The Fifth Beatle: Brian Epstein's Story Gets Its Due

“If anyone was the fifth Beatle, it was Brian.” – Paul McCartney

In 1965, the Beatles went to Buckingham Palace to receive their MBEs from Queen Elizabeth II.  That’s Member of the British Empire for those of you who came in late.  It’s the first level of awards, and had traditionally been given to businessfolk and supporters of the monarchy.  But in 1965 it went to John, Paul, George and Ringo.  McCartney and Harrison quipped, “Yeah, MBE stands for Mr. Brian Epstein!”  Eppy was the businessman.  Scion of a well-to-do store owner in Liverpool, he had drifted from school to school and job to job before moving into the family business managing the NEMS (North East Music Stores) record shop on Great Charlotte Street.  He had hopes of a career in design or theatre, having studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts alongside Peter O’Toole and Susannah York.  It was at the record shop, however, that his career was made.

Legend has it that a young fan dropped in one day looking for ‘that new record from The Beatles.’  It wasn’t in stock, so Epstein ordered it thinking the group was from Germany.  It turned out the band was from Liverpool and they were playing not far from the store.  Epstein stopped by for a listen, and ended up managing the biggest group the world had ever seen.

Hannah Arendt: The Limits of Thinking

Barbara Sukowa stars in Margarethe von Trotta's Hannah Arendt (2013)

When the influential German-Jewish philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt reported on the 1961 trial of ex-Nazi Adolf Eichmann for The New Yorker, it caused an outrage. Its subsequent publication as Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, which included a provocative postscript wherein she commented on the implications of her report, only compounded the controversy. Arendt’s critics were most upset about her portrait of Eichmann and her views on the Jewish councils organized by the Nazis. She regarded Eichmann as a pathetic little pen-pusher, a hapless clown in a glass booth, and not as a fanatical ideologue who hated Jews. Although her material on Jewish councils was only about a dozen pages and threaded throughout the book, many of her critics took umbrage at her suggestion that Jewish leaders failed to use their power to protect Jews.
 

Given that Eichmann, in his shabby and insidious mediocrity, spoke in clichés and bureaucratic jargon during the trial, he was for Arendt representative the personification of true evil. As she remarked in her postscript, Eichmann “was not Iago and not Macbeth” – no villain doing evil out of villainy since “he never realized what he was doing.” (The italics are in the original.) Neither perverted nor sadistic,” was how Arendt described Eichmann, but “terribly and terrifyingly normal.” Arendt argued that Eichmann was flawed because he could not think. Conversely, she implied that had he possessed that quality, he would never have committed barbarous acts, an implication that underestimates the torque of ideology, disregards history and ignores individual and collective psychopathology.

Red-Letter Day: Thomas Vinterberg’s The Hunt

Mads Mikkelsen in The Hunt, directed by Thomas Vinterberg

The Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen has proven his ability to play nice guys and even romantic leads, but with his heavy lids and puckered-up lips, on a large head riding atop an incongruously lumbering frame, he doesn’t have to work very hard to give audiences the impression that there may be something creepy and perverse about him. (Especially in the case of English-language audiences, who know him best for playing the villain in Daniel Craig’s first James Bond movie and Hannibal Lector on TV.) Mikkelsen is well-cast in Thomas Vinterberg’s The Hunt (Jagten, in Danish), about a divorced, fortyish kindergarten teacher who is accused of sexual assault by a little girl who’s the daughter of his best friend, Theo (Thomas Bo Larsen). Mikkelsen’s character, Lucas, is totally sympathetic, and there’s nothing ambiguous about his innocence. One day, the girl, carelessly jumbling together the events of a day that began with her brother showing her a pornographic photo, says the wrong thing to the women who work at the kindergarten, and that’s it: the snowball has started rolling. But with Mikkelsen in the role, Lucas doesn’t have to be guilty, or even act guilty, for it to be plausible that the media, and people’s lurid imaginations, would take one look at him and think, as they did with Richard Jewell and Liddy Chamberlain, “Yeah, we can work with this.”

In Secret: Lovers in Hell

Oscar Isaac and Elizabeth Olsen in In Secret

The new film In Secret has had a limited release and drawn very little notice, but it’s tense and intelligent and beautifully acted. The only generic thing about it, really, is its title. The writer-director, Charlie Stratton, has based it on Émile Zola’s harrowing 1867 novel Thérèse Raquin. Zola’s Thérèse is a young woman brought up by her aunt, who marries her off to her weak, fever-prone son Camille, whose bed the girl shared when they were children. Having relocated to Paris from the country to please Camille, they live above Mme. Raquin’s shop in a glum alley. Thérèse helps out behind the counter during the day; in the evenings she has nothing to do but cook dinner and take care of Camille when he comes home from his shipping-office job. The only distraction in her dull life is the games of dominos they play with some friends one night a week. Mme. Raquin is contented by this bourgeois existence, but Thérèse is so bored that she generally sits in defeated silence as the others play. Then one evening Camille brings one of his co-workers, Laurent – who knew the family as a boy in the provinces – home for supper. He’s an aspiring painter who speaks openly of the free-spirited world of the artist – of the women who model nude – as he executes Camille’s portrait (really a way of endearing himself to the Raquins so that he can enjoy their hospitality on a daily basis). And though at first his sensuality unsettles Thérèse and makes him dislikable to her, when she finds herself alone with him for an hour and he scoops her up in a kiss, she allows him to make her his mistress. The affair transforms her from a virtual sleepwalker to an alert, voracious young animal who finds it surprisingly easy to deceive both her husband and her mother-in-law. Eventually she and Laurent both grow impatient with the restrictions on their life together – especially Laurent, a soft, indolent character who gave up studying the law because he found it too rigorous and would like someone to take care of him so that he could quit his job and go back to the studio (out of laziness, not out of dedication to art). So he takes Thérèse and Camille rowing and drowns his friend while she watches, horrified yet paralyzed by the recognition that he’s acting on their mutual desire. Both the lovers believe that this murder will liberate them, but instead it dooms them: the image of Camille’s sodden corpse haunts their dreams when they’re apart and even after they marry – after a respectable mourning period, and with the blessing of the ignorant Mme. Raquin, who thinks of Laurent as a second son – they see that image in their bed like a ghost. It drives a stake between them and inevitably causes them to turn on each other.

Exploding on the Launch Pad: Andy Weir’s The Martian

The Martian is Andy Weir’s writing debut, marketed as “a truly remarkable thriller” and “an impossible-to-put-down suspense novel.” Like all dust jacket claims, these brandings are boilerplate, easily dismissed, and normally you’d have no reason to dispute them (or even think about them), regardless of the novel’s quality. But The Martian calls even these most basic descriptions into question, and what began in my mind as niggling doubts became full-bore distaste by story’s end. The premise – an astronaut named Mark Watney is stranded alone on a distant planet and must figure out a way to survive – is as old as the Martian hills, tracing its SF roots all the way back to Bradbury, and even Jules Verne before him. There’s no promise of supernatural or fantastic elements, because the book is “grounded in real, present-day science”. So with a tired conceit and an inauspicious focus on technical accuracy, the question is, what’s left to intrigue us? The answer, unfortunately, is: not much.

I was alternately bored, frustrated, and apathetic while reading The Martian, none of which are feelings I imagine Weir wanted to engender. Worse, I don’t think they are simply a result of personal subjectivity – I think the awful dialogue, clumsy story construction, and inane characterization will be obvious to any attentive reader. The focus of the novel is also its most glaring flaw by far: believability, or the utter lack thereof. Because the author has done his homework and presents us with many realistic space survival scenarios, we’re meant to buy into Mark Watney’s struggle. The problem is, I don’t believe that someone who talks and thinks like Watney would ever have been selected for a dangerous, expensive, and highly difficult mission to a distant planet. We’re told he’s the best botanist on Earth, and he does prove to be highly resourceful at growing food for himself, but what expert-level botanist talks like a frat boy? High academia has a way of smoothing out juvenile character traits like these, and when you’re ready to represent the best our planet has to offer in your field of study, you’re going to take it seriously. Watney doesn’t take anything seriously, and I don’t buy it for a second.

Two Classic Texts, Modernized

Tom Hiddleston in Coriolanus (Photo by Johan Persson)

Like Timon of Athens, Shakespeare’s late Roman tragedy Coriolanus is getting more attention these days than it did for years, though, like their title characters, both plays are perhaps too unyielding to make it into anybody’s list of favorite Shakespeares. Ralph Fiennes made an intelligent attempt at filming it in 2011 with himself in the title role, the warrior who wins a major victory for Rome but whose patrician pride prevents him from winning the favor of the fickle (and easily manipulated) citizens; he winds up being exiled, turning his back on Rome and allying himself with the enemy he defeated. (The bankrupt Timon turns his back on Athens when his fair-weather friends won’t lift a finger to help him and goes to live in a cave.) In Josie Rourke’s economically staged production of Coriolanus for London’s Donmar Warehouse – recently transmitted on HD in the NT Live series – the protagonist is played by Tom Hiddleston, and his performance, which grows in depth and stature as the evening wears on, is the best reason to see the show. Toward the end of the second half Coriolanus’s mother Volumnia (Deborah Findlay), who has come with his wife Virgilia (Brigitte Hjort Sørensen) and their little boy (Joe Willis) to beg him to reconsider his abandonment of Rome, makes a long speech to which Coriolanus listens without answering her or even moving from his spot. Findlay, whose performance is so hambone it verges on camp, wails and whines; after a while I stopped paying attention to her and focused entirely on Hiddleston, who conveys the influence of her pleas in the tension of his body and the way his face struggles to remain taut and unmoved while his tears betray him. It’s a small but potent acting lesson in the effectiveness of stillness and understatement.

And the Oscar Doesn’t Go To…: Ten Snubs by the Academy

I've long made my peace with the Academy Awards, although I do still remember being pretty infuriated in 1980 when Milo Forman’s Hair wasn’t nominated for Best Picture. Instead of watching the Oscar telecast, I went off and saw the movie again that night. Since then I’ve calmed down and stopped taking the show so seriously: partly because there is a rough justice in the winners. Most good actors do win an Oscar but usually not for the right film. Despite the show’s frequent dull bits, I also enjoy many parts of the ceremony. I like seeing the movie stars, the moving ‘In Memoriam’ tribute to the industry folk who have passed away in the last year and I revel in the excitement of those winners. They're usually from outside the U.S. and they are absolutely thrilled to get one of the gold statues, a testimony to how much Hollywood accolades still mean to so many people who make movies. You’re also guaranteed to hear at least a couple of great speeches from the winners, particularly from the British contingent.

A Sharp-Looking Gentleman of Music – Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington

On the inside page of Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington (Gotham Books), opposite the title page, is a photograph of the jazz composer/pianist looking in a mirror as he adjusts a bow tie that adorns his tuxedo. It was taken in London in 1958, quite possibly in his room at one of the many hotels in which he lived while on tour. In many ways, the photograph represents the familiar and mysterious qualities of the famous composer: a sharp-looking gentleman of music; a charismatic band leader getting ready for another event where he’s the most important man in the room. For author Terry Teachout, the picture of Ellington looking into the mirror begs the question, “Who Are You?” And for the next 360 pages, Teachout attempts to answer it. But his subject is elusive, a character in music history with a significant body of work, hundreds of recordings and with a reputation beyond dispute. As history has taught us, the name Duke Ellington weighs large to every serious lover of jazz. His music continues to be heard on recordings, played in concert halls and clubs around the world. But as Terry Teachout surmises, “Everyone knows him; yet no one knows him. That was the way he wanted it.” Teachout’s purpose with this new biography seeks to reveal the mask of Duke Ellington. He does his scholarly best to collect, synthesis and deduce from a ton of information that defined Ellington such as, how he treated his family, friends and band members. It’s a book rich in detail with some extraordinary passages about Ellington’s music that had me reaching into my collection within a few chapters. Teachout’s critical assessment of Ellington’s music within the context of his search for the man stands as a juxtaposition to what we generally know about Duke. It is for this reason alone that I highly recommend it even to the most informed music fan.

Spies, Lies And Pointe Shoes: The National Ballet Of Canada's Mixed Program

Aszure Barton's Watch her

Dancers can act. This is one conclusion to be drawn from the mixed program of dramatic work the National Ballet Canada is presenting this week at Toronto’s Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts. There are only two ballets on offer now through Sunday: a reprise of the Edmonton-born Aszure Barton’s shadowy and complex Watch her (originally created for the National in 2011) and Sir Frederick Ashton’s decidedly more sunny and farcical A Month in the Country (originally created for the Royal Ballet in 1976). Barton's ballet is idiosyncratically contemporary while Ashton’s is rooted more firmly in the language of classical ballet. But while diametrically opposed, stylistically speaking, both works foreground the art of acting in ballet in delineating character and driving plot. Emotions are inevitably drawn to the surface, and people tested along the way.

The Ashton ballet is more obviously a narrative being an adaptation of the Ivan Turgenev play of the same name. Barton’s piece, on the other hand, is more evocative and less declarative about its intentions. Yet, there is no mistaking the taut dramatic line upon which her choreography hangs and sways. Like the Ashton ballet, hers is a work which eviscerates human psychology, laying the guts on the floor. Both one-act ballets, the works have other elements in common. Each is concerned with themes of keeping secrets, spying and feeling betrayed. Each also offers up a chocolate box of impossible relationships doomed to have unsatisfying endings for all involved. In both works, the dancers use dancing to bring to life characters attempting to navigate a vivid situation. And really they have rarely looked better: solid ensemble performances and acting worthy of an Academy Award. This is the real show to watch this weekend. The range alone is marvellous.

Lost in Spacey: Two Views on House of Cards

Kevin Spacey in House of Cards

Pop culture gains something when it ties itself into trends and issues that people are actually talking about, and Netflix’s political-melodrama series House of Cards gives viewers the chance to talk about something that’s been nagging at some of us for years now: what the hell has happened to Kevin Spacey’s acting? It may not be the most pressing issue on the table, but it’s one of the most mysterious and dispiriting. It’s hard to exaggerate the sense of excitement and discovery experienced by those who discovered Spacey when he took over the Big Bad position on the TV series Wiseguy from Ray Sharkey, back in early 1988. Sharkey, who had traded in a promising movie career for a heroin habit, was so charismatic and disturbingly likable in his comeback performance as the New Jersey gangster Sonny Steelgrave that a less confident actor would have been leery of following him. But the eight episodes in which Spacey played Mel Profitt, a self-made billionaire drug dealer looking to transition into munitions, amount to one of the high points of ‘80s TV. His sheer pleasure in performing, combined with the skill and dazzle of his technique, really made him jump out at a time when many film reviewers, presumably in a spirit of mournful resignation, had begun to write about what marvelous actors Tom Cruise and Kevin Costner were. 

Unmistakable Genius: Greg Kot's I'll Take You There, Mavis Staples

Just put some Mavis Staples in the CD player (or however you listen to music these days) and crank it up. That voice, that unmistakeable glorious voice, will take you there all right. I've witnessed her power in person a couple of times, and the most recent was extraordinary. The lady is over 70 years old now, and still on the road. Her solo CDs are selling better than ever. The sympathetic production by Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy doesn’t hurt, and certainly that tight touring band made the songs come alive in concert. But where did she come from? Where has she been? What’s her story? Chicago writer Greg Kott tells the tale in his fine new book I’ll Take You There. He starts with the story of Mavis’s father Roebuck Staples who at five years old watched a mule-driven wagon carry his mother away to her grave in 1920 Mississippi. Roebuck was the seventh son of Warren and Florence Staples, the family worked on the Dockery Plantation Farms, plowing, planting, chopping and picking cotton. The family had a tradition of being good workers which allowed them to cope with the racism of the South. “A man or woman’s reputation did matter in the divided South. The boss man could insult you, beat you, even try to kill you, but dignity and pride were held sacred in the home of Warren Staples. As a member of his family you did not buckle.”

The Perils of Playing it Safe: Studio Ghibli’s Ni no Kuni

Ni no Kuni occupies a strange space in the video game/film continuum. It’s a game which, for all intents and purposes, is a Studio Ghibli film – except that it’s also an RPG. It’s not a game based on a film, because there is no accompanying movie. Nor will there likely be a film based on the game, despite its huge success on the global market. In fact, Studio Ghibli creator and visionary Hayao Miyazaki doesn’t allow video game adaptations of his films after several embarrassing swings at Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind were attempted in the 1980s. So Ni no Kuni is a bit of an anomaly – a straightforward Japanese role playing game with the gorgeous animated art and sweeping soundtrack of a Studio Ghibli film. It’s just too bad that it doesn’t capture the same soul.

Ni no Kuni (translated as “Another World”) is the story of Oliver, a boy from the quiet hamlet of Motorville, whose mother dies of a heart attack. Stricken with grief, he weeps over a favourite doll, and when his tears touch the doll it transforms into a cantankerous little lantern goblin who calls himself Mister Drippy. Drippy tells Oliver that he can save his mother if he travels to Drippy’s native magical realm – the titular “other world” – and learn the skills of a wizard. Then, the game itself rolls out its very standard role-playing fare: as Oliver, you fight monsters, complete quests, earn experience and new abilities, and travel to exotic locales. Most games developed for a Japanese audience are deliberately complex, especially by Western standards, but Kuni sticks to simplicity, which works to its benefit. A fine balance is struck between the satisfying depth of item and ability micromanagement and the plainness of combat and story construction. This isn’t Final Fantasy – you don’t play as the dream of a dead hero’s father’s dream, or whatever. This is a refined experience aimed at young people which can still reward the older player.

No Lessons Learned: Witness Uganda

Photo by Gretjen Helene Photography

In the American Repertory Theatre’s latest musical production, Witness Uganda, a twenty-three-year-old black kid from New York named Griffin travels to Uganda as a volunteer to help a local known as Pastor Jim build a school for the poor in a small village. Griffin sings in the choir of his church and aspires to an acting career, but he feels alienated – he senses that his homosexuality makes him persona non grata in the choir – and undefined, and he hopes that being committed to something beyond himself will change all that. But when he gets to the village he doesn’t like the rules that restrict him to Pastor Jim’s compound, and the more he sees of the operation the more suspicious it looks. So he ends up breaking away from Pastor Jim and setting up a classroom in an abandoned library for some teenagers who aren’t being educated at all because the schools aren’t free.

Amazon's 2nd Pilot Season: Cops, Oboes, and Jeffrey Tambor

A scene from Bosch, now streaming on Amazon Instant Video

In April 2013, Amazon stepped decidedly into the world of original television programming when it streamed over a dozen pilot episodes for free and asked viewers worldwide to vote on which among them should get picked up. Out of that great experiment in participatory democracy came two new series – the Silicon Valley comedy Betas and Garry Trudeau's political comedy Alpha House – which both premiered in November and were only available online for Amazon Prime subscribers. (Alpha House, starring John Goodman and Clark Johnson, turned into the surprise highlight of this past fall's TV season.) Now, less than a year later, Amazon's "pilot season" returns, stronger and more confident than before. Amazon's second year may offer fewer "prime time" pilots than before (two one-hour dramas, and three half-hour comedies), but the productions are more ambitious, and come with some genuinely high-profile talent both in front of the camera and behind it. We have Chris Carter's apocalyptic thriller The After, the well-crafted crime procedural Bosch (adapted from Michael Connelly's popular series of novels), Transparent with Arrested Development's Jeffrey Tambor, Mozart in the Jungle set in the cutthroat world of a New York philharmonic orchestra, and The Rebels, a more conventional comedy about a failing professional football franchise. While each of the pilots has something worthwhile, the two real gems are Bosch and Transparent, which are easily among the most polished and self-possessed new shows I've seen in a while.

Once Upon a Time: FX’s The Americans

Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys in FX's The Americans.

The last piece Critics at Large’s David Churchill was working on before he died was a post on the TV show The Americans. His ill health prevented him from finishing his post and I never did find out what he thought of the series. I’m sorry he never got to write on The Americans as I’m sure he would have had some interesting, provocative things to say about it. This post is dedicated to his memory. - ss

Note: this post also contains some spoilers.

When I first heard of the new FX series, The Americans, about a married couple, posing as Americans who are actually Soviet sleeper agents living undercover in the United States, I was worried. I thought that the series would traffic in moral equivalence, implying or stating outright that the two major opponents in the Cold War were somehow one and the same. I also remembered the outcry from the myopic left, back in 1987, when ABC aired the mini-series Amerika, detailing a future scenario wherein the Soviet Union took over the U.S. Their concerns were that the show would foment hatred against the Soviet Union, though of course, they would never have protested a Soviet TV show suggesting the reverse. This occurred during Ronald Reagan’s presidency and, of course, he was considered much more the villain than they were, though I know fear of a nuclear war between the Soviets and the U.S. also played a part in protesters’ worries that Amerika could somehow make the already tense situation between the two sides worse. In any case, the creatively uneven mini-series aired to mixed reviews and so-so ratings and pretty much vanished from the cultural radar (it’s never been released on DVD.) Fortunately, The Americans, from cable channel FX, which begins its second season on Feb. 26 – its first season is now out on DVD – is a much superior production and, equally as gratifying, functions as a timely reminder of how vicious and dangerous the Soviets actually were. (They weren’t far off the ‘evil empire’ mark Reagan said they were.) That’s not to say, The Americans is a black and white simplistic affair. It’s certainly not that. At its best, it is one of the better, more compelling cable shows of recent years.

Neglected Gem #51: Old Man (1997)

In a career spanning more than half a century, the unassuming workaholic southern writer Horton Foote turned out probably a hundred scripts for the stage, TV, and the movies. And of the many I’ve seen, the only one I’ve ever liked is his adaptation of William Faulkner’s story “Old Man,” which he did for the anthology series Playhouse 90 in 1958 and then refurbished (and improved upon) for a Hallmark Hall of Fame telecast in 1997. The old man in the story, which Faulkner interlaced with the tragic romantic main plot of his great 1931 novel Wild Palms, is the Mississippi River; the setting is the legendary flood of 1927. The two nameless main characters are a convict on rescue detail and a pregnant woman, abandoned by her husband, whom he’s sent, in a skiff with another prisoner, to round up from the tree she’s been clinging to since the water washed her home away. The convict’s companion, who lied about his skill with a boat because he had his eye on escaping under cover of the flood, doesn’t get very far; he and the protagonist are separated, and he ends up back in camp, with years added to his sentence for his effort. The protagonist, a laconic and unimaginative soul whose refusal to bend the rules of his assignment becomes a badge of honor, does indeed save the woman, sees her through her labor, keeps them both alive, and takes her back home, as he promised he would – though the process takes weeks and requires a detour through the Louisiana bayou.

Women in Trouble: Loves Her Gun & Raze

Trieste Kelly Dunn in Loves Her Gun

A couple of small pictures that have begun knocking around in recent weeks illustrate some of the possibilities that, for better or worse, are out there on the fringe for actresses. Loves Her Gun which is set mostly in Austin, was directed and co-written (with Lauren Modery) by Geoff Marslett, who teaches digital animation at the University of Texas. Trieste Kelly Dunn plays Allie, a young Brooklynite whose with an especially lame version of that movie stand-by—the boyfriend who exists to be dumped, like sandbags from a hot-air balloon, so that the story can begin. Not much else of a life can be discerned from what the movie shows. One night, after enjoying the musical stylings of a wacky combo who play dress in kung-fu gear with fake hands raised high above their heads, Allie is assaulted on the street by a couple of thugs in animal masks who might have stepped out of the slasher movie You’re Next. The encounter leaves her with a black eye and a case of PTSD that the hang-loose Austin kids—with whom she impulsively hitches a ride back to their home base—are especially well-equipped to mistake for a sort of spacy, zoned-out joie de vivre.

The Eco-Gothic: Hilary Scharper's Perdita

“I do feel sometimes as if I lived next to some great, slumbering beast that lulls me into thinking of it as just rocks and water. And then, every once in a while, it awakens and I realize that it is alive and powerful and that I am a tiny, helpless creature next to it!”

– Hilary Scharper, Perdita.

It is abundantly clear that Hilary Scharper’s fine debut novel Perdita (Simon & Schuster, 2013) has been inspired by Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca. These classics are suffused with Gothic inflections: the desolate landscapes which can be powerful and cruel, the suggestion of a supernatural or preternatural presence, buried secrets in ancestral homes, unrequited love, and what may be most relevant for the novel under review, the sense of a soul trapped in a human body. In addition to these elements, Perdita is populated with malevolent villains and attractive characters with demons that haunt them. The novel also represents an emerging literary form, something Scharper terms the “eco-gothic,” in which nature does not serve as a backdrop, but as a central character in the novel. (Scharper also teaches cultural anthropology at the University of Toronto and has written a well-received collection of short stories, Dream Dresses (2009), about the aspirations of women and the clothes they wear.) Even though she combines elements of the historical novel and magic realism, Perdita’s setting in the tempestuous wilderness of the northern Bruce Peninsula, an area she knows intimately since she has spent many summers there, underpins her decision to allocate human-nature relations a central role in her multi-layered narrative. 

Neglected Gem #50: Dredd (2012)

Karl Urban & Olivia Thirlby in Dredd

Based on the trailer, you could be forgiven for dismissing Dredd as a low-rent, forgettable action feature, or at best a disposable reboot of a franchise nobody really liked in the first place (1995’s Judge Dredd). I certainly did, and even as an action movie fan I turned up my nose. I am happy to report that I was wrong: Dredd is one of the most finely-crafted action pictures of the last five years, and a necessary addition to any action junkie’s collection.

The plot is superbly straightforward: a species of super-cop called "Judges" patrol the streets of a post-apocalyptic East Coast, acting as judge, jury, and executioner for criminals whom they sentence on the spot. This rather drastic legal system is employed in an effort to combat the excessive amounts of crime committed in the overcrowded, polluted Mega-City One. One such lawman, the titular Judge Dredd (Karl Urban), is escorting a rookie Judge (Olivia Thirlby) on her first assignment. They are called to a 200-storey block of flats called Peach Trees, when the resident matriarch – a terrifying drug lord named Ma-Ma (Lena Headey) – locks down the complex and demands the death of the interfering Judges. Dredd and the rookie must fight their way through legions of henchmen to execute Ma-Ma and seize their chance at escape. Dredd takes notes from the leanest and meanest of action screenplays, combining the wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time, one-man-army, "fly in the ointment" premise of Die Hard with the "fight your way to the top" video game style action of The Raid: Redemption. In a sea of films where the whole world (or indeed, the very universe itself) is often in jeopardy, an action flick with such a narrow focus is like a breath of fresh air. The all-consuming destruction that takes place in films such as Man of Steel is too shocking and visually exhausting to bear its own emotional weight; I much prefer stakes on a smaller scale. Dredd feels like just another day in the hellscape of Mega-City One, where stories like this are playing out all the time. This also makes the possibility of sequels (which Dredd is unlikely to get based on its middling box office performance, despite strong fan support) much more enticing, as the filmmakers haven't already shot their proverbial wad on an excessively "epic" storyline.

Roundabout’s Machinal

Rebecca Hall & Morgan Spector in Machinal (Photo by Joan Marcus)

Before it was rediscovered in the early nineties – it was produced at the Public in New York in 1990 and three years later at the National Theatre in London – Sophie Treadwell’s Machinal was a forgotten artifact of the experimental American theatre of the twenties. (There was a TV adaptation in the mid-fifties and a short-lived off-Broadway revival in 1960.) The script was out of print for decades; when I wanted to teach it, I had to rely on an old anthology of early American plays. Now the play pops up occasionally on college campuses – my own department has mounted it – though Lyndsey Turner’s production at the Roundabout Theatre marks the first time it’s appeared on Broadway since its 1928 premiere. Treadwell adapted the generic German Expressionist protest drama (the protagonist moves through one episode after another, on a journey of self-discovery that leads inevitably to disaster) most famously developed by Georg Kaiser in From Morn to Midnight. She wasn’t the first American writer to do so – O’Neill had got there before her with The Hairy Ape, and Elmer Rice with The Adding Machine – but to the usual themes of this kind of play (the soulless mechanization of modern society, the restrictions of class, the grim triumph of materialism) she added a specifically feminist orientation. She wasn’t the only playwright working to take this genre in new directions: the first American Expressionist drama I know of, O’Neill’s 1920 The Emperor Jones, was about race. But she and Susan Glaspell, whose 1916 Trifles was in last summer’s season at the Shaw Festival, were pioneers, since hardly any women were getting plays of any description produced in the early decades of the twentieth century, let alone feminist ones.