Hurricane of Love: The 50th Anniversary of The Beatles Appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show

The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show 

When The Beatles appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show on Sunday, February 9, 1964, it was the night America stopped mourning the murder of President Kennedy a few months earlier. At first, shortly after that tragedy, record producer Phil Spector thought he had the answer to America's sorrow. He had released a joyous Christmas album filled with great rock 'n' roll holiday songs by The Crystals, The Ronettes and Darlene Love. Perhaps in a better time, The Crystals singing "Santa Claus is Coming to Town" would have provided the appropriate yuletide spirit, but the album bombed. During the Christmas of 1963, one month after the murder of JFK, nobody cared if Santa ever came to town. But that Sunday evening in February, over 74 million American viewers were finally ready to move on, and share in The Beatles' exhilarating appearance. They tuned in and bided their time with the cast of the Broadway production of Oliver!, impressionist Frank Gorshin (who would ultimately play the Riddler on the 1966 spoof TV series Batman), and singer and banjo player Tessie O'Shea – but, who would remember them fifty years on? From the moment Paul McCartney opened his mouth to sing "All My Loving," everyone else became irrelevant. What came before, or what was to come after, wasn't a consideration. What people heard was astonishingly new, a fresh vision of America coming right back to them. The spirit of the New Frontier, which many felt was left for dead in Dallas, was again sparkling with intensity.‘

High Frequency Dance: Kyle Abraham's The Radio Show

(photo by Bill H Photography)

Don’t touch that dial. Choreographer Kyle Abraham’s The Radio Show is dance you can listen to, relatable in the extreme. The award-winning piece, originally conceived in 2010, uses fragments from more than four dozen popular songs, Beyoncé to Michael Jackson, to drive itself rhythmically forward, viscerally connecting with the viewer along the way. Making its Canadian debut at Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre this week as part of the ongoing World Stage series (the final show is Saturday night), and with additional performances scheduled for Ottawa later this month, The Radio Show is up-tempo choreography that (Gaye-ly) gets it on.

The Motown veined riches of two black radio stations have been mined to form the hip-swaying, toe-tapping backdrop to a piece that is semi-autobiographical in nature. Considered one of dance’s hottest new talents, a status confirmed by Abraham having recently received a prestigious MacArthur (a.k.a.Genius Grant) Fellowship, the 35-year old Afro-American choreographer listened to those AM/FM stations in his native Pittsburgh until they were suddenly yanked off the air in 2009. Around the same time, his father lost his ability to speak, a victim of Alzheimer’s and aphasia disease. The Radio Show, as performed by the seven high-octane members of the New York-based Abraham.In.Motion dance company, is Abraham’s bracingly contemporary mediation on love and loss – one cultural, the other personal – and it is a kick to the head and heart.

But If You Try Sometimes, You Can Get What You Need: Philip Seymour Hoffman and Christopher Jones

The public outpouring of shock and grief in response to the death of Philip Seymour Hoffman has made it clear that the actor’s fan base was not just broader but far more deeply committed than some of us ever realized. (So have some other emotions that have been expressed in the wake of tragedy, such as the tsunami of angry disgust that’s hit those people, not all of them on-line, who saw it as occasion to proclaim their moral superiority to someone suffering from drug addiction.) Like Gene Hackman, Hoffman didn’t look like a movie star. And although he had a few starring roles in movies—his Oscar-winning turn as Truman Capote; a schlub plotting a robbery in Sidney Lumet’s last film; Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead; the Charlie Kaufman head trip Synecdoche, New York; as well as Jack Goes Boating, which he directed, and Love Liza, which his brother, Gordy Hoffman, wrote—he hadn’t quite made the definitive leap to leading man that Hackman had made by the time he was in his mid-forties.

But Hoffman shared Hackman’s ability to simply, quietly become someone else, without any show of actorly “transformation.” Compared to the more glamorous leading men of their time, both looked as if they were made of common clay, but their range seemed limitless, and both of them were willing to play irredeemable slimeballs, for all the juicy entertainment that such roles are good for. Yet they were also capable of playing good men in a way that didn’t make goodness seem ordinary or boring.  Hoffman had the kind of talent, and made the kind of use of it, that inspired not just admiration but love. Audiences might have watched someone like Tom Cruise and seen in him the person they’d sometimes like to be, but they watched Hoffman—as, say, Lester Bangs in Almost Famous, telling a young, aspiring writer not to get hung up on the feelings of inadequacy that the rock stars he idolizes inspire in him—and saw themselves. Hoffman had a gift for capturing the least-loved parts of our selves, the parts that feel unlovely and unloved and alone, and making them seem interesting and appealing. So maybe it’s no wonder that a surprising number of people heard that he had died and felt that they’d lost a friend.

Critic's Notes & Frames, Vol. VII

Late last year, I included a few samplings from my Facebook page, which I've been treating as an ongoing dialogue with friends about social and cultural matters. (Some have described it as a salon.) Here is even more of the same. As before, it includes borrowings of songs and photos that others have posted and that I've commented on:

Come Together: Conor McPherson's The Night Alive

Ciarán Hinds & Caolifhionn Dunne 

In the Irish playwright Conor McPherson’s latest play, The Night Alive – currently playing off Broadway at the Atlantic Theater Company, where it transferred after a run at London’s Donmar Warehouse – four stumblebums collect in the back room of an old Dublin house. The owner, Maurice (Jim Norton), is an aging drunk who affects a grandstanding aristocratic manner but whose life has stalled since the sudden death of his wife. He lets the room to his nephew, Tommy (Ciarán Hinds), who has lost his business and whose teenage kids live with the wife from whom he’s been separated for two years. Tommy makes a little money as a mover but not much – in the opening scene we learn that a police video has caught him stealing gas for his van. Yet he’s generous with the little he has. He gives his pal Doc (Michael McElhatton) the only work he can ever cadge and puts him up whenever his sister and her boy friend throw him out. And when Tommy finds a battered young whore named Aimee (Caolifhionn Dunne) at a bar, he brings her home too.

Off the Shelf: Max (2002), Touch the Sound (2005) & I Don't Want to Sleep Alone (2007)

Noah Taylor and John Cusack in Max

Since we're now in the gloomy month of February, and some of us may feel less inclined to go out to the movies, Shlomo Schwartzberg has decided to draw our attention to some little seen titles we can watch at home, ones that just might shake the winter blues.  

Max, Menno Meyjes's controversial film about Adolf Hitler's early years, is a smart, provocative drama that does the nearly impossible: It gets under the skin of a man we only know as an evil, monstrous lunatic. By the time World War II ended, that appellation was apt, but obviously, Htler couldn't have always been that way. Max centers on that more “innocent” period in 1919, after World War I, when Hitler (Noah Taylor), still recovering from his part in the calamitous battle of Ypres, returns to Germany. He is a bitter, angry man who still harbors dreams of becoming an artist. Enter Max Rothman (John Cusack), a Jewish art dealer, who was also at Ypres and lost an arm in battle. Formerly an aspiring artist but now sidelined by his war injury, Max is seeking out talent he can sell in the marketplace. Hitler is one such candidate, he feels, possessor of an artistic forcefulness – a unique type of kitsch that shows potential. And Hitler is eager for artistic success.

Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit – A Hero at Long Last

Directed by Kenneth Branagh, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit is the fifth movie built around spy novelist Tom Clancy’s hero, the first with a plot invented entirely for the movies, and the first I enjoyed from start to finish. It’s never occurred to me to pick up one of Clancy’s books, because the movies culled from them are suffused with the kind of unremittingly gray techno-dreariness that makes my eyes glaze over. Sean Connery redeemed the first Clancy picture, The Hunt for Red October (1990), with a glittering performance as a Soviet sub commander who hatches a complicated scheme to defect; as the hero, a Soviet analyst turned CIA operative, Alec Baldwin made so little impression that when I sat down to write this review I found I couldn’t remember who first played Jack Ryan on screen. In Patriot Games (1992) and Clear and Present Danger (1994), the role went to Harrison Ford, deep in his ulcerated, acting-is-misery period. (The movies that precede Patriot Games in Ford’s filmography are Presumed Innocent and Regarding Henry and the one that comes between his two Clancys is The Fugitive – a veritable dirge of performances.) Clear and Present Danger was easier viewing than Patriot Games, but the week I saw it I happened to be reading Ross Thomas’s 1984 thriller Missionary Stew, which covers some of the same territory, and as a piece of entertainment the Thomas novel is superior in every conceivable way. Then there was 2002’s The Sum of All Fears, a bloated (two hours four minutes) pretend commentary on post-9/11 America in which the director, Phil Alden Robinson, threw symbolic weight behind the images of destruction and potential destruction as well as slowing down the action to make sure we understood how important it was. The role of Ryan had now passed to Ben Affleck, who seemed absurdly lightweight both as an action hero – this was a decade before he earned the right to play one in his own terrific Argo – and as a Soviet expert.

Road Maps Home: Rosanne Cash's The River & The Thread

Five years ago, Rosanne Cash released an album called The List (Blue Note). It was a collection of songs that her father, Johnny Cash, considered standards in the Americana songbook. It was and remains an important musical connection to her past. With the release of The River & The Thread, (Blue Note) Cash has extended the reach of her father’s favourite songs by writing her own “list” and the results are nothing short of superb.

The River & The Thread weaves its way through the American south like the Mississippi river. To me, it’s a collection of short stories set to music with the insightful assistance of Cash’s husband and musical partner, John Levanthal. The pair has written and produced a beautiful, unadorned album that is more than just a traveller’s diary. It’s a geographic and spiritual road map. The record opens with the philosophical “A Feather’s not a Bird,” a slightly ambiguous song about the importance of change and being open to it. She sings, “a feather’s not a bird, the rain is not the sea, but the river runs through me.” Perhaps she’s taking on the role of a spiritual conduit of American history? The record, or journey, continues as Cash tells the story of a woman who continues to work the land in spite of impending floods every year ("The Sunken Lands").

Movin' On: Rosanne Cash Live at the Burlington Performing Arts Centre

Photo by Clay Patrick McBride

“For my entire life I have been trying to give voice to the rhythms and words that underscore, propel, and inform me. Because my peripheral vision is more acute than my direct powers of observation, and my love of an A-minor chord is more charged and refined than my understanding of my own psyche, I have often attempted to explain my experiences to myself through songs: by writing them, singing them, listening to them, deconstructing them, and letting them fill me like food and water. I have charted my life through not only the songs I’ve composed, but the songs I’ve discovered, the songs that have been given to me, the songs that are part of my legacy and ancestry. Through them I’ve often found meaning and relief, while at other times I’ve failed to recognize or understand a rhythm or a theme until it became urgent or ingrained and I finally came across a song that captured that experience…My life has been circumscribed by music…”

Rosanne Cash said all that in the introduction to her brilliant 2011 memoir Composed. And last Saturday night at the Burlington Performing Arts Centre, she and her band took a sold out audience on a journey through music that no one will soon forget. The Performing Arts Centre in Burlington is a gem. Medium-sized it maintains an intimacy and warmth that makes it a first choice as a venue for acoustic music such as Rosanne plays. There is a carpark directly next door offering free parking after 6pm and all day on weekends. This is a bonus if you’re used to theatres in Toronto, or other big cities. And the icy cold didn’t affect us either since the car park is connected by a bridge to the theatre. Genius.

The Higher Depths: The Criterion Collection Blu-ray Release of Aki Kaurismaki's La Vie de Boheme

When the Finnish writer-director Aki Kaurismaki first appeared on the world film scene in the late 1980s, he risked being typecast as a sort of Nordic-European doppelgänger to Jim Jarmusch, who shared Kaurismaki’s dry wit, his fixation on slightly outdated lowlife-bohemian milieus, and devotion to visual and narrative spareness. Like Jarmusch, Kaurismaki has sometimes rushed into production with only one joke in mind – as in his rock-band road movie Leningrad Cowboys Go America, which boasted a cameo by Jarmusch himself – and one audience member in mind, himself. La Vie de Boheme, which has just been released on DVD and Blu-ray by the Criterion Collection, was Kaurismaki’s most full-bodied and accessibly funny picture to date when it was first released in 1992. (He’s since topped himself, with The Man Without A Past, his 2002 comedy about an amnesiac who reinvents himself as a promotor of “rhythm music,” i.e., jumpy, stripped-down rock and roll.) In some ways, this, too, is a one-joke movie, but the director loves the joke, and the people who embody it, so much that it takes on the quality of a world view.

Fare-Thee-Well Pete Seeger: A Folksinger Who Really Cared

One summer at Camp Kinderland in the late 1950s my eight-year-old sister approached Pete Seeger, who often performed at this Upstate New York enclave that promoted politically progressive ideas and folk music . She mentioned that I – then about 15 – had met him on a recent boat cruise around Manhattan. He supposedly remembered. I have no recollection of such a cruise but will gladly keep that encounter in my mind’s treasure trove of those who went before. Seeger’s death this week at age 94 makes me think of a tune we used to belt out at Kinderland: “Passing through/passing through/ Sometimes happy/ sometimes blue/ glad that I ran into you/ Tell the people that you saw me passing through...” (Listen to "Passing Through" here.)

As adolescents, my friends and I went to every possible Seeger concert in New York City. It was the equivalent of today’s youngsters never missing, say, a Justin Timberlake show. But instead of singing about personal romance, our hero generally addressed the more universal “love between my brothers and my sisters/ all over this land ...” That snatch of lyrics comes from “If I Had a Hammer,” a leftie anthem Seeger co-wrote in 1949 that was made famous more than a decade later by Peter, Paul and Mary. Although he experienced blacklisting and censorship during the McCarthy Era, Seeger always maintained Americans had the right to express any views, however unpopular – or far ahead of their time – they might be. He was a Communist with a capital C before disillusionment about the Soviet Union transformed him into a lower-case communist. His celebrated unionization, justice, tolerance and peace, while fighting against dangerous signs of fascism. His weapons: a banjo and not-so-fabulous vocals driven to greatness by sheer passion. CBS didn’t allow broadcast of Seeger’s Vietnam protest song, “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy,” when he appeared on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour in 1967. After an outcry, he reprised it on the program the following year but the network excised the last verse. No matter how much the government or corporations tried to marginalize him, Seeger somehow went on to inspire generations of activists and just plain music lovers.

Luigi’s Legacy: Reflecting On 30 Years of Second Place

A year ago this month, someone at Nintendo must have snorted awake at their desk, shaken off their New Year’s hangover and said, “Hey! Luigi has been around for 30 years now. Should we do something about that?” The result was a branding of 2013 as “The Year of Luigi," a hastily-manufactured tribute to a character which Nintendo seems to think nobody cares about. All the marketing focused on Luigi stealing the spotlight from his older brother Mario by adding Luigi-flavoured content to pre-existing games, and releasing sequels to first-party titles in which Luigi plays a supporting role. The attitude seemed to be one of playful mischievousness, hinting that while we want to give Luigi his due, don’t worry – the hero you all know and love will be back in 2014. Well, I’m going to give the downtrodden underdog the benefit of the doubt, and explore why he might just be more interesting and memorable than his extremely famous Bro.

Hamlet of Hamlets

Rory Kinnear as Hamlet

Nicholas Hytner’s production of Hamlet at the National Theatre, which was transmitted in HD in 2010 and recently had an encore screening, is set in a distinctly modern police state where the omnipresence of security is such a familiar sight in the court of Denmark that the characters have stopped noticing them. Polonius (David Calder) and Ophelia (Ruth Negga) talk freely in front of one guard, though the topic of their conversation is her romantic relationship with Hamlet (Rory Kinnear), and when Polonius confronts her about it, he produces a file containing photos of them together. Spying is a natural impulse to Polonius, who sends Reynaldo (Victor Power) off to France to check on his son Laertes (Alex Lanipekun) and later gives his daughter a walkie-talkie concealed in a Bible so that he and King Claudius (Patrick Malahide) can hear how Hamlet reacts when she returns his love gifts. The way Calder plays the old counselor, he has a passion for spying. He’s proud of himself for his ability to tender this service to his king – though when he tells his son, “This above all: to thine own self be true,” he pauses, unsettled, and you wonder if, just for a moment, he contemplates the possibility that he’s violated his own principles (at least since Claudius took over the throne). After Hamlet kills him by accident in his mother’s bedroom and Claudius can’t get him to stop clowning long enough to tell him where he stowed the body, one of the king’s men opens an attaché case full of torture instruments, and Hamlet, who has been handcuffed, acquiesces. Instead of being a fop (as he’s usually played), Osric (Nick Sampson) is the same military man who had a hand in Hamlet’s deportation to England – where he was supposed to be executed on the English king’s orders – and when he invites Hamlet to take part in the duel with Laertes, it’s obvious to us that he’s in on the conspiracy.

"Yes We're Soldiers": BBC's Bluestone 42 and FOX's Enlisted

War is never funny. But, on-screen at least, life in the army is another story. The culture, bureaucracy, and general absurdity of life in uniform has been mined for comedy and satire for centuries, and for good reason. Military service in times of war and especially during eras of conscription has become an (often involuntary) rite of passage for men. And as Catch-22 and M*A*S*H (both the novels and the films) demonstrate, the most fertile ground for comedy often comes from putting men into the army that simply shouldn't be there. But WWII, Korea, and Vietnam are long past, and our collective memory of the draft has faded considerably in the last few decades. Even as the US, Canada, and NATO forces are in their second decade of continual war in Afghanistan, military service remains the choice of the relatively few men and women who take that professional route – as the choice of a few, it is difficult to mine for experience that can be shared with larger television audiences. In short, the time of Sgt. Bilko, F Troop, and McHale's Navy are over. War hasn't gone away, but the politics of warfare – especially since 2001 – have grown far more contested. In short, to apply a too-on-the-nose metaphor, the army sitcom has become a minefield.

All which of makes the fact that there are currently two army-centred comedies on television all the more notable. And they are set in our present era. (Stories set during a contemporary war have long been the purview of propaganda mills – see the short-term industry of WWII-era Hollywood films.) Of the two series, one will begin its second season in April and another is just beginning – the first is British and the other is American. It is perhaps not surprising that the BBC 3 series, Bluestone 42, is the raunchier, more biting, and as a result more consistently hilarious series, but Enlisted, which premiered on FOX two weeks ago, while still taking its first steps, already has charm to spare and has demonstrated a lot of potential.

A Zionist Love Letter: The Prime Ministers: The Pioneers

The recent death of Ariel Sharon, Israel’s Prime Minister from 2001-2006, was a timely reminder of the unique situation of the men and women who have held that country’s highest office.While leaders of all lands bear a heavy responsibility for their country’s safety, it’s only in Israel that the threat is existential. Should Israel lose a war, she would cease to exist, something that is not a factor anywhere else. Richard Trank’s documentary The Prime Ministers: The Pioneers, based on Yehuda Avner’s book The Prime Ministers, testifies to that fact as well as illuminating two of Israel’s PMs, Levi Eshkol and Golda Meir, whom Avner served in various capacities. It’s a sometimes schmaltzy, overwrought film but also an emotional and thoughtful testament to one’s man’s love of country and those who led it. (It’s the first of two parts, with the second film, The Prime Ministers: Soldiers and Peacemakers, detailing Avner’s stints under Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres set for release in the spring.)

Heartbreakers: Our Children and The Past

 Tahar Rahim & Émilie Dequenne in Our Children

The devastating Belgian picture Our Children begins with its heroine, Murielle (Émilie Dequenne), in a post-traumatic condition and then shows us how she got there. (The much better French title is À perdre la raison, or To Lose Your Mind.) At the beginning of the story Murielle marries her Moroccan boy friend, Mounir (Tahar Rahim), and moves in with his unofficial adoptive father, André (Niels Arestrup), a successful doctor who has also invited Mounir into his practice. André is married to Mounir’s older sister, but it’s a paper marriage – a marriage of convenience so that she can get Belgian citizenship – and André’s professional and financial support of Mounir is his way of offering another member of the family a better life in Europe. (In the course of the movie he engineers a second paper marriage between Mounir’s younger brother and Murielle’s sister.) It’s generous of him, but of course there are strings attached. As the couple begins to have children, the communal space they share with André feels more and more constrained, especially since Mounir is always conscious of wanting to please this man who is his mentor and who owns the house they’re living in. But when Murielle suggests they might be happier living in Morocco – the only bond her locked-in world allows her is with Mounir’s warm, solicitous mother (Baya Belal), whom she gets to see too rarely – André explodes at Mounir, accusing him of ingratitude, and Mounir backs down immediately. Meanwhile two children have become too much for Murielle to handle, and when the family expands to five and then six she finds her only outlet in visits to a therapist. Her husband isn’t kind or patient with her; he behaves with an entitled masculinity and has little tolerance for her when she can’t keep the children controlled and out of his hair. You don’t wonder when she grasps her mother-in-law in a desperate embrace before they put her on a plane back to Morocco – she sorely needs the comfort that only another woman can provide. (Her sister isn’t especially giving.)

Bittersweet Symphony: The Beatles U.S. Albums Box Set

This past Tuesday, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of The Beatles' invasion of America in February 1964, Capitol Records released The U.S. Albums, a 13-CD Beatles collection that spans from 1964’s Meet The Beatles! to 1970’s Hey Jude. While many fans back in 2009 already shelled out a fair chunk of cash for the official U.K. remastered stereo CDs and the subsequent box set of the mono versions, The U.S. Albums can seem like a redundant cash grab. But these albums actually differed considerably from the band’s U.K. versions, including having different track lists, song mixes, album titles, and even cover art. For those of us who grew up in North America during the Sixties, these were the albums we knew, and the history we were familiar with. The albums presented here are also in both mono and stereo, with the exception of the embarrassingly fawning 2-LP documentary, The Beatles’ Story, and Hey Jude, a collection of mostly unreleased singles, which are in stereo only.

But there are a number of issues that bring a sour taste to this spirit of celebration. To begin with, Capitol had already released two box sets (The Capitol Albums, Vol. 1 & 2) containing their first eight American albums a decade ago. So why didn't they just put out Volume 3 to fill out the rest? For those of us who bought those sets, we now have to repurchase them to get the remaining discs. On top of that, do we really need The Beatles' Story added instead of, say, The Beatles Live at the Hollywood Bowl, which was only made available on LP? Hey Jude is also not a Capitol album, but an Apple product devised by then manager Allen Klein in 1969 after he'd negotiated a new contract for the band and wanted to massage the deal. The only reason it's being included here is because of the inclusion of tracks like "Paperback Writer," "Hey Jude" and "Lady Madonna." So why not then include in the box set Rarities (which is a Capitol release and collects the magical "There's a Place" and "Misery" that were missing on The Early Beatles, as well as "The Inner Light" (the B-side of "Lady Madonna"), and the rare promotional single "Penny Lane" that featured the French horn coda at the end)? But what is worse: Capitol has decided in this new box to largely ignore the original American mixes and use the 2009 ones instead. Even if the 2009 versions sound better, and they do, we are just re-purchasing what we already bought a few years ago. Whatever you think of the altered sound of the North American albums (with their added reverb, duophonic simulated stereo, and remixed songs), you're supposed to be paying tribute to one culture's way of hearing and remembering the past. As always, when it comes to The Beatles' catalogue, Capitol Records finds new and imaginative ways to botch things up. And they've done it right from the beginning just before the group landed in New York to change the world almost half a century ago. 

The Coen Odyssey: Joel and Ethan Coen's Inside Llewyn Davis

Oscar Isaac as Llewyn Davis

In his memoir, Chronicles, Bob Dylan wrote that “a folk song has over a thousand faces and you must meet them all if you want to play this stuff.” What he meant was that you had to let the songs sing you rather than the other way around. When Dylan would perform a traditional tune about the slave market, like "No More Auction Block," he wanted to sing it from inside the experience of the black man being sold into bondage. "With a certain kind of blues music, you can sit down and play it," he said in 1966. "[But] you may have to lean forward a little." Becoming a character in a song like "No More Auction Block" requires a fair bit of leaning, and maybe sometimes even donning a few nifty disguises, but that's how Bob Dylan transformed American topical music into a fervid national drama that the listener had a stake in.

In the opening scene of the latest Coen brothers' film, Inside Llewyn Davis, as the titular folk singer (Oscar Isaac) plays the traditional death ballad "Hang Me, Oh Hang Me" with earnest dedication, what's clear is that Llewyn Davis has yet to meet even one of those thousand faces. He sits on a faintly lit stage in a Greenwich Village club with confident assurance and sings that he doesn't mind being hanged, but dreads the finality of the grave. Yet for all his fidelity to this dramatic dirge, Llewyn never truly gets possessed enough by its power to bring the Gaslight Cafe audience into that endless sleep with him. Over the course of the picture, however, we quickly grasp that Joel and Ethan Coen are most certainly fascinated by what's at stake in the song. With Inside Llewyn Davis, they take Llewyn on an elliptical and evocative sojourn through the American heartland of the early Sixties, in the dead of winter, and touch the despair and futility that's right at the heart of the song. In doing so, they've fashioned a funny, occasionally touching, and remarkably haunting ballad of their own. It's by far their best picture.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle: Nintendo & The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds

Fierce and bitter wars were fought in the playgrounds of the 1990s. They were secretive conflicts, pitting friend against friend in brutal opposition, even as the teachers looked on in disinterest. I’m not talking about marbles or King of the Hill or whatever – I’m talking about the Console Wars, and any child of my generation will remember them, and count their scars.

When many of us were young, we couldn’t afford to buy video game systems ourselves. This meant relying on Mom and Dad (or sometimes Santa) to deliver these incredible imagination machines to our living rooms – but they came bundled with a decision of deadly import. Multiple consoles (and iPads and phones and laptops and any number of electronic ephemera) might be common today, but in those halcyon days it was always, “Which one do you want – a Nintendo, or a Sega?” You would agonize over the decision, weighing Super Mario against Sonic the Hedgehog, and when you finally chose and got your console it was your sworn and noble duty to justify and defend your choice as fervently as your grade-school psyche would allow. You would brook no pretenders to the throne: you picked the Sega Genesis, and it didn’t matter that Nintendo’s Zelda and Metroid and Kirby looked so fantastically fun – they were garbage games when compared to the ones you could play. These arguments were the ground zero of the Console Wars, which are still raging today – just visit any internet forum which pits the Xbox One against the Playstation 4 to witness true modern warfare.

Celebration: Twelfth Night on Broadway

Stephen Fry and Mark Rylance in Twelfth Night 

Twelfth Night was first performed in Queen Elizabeth’s court, and Shakespeare wrote it for the end of the twelve days of Christmas. Tim Carroll’s all-male production, which originated at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, conveys the celebratory mood. Carroll and his actors imported it to Broadway for the holiday season, in repertory with Richard III, showcasing Mark Rylance’s performances as Richard and as Olivia. (The title cards for the two shows borrow the Renaissance spellings: Twelfe Night, or What You Will and The Tragedie of King Richard the Third.) I saw Richard III in November but I didn’t write about it because I’d already reviewed both Kevin Spacey’s Richard at the Old Vic and the brilliant production by Propeller Theatre, and I found the Globe version – also with a completely male cast that overlaps with that of Twelfth Night – uninteresting. Even Rylance’s depiction of Shakespeare’s busy, self-amused villain-king felt recycled, a compendium of tricks he’d pulled from his voluminous sleeves on other occasions. But Twelfth Night is something else again – a splendiferous entertainment in which Rylance’s hilarious, love-addled Countess Olivia is just one member of a grand ensemble.

You get into the spirit as soon as you walk into the house. The actors are still getting into costume, so those audience members who have purchased tickets to sit on the stage above the playing area become part of the general bustle as ushers escort them to their places. Once strove for a companionable cross-over between actors and audience, inviting viewers to hang out in the pub at the top of the show, and Diane Paulus’s revival of Hair encouraged dancing on the stage after the curtain call, but both these efforts felt forced. At Twelfth Night the immediacy of the actors from the start doesn’t pretend that we have some relationship with them, but it does get us excited about the treats in store.