Representation: Disabled Theater at Harbourfront's World Stage

At the beginning of Disabled Theater, which is playing at Toronto’s Fleck Dance Theatre as part of Harbourfront’s World Stage, the 11 members of the cast enter one at a time and stand centre-stage, in silence, for one minute. Then they exit and the next cast member comes out. That’s well over 11-plus minutes of silence, which can be pretty challenging for an audience, and also for the cast members. But Jérôme Bel, a Swiss director and choreographer living in Paris, is not afraid of a challenge. (Even the show’s title is somewhat controversial, as became clear in a pre-show chat session, in which one person drew applause when she objected to the term “disabled” as inherently divisive and demeaning.) In this work, a co-production with Zurich-based Theatre HORA, is designed to present people who “are not represented in the public sphere,” Bel says in the program notes. “If one is not represented, one doesn’t exist. And representation is my job.”

iZombie: She Is What She Eats

Rose McIver in iZombie, on The CW.

iZombie is a blast. When I first heard of The CW show's Millennial-cum-zombie plotline, I immediately developed some clear, but entirely mistaken, assumptions about the series. But two increasingly entertaining episodes later, iZombie has already wormed its way into my heart (as well as into my thankfully still skull-ensconced brain.) At its core, iZombie is a light crime procedural with a fantasy conceit – a fresher-faced cousin to ABC's Forever, which also follows the adventures of a medical examiner with a secretly personal connection to death who sometimes partners with a homicide detective – and with its clever writing, charming cast, and a strong female lead with genuinely interesting relationships, iZombie has demonstrated more potential than many longer-running series.

Scenes From a Marriage: Kaeja 25

Kaeja d'Dance (photo by Aria Evans)

Wedding dresses sparkle and shimmer in Taxi!, a new work by Karen Kaeja whose world premiere took place at Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre Theatre on Tuesday night. Significantly, at least one of the gowns was worn by the choreographer’s husband, Allen Kaeja, who earlier in the evening unveiled a world premiere of his own, .0 (point zero), a wonderfully unpredictable work about unpredictability. The wedding dress prop instantly telegraphed that Taxi!, at least in part, is about marriage, an arena of human experience which similarly could be characterized as being fraught with uncertainty. There are highs, lows, and never ending piles laundry. Taxi! could be described a mirror of a life lived. But it is also a reflection of mating rituals in complicated times. Its spunk, subtle poignancy and unmistakeable sense of humour make it a keeper.

Carrion Discomfort: Buzzard

Joshua Burge stars in Joel Potrykus’ Buzzard.

As Marty, the title character of Joel Potrykus’ Buzzard, Joshua Burge has the bantamweight build and long, skinny face of a classic smartass, urban American type—a synthesis of James Woods, Richard Belzer, and Steve Buscemi for the post-slacker era. His eyes are alternatively heavy-lidded and wreathed in boredom or as huge and searching as a baby’s; his sarcastic asides and random outbursts of disgust (“Taco Bell sucks!”) are delivered in a husky, nasal voice that seems to weigh more than his body. Marty has a temp job in the mortgage department of a bank, but he spends all his time at work running petty scams, such as ordering expensive office supplies that he then steals so he can lope over to the supplier’s nearest branch store and pocket the case returns. In the movie’s long, transfixing first scene, the camera holds him in close-up as he dully instructs a bank clerk to cancel out his checking account, then announces that he wants to open a new account, so he can collect the fifty dollars the bank is offering as a come-on for virgin customers.

Everything in Its Proper Place: Patrick Rothfuss’s The Slow Regard of Silent Things

“Some places had names. Some places changed, or they were shy about their names. Some places had no names at all, and that was always sad. It was one thing to be private. But to have no name at all? How horrible. How lonely.”

It was dangerous for Patrick Rothfuss, author of The Kingkiller Chronicles novels, to release a side project in the midst of a highly-anticipated release schedule – something that fellow fantasy author George R.R. Martin knows all too well, being constantly hounded by fans to quit lollygagging and finish his own long-awaited series. The risk these authors run is to alienate loyal fans left unfulfilled by an incomplete narrative – a “what’s this new book, and why isn’t it the sequel we’ve been waiting for” situation – which is a valid concern, but one that I think devalues the creative spark which led to the work that fans crave in the first place. Authors, like any artist, are led by the collar by their own inspiration, and must follow where it leads. It’s not hard to imagine that after inhabiting the same world, the same characters, and the same story for years on end that their brains would cry out for creative release in any other direction.

The vocal minority, unfortunately, directs the ebb and flow of narrative trends (just look at popular Hollywood films for proof). The problem is that the vocal minority is just that – the smaller group – and doesn’t really represent what many people want. Formulaic “excitement” has a short shelf-life, and risky, unconventional fare can be surprisingly successful based on the needs of this silent majority. It was uncommonly brave for Rothfuss to take the risk he took and devote a novella to a side character of little significance to the Kingkiller series’ plot. It speaks to his love for her, and his willingness to go wherever his creative instinct takes him. Auri had things to tell him, and he had the presence of mind to listen. That he had to interrupt his blockbuster bestseller series in order to transcribe her tale speaks to his strength as an artist, and his remorse at keeping the vocal minority waiting (with apologies to his fans spilling out both online and in the liner notes) speaks to his fine character as a person. The Slow Regard of Silent Things, then, is a gift – not asked for, but gratefully accepted both for its own beauty and for the peace of mind it doubtless brought its creator.

On the 20th Century: Spiffy Ride

On the 20th Century, the 1978 musical currently being favored with a gold-standard revival by the Roundabout Theatre Company, is adapted from one of the great Hollywood screwball farces of the thirties, Howard Hawks’ Twentieth Century. Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur based their screenplay on their 1932 Broadway show, which had begun life as an unproduced play by Charles Bruce Milholland called Napoleon of Broadway, but the Hawks movie is better than its source. (The Roundabout produced the straight version in 2004, with Alec Baldwin and Anne Heche.) The 1934 film Twentieth Century is often labeled a romantic comedy, but really it’s a hard-boiled comedy like Hecht and MacArthur’s The Front Page and Kaufman and Hart’s Once in a Lifetime; the only love affair the two protagonists, down-on-his-luck showman Oscar Jaffe and his ex-wife and one-time star Lily Garland, now a movie celebrity, conduct is with themselves. Twentieth Century is perhaps the most extravagant and hilarious display of narcissism in the history of movie comedy, and the incandescent spectacle of John Barrymore and Carole Lombard as the dueling egotists – who suggest utterly heartless counterparts to the hero and heroine of Kiss Me, Kate – hasn’t dimmed in the intervening eight decades. The picture is called Twentieth Century because almost all of it takes place on the gleaming art deco train, a landmark of its era, that carries Oscar and Lily from Chicago to New York. Oscar and his hard-drinking sycophants, his press agent (Roscoe Karns) and business manager (Walter Connolly), have thirty-six hours in which to save their wobbly producing enterprise, battered by one expensive, misbegotten flop after another, by convincing Lily, who walked out on Oscar long ago, to sign on for a new show with him.

The musical hasn’t been produced on Broadway since its original 1978 run, when it was directed by Harold Prince and starred John Cullum and Madeline Kahn. (Kahn’s performance on the cast album is remarkable, but she dropped out after only nine weeks and was replaced by Judy Kaye.) The show ran for a year and a half and toured the country, yet despite its success and despite the first-rate book and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green (among their best work) and the robust, tuneful and varied Cy Coleman music (his best score except for City of Angels), it’s never enjoyed the reputation it deserves. The Roundabout production, directed by Scott Ellis and choreographed by Warren Carlyle, showcases what’s so special about the musical. The David Rockwell set – a beauty – and Donald Holder’s glistening lighting design even manage to replicate, more or less, the complicated stagecraft of the 1978 version (with its much touted Robin Wagner setting), which includes not only a series of cross-sections of the train but, at a climactic moment (the mid-second-act ensemble number “She’s a Nut”), turns it around so that it travels toward the audience with the “nut,” a devout Baptist named Letitia Peabody Primrose who’s been masquerading as a millionaire philanthropist, implausibly but uproariously strapped to its front.

On the Altar of Perfection: Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Satan in Goray

Isaac Bashevis Singer, in New York City in 1975. (Photo credit: Bruce Davidson)

Messiahs are seductive characters, for at least one very obvious reason: the Messiah, by definition, perfects the world. Different religious traditions have different understandings of what (or who) the Messiah is, different estimations of the amount of blood and gore that will precede the Messiah, and different illustrations of what the world that the Messiah ushers in will look like. But they agree that the coming of the Messiah will in some way make the world the way it should be, and could be if it was not for the imperfections of human beings and human leadership. If we are being honest, this Messianism is not limited to religious traditions – the notion that there is one person, one idea, or one system that, instituted perfectly, can obliterate the injustices in the world is also found in apparently secular political theories like capitalism, Marxism, and fascism. In all its forms, Messianism encourages a single-minded devotion to a particular future, encouraging those entranced by that vision to devote all their energy to its fulfillment. In Satan in Goray (1955), Isaac Bashevis Singer illustrates the ways that Messianism can inspire and destroy a community. Few novels so well demonstrate the destructive power of inspiration itself, while giving just due to the brilliance and beauty that makes such inspiration powerfully seductive. 

Get On Up: Shot in the Arm

Get On Up, the James Brown biopic, is full of life, most of it supplied by Chadwick Boseman, the remarkable actor and dancer who gets down Brown’s startlingly kinetic presence. Boseman didn’t make much of an impression as Jackie Robinson in the bland 42, but he’s mesmerizing as the charismatic and tyrannical Godfather of Soul. Brown’s sense of himself as a one-man band whose fellow musicians – and wives - he sees as no more than necessary echoes of his presence alienates everyone around him, even, eventually, his best friend and loyal colleague Bobby Byrd (Nelsan Ellis), who sticks around longer than anyone else. But his musical inventiveness is as outsize as his personality. The musical numbers, directed with a great deal of skill by Tate Taylor, do exactly what they need to do: they replicate the excitement of seeing James Brown.

The Cost of Sacrificing Liberty for Security: Guantánamo Diary

A Guantanamo detainee being led by a guard in March 2002. (Photo: Andres Leighton)

“Those who surrender freedom for security will not have, nor do they deserve, either one.”

– Benjamin Franklin cited by Mohamedou Ould Slahi in Guantánamo Diary.

On November 20, 2001, Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a 30-year-old electrical engineer and telecommunications specialist from Mauritania, received a visit at his house from two Mauritanian officers summoning him to answer questions at the country’s intelligence ministry. “Take your car,” one of the men told him, as Slahi stood in front of his house with his mother and his aunt. “We hope you can come back today.” He has not returned. After spending a week in a cell in his native country, the authorities found no evidence against him. However, at the behest of the Americans, Slahi was rendered to a black site in Jordan for six months, and then flown blindfolded, shackled and diapered to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan for two weeks; from there he was transported to Guantánamo in Cuba where he remains incommunicable to this day. Three years into his detention, Slahi wrote in basic idiomatic English he obviously picked up from his guards – his fourth language and acquired in Guantanamo – a manuscript which was immediately classified. It took years of litigation and negotiation by Slahi’s pro bono lawyers to force the military to declassify a redacted version, heavily black-barred (that sometimes goes on for pages, some of it to conceal the identity of his interrogators, guards and fellow detainees).

Blame it on Hamilton: A Celebration

It’s Tuesday after Juno week in Hamilton. The big poster designed by Tom Wilson still overlooks James Street. Swag bags are emptied though, and the blue boxes are filled with was passed for swag in some of those bags. Booklets, ads, tickets are blowing down the road. All that remains are the memories. Memories of that week when all the clubs were full of people, and music was played everywhere. Even Limeridge Mall had an event. A music event! Not a sale. The libraries had an event, believe it or not. Hamilton Public hosted a concert in the round on their 4th floor. And McMaster Libraries did a demonstration of electronic instruments for attendees! Give your head a shake. I was there, participating, demoing the Makey Makey and my colleagues showed off the Atari Punk Console, the Little Bits Synth Kit and a theremin that was also built from a kit. The theremin was the big draw. After people bought their beer at the bar they were pulled over by the sounds of alien invasion coming from the weird black box. They then stayed to twist the knobs of the punk console or bang away on the banana piano. Yep, it’s a piano with bananas for keys (or forks, or tofu, or even raw meat). Fun wow!

Storybook Movies: Paddington and Cinderella

The English filmmaker Paul King, who wrote and directed Paddington, seems to have come out of nowhere. (His résumé includes only one previous feature – something called Bunny and the Bull, which never opened in the U.S. – and a handful of obscure TV credits.) And he comes fully formed, with style, sensibility and a level of inventiveness and filmmaking expertise that ought to make other novice directors green with envy – or inspire them to go and do likewise. Paddington, based on the Michael Bond children’s books about a Peruvian bear who’s adopted by a family of Londoners (King and Hamish McColl worked up the screen story), is so accomplished visually, so funny and enchanting, that watching it makes you feel a bit delirious.

Neglected Gem #73: Speed Racer (2008)

Emile Hirsch in Andy and Lana Wachowski's Speed Racer.

Is there such a thing as a “delayed-onset masterpiece”? Is it possible for a film to be purposefully designed to achieve “cult favourite” status some five-to-ten years after its initial release? It hardly seems like such a thing could (or would) be done intentionally, but it’s hard to ascribe any other methodology to the directing work of Andy and Lana Wachowski. Maybe they’re just continually a few years ahead of the curve?

I’ve described their films as flawed but inspired, and the more I consider their body of work, the less I find that these flaws detract from the experience – whether it’s the Orwellian dystopia of V for Vendetta or the neo-noir cyberthrills of The Matrix and its sequels, the only real issue I have that remains constant is overindulgence. The Wachowskis seem to allow their creativity to get the best of them, and after intoxicating themselves on a subject, attempt to cram all the ideas that emerge into the final product, for good or ill. Perhaps it’s their ability to operate as a duo that stops this from completely crippling each film – keeping each other in check is doubtless one of their many talents – but it does result in longer runtimes and more complicated plots than are necessary to communicate the most exciting and valuable parts of their projects. In every other sense, the Wachowskis have cemented themselves as ingenious and artful filmmakers, providing a unique vision on par with Guillermo del Toro or even Steven Spielberg. With the Wachowskis, you never know what you’re going to get, but you can be sure it’ll be unlike anything else on the marquee.

Playwrights With and Without Agendas: Reverberation and The Colored Museum

Luke Macfarlane and Aya Cash in Reverberation. (Photo: T. Charles Erickson)

Reverberation, which just closed at Hartford Stage in Hartford, Connecticut, is the first play I’ve seen by Matthew Lopez, whose The Whipping Man was well received in New York in 2011. Reverberation is a brand-new play about the debilitating consequences of grief and the interplay of loss and sexuality. Its thirty-five-year-old protagonist, Jonathan (the Canadian-born actor Luke MacFarlane, best known for the TV series Brothers and Sisters), has lived alone in Queens since his partner of fifteen years, Gabriel, was beaten to death in front of his eyes. His grief has paralyzed him.  He works out of his apartment, rarely venturing outside; he doesn’t keep up with friends; he turns down his parents’ offer to visit them in Oregon for Thanksgiving or Christmas. His only ongoing contact with the world is in the form of one-night stands with men he meets on Grindr, and he prefers them to visit him and gets rid of them when the sex is over. That’s what happens in the opening scene, where he has an intense sexual encounter with Wes (Carl Lundstedt), who’s twenty-three and so knocked out by the experience that he’s eager to see Jonathan again. “You fuck like you invented it,” he tells Jonathan, and a month or two later, when he gets up the nerve to come around to see him again, he’s both more graphic and more lyrical about what made Jonathan a more powerful, and also more poignant, lover than anyone else he’s known. By then we’ve figured out that Jonathan’s sexual performance is his way of holding onto his life with Gabe – of channeling those emotions once more – but he can only parcel them out in discrete, limited interactions. 

Critic's Notes and Frames Vol. XIII

In Steven Knight's Locke (2014), which recently came out on DVD and Blu-ray, Tom Hardy plays Ivan Locke, a construction foreman who, the day before he must supervise a large concrete pour in Birmingham, learns that a colleague with whom he had a one-night stand with seven months earlier has gone into premature labour with their baby. Despite his huge job responsibilities and his wife and children still awaiting him at home, he decides to drive to London to be with the woman carrying his child.

From the moment Hardy makes a crucial turn in his car onto a highway of his choice, he never veers from its destination despite the demands over the phone from all the important people in his life. For just over 80 minutes, as we stay focused almost entirely in close-up on Hardy's face, he remains steadfast and glued to the road, as if it were a lifeline pulling him towards a liberation that comes at a price. While he fields a never ending series of desperate phone calls, and hears voices that compete with the ones already in his head, Hardy sustains a tightrope act not easy for an actor to pull off in such a minimal dramatic concept. Yet he finds a way to enlarge the confined space of the vehicle by drawing us into his battle with larger worlds outside that car: one world which has defined him, one that has harnessed him, and another that holds a mystery for which there is still no easy conclusion.

Talking Out of Turn #36: bp Nichol (1988)

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show, On the Arts, at CJRT-FM in Toronto. With the late Tom Fulton, who was the show's prime host and producer, we did a half-hour interview program where we talked to artists from all fields. In 1994, after I had gone to CBC, I had an idea to collate an interview anthology from some of the more interesting discussions I'd had with guests from that period. Since they all took place during the Eighties, I thought I could edit the collection into an oral history of the decade from some of its most outspoken participants. The book was assembled from interview transcripts and organized thematically. I titled it Talking Out of Turn: Revisiting the '80s. With financial help from the Canada Council, I shaped the individual pieces into a number of pertinent themes relevant to the decade. By the time I began to contact publishers, though, the industry was radically starting to change. At one time, editorial controlled marketing. Now the reverse was taking place. Acquisition editors, who once responded to an interesting idea for a book, were soon following marketing divisions who were only concerned with whether the person doing it was hot enough to sell it.

For a few years, I flogged the proposal to various publishers but many were worried that there were too many people from different backgrounds (e.g. Margaret Atwood sitting alongside Oliver Stone) which made it look as if they hadn't read the outline. Another publisher curiously chose to reject it because, to them, it appeared to be simply a book about me promoting my interviews (as if I was trying to be a low-rent Larry King) rather than seeing it as a commentary on the decade through the eyes of the guests. All told, the book soon faded away and I turned to other projects. However, when uncovering the original proposal and sample interviews a number of years ago, I felt that maybe some of them could find a new life on Critics at Large.

Tom Fulton, producer of On the Arts. 

In a decade, that many considered to be drowning in narcissism, I decided to include interviews in Talking Out of Turn with artists who posed alternatives in the Eighties to self-centredness when it came to examining the self. That included Wallace Shawn talking about the process of making (with Louis Malle and Andre Gregory) the highly experimental fictional documentary My Dinner with Andre (1981), D.M. Thomas inserting into fiction the theories of Freud and the horror of the Holocaust in The White Hotel (1981), and William Diehl, a pulp fiction writer (Chameleon, Sharky's Machine), who was also a pacifist who wrote violent dramas to purge himself of the turbulence he had within him. The chapter on biography also included the Canadian poet bp Nichol whose life work in both narrative and experimental poetry was almost always autobiographical in nature. Whether it was his epic poem, The Martyrology or the more compact Selected Organs (Black Moss Press, 1988), Nichol never lost touch with his personal attachment to language which became a living organism in his work. One might call Selected Organs a body of work and a work of the body. It was also only a portion of a larger volume (planned over eight years) to be titled Organ Music, which featured autobiographical chapters focusing on the organs: The Vagina, The Mouth, The Chest, The Tonsils, The Hips, etc.

The Last Man on Earth Meets Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt

Will Forte is The Last Man on Earth, on Fox.

“Everyone's still dead.  Oh, thank God!” – Phil Miller, The Last Man on Earth.

"Oh, I'm very normal. I've had everything normal happen to me. " – Kimmy Schmidt, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.

March 2015 has already proven to be the season of the high-concept comedy. Within a few days of one another, television audiences were given two ambitious new comedy series: Fox's The Last Man on Earth and Neflix's Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. True to its distribution model, the entire 13-episode first season of Kimmy Schmidt dropped all at once last Friday, and the Fox comedy will air its fourth episode this Sunday night. On paper, neither premise seems like a recipe for high comedy: The Last Man on Earth follows its titular last man (Will Forte, Saturday Night Live, 30 Rock), the apparently sole survivor of a worldwide plague that has wipe out humanity, while the title character of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is a 29-year-old woman (Ellie Kemper, The Office) who moves to New York City after spending the last 15 years living in an underground bunker, kidnapped by cult leader who told her that the world outside has been destroyed. The shows come with impressive, and even parallel, pedigrees – Tina Fey (also SNL and 30 Rock) and 30 Rock writer and showrunner Robert Carlock created Kimmy Schmidt, and along with Forte, the screenwriting and directing partnership of  Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (21 and 22 Jump Street, The Lego Movie, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs) have brought us Last Man. Once the ambitious conceits are introduced, both comedies are revealed as more familiar genres: The Last Man is fundamentally a romantic comedy (albeit a rom-com ad absurdum), and Kimmy Schmidt is basically a small-town-girl-comes-to-the-big-city story under its hood.  In both cases, that is to their credit; but, side-by-side, it is impossible to deny that the Netflix series is the far stronger, and funnier, of the two.

Sins of the Children: David Cronenberg and Bruce Wagner's Maps to the Stars

Julianne Moore in Maps to the Stars.

“Everything is research, in a sense,” says Robert Pattinson in David Cronenberg’s new inside-Hollywood movie, Maps to the Stars. Pattinson’s character, a struggling actor and aspiring screenwriter who supports himself by working as a limo driver, is the resident Tod Hackett figure in this Day of the Locust set-up: he doesn’t represent a central consciousness for the film, but he’s the only character in it who could pass for sane. He’s also the only character on view who seems to be essentially decent, up to the point when, in the name of “research,” he agrees to screw his client, a movie actress and sex symbol (Julianne Moore), in the back seat of the car while it’s parked outside a house where they can be seen by the young woman (Mia Wasikowska) he has been dating.

Maps to the Stars has been in the planning stages for so long that Bruce Wagner, who wrote the script, turned the material into a novel when it looked as if he and Cronenberg would never be able to make the movie. But whenever the scene was first written, with Pattinson in the role, it gets what dirty charge it has from the audience’s knowledge that Pattinson endured his own public humiliation a few years ago when his Twilight co-star and real-life girlfriend, Kristen Stewart, was reported to have had an affair with her director on Snow White and the Huntsman. When Billy Wilder made Sunset Boulevard sixty-five years ago, a Gothic horror satire about Hollywood, with a bitchy, acidic tone and in-jokes, he had the advantage of giving audiences a close-up look at an unfamiliar world. Today, with a twenty-four news cycle that devotes a disproportionate amount of its attention to show-business “news,” most of it shaped to make everyone feel like an insider, it’s like everyone is spending part of their day doing the research to appreciate a movie like this.

Swedish thrillers in a post-Larsson and Mankell World

Memorial to slain Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme, in Stockholm. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Readers of Swedish thrillers might wonder what is currently available in the genre since the untimely death of Stieg Larsson in 2004 and the 2011 publication of A Troubled Man by Henning Mankell that completed the Inspector Kurt Wallander series. Mankell still continues to churn out standalones – his most recent is A Treacherous Paradise (2013) – but they do not appear to have garnered the favourable critical responses and wide readership that the Wallander novels achieved. However, it turns out that there is a cornucopia of literary and visual riches from Swedish authors, who like Mankell and Larsson continue to be influenced by the team of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö that produced, between 1965 and 1975, the ten-volume Martin Beck series Story of a Crime. Sjöwall and Wahlöö recognized that the crime novel could be a vehicle for social criticism, believing that beneath the vaunted welfare system, the collusion of powerful capitalists with the state produced more inequality and exploitation. Secondly, they debunked the idea of a private or public detective who solved crimes himself, and stressed the collegial nature of police work. Thirdly, they warned of right-wing extremist elements in the police force that could turn Sweden into a dictatorship. In their final 1975 novel, The Terrorists, Sjöwall and Wahlöö chronicle the then far-fetched scenario of the assassination of the unnamed Prime Minister, and his assailant, a disturbed woman, is given a compassionate rendering in court when her lawyer relates her sad story and how society failed her.

Short Circuit: Neill Blomkamp’s Chappie

Die Antwoord's Ninja, Jose Pablo Cantillo, and Chappie in Neill Blomkamp's Chappie.

It used to be that a film depicting “a robotic police force in the crime-ridden future of 2016” was a far-flung concept, usually with at least twenty years’ time for filmgoers to remember to be kind to one another and help prevent such a terrible vision from becoming reality. Neill Blomkamp’s Chappie was released this year, in 2015, which I admit makes me nervous. I hope the world of Chappie is meant to take place in some alternate reality – because if not, then we wasted the time we had, and that future has come to pass.

Anyone who has seen the film’s trailer – or any combination of Short Circuit (1986), Robocop (1987), I, Robot (2004) or even Her (2013) – will already be able to plot out Chappie’s story beats: robot becomes sentient, robot learns the highs and lows of human emotion, robot questions its existence, credits, curtain. Likewise, anyone familiar with Blomkamp’s previous work – especially 2009’s risky, fascinating District 9 – will be unsurprised that he offers more of the same: thoughtful SF quandaries that are lost in a hail of gunfire, and dull storytelling that is disguised by beautiful visual design. That Blomkamp has failed to evolve over the course of his three feature films is a contradictory comfort. His consistency is to be admired, but not at the cost of the high-concept themes and narratives hinted at by his early films. I think I could be forgiven for hoping that by now he’d have found the path away from mindless violence and into the light of refreshing, challenging SF material. Instead, he’s stuck in limbo, and we’re stuck with Chappie.

Juxtapositions: The Mystery of Love and Sex & Lives of the Saints

Mamoudou Athie, Diane Lane, Tony Shalhoub & Gayle Rankin in The Mystery of Love & Sex (Photo:T. Charles Erickson)

Bathsheba Doran’s The Mystery of Love and Sex (Newhouse Theater, Lincoln Center) begins with a famous detective-thriller novelist (Tony Shalhoub) and his glamorous wife (Diane Lane) being given dinner in a college dorm by their daughter (Gayle Rankin) and her classmate (Mamoudou Athie), a young African-American man with whom she grew up. The undergrads, Charlotte and Jonny, entertain as if they were an established couple, but they don’t give off couple vibes, and Charlotte’s parents, Howard and Lucinda, are as confused as we are. When Jonny runs off to pick up a missing ingredient for the meal, Charlotte assures them that she and Jonny love each other deeply and intimates that they’re together. That isn’t the case, however, as we find out when the young people are alone. They’re inseparable best friends, but he claims he’s still a virgin and she thinks she’s fallen in love with another woman. She offers to relieve him of his virginity, but he has his eye on someone else. And though she assumes that somehow  they’ll end up together, he envisions himself settling down with another church-going Christian like himself. Charlotte’s an atheist, raised by a New York Jew and a Southern mother who converted to marry him (Lucinda has been persona non grata in her family ever since). Meanwhile Howard and Lucinda are having their own problems: she’s involved with another man.