Climate of Fear: Two Post-9/11 Crime Novels

“I didn’t know what frightened me more, radical Muslims or radical Americans.”
       —Sara Paretsky, Blacklist

“‘Welcome to the police state,’ Rebus added. ‘They pulled that…stunt…because they could.’
‘You say “they” as if we are not on the same side.’
‘Remains to be seen, Siobhan.’”
       —Ian Rankin, The Naming of the Dead


When national security issues and protection of the privileged and powerful override constitutional protections and the rule of law, is that society in danger of becoming a proto-police state? This is the question raised in two excellent political crime novels by the Chicago writer Sara Paretsky and her Edinburgh counterpart Ian Rankin. Blacklist (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2003), Paretsky’s eleventh outing of her feisty private investigator, Vicky Warshawski (V. I.), is set against the backdrop of post-9/11 America, when the Patriot Act provided overzealous officials with powers from Homeland Security that threatened civil liberties guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. Paretsky’s story spans over fifty years going back to the blacklist period of the 1950s, a broad tapestry which enables her to draw a direct line between the fear generated by the politics of McCarthyism and the politics of fear in an America traumatized by a major terrorist attack. One common link between the historical eras is race, and whether racial minorities – in this case, blacks and Muslims – receive justice in America. Rankin’s sixteenth John Rebus novel, The Naming of the Dead (Orion Books, 2006), is set in 2005, during the week of the G8 Gleneagles summit outside of Edinburgh and the London Tube bombings. The protection of the politically powerful meant that vast numbers of security forces invaded Edinburgh and were empowered to suspend the normal rule of law, which resulted in the flouting of their power and the intimidation of citizens, including, in Rankin’s novel, the truculent Rebus. Both novels question the balance between freedom and safety when the perpetrators of violent crimes are apparently able to elude justice by exploiting their privileged status and the fear of the time.

Blacklist kicks into action when Warshawski receives a telephone call from a well-heeled client asking her to investigate a complaint made by his ninety-year old mother that she has seen lights on in the attic of their former family estate from her nursing home window. When she arrives at night in New Solway, a gated retirement community outside of Chicago, she surprises a teenage girl and stumbles into a pond where she discovers the body of a black journalist. In the process of identifying the girl and the journalist, V. I. tangles with an old-moneyed set and discovers their bitter ideological rivalries and betrayals between the far right and far left that go back to the McCarthy era, specifically to the activities of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) who were hunting people they perceived to be communists. The journalist Marcus Whitby was a respected writer researching a story on a black dancer, who, after a period of fame, became a victim of the blacklist; she lost her teaching position and was forced to decamp to Africa in order to save her career. When Whitby travelled to the exclusive ultra-posh suburb to check on the veracity of what would be damaging revelations, he was killed. The local cops initially attributed his death to a misadventure or suicide, but V. I., hired by the Whitby family to find the truth, uses her resources, including an old friend of her late-father cop on the Chicago police force, to discredit this cover story.

Tabloid Treatment: Martin Himel’s New Documentary Series on Anti-Semitism

The inelegantly titled Jew Bashing: The New Anti-Semitism, Martin Himel’s four-part documentary series which ended on Vision TV on May 27, is certainly of vital import in terms of its relevant subject matter. But, regrettably, its execution, which often tended towards tabloid treatment and eschewing of nuance, rendered it too much of a sop to those who prefer dumbed-down, simple takes on important issues of the day. That’s not to say there’s not much of value in the series – there definitely is – but Himel, for a number of reasons, many having to do with the limitations and rules of commercial TV, didn’t do full justice to his subject.

Downey Softener: Iron Man 3

Robert Downey Jr. (right) as Tony Stark, in Iron Man 3

Iron Man 3 is a pre-programmed summer blockbuster (of the sort that now opens in the middle of spring) and the second sequel in a comic-book movie franchise (that also ties into the Avengers mega-franchise), but it’s also a Robert Downey, Jr., so attention must be paid. For most of the past quarter of a century, Downey has been the most gifted and unpredictable American movie actor under fifty, which is an official-statistics-sounding way of saying that he’s the best actor in English-language movies who isn’t Morgan Freeman or Daniel Day-Lewis. Iron Man 3 represents a reunion for Downey and Shane Black, who directed the movie and is credited, along with Drew Pearce, with writing the screenplay.

For Netflix Eyes Only: Arrested Development Returns

Jason Bateman returns as Michael Bluth in the new season of Arrested Development, now available on Netflix

Francine (to Stan): Are you still moping about Steve? Come on. He's just going through a phase. It's like Steve is America and you're Arrested Development. It doesn't mean you're bad, it just means he's not interested in you.

– American Dad Season 2, Episode 15 (aired May 7, 2006, three months after Arrested Development’s cancellation)

 

What a difference seven years makes. Running for just three, ever-shortening seasons, Arrested Development (Fox, 2003-2006) was an innovative take on the traditional broadcast sitcom, finding a dedicated but too small audience when it first aired. The show was comedically loose and narratively tight: full of visual puns, interwoven storylines, deadpan deliveries and dark consequences, with many of its funniest gags taking weeks if not years to play out completely. The ensemble cast was pitch perfect, from the young Michael Cera as George Michael Bluth, to the veteran Jeffrey Tambor (The Larry Sanders Show) as his “Pop-Pop” George Sr. and Jessica Walter (Archer) as the passive and not so passive aggressive Bluth matriarch, to Tony Hale’s perennial man-child ‘Buster’.

Arrested Development has long been for me the gold standard of our new era of “continuity comedy”, along with the early (and only the early) seasons of CBS’s How I Met Your Mother. Like How I Met Your Mother, Arrested was a series that hit the ground running, absolutely confident of the rules of its narrative universe and the people that populated it. You can witness all of Arrested Development’s potential in its opening minutes, which lay out the tone and even some of the running jokes for years to come. Re-watching the original series is actually a special delight, as increased familiarity with the characters' past and future histories only deepens the enjoyment.

Critical acclaim couldn’t trump its struggling ratings however, and Fox pulled the plug on the show in 2006. But like many cancelled-too-soon shows in this age of DVD box sets and streaming channels, the years have been kind to the series, further expanding its audience and growing its reputation to near legendary proportions. A year after Fox cancelled the show, Time Magazine put it in its “The 100 Best TV Shows of All-TIME" list. And in 2011, IGN named it the funniest television show of all time (edging out Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Seinfeld for the top spot). Rumours of a new season or even a reunion movie floated around for years, until November 2011, when Netflix and Arrested creator Mitch Hurwitz confirmed their intentions to bring the series back, along the entire original cast and crew, for a new, exclusive fourth season. These, to be sure, are very large shoes to fill (even if they are their own).
 

Art Among the Ruins: Rodin by Russia’s Eifman Ballet

The Eifman Ballet performing Rodin (All photos by Gene Schiavone)

St. Petersburg’s Eifman Ballet’s international reputation as a potent example of contemporary classical dance was fully evident when the troupe, lead by celebrated choreographer Boris Eifman, made its Toronto debut at the Sony Centre last week. In performing Rodin, Eifman’s two-act narrative ballet based on the life of French sculptor Auguste Rodin and his tempestuous relationship with fellow artist Camille Claudel, the 55-member Russian ballet company flew across the stage with a power-surge of energy, carving the air with alternatively spasmodic and smooth gestures to tell a story of tortured artistic genius. It was visually and viscerally explosive.

Transplanted Russians: Nikolai and the Others

The cast of Nikolai and the Others, at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theatre in New York. (Photo: Paul Kolnik)

Richard Nelson’s new play, Nikolai and the Others, begins with deceptive casualness. The setting is a Westport, Connecticut farmhouse in 1948, whose owner, Lucia Davidova (Haviland Morris), is hosting a gathering of fellow émigré Russians in honor of the name-day of the set designer Sergey Sudeikin (Alvin Epstein, in a touching portrayal). The cast of characters includes George Balanchine (Michael Cerveris) and Igor Stravinsky (John Glover), who are working on Orpheus for the New York City Ballet with Sudeikin’s nephew Kolya (Alan Schmuckler) as their rehearsal pianist; Stravinsky’s wife Vera (Blair Brown), who used to be married to Sudeikin; Natasha Nabokov (Kathryn Erbe) and her fiancé, Aleksi Karpov (Anthony Cochrane), a piano teacher; Evgenia (Katie Kreisler), who runs the NYCB school, and Natalia (Jennifer Grace), who works with her; the actor Vladimir Sokoloff (John Procaccino) and his wife Lisa (Betsy Aidem), Vera’s best friend; and Natasha’s ex-husband Nikolai Nabokov (Stephen Kunken), a composer who now works for the American government as a kind of liaison to these Russian nationals.

The name-day celebration, of course, evokes the opening of Three Sisters, and Nelson has scattered other references to Chekhov through the play. Lucia’s niece Anna (Lauren Culpepper, who is studying to be a dancer, plays a game with Balanchine at one point, presenting herself as if she were Nina in The Sea Gull – a novice among these celebrities - and then pretending she’s never read it. (Nina is a vivid but not very talented actress who is given encouragement by the celebrities; by contrast Balanchine determines that Anna will never make a dancer, though he leaves it up to Lucia to break the news to her niece.) Stravinsky, joking to Balanchine, compares Aleksi to the hapless Yepihodov of The Cherry Orchard, and Nicky marvels that on a walk around the farm he thought he heard a Jewish band like the ones he recalls from his childhood, just as Ranevskaya in the same play is stirred by the sounds of a Jewish band across the water. The director, David Cromer, emulates a Chekhovian mood as these Russians talk and complain, wax nostalgic and insult each other (in varying degrees of good-heartedness and legitimate resentment), and the style is Stanislavkskian psychological realism. And by the end of the first act you realize that Nelson has pulled off the Chekhovian trick of infusing real substance into what seems like the engaging – and completely convincing – chatter of fascinating personalities thrown together for a social occasion.

School Session: The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Riz Ahmed (centre, in red) stars in The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Whatever else I may say about director Mira Nair’s new film, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, I have to give it credit for one fact: it is one of the few movies in recent years that attempts to take on some of the complex issues of the post-9/11 milieu. The past dozen years have witnessed some staggering events: terrorism in New York and Washington, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, torture in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Yet for all that history, we have precious few films that capture the essence of the era. The best in my opinion all come from the same director, Britain’s Paul Greengrass. With United 93, the second two installments in the Jason Bourne franchise, and even Green Zone, Greengrass managed to keep his finger on the pulse of the times, mapping our moods and anxieties even as we lived through them (much the way the great directors did in the Vietnam era).

But Greengrass’s movies matched their seriousness of purpose with intelligent writing, which is where Nair’s fails. Even Green Zone, hampered by a clichéd script, was saved by Greengrass’s adrenaline-pumping, kinetic action directing. The Reluctant Fundamentalist, by contrast, feels like a potted plant. The film comes from a novel of the same name by Moshin Hamid, and gets bogged down in the exposition of its source material. That material could work in the hands of the right adapters. But Nair and screenwriters Ami Boghani and Hamid haven’t figured out how to dramatize the various interchanges. The result is too much talk and too few thrills.

Blues U Can Use Part 2: Ronnie Earl and the Broadcasters' Just For Today

In 1967, while many of their friends were playing in rock bands, Rhode Island natives Duke Robillard and Al Copley formed, A Roomful of Blues. It was a seven-member ensemble that played Chicago-style blues with a heavy dose of jump-blues, r & b and rock ‘n roll that was entertaining and fun. But after a series of gigs in New England, the band got noticed by songwriter, Doc Pomus who helped them launch a working career in music with their first record deal in 1977 on the adventurous label, Island. Duke Robillard left the group in 1980 to pursue a solo career. Guitarist, Ronnie Earl, replaced him. Fast-forward to 2013, and the two have just released new solo records on Stony Plain, the fine Canadian label established by Holger Peterson.

On May 16th I wrote here about Robillard’s latest release called, Independently Blue. Today it’s Just For Today (Stony Plain) by Ronnie Earl and the Broadcasters. In 1980, Ronnie Earl (Horvath) took over for Duke Robillard in A Roomful of Blues. He was a young New Yorker filling the shoes of a fine guitarist. Five years earlier, Earl attended Boston University and took up the instrument after seeing Muddy Waters in concert. He developed his style through careful study of blues music with a pilgrimage to Chicago at the invitation of blues singer, Koko Taylor. He later spent quality time in Texas with Jimmy Vaughan and the Fabulous Thunderbirds, a band Duke Robillard did time with before going solo.

Beyond Palookaville: The Criterion Collection Release of On the Waterfront

"I can't discuss it as a movie anymore," director Martin Scorsese tells film critic Kent Jones in an interview included on the new Criterion Collection release of Elia Kazan's powerhouse 1954 drama On the Waterfront. "It's more of a phenomenon. Are there better movies? Probably. I see how the story is structured to make a point...[Yet] there is something revolutionary about that film." There are few movies that take us beyond the experience of simply watching one. Certainly Citizen Kane (1941) does, with its dazzling sound and visual innovations, where director Orson Welles – having come to Hollywood out of his daring work in theatre and radio – combines the two mediums in order to treat our eyes in the way we often use our ears. In doing so, he distracts us from some of the shallowness and the flaws in the plot and unleashes something boldly new and entertaining. Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game (1939) is undoubtedly another, where all the rules of genre get broken to create a masterpiece of multiple genres mingling together into something so new that the viewer is both engaged and moved by a picture that defies classification.

On the Waterfront is a straight-forward drama, written by Budd Schulberg (What Makes Sammy Run), about a New Jersey longshoreman and ex-boxer Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) who comes to tackle the moral dilemma of whether to remain loyal to his mob-connected boss Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb) and Terry's brother, Charlie (Rod Steiger), who is the mobster's right-hand man, or to talk instead to the crime commission and name names. It doesn't seem to belong in the same category of films that could be described as "revolutionary." But that's only if you seize solely upon the melodramatic structure of its plot. What sets On the Waterfront apart from more conventional melodrama, besides the emotional force of its storytelling, happens between the lines of the story. It even goes beyond the film into the larger world that shaped it. "On the Waterfront is no more about the real business of the docks – working conditions, union racketeering, or reform – than Hamlet is an expose of corruption in the medieval Danish court," writes filmmaker Michael Almereyda (Nadja) in the DVD liner notes. "[On the Waterfront arrives] at an elevated place in our collective consciousness, a place where familiar images and scenes continue to seem urgent, to surprise us, to trigger intense feelings, reaching past the long shadows of politics and the blind wind of success or failure." To define that elevated place Almereyda refers to, you first have to grasp the social and political issues that turned On the Waterfront into the very phenomenon that Scorsese describes.

"Mother, May I?": Pietà

Lee Jung-jin stars in Kim Ki-duk’s Pietà

At the start of Kim Ki-duk’s Pietà, which generated headlines and won top prizes when it played at the Cannes, Venice, and Berlin Film Festivals, the central character, a professional sociopath named Kang-do (Lee Jung-jin), wakes up in his squalid home, masturbates, staggers into his bathroom – whose floor is littered with entrails – and shaves. Then he leaves, after yanking a knife out of the wall, where it’s embedded in a drawing of a woman. For anyone who has seen some of the other Kim Ki-duk pictures that have played in this country but have fallen out of touch with his work in the last several years, this blandly presented procession of transgressive weirdness will feel like the director holding out his arms and crying, “Welcome back! The place is pretty much just like you left it.” Kang-do works as an enforcer for a loan shark, shaking down people who can’t pay their debts and mutilating them so they can collect on their insurance claims. With his baby fat, glaring eyes (with a hint of eyeliner), and mop of spiky, tousled black hair, Lee Jung-jin suggests an awkwardly grown-up version of the kind of child actor who gets cast as Damien the baby antichrist or one of the kids who inhabit the Village of the Damned.

Twilight of the Soul: Robert Carsen’s Dialogues des Carmélites at the Canadian Opera Company

Adrianne Pieczonka (centre) and members of the COC in Dialogues des Carmélites (All photos by Michael Cooper)

Dialogues des Carmélites, which the Canadian Opera Company is performing at Toronto’s Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts now through May 25, is an impressive theatrical creation. Sobering and meditative are words that also come to mind in describing it. Despite an outstanding predominately female cast and conductor Johannes Debus' firm grasp of Francis Poulenc's mercurial score, an evening’s diversion it is not. There is no romance here. No spectacular effects. Like its Revolutionary setting, Dialogues is dark and brooding. No tra-la-la among the tra-la-las.

To Boldly Go Where No Parody Has Gone Before: Galaxy Quest (1999)

What's disappointing about J.J. Abrams' new Star Trek film is that it feels less an inspired tribute to the original TV series than an attempt to simply exploit the fondness fans feel for it. While the new cast seems more at home in their parts than in the last one, Star Trek Into Darkness unfortunately is a cluttered action adventure. It also tries to clone itself from the superior Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, but without the core of emotion that gave that film its special poignancy. The new film is intermittently entertaining, but Star Trek Into Darkness takes its title perhaps a little too literally. (The 3-D effects have a way of making the picture look like it was shot through sludge.) Abrams also gives the picture an obvious post-9/11 context, but it doesn't resonate in the same way The Wrath of Khan's literary allusions did. That's, in part, because Abrams explicitly imposes the War on Terror on the material of Into Darkness whereas A Tale of Two Cities and Moby Dick were thematically linked to the overall story of The Wrath of Khan. It would hardly be necessary for me to continually bring up The Wrath of Khan had Into Darkness not copied so much from it. But Abrams seems to want the cachet of the latter film without actually earning it. He's hoping that in using some of the same powerful scenes from Khan he will magically ignite his own picture. But they don't because Into Darkness lacks the sensibility to underscore the significance of what those scenes reveal about the characters. Which is why sometimes parody does better at capturing the appeal in a favourite TV show than the straight homage of Abrams' approach.

Tim Allen as Quincy Taggart

Galaxy Quest (1999) is that rare kind of parody that actually has the same affection for its subject as Into Darkness does, but director Dean Parisot and screenwriters David Howard and Robert Gordon create a genial, often hilarious lampoon that manages to get at the crux of why these space adventures have such a devotional audience. (Into Darkness merely caters to that devotion without reflecting on it.) Galaxy Quest doesn't even have to trash the genre to accomplish this task. It's a peppy comedy that instead redeems the love of the fan. Galaxy Quest isn't telling followers to get a life, as William Shatner once did to followers of Star Trek; it examines why this is a life. Tim Allen stars as actor Jason Nesmith, who played Commander Peter Quincy Taggart on 'Galaxy Quest.' Like Captain Kirk (William Shatner) of Star Trek, he's given to uttering such pontifically heroic lines as "Never give up, never surrender" when in imminent danger. Alan Rickman is Alexander Dane, a stylish Shakespearean actor who portrays Dr. Lazurus, a half-humanoid, half-reptilian alien. Dane is endlessly depressed that he is forever being identified with 'Galaxy Quest' rather than his higher calling. "I was an actor once," he is given to moan. Sigourney Weaver is the blond and bursting-at-the-chest Gwen DeMarco, who was the fictional ship's communications officer. Her biggest complaint is that fan magazines write "six paragraphs" on her boobs rather than her brawn. Tony Shalhoub, as actor Fred Kwan, is the unperturbed Tech Sergeant Chen.

Kinetic Art: Everybody Street (2013)

from Brooklyn Gang (1959) by Bruce Davidson

“What did August Sander tell his sitters before he took their pictures?” the art critic John Berger asked of the expressive plein-air portraits made by this turn-of-the-century photographer. “And how did he say it so that they all believed him in the same way?” These are the kinds of questions asked and answered in Everybody Street (2013), a documentary made by Cheryl Dunn about street photographers in New York City. Profiling the likes of Bruce Davidson, Joel Meyerowitz, Boogie, Mary Ellen Mark, and the New York Photo League’s Rebecca Lepkoff with her 16 mm video camera, Dunn, a New York street photographer herself, captures the curiosity, spontaneity, and obsessional passion that drive the craft. In showcasing the work and careers of her colleagues and idols, Dunn reveals street photography as both a kinetic art and a romance. The documentary seeks to pay homage to the art and the artists while probing the distinct means by which each photographer invites their shared subject – New York City – to reveal itself anew. 

The Big Knife: Botching the Trick

Marin Ireland and Bobby Cannavale in The Big Knife, at the Roundabout Theatre Company (Photo by Joan Marcus)

Staging Clifford Odets is tricky business, but Bartlett Sher’s production of his 1937 Golden Boy last fall showed that in the twenty-first century there’s still a way to use his language – stylized but firmly grounded in Stanislavskian psychological realism – to unleash theatrical power. Unhappily, the second Odets revival of the season, The Big Knife at the Roundabout, is a lame duck. Under Doug Hughes’ direction the actors either pretend the language isn’t heightened at all or else they seize on it as an excuse for overacting.

Off the Shelf: The Source (1999)

Watching Chuck Workman's impressionistic, stirring, and often quite entertaining documentary The Source, you'll certainly get a supple feeling for who, and what, the literary movement known as the Beats was to American life. While weaving together a dazzling collage of free-associating visuals and sounds, Workman aptly demonstrates that there is certainly no shortage of material – written, filmed, or recorded – on this group of socially radical writers. Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, in the late Forties, came to be the pioneers of this subterranean movement. Out of this material, The Source creates a wealth of associations about the Beats with the details – and incongruities – of their history lurking under the surface.

It was America's post-Second World War desire for calm and conformity that spawned the Beat Generation. These writers, as the official story goes, set out to break down the walls, shake up the straight world, and reject the spoils of American society. They wrote novels and books of poetry that shocked both the literary and the artistic world with explicit language, performed improvised readings that captured the bop rhythms of cool jazz, and lived lives of notorious excess. Novels like Kerouac's On the Road, Ginsberg's epic poem Howl, and Burroughs' The Soft Machine or Naked Lunch, ripped into the fabric of the staid Eisenhower Fifties. Yet this rebellious subculture, filled with individuals who laid claim to being desolate and underground dharma bums, also sought access to the mass culture. They wanted to be cool and hip, and to live out the mythology they helped create. The Source is a riff on their mythologized history. It's about how they created a movement, which became co-opted on television and in the movies, that would be the antecedent for Sixties counter-culture and, later, the music of such diverse bands as Soft Machine, Steely Dan, Sonic Youth and the head-butting poetry of Henry Rollins.

Soul Survivor: Philip Kerr’s A Man Without Breath

Somebody has to give a damn, otherwise we are no better than the criminals themselves.
– Bernie Gunter speaking in The Pale Criminal

Scottish writer Philip Kerr’s ninth Bernie Gunther novel, A Man Without Breath (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2013), has all the familiar trademarks of its predecessors: impeccable research and textured detail, an ability to weave history with a mystery, and to some extent, the unabashed sass and defiance of authority by the chief protagonist, the onetime homicide detective in Weimar Berlin. In The Pale Criminal (1990), Gunter displays that barbed wit when mocking Hitler’s Mein Kampf: “That funny old book they gave free to all newlyweds? It’s the best reason to stay single I can think of.” That hard-boiled sarcasm is one of Gunter’s weapons as an anti-Nazi German who never abandoned his belief in the democratic values of the Weimar Republic. He valiantly struggled to retain some semblance of his own humanity amid the inhumanity and immortality of National Socialist Germany, the Eastern Front during the Second World War, and postwar Vienna, Argentina, Cuba and Germany.

Blues U Can Use Part 1: Duke Robillard Band

The Duke Robillard Band: (from left) Brad Hallen, Mark Teixeira, Duke Robillard and Bruce Bears

In 1967, while many of their friends were playing in rock bands, Rhode Island natives Duke Robillard and Al Copley formed, A Roomful of Blues. It was an 7-member ensemble that played Chicago-style blues with a heavy dose of Jump-Blues, R & B and rock ‘n roll that was entertaining and fun. But after a series of gigs in New England, the band got noticed by songwriter, Doc Pomus who helped them launch a working career in music with their first record deal in 1977 on the adventurous label, Island. Duke Robillard left the group in 1980 to pursue a solo career. Guitarist, Ronnie Earl, replaced him. Fast-forward to 2013, and the two have just released new solo records on Stony Plain, the fine Canadian label established by Holger Peterson. My next review will be Ronnie Earl’s album, but today I’d like to talk about Robillard’s latest release called, Independently Blue.

Something Big: Pain & Gain

Anthony Mackie, Mark Wahlberg, and Dwayne Johnson star in Michael Bay's Pain & Gain

The true-crime black comedy Pain & Gain is set in Miami in the mid-‘90s and stars Mark Wahlberg as Daniel Lugo, an egotistical musclehead who works in a gym as a personal trainer. Lugo, whose most ambitious attempt at making his dreams come true has involved a fraud scheme he ran on senior citizens that landed him in prison, can’t understand why he’s living in a tiny apartment, bouncing checks, and getting turned down for dates by his clients when other people less cool than himself are raking it in, and he bristles with the resentment of someone whose thinks the system must be rigged against him. His master plan for getting ahead is to team up with a couple of other muscleheads – Adrian (Anthony Mackie), who needs money for medical treatment to correct the damage that his steroid use has done to his sexual virility, and Paul (Dwayne Johnson), a homeless ex-con with a cocaine addiction – and kidnap one of his rich clients, Victor Kershaw (Tony Shalhoub) and torture him into signing over all his funds and assets. Things spiral downward from there. The movie opens with Lugo, on foot, running from the cops who are coming to arrest him, and the words “THIS IS A TRUE STORY” flash on the screen. At one point much later, after the main action has begun to unfold in flashback, there’s a scene in which someone who has been tasked with making the bodies of a couple of murder victims unidentifiable cuts off the corpses’ hands and barbecues them on an outdoor grill, and the words ‘THIS IS STILL A TRUE STORY” appear. There are a few different ways that a filmmaker could go with this material. The director, Michael Bay, goes with a tone of thrilled, grossed-out amazement at how stupid his characters are and how depraved their behavior is. The film speaks in a voice that has only one reaction to anything: “Can you believe this shit!?”

Resident Alien: One on One with Defiance’s Trenna Keating

Trenna Keating as Doc Yewll on Defiance, now airing on SyFy and Showcase

Already, 2013 has been a bit of a banner year for science fiction television. Since Fringe aired its final episodes in January, television viewers have been given a number of new and very promising series. Showcase’s time travel drama Continuum began its second season a few weeks ago here in Canada, and BBC America and Space launched its clone thriller Orphan Black at the end of April. (All this, and Doctor Who’s 50th anniversary special in November!) And three weeks ago, Defiance premiered on the SyFy network, in the U.S., and on Showcase, in Canada.

Defiance is an ambitious ensemble drama; part space Western, part post-Apocalyptic intrigue, the series is set on Earth, some years after the arrival of several colony ships,bearing seven different alien races from a nearby Votan star system. Earth has survived a traumatic ‘terraforming’ event and a disastrous inter-species conflict (called the Pale Wars), and now humanity struggles to get back on its feet in partnership (and often conflict) with its new, and suddenly diverse, populations. Our story takes place in the outpost town of Defiance, a makeshift city built on the ruins of St. Louis, Missouri. It’s been a little over three decades since the aliens’ arrival, and Defiance is one of the few places where the human and alien races have voluntarily come together in their struggle to survive.

Trenna Keating plays Doc Yewll on Defiance. Keating is a Canadian actress who has appeared on ABC/Global’s Combat Hospital (as Sgt. Hannah Corday), CTV’s Corner Gas, and CBC’s Little Mosque on the Prairie. Doc Yewll is a resident of Defiance and an Indogene, a member of one of the seven alien Votan races. Keating describes the character “as a bit of a misfit, scientific and mathematical in her way of thinking, who doesn’t really get humans necessarily.”

Mark Clamen sat down with Trenna Keating for an exclusive interview for Critics at Large.  

(Note: this interview was conducted on May 9th. On May 10th, SyFy announced that Defiance would be returning for a second season.) 

Three Musicals, Three Eras

Tessa Faye and the cast of Goodspeed's Good News (Photo by Diane Sobolewski)

Of the collegiate musicals that used to be a staple of the Broadway stage, like Best Foot Forward and Rodgers and Hart’s Too Many Girls, Good News!, with its sweet and snappy DeSylva, Brown and Henderson songs, is probably the most enjoyable. (That is unless you count the 1943 movie version of the Gershwins’ Girl Crazy, which changes the setting from a ranch to a rural college.) Good News! opened in 1927 and though its cast of characters is mostly undergraduate, it presents a juvenile version of the Roaring Twenties, with its sorority flappers and freewheeling football players and its air of unrestrained frivolity – its tacit conviction that youth ought to be able to last forever. Vince Pesce’s new production at the Goodspeed Opera House in East Haddam, Connecticut is true to that ebullient spirit. Typically for a Goodspeed show, it’s expertly sung and danced and the numbers (choreographed by Pesce) are spirited.  One – “The Varsity Drag,” one of the play’s big hits, which comes before intermission – is a rabble-rouser that finds half a dozen clever ways to get the high-stepping ensemble back and forth across the relatively compact space.

The double conflict centers on the feasibility of getting Tait College football star Tom Marlowe (Ross Lekites) into the climactic game against Tait’s traditional competition, Colton, after he’s flunked his astronomy exam. Professor Kenyon (Beth Glover), a Tait alumna, reluctantly agrees to give him a make-up, and his debutante girl friend, Pat Bingham (Lindsay O’Neil), persuades her egghead cousin, Connie Lane (Chelsea Morgan Stock), to tutor him. When, inevitably, Tom and Connie fall in love, he realizes that if he plays he’ll be duty-bound to marry Pat, who’s pinned their engagement to the outcome of the game. Professor Kenyon’s unresolved one-time relationship with the football coach (Mark Zimmerman) and a secondary (comic) love triangle involving the most formidable physical specimen on the team, Beef Saunders (Myles J. McHale), spunky Babe O’Day (Tessa Faye), and a skinny clown named Bobby Randall (Barry Shafrin) round out the romantic entanglements.