The Pleasures of Peter Robinson’s DCI Banks Series

Novelist Peter Robinson.

Although I had previously read with pleasure the British-born Canadian Peter Robinson’s standalone novel, Before the Poison (William Morrow & Co., 2013), I had not dipped into his DCI Alan Banks police procedural series until this summer. My first entry was All the Colours of Darkness (McClelland & Stewart, 2008), and it was a wonderful introduction, particularly for a reader whose primary interest in mysteries is not a whodunit but an exploration of character, relationships, issues or themes. That was followed by several other novels: Bad Boy (2011), Watching in the Dark, (2012), Children of the Revolution (2013), and perhaps the best of them all, the multiple award-winning In a Dry Season (1999). Also, as a highly educated writer with a PhD in twentieth-century British poets and an individual with an eclectic taste in music, his novels are laced with literary and musical associations that are frequently integrated into the narrative as motifs. For instance, the title of the last novel mentioned above derives from a line from a T.S. Eliot poem that Banks himself references. Banks who works in rural Yorkshire in the town of Eastvale may remind some readers of Inspector Reg Wexford and the cultured Commander Adam Dalgliesh. Their creators, both the late P.D. James and Ruth Rendell respectively, were inspirations to Robinson. For the purposes of this review, I will focus primarily on All the Colours of Darkness and In a Dry Season.

Parris is Burning: Interview with Hip Hop Dance Queen Parris Goebel

Dancer/Choreographer Parris Goebel.

Parris Goebel is the reigning queen of the international hip hop dance scene. The triple award-winning dancer and choreographer from New Zealand has several times won the world championships with her The Royal Family megacrew and famed all-female crew ReQuest at competitions held in the U.S. Her explosive, exact and erotically charged movement style pulsates with the rhythms of Maori and Polynesian dance traditions she learned growing up in Auckland: hip hop as ancestral soul.

Jennifer Lopez, who saw Goebel dance on video, was so impressed by her elbow-popping, foot-stomping, hip-circling moves she hired the 23-year-old diamond-toothed Kiwi with the bleached blonde hair to choreograph her 2012 Dance Again world tour. Since then, Goebel has worked with Canada’s Cirque du Soleil, choreographing its 2013 Michael Jackson tribute show in Las Vegas, hip hop’s Missy Elliott and Korean pop star, Taeyang. An electrifying performer in her own right, Goebel danced with J-Lo on the season 11 finale of American Idol and appeared in the fifth installment of the U.S dance film franchise, Step Up. Earlier this year, Goebel choreographed Nicki Minaj’s PinkPrint tour and a video for Beyoncé.

Her latest venture is Born to Dance, New Zealand’s first hip hop dance film, directed by actor Tammy Davis of Whale Rider and Black Sheep fame from a script by acclaimed Maori writer Hone Kouka, Steve Barr and Casey Whelan. Goebel choreographed the energized dance sequences performed by members of her own Palace Dance Studios, including Tia-Taharoa Maipi making his screen debut as Tu, the film’s dance-mad male lead. Goebel dances herself in one sequence in which she raunchily fronts a female crew that decimates the men in a forward-charge dance battle.

With a pumped up score by Auckland DJ P-Money, Born to Dance had its world premiere at the recent edition of the Toronto International Film Festival which Goebel attended with Maipi and the film’s other male star, Australian/New Zealand recording star Stan Walker, in tow. The sold out screenings were followed by rave reviews in The Hollywood Reporter and Variety, both of which downplayed the pot-boiler plot in favour of the dancing. The latter singled out Goebel for praise, calling Born to Dance “an astonishing Kiwi choreography showcase, the biggest and by far more impressive of its kind to originate Down Under.”

Opening in New Zealand at the end of September where, after four weeks, it topped $1-million at the box office, Born to Dance is looking to get a North American distribution deal following its participation in the American Film Market, Nov. 4 to 11. Meanwhile, Goebel continues to dance in ways that are earning her legions of admirers.

In Toronto, together with Walker and Maipi, she judged a hip hop dance battle featuring students of Jade’s Hip Hop Academy and afterward was besieged by dozens of young dancers wanting to pose with her in fan selfies and get her autograph. Stepping away from the adoring crowd for a quick in-the-street interview, Goebel told me that hip hop dance is not just a series of body locking moves, it’s a communal movement. “And we in New Zealand,” she said, “just happen to be the ones leading it.” Here’s more of that conversation.

Goosebumps the Movie's Meta Monster Story

Ryan Lee, Jack Black, Dylan Minnette, and Odeya Rush in Goosebumps.

This review contains some spoilers for Goosebumps.

Zach Cooper (Dylan Minnette) is hardly thrilled when his recently widowed mother Gale (Amy Ryan) decides she’s moving their two-person family from New York to Madison, Delaware for a job at the local high school. The town is small but charming. Obviously, big city teenager Zach is bored in the ‘burbs – that is, until he meets Hannah (Odeya Rush), the cute girl next door, and her surly and mysterious father (Jack Black). As it turns out, Dad is prolific children’s horror novelist R. L. Stine, famous for penning the Goosebumps stories beloved by real-life 90s kids across the globe. It also so happens that Stine has a dark secret: his fictional monsters are real, brought to life by his supernaturally vivid imagination. To control the herd, Stine keeps his original manuscripts locked in his study until one night, Zach and awkward tag-along buddy, Champ (this is his real name; yes they address how ridiculous that is) accidentally set the monsters loose on the town. Hannah, Zach, Champ and R. L. Stine team up to minimize destruction of the town and put the monsters back where they belong, on paper. I can’t believe I just wrote that sentence.

Failed Experiments: Experimenter and The Stanford Prison Experiment

Peter Sarsgaard as Stanley Milgram in Experimenter: The Stanley Milgram Story.

In May 1961, Stanley Milgram, a psychology professor at Yale University, first paired two randomly chosen subjects, a “teacher” and a “learner,” supposedly to study the effect of punishment on memory. The learner sat in a separate room with wires on his forearm, the teacher at a box equipped with switches set to ascending voltages. The teacher read a series of word matches, and the subject was to repeat random matches from memory. An official-looking man in a lab coat instructed the teacher to administer a shock if the learner was incorrect, and to raise the voltage for each successive error. From the learner’s room, very soon, came cries of pain, pleas for release, and finally silence. Only then was the teacher told that the shocks had been false, the learner an actor, and the experiment a ruse to see if and to what extent ordinary people would inflict pain under orders. Ultimately, 65 percent of the teachers went to the highest shock level, while an even larger number went at least to the “dangerous” level.

Ten years later, Philip Zimbardo, a psychology professor at Stanford University, randomly divided a group of college-age males into “guards” and “prisoners.” A mock prison—three cells, a hallway “yard,” a closet “hole”—was constructed in the bowels of an academic building; the cells were bugged and the hallway surveilled by video. The prisoners were arrested, fingerprinted, taken blindfolded to the prison, stripped, deloused, and dressed in loose smocks sewed with ID numbers. The guards were given opaque sunglasses, matching uniforms, and nightsticks. Within a day, guards had begun to mistreat prisoners verbally and psychologically. Within three days, prisoners were showing signs of extreme stress; two had to be released early. The abuse escalating, Zimbardo shut it all down. A study intended to run two weeks had to be terminated after six days.

By some odd coincidence, the professors who designed and supervised the two most alarming experiments in postwar American psychology were classmates at the same Bronx high school. It’s also coincidence, seemingly, that this year’s Sundance Film Festival hosted the premiers of dramatic films based on both men’s work. The Stanford Prison Experiment was released in July, while Experimenter: The Stanley Milgram Story is just out. Admirably tackling the question posed to filmmakers by any fascinating real-life event—How do I make a movie out of this?—each tries to wrest narrative and metaphor from scientific inquiry, closed environments, and base human tendency. Presumably the releases were staggered to prevent the films from canceling each other out, but their only real overlap is the disturbing nature of the results examined in each. (And, I suppose, those long-ago Bronx classrooms.)

Beasts of No Nation: Sun, Why Do You Shine?

Abraham Attah and Idris Elba in the Netflix original film Beasts of No Nation. (Photo: Shawn Greene/Netflix)

It seems like Beasts of No Nation has been fermenting in Cary Joji Fukunaga’s brain for a long time. Busy until recently with HBO’s True Detective – the second season of which saw him cutting back his involvement from directing to just producing – he has finally had the chance to pursue this project, which he has written, directed, produced, and shot all by himself. That sort of personal dedication speaks to a passionate need to bring this story to life, and that passion is clear in every frame of his harrowing war drama, even if it doesn’t always pay off for the viewer. At least Fukunaga finally got to scratch his itch.

Goodspeed's Musical Capracorn & Verdi’s Shakespeare at the Met

Duke Lafoon (right), with Ella Briggs, in A Wonderful Life at the Goodspeed Opera House. (Photo: Diane Sobolewski)

Considering the unusual kinds of musicals Sheldon Harnick collaborated on with the late Jerry Bock – Fiorello!, Tenderloin, She Loves Me, The Rothschilds and of course Fiddler on the Roof, all complex period shows with evocative settings – his determination to turn It’s a Wonderful Life into a musical is a little puzzling. Frank Capra’s 1946 movie is so well known that most Americans can probably recite whole sections of the screenplay off by heart, which makes you wonder why anyone would bother adapting it in the first place. And for those of us who aren’t seduced by its all-too-familiar charms, the project just seems untenable. The picture, with its Albert Hackett-Frances Goodrich script (the last of several versions that were floated to RKO, including efforts by Clifford Odets and Marc Connelly), may be the most beloved of all Christmas movies – though, famously, it wasn’t a hit on its original release and didn’t attain its legendary status until the Vietnam era – but it’s also certainly the weirdest. The story may have an angel named Clarence striving to earn his wings and Capra’s usual Christian-flavored populist hokum (the whole town of Bedford Falls turns out at the eleventh hour to save their friend George Bailey from bankruptcy and prison), but there’s a bitterness at its core that’s so jarringly at odds with its depiction of the self-sacrificing hero as to be pathological. Capra crafts sequences of horror and despair that linger in the mind longer after you’ve digested the treacly happy ending, like the one where the alcoholic druggist George works for in his boyhood mixes a lethal medicine by accident for one of his patients (George prevents him from sending it out) or the climactic episode in which Clarence shows George, who’s about to commit suicide, what a cold, heartless town Bedford Falls would have been had he never been born. And in his best scenes Jimmy Stewart gets so deep into George’s anger and disappointment and misery at the way life has cheated him that the upbeat finale simply isn’t convincing.

Not Quite: Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven

Novelist Emily St. John Mandel. (Photo by Dese'Rae L. Stage)

Though it won the prestigious 2015 Arthur C. Clarke award, for best science fiction novel published in the United Kingdom in the previous year, as well as this year’s Toronto Book Award, Emily St. John Mandel, author of the dystopian novel Station Eleven, resists her novel being classified as SF. Her reply when it was nominated for the U.S. National Book Award late last year, and referenced as one of the few SF novels so honoured, was to tweet, “I actually don't think of Station Eleven as sci-fi, but am fully prepared to concede that I may be alone in this...”. One reason given by her for this view is that it didn’t contain futuristic technology. As it’s set in the near future, I can’t imagine why it would. Besides, I’m not sure how you would classify a book about our world after it has been almost completely decimated by a plague, as anything but science fiction, but even if you didn’t, Station Eleven, for all its many virtues, falls flat as fully satisfying literature or, for that matter, as successful science fiction.

The Second Mother: Discovery

Camila Márdila and Regina Casé in The Second Mother, directed by Anna Muylaert.

The Brazilian film The Second Mother (Que Horas Ela Volta?), about how the relationship of a long-time live-in domestic and her employers changes when her college-age daughter comes to live with her, is a quiet and unobtrusive piece of pure naturalism. The writer-director, Anna Muylaert, barely seems to impose a style of her own on the material, an unconventional comedy of manners, but the quality of her observations is uncannily shrewd, and the movie’s treatment of the subjects of class and family is trenchant. The setting is São Paulo, where Val (Regina Casé) has worked for thirteen years as housekeeper for a high-powered socialite, Bárbara (Karine Teles), and her retiring artist husband Carlos (Laurenço Mutarelli) and nanny for their son Fabinho (Michel Joelsas). Val is devoted to the family – especially to Fabinho, who is around eighteen but still likes to be treated (by Val, if by no one else) like a little boy, coddled and cradled in her arms; he sometimes steals into her bedroom at night to sleep there. (She protects him, sometimes even from his parents: when his mother finds his stash of weed and voices her concern that he’s getting high too often, he denies it’s his, so Bárbara tosses it in the garbage. Val retrieves it and returns it to Fabinho on the sly.) Bárbara pays Val well, and she’s convinced that she and Carlos treat her like one of the family, and Val likes to think so too. But we can see the limits of her sensitivity: when Val gives her a coffee set for her birthday, Bárbara makes a show about saving it for a special occasion, but when Val tries to incorporate it into her employer’s birthday party, Bárbara gets annoyed. This is a remarkably layered episode – we note Val’s generosity in using her money to buy a gift for her and the implication that she thinks of Bárbara as more than just her boss, but when she takes Bárbara at her word she’s clearly crossing an invisible social line. Usually Val doesn’t make this kind of mistake: she treats both her employers with grateful deference. And Muylaert refuses to score easy points against them. When Val’s daughter Jéssica (Camilla Márdila) shows up in São Paulo to take her college entrance exams and asks if she can stay with her, at least until she gets settled, Bárbara agrees without hesitation, though she comes to regret it almost immediately.

Cheesy Kids' Stuff: The Danny Kaye Show

Danny Kaye and Mary Tyler Moore on The Danny Kaye Show.

In a time as besotted as ours with pop culture nostalgia, when people with a hundred years' worth of recorded entertainment available at their fingertips insist that anything they liked as kids is a "classic" and regard anything outside their generational frame of reference as a likely source of camp hilarity, it's hard not to find it fascinating whenever any performer once regarded as a big deal sinks out of view and doesn't bob back to the surface within six months. What's Goonies and Grease 2 got that George Raft doesn't? (Don't answer that.) Consider the case of Danny Kaye. When Kaye died, less than thirty years ago, there was a whole generation that knew him, if they knew him at all, as a faded children's entertainer. Kaye's movie career was over by 1970, but in the mid-'70s, he co-starred in a couple of TV musicals, playing Geppetto to Sandy Duncan's Pinocchio and Captain Hook to Mia Farrow's Peter Pan. They felt like an extension of his ubiquitous work promoting UNICEF, the international children's charity that had tapped him as its Goodwill Ambassador back in 1954.

A Nightmare of Storytelling: Rodney Ascher’s The Nightmare

I have this vivid recollection of a dream I had when I was probably 6 or 7. It was sometime before my parents separated and I was sleeping in my first-ever bedroom with the pink wallpaper and the unicorn lamp someone painted for me. As a kid, I watched a lot of reruns of Adam West's Batman after school. One night, I had a dream that Batman had died and we were holding a funeral for him in my living room. I was barred from attending but I crept down the stairs from my bedroom in the dream, as kids do, and watched the funeral from the stairs. Julie Newmar’s Catwoman was crying next to the casket; Burt Ward’s Robin looked lost; my grandparents were, for some reason, devastated. Suddenly, someone kicked the front door down. It was the Purple Man, in the first of his many appearances in my childhood dreams, and he was pointing a gun. He looked a lot like Rorschach from Watchmen, before I even knew what a Rorschach was. In a later dream, he turned out to be my dad. Riddle me that; I still don’t know what it means.

Did you find that story boring? Were you indifferent and wondering how it was relevant to this review? Perfect. Now imagine hearing about it for 91 minutes.

The sad truth is that no one wants to hear about your dreams unless they’re being paid and Netlfix’s newly-added horror documentary, The Nightmare, illustrates this fact well. The latest from director Rodney Ascher, The Nightmare tells the story of eight people who suffer from sleep paralysis and the eerily similar nightmares they’ve independently converged on. Sleep paralysis is a bizarre phenomenon that renders one unable to move or speak during the transitional periods between sleeping and waking. It’s often accompanied by vivid and disturbing nightmares. The medical and scientific hypotheses surrounding sleep paralysis are fascinating but you won’t find them here. In fact, it’s almost 25 minutes into The Nightmare before anyone mentions sleep paralysis at all.

Adieu, Sylvie

Sylvie Guillem performing Technê in Life in Progress, at London's Sadler's Wells Theatre. (Photo: Bill Cooper)

As a seasoned dance critic and author of a history of the ballerina, I am often asked who my favourite dancer is. I never hesitate. The answer is Sylvie Guillem. I saw the goddess of the dance perform in a full-length ballet only once, in 1990 when the Paris-born ballerina was at the peak of her powers. But it was the kind of experience I needed to have only once to know that Guillem was the era’s supreme objet d’art.

The ballet in question was Don Quixote which Guillem’s mentor, the great Rudolf Nureyev, had staged for the Paris Opera using original choreography by Marius Petipa. Guillem was Kitri, the feisty female lead whose elegantly assured dancing is peppered with intricate pointe work, lightening quick jumps and whipping wrists that flutter a fan. Guillem danced the role as if she were born to it, sparking thunderous applause and a standing ovation for herself and her partner, Patrick Dupond.

Nureyev had invited me to this performance and insisted I meet him backstage so he could introduce me to his protégée. I remember that the spitfire I had watched in amazement only moments ago looked shy and retiring in Nureyev’s presence. Clasping her willowy arms behind the back of her tutu and shifting her weight back and forth in satin toe shoes scuffed and bruised from almost two hours of non-stop dancing, she waited anxiously behind-the-scenes to hear what Nureyev had to say.

The Russian devilishly bided his time, letting her squirm. After Nureyev had made her France’s top-ranking dancer, raising her to the position of étoile, the Paris Opera Ballet’s highest position, when she was just 19 years old, Guillem had a year earlier decamped to the Royal Ballet in London to become a principal guest artist. While Nureyev had obviously gotten over his feelings of betrayal, inviting Guillem back to dance in his ballet, he still wanted her to know who was boss.

Her fans crowed around her and she smiled at them but was clearly distracted. Her eyes were always on Nureyev. When he finally but slowly walked up to her everyone went silent. Grabbing hold of her pale hands, he looked Guillem in the eyes and declared in a voice that was barely above a whisper that she had been magnifique. You could feel the nervous tension rushing out of her in an exhalation of relief. She had been great, but she would believe it only when said from on top.

This Job’ll Kill Ya: Cooties

Elijah Wood fending off a zombie child in Cooties.

A lot was riding on Cooties for me. I’m sure I’m not alone in being good and done with the zombie horror craze, so when I heard about the conceit of this latest effort, I thought, ok, this is it. This is the last twist on the genre that hasn’t been done yet. I’m willing to give it the benefit of the doubt on the strength of its bonkers premise alone. It really is an incredible idea for a zombie film: a batch of contaminated chicken nuggets transmits a virus to schoolchildren that turns them into murderous, flesh-hungry fiends, and a group of teachers must band together to survive and escape. Amazing! The mind boggles at why the world of horror comedy hasn’t taken a crack at this already, except that it’s only in recent years that the distribution platforms exist to push something this outwardly “offensive” through into theatres and homes as an independent, niche genre film, rather than having to try and convince a studio to bankroll it – or to have it die a slow death running in seedy midnight movie circles.

Cumberbatch’s Hamlet

Benedict Cumberbatch in Hamlet, at London's Barbican Theatre. (Photo: Catherine Ashmore)

Tickets went on sale for Benedict Cumberbatch’s Hamlet a year before it opened at the Barbican, and sold out faster than any play in London theatre history. Cumberbatch’s formidable success on British TV – and world-wide – as a twenty-first-century Holmes in Sherlock has made him fantastically popular, but he’s not just the actor’s equivalent of a rock star; he’s a magnificent performer, in apparently every medium. (The best of his film work has been biographical: as Julian Assange in The Fifth Estate and as Alan Turing in The Imitation Game.) The production of Hamlet in which he’s been starring kicked off this season’s NT Live series yesterday, and it’s no doubt the series’ major draw.

A Female Spy at the Heart of the Third Reich

Author Jane Thynne.

This review contains some spoilers for Jane Thynne's A Winter Garden and The Scent of Secrets.
 
Over a month ago at the Berlin airport, I picked up a copy of the novel, A Winter Garden (Simon & Schuster, 2014) by Jane Thynne, an author with whom I was not familiar. I was most interested in finding out whether she had anything new to say about the deeply-lined runes of the Third Reich. Apart from a few academic studies that Thynne acknowledges, I do not recall any novelist that explores as she does the intensity of Nazi misogyny and contempt for women. When I finished it, I ordered the next book in the series, The Scent of Secrets (Doubleday Canada, 2015). In the UK, the same novel is published with the title, A War of Flowers. Unfortunately, the cover of The Scent of Secrets is almost identical to that of A Winter Garden. On the plus side, either Thynne or her publishers made the astute decision to hook the reader by publishing the prelude and chapter of the subsequent entry in the last few pages of the book. She succeeded with me.

Neglected Gem #84: Our Song (2001)

Melissa Martinez, Anna Simpson and Kerry Washington in Our Song (2001).

Our Song is a small, sweet picture about three teenage African-American girls in Crown Heights – best of friends dealing with the vicissitudes of adolescence exacerbated by the special challenges of a poor neighborhood. Lanisha (Kerry Washington, at the very beginning of her acting career) lives with her Spanish mom (Marlene Forte); her dad (Raymond Anthony Thomas) is a loving and well-meaning man who, in her mother’s words, lacks follow-through, and that’s the reason they split up, though they’ve remained friends. Lanisha has a boyfriend (Tommy Axson) but he isn’t around much, and lately he’s floated the idea that they see other people. Maria (Melissa Martinez) has a more serious problem: she’s just learned she’s pregnant, and she’s afraid to say anything to her mother (Carmen López), a no-nonsense woman who thinks her daughter should concentrate on getting a decent job. Joycelyn (Anna Simpson) is a restless, dreamy girl who works in a clothing store and has it in her head to manage her own someday – if her number one agenda, to become a star, doesn’t pan out.

Crazy Fun: Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

Rachel Bloom and the West Covina marching band in Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, on The CW.

This winter, ABC premiered a medieval musical comedy spoof called Galavant. Galavant tells the story of Sir Galavant (Joshua Sasse), a washed-up knight who fell off the hero wagon after his beloved Madelena (Mallory Jansen) is stolen from him by an evil king. Each episode boasted original songs and an ensemble cast clearly having the time of their on-screen lives. Add in a few insidiously catchy tunes (penned by Tangled songwriters Alan Menken and Glenn Slater), a regular sprinkling of anachronistic Yiddish, a few pointed Game of Thrones shout-outs, and several happy inversions of fairy tale tropes (including a damsel-in-distress who, as a song lyric put it, tilts "pretty sharply bitchward" as the season progresses), and you have one of the 2015's most underseen delights. Its plots were breezy and largely without consequence – pure candy perhaps, but in the best sense. Galavant's first season also included some of this year's most surprising – and often equally unrecognizable – cameo appearances: including the incomparable Anthony Head, "Weird Al" Yankovic, Ricky Gervais, Hugh Bonneville, Rutger Hauer, and even John Stamos (as a rival knight named Sir Jean Hamm, a one-off joke that I kept waiting to land but somehow never quite did). But the biggest surprise was yet to come: in May, ABC renewed the musical series for a second season. Not being a cross-platform, money-making juggernaut like Glee, the straight-ahead juvenile fun of Galavant seemed destined from the start to be a single season curiosity; ABC aired its 8 episodes two-a-night in January and the whole season barely clocked in at 3 hours in total, giving it the feel of a slightly too-long feature musical. In this era of so-called Peak TV, where it seems that practically everything gets made but very few shows live long enough to tell their tale, I am grateful and still not a little bit shocked that Galavant will be returning to prime time this coming January. But now it may turn out that Galavant's renewal was just the first wave of a trend. This Monday, The CW premiered Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, a musical series that is easily the most refreshing new show is this still rather underwhelming fall television season.

Checking Out “Checking In” – The Season Premiere of American Horror Story: Hotel

Last Wednesday, creators Brad Falchuk and Ryan Murphy checked us into the fifth season of their anthology horror series, American Horror Story, with a gore-packed hour-long premiere. The episode, aptly titled “Checking In,” introduces us to this season’s setting of The Cortez Hotel and an assortment of bizarre and fascinating key players. Like the previous installments of American Horror Story, the fifth season (subtitled Hotel) tells a new, self-contained story with many familiar faces stepping into fresh characters. Falchuk and Murphy have hinted that American Horror Story: Hotel will be the season that ties American Horror Story’s previous story arcs together at last into one cohesive (and undoubtedly messed up) narrative through the use of flashbacks and crossover characters. Whether it does indeed all come together or not remains to be seen, but Hotel’s return to the present day Los Angeles from season one’s Murder House storyline certainly bodes well for fans looking for closure. As a fan looking mostly for fun, the episode's gorgeous setting and wild performances bode well for me too.

The Castle of Del Toro: Crimson Peak

Jessica Chastain in Guillermo Del Toro’s Crimson Peak.

Like the work of many artists, Guillermo Del Toro’s films are an amalgamation of his many different influences: from the eye-catching visuals and mythic storytelling of the comic book world to the heightened melodrama of Spanish literature and film, both of which deeply informed his upbringing in Mexico. His love of classic horror is clear too – he vibrates to the cerebral angst of Lovecraft, when he’s not referencing the Gothic staples of Shelley and Stoker. Crimson Peak is all of these, a Gothic horror romance come screaming to life with all the repressed sexual anxiety of the Victorian era and a lavish modern sheen. They (read: everyone except Del Toro) simply don’t make them like this anymore.

A New Look at Erroll Garner's Concert By The Sea

Erroll Garner at the piano, 1946. (Photo by William P. Gottlieb, courtesy of Library of Congress.)

On September 19, 1955 Erroll Garner and his trio were booked to play the auditorium at the Sunset Center in Carmel, California. The gig included bassist Eddie Calhoun and drummer Denzil DeCosta Best. It paid a guaranteed $650 plus sixty cents “privilege of net receipts.” The band was scheduled to play two sets between 8:30 and 11pm. At first glance the contract was just another gig in the life of Erroll Garner, one of the best and most-beloved jazz pianists of his era who travelled and performed regularly during the fifties in between recording dates for his label at the time, Columbia Records. A year earlier, Garner recorded his biggest hit “Misty” which put his name and music into the mainstream.

The Method Meets Stand-Up: Lily Tomlin in The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe

Lily Tomlin (as Trudy the bag lady) in the film version of The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe (1991).

Though it has often been the case that actors celebrated for their work on the stage are replaced in the film adaptations by established movie stars, there’s a long and respectable history of great stage actors who have recreated their signature performances on the screen; it goes back at least to Walter Huston in Dodsworth (1936), if not even farther. Often it denotes pedigree in the eyes of Oscar voters: sixteen women and men have won Academy Awards for performances they originated on the stage.* In the case of actors who have an instinctual sense for the camera, the work may deepen on film: I suspect that was the case with Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire, and I know from personal experience that it was true of Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl, Stockard Channing in Six Degrees of Separation and Lily Tomlin in The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, the one-woman show Jane Wagner wrote for her in 1985 and John Bailey filmed in 1991, in which she plays a dozen different characters. When Tomlin opened it on Broadway theatre critics searched for new superlatives to describe her performance; she had a triumphant national tour with it afterwards, and it was the subject of a PBS documentary. I saw it in Boston prior to the New York opening, and I was mesmerized by her invention, by her emotional range, and by the physical commitment. It was a Saturday night, and she still had a second evening show to give, but she moved as if she’d been shot out of a cannon, and the level of energy never lessened – she even did handstands. It was one of the most amazing performances I’ve ever seen on a stage, and it was even greater on screen, yet the critical reception it got was merely respectful and no one turned out to see it. Perhaps a movie of a one-person show – especially one that acknowledges its stage origins (though one can hardly envision a movie version of a one-person show that didn’t) – is easy to dismiss as a kind of second-hand special event, though in fact Bailey, a cinematographer making his directorial debut, developed a real concept that altered the stage play while paradoxically preserving it at the same time. Perhaps the ideal audience for this sort of entertainment had mostly seen it on stage or caught excerpts on PBS and didn’t bother checking it out at the movies. Or perhaps the show had been touted so loudly and so long when Tomlin was performing it live that it already felt old hat by the time it came out on film.