon (David Wohl), the producer who runs the Village Vanguard. Mitchell first encounters Gould at a Village lunch counter. Intrigued, he interviews him and talks to the people who seem to know him best: Gordon, Alice Neel (Susan Sarandon, in a lovely small performance), who painted his portrait during the early days of the Depression (she says she gave him three penises because he seemed to require the excess), the gallery owner Vivian Marquis (Patricia Clarkson), and Freddy (Allan Corduner), who runs a poetry club called The Ravens and wears his coat the affected-theatrical way, hanging off his shoulders. They’re an entertaining crowd, though Tucci depicts them a mite quaintly. (You think, by contrast, of the treatment Mazursky gave this setting in his valentine to the Village in the 1950s, Next Stop, Greenwich Village.) 

Petty Larceny: Gimme the Loot

Tashiana Washington and Ty Hickson stars in Gimme the Loot

Gimme the Loot, an engaging 81-minute first feature from Adam Leon, is about a couple of black teenagers from the Bronx, Sofia (Tashiana Washington) and Malcolm (Ty Hickson), and how they spend the hot summer days drifting around the city on adventures that look aimless but, from minute to minute, always seem like matters of vital importance to them. They’re adolescents, with no perspective or capacity for long-range planning, but with passionate feelings that they can neither control nor modulate. In the case of the feelings they may be developing for each other beneath the playful but spiky surface of their platonic partnership, they can’t even articulate them, even though she’s smoldering and direct and he’s a happy motor-mouth.

Orphan Black and the New Face of Canadian Science Fiction

Tatiana Maslany stars in Orphan Black, on BBC America and Space

If you love TV and live in Toronto (as I do), watching American television can often be a frustrating experience. As thrilled as I am that Toronto has established itself as the go-to site for American-produced film and TV, it is often impossible to watch an episode of a favourite series without feeling that the city is being slighted, an “always the bridesmaid, never the bride” feeling which gets called up whenever a signature Toronto location is passed off as a generic street in “Pick Your City”, USA. – to single out just one recurring example, see the numerous uses of Daniel Libeskind’s striking crystalline extension to the Royal Ontario Museum in the background of scenes set in Chicago or DC. It is therefore especially gratifying when those norms are shaken up.

This past Sunday, Orphan Black aired its first episode, and on April 21, Showcase’s hit time-travel drama Continuum premieres its second season on Canadian airwaves; both shows are not only produced and filmed in Canada, but (with an appalling deficiency of that renowned Canadian humility) are also set here as well.

With Fringe, Alphas, and Eureka’s recent departures, there are barely any original science fiction series on the U.S. networks – TNT’s Falling Skies and SyFy’s always delightful Warehouse 13 are the only current exceptions. (There is, interestingly, no immediate shortage of fantasy stories: Grimm, Games of Thrones, Supernatural, True Blood and any of that long and growing list of vampire and werewolf shows are in constant rotation.) I won’t speculate on the reasons for the lack of success U.S. networks have had with science fiction shows in the last few years, even following up on the popular and critical successes of Battlestar Galactica and Lost. Whatever the causes, American viewers and cable networks have had to look beyond their borders to find new science fiction storytelling: across the pond to the UK (Doctor Who, Misfits, and the recent Utopia) and, perhaps most surprisingly, north to Canada. With two ambitious and entertaining series, Continuum and now the extremely promising Orphan Black, we are perhaps entering a minor golden age of Canadian science fiction programming.

The Ethics of Forgiveness in The Storyteller

In the Epilogue of That Line of Darkness: The Gothic from Lenin to bin Laden (2013), I wrote that “not a single SS officer arrested after the war demonstrated any remorse.” I had not yet encountered a perpetrator seeking forgiveness from a victim until I read The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness (1969, 1997) by the late concentration camp survivor and Nazi hunter, Simon Wiesenthal. He recounts that, while in the camps, he was once assigned to hear the death-bed confession of a SS officer in the hope that he, a Jew, would offer the dying man absolution. Although the young man appeared to show remorse over the crimes in which he had participated in the East, he was also self-centered, as he repeatedly indicated that he was too young to die, and more offensively, he contended that Jews died quickly, whereas, he was suffering a slow death. Wiesenthal offered compassion by holding his hand and by listening, but he remained silent throughout this ordeal. He left without saying a word. That meeting unsettled him and disturbed his equilibrium when he debated with camp inmates the morality of forgiving this man. Two years later, his companions are all dead but that encounter with the SS officer continued to preoccupy him and invaded his dreams as he talked about it again. After the war, he visited the young man’s mother to hear her story about her “good son” who would never have committed the crimes that she had heard about. He decided not to compound the woman’s sufferings by disabusing her of her ideas. Wiesenthal came to the conclusion that the only individuals who could offer forgiveness were those who had directly suffered from a perpetrator’s actions. He also noted that twenty five years later at the Stuttgart trials only one of the accused acknowledged his crimes and showed contrition; the rest challenged what the victims said and, according to Wiesenthal, only regretted that there were survivors to testify against them.

Wiesenthal’s book came to my attention when I read The Storyteller by Jodi Picoult (Emily Bestler Books, 2013), who begins her acknowledgments by indicating that his book was the genesis for her exploration of the moral and philosophical conundrums he raised if the same request was made decades later by a perpetrator to a Jew. Picoult, a prolific writer, is a novelist of twenty books who focuses on the family by addressing current controversial issues, among them: gay relationships, the dissolution of professional and personal boundaries when one’s child is a victim of sexual abuse, the dilemmas posed by contentious medical procedures and school shootings. The Storyteller may be her most ambitious and layered work. The novel begins with a dark fairy tale, reminiscent of a story told by the Grimm brothers or Hans Christian Anderson. A young woman falls in love with a vampire-like creature called the upior who terrorizes the town and may have killed the girl’s father. This tale is woven in and out throughout and we are not certain of its significance until later in the novel when it becomes clear that this allegory was written by a Holocaust survivor, Minka, the grandmother of a young woman, Sage Singer, whose viewpoint anchors the present-day account.

Passion: Where the Romantic Becomes the Baroque

Melissa Errico and Ryan Silverman, in Classic Stage Company's new production of Passion (Photo by Joan Marcus)

No other American musical works in the same way as Passion, with its uncharacteristically subdued score by Stephen Sondheim and its book by James Lapine, who also did the elegant spare staging in the original Broadway version, in 1994. (That production was broadcast on PBS and is available on DVD.) Written in one intense act, Passion – which is currently being given an excellent revival by New York’s Classic Stage Company, under John Doyle’s direction – is a genuine oddity: a short-story musical (it’s single-themed and single-plotted) that operates exactly at cross-purposes to what it appears to be doing, and builds power by not delivering the emotional satisfaction it appears to promise.