A Secret and Moving Romance: Ralph Fiennes' The Invisible Woman

Ralph Fiennes & Felicity Jones in The Invisible Woman

One of the things that has been most lacking this past year in the movies has been great scripts. The screenplays for many of the worthwhile movies of 2013, Inside Llewyn Davis, Nebraska, Dallas Buyers Club, Gravity, Philomena, all suffered from underdeveloped characters, other than the lead ones, pedestrian plotting or simply thin story lines. That makes it all the more puzzling that such a beautifully written and nuanced film like The Invisible Woman has fallen through the cracks, receiving only a limited release in the U.S. It’s doubly disappointing that its lead actors, Ralph Fiennes and Felicity Jones, were also overlooked for the Oscars. All this means that the movie, despite some success in Toronto, in limited screenings at a second run house where it’s in its third week, is well worth your time. It’s recently opened in its native U.K. where hopefully, it will shine brighter.

Based on Claire Tomalin’s popular biographical book The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens, it tells the riveting and rich story of a late in life affair that popular author Charles Dickens (Ralph Fiennes), then aged 45, had with 18 year old Nelly Ternan (Felicity Jones), a would be actress whom he met when she replaced her sister in a play he was producing. Slowly falling in love with her – something evident to her loving mother (Kristin Scott Thomas) and two sisters, Dickens has to navigate a censorious Victorian society, which would never countenance the relationship and deal with his wife Catherine (Joanna Scanlan), mother of his eight children, with whom he has long fallen out of love. The film begins more than ten years after Dickens has passed on in 1870, where a troubled Nelly, prone to striding along the beach near where she lives as if possessed of demons, is causing a near spectacle of herself and forcing her loving and decent husband George (Tom Burke) to despair of their relationship. Slowly, Fiennes, working from Abi Morgan’s delicate screenplay, peels back the layers of Nelly’s disturbances and brings us into Dickens' world, one just as complex, emotional and dark as any of his great and lasting novels. Desperately hoping to make a go of it with the beautiful and strong willed Nelly, Dickens finds that even as the author of some of his country’s most acclaimed works, Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, Little Dorrit, and a cultural superstar of his time – much in demand for lectures, reading and autograph sessions – he cannot, dare not, declare his love for Nelly publicly, much less live with her as he so desires.

The Lego Movie: Imagination & the Nature of Play

There have been many films based on toys, and even more films with tie-ins to real-life toy franchises. The Lego Movie presents us with both, but in doing so it manages to say something unique about creativity, imagination, and how we all approach the act of play. Living in a clockwork Lego city, the tiny plastic Emmet must rise to his role as. “The Special” and stop the evil Lord Business from putting a stop to their existence, brick-by-brick. The premise may sound less than inspired, but in The Lego Movie, toys come to life in more ways than one.

The Lego Movie’s visuals are incredibly varied and rich in detail. The film employs CGI to great effect in its attempt to recreate a stop-motion feel, which is undoubtedly the way the movie would have actually been made in years past. True stop-motion would not have been able to achieve the heroic visual scope on display here, however – thousands of disparate (and recognizable) Lego pieces fly across the screen in frantic volleys, creating exciting and visually breathtaking sequences and settings. Nods are made to classic Lego sets (such as the blue spaceman of the 1980s Classic Space series, who looks appropriately weathered and play-beaten and is hilariously voiced by Charlie Day), and there are very few things in the movie which aren’t made entirely of Lego – even the muzzle flashes of characters’ guns, to give one small example, are re-purposed flower stem pieces. The Lego Movie is full to the brim of this kind of inventiveness and visual creativity. The only problem was the inclusion of 3D, which felt tacked-on and served only to dim the film’s vibrant colours.

Kids' Stuff: Some Thoughts on Shirley Temple and Mitt

There’s a scene in one of the Shrek movies in which Puss in Boots, a tricky cat with extraordinary powers of seduction and persuasion, voice by Antonio Banderas, trades bodies with Donkey, a, well, donkey, voiced by Eddie Murphy. When Puss tries to win over some guards by flashing them one of his adorable smiles, he fails to take into account how different his features now look, and the guards recoil, screaming, “Kill it! Kill it!” If I admit that that’s pretty much how I feel when I see clips of Shirley Temple in her prime, does that make me a bad person, or just a bad American?

In her first big role in a big-studio movie, Stand Up and Cheer (1934), Temple played one of the discoveries of Warner Baxter, the newly appointed Secretary of Amusement, who is personally tasked by FDR to drum up some entertainment that will end the Great Depression by inspiring Americans to cheer the fuck up. It sounds enough like campy fun that I worry a bit about the spoilsport inside me, who wonders if this presentation of the Depression as some kind of shared national bummer, without regard to the actual policies and attitudes that led to the economic disaster, might have been as bad for people as the sight of people on cable news. That is, those people a few years ago, acting as if the Bush-era economic meltdown had been caused by the government being too helpful and generous to people on the verge of having their lives ruined by bad mortgages sold to them by predatory lenders. When the Great Recession hit, it inspired a special kind of nostalgia in some people for the kinds of movies that helped Americans hold it together in the 1930s. You'd think the popular image that might be conjured up in the minds of repertory programmers and hip film geeks would be the sporty, fast-talking urban comedies and the last of pre-Code Hollywood. But no. It was Shirley Temple, dimpling and smiling, and ordering adults not to be frowny faces, who was the number-one box office attraction, for four years running. How were she and William Powell and James Cagney popular in the same medium, at the same time? How did they share the same solar system?

Exercise in Technique: Pat Metheny Unity Group's Kin

I've been listening to the music of Pat Metheny for over 30 years. What initially struck me was the sound of his guitar, his remarkable technique as a musician and his highly energized band. Inspired, I went to his concerts and sought out interviews, articles and videos of which he was a part. Today Metheny continues to be a personal favourite of mine and I've had the privilege to hear his music evolve since the release of the band’s 1978 self-titled release, Pat Metheny Group. (ECM). Lyle Mays, the Group’s long time keyboard-player, whose lyricism often complemented the highly skilled guitarist, always balanced Metheny’s rhythm-based work. Their approach was always fresh to the ear and made for a melodic blend. From 1978 to 2005, the Metheny/Mays compositions dominated the contemporary jazz charts and pushed the boundaries of the music to places even they probably never expected. Their high energy works are juxtaposed with the quietest of ballad writing, reaching audiences around the world who were impressed by the shear skill of reproducing their often complex works in performance.

Huffing and Puffing: Big Bad Wolves

Menashe Noy & Lior Ashkenazi in Big Bad Wolves

When it comes to genres, including movies, not all countries are created equal. Israeli cinema has received much deserved acclaim in recent years but the country’s best movies, or at least the ones that play commercially in North America, are usually dramas, with the odd lighter exception like The Band’s Visit. The few Israeli genre flicks I've seen haven’t impressed me all that much. Saint Clara (1996) was a Carrie-like horror movie about a telekinetic Russian girl newly immigrated to Israel which was chiefly interesting for its scathing portrait of juvenile delinquency in Israel and the fact that it was co-directed by Ari Folman, who would go on to make the brilliant animated anti-war movie Waltz with Bashir. (2008). Total Love (2000) was a fantastical cult film (in Israel) about the invention of the ultimate love drug that quickly devolved into incoherence if not outright silliness. Clean Sweep aka Mars Turkey (2001) was a profane and overly violent cops and crooks movie that wore out its welcome early on. A few years back, directors Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado concocted Rabies (2010), Israel’s’ first zombie film, which I didn't see but which garnered quite the reputation at home. Now the directing duo are back with Big Bad Wolves, a thriller that owes equal amounts to American classics like Joe (1970) and more recent torture porn movies like the Saw series, though it’s not nearly as exploitative as those films. It’s also, despite rave reviews from director Quentin Tarantino, who called it the best film of 2013,  and some other critics who put it on their ten best lists in the year end Film Comment issue, not nearly the revolutionary genre buster they’re calling it.

Peter O’Toole and the Modern Breed of English Movie Actors

Before Peter O’Toole died in mid-December at the age of eighty-one, he was probably the greatest male actor in the movies; if you wanted to be more circumspect you might have tied him with Michael Caine. His career in film stretched back more than half a century, on TV and in live theatre even farther. He attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art from 1952 and 1954, where his classmates included Alan Bates, Albert Finney and Brian Bedford – just a sample of what can only be assumed to be the most amazing generation of British actors in history. Think about it: O’Toole’s cohort also included Maggie Smith, Sean Connery, Richard Burton, Helen Mirren, Judi Dench, Richard Harris, Terence Stamp, Vanessa Redgrave, Ian McKellen, Derek Jacobi, Rosemary Harris, Tom Courtenay, Diana Rigg, Claire Bloom, Joan Plowright and Julie Christie. Their predecessors had included such luminaries as John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson, Edith Evans, Michael Redgrave, Peggy Ashcroft, Alec Guinness, and of course Laurence Olivier: classically trained stage actors who conferred a kind of aristocratic status on the projects in which they were involved. They were strikingly different from their American peers – classier, better spoken, more pensive, with vastly more impressive dramatic ranges but (with the exceptions of Guinness and Olivier) less star dazzle. England didn’t cultivate stars; the English film industry, for all its virtues, was more sedate, more modest, a little grayer. O’Toole’s generation was more dynamic. They came up after the war, and the Suez crisis, which denoted the last gasps of the British Empire, helped to form their world view. When they began their careers the Angry Young Man playwrights were transforming the English theatre: Burton, Bloom, Plowright, Bates and Finney appeared in the exciting film versions of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger and The Entertainer. They married the same fastidious classical training the preceding generation had received with a more democratic sense of what theatre could offer, an instinct for the camera, the uncorseting influences of the American Method and the sixties, and a willingness to explore sexuality as part of the process of building a character. And they didn’t just want to be stage and TV actors; they wanted to be movie stars too, and many of them became just that.

Freedom, Family, and Basketball: Max Minsky and Me (2007)

Emil Reinke and Zoe Moore star in Max Minsky and Me

"You don't have to understand the world. You just have to find your place in it."

 – attributed to Albert Einstein

In an era when films for and about adolescents have a rough time navigating the divide between Disney animated movies (strong though films like Frozen might be) and apocalyptic and pseudo-gothic fare like The Hunger Games and the Twilight films, it is always a special delight when a movie offers a sincere look into the lives of young adults. Max Minsky and Me (2007, Max Minsky und ich in German) is just such a movie. One of the few feature films of German filmmaker Anna Justice, Max Minsky and Me offers a well-crafted and often delightful story about the frustrations and joys of young adulthood, set in contemporary Berlin. Based on Holly-Jane Rahlens' award-winning novel Prince William, Maximillian Minsky, and Me (set in 1997, published in 2002) and adapted for the screen by the novelist herself, Max Minsky and Me stars Zoe Moore as Nelly Sue Edelmeister, a bookish Jewish girl who is more interested in astronomy than her imminent bat mitzvah, and Emil Reinke as Max, the sullen, slightly older boy that Nelly coerces into coaching her in basketball. The two teens could not be more different – but as the story unfolds, it is clear that they find in one another precisely what they need.

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.