Two Movie Movies: The Martian and Shanghai

Matt Damon in Ridley Scott's The Martian.

Ridley Scott has a reputation for making engrossing large-scale entertainments, but most of his movies are somber and bloated in almost equal parts. The somberness seems to be a pass at seriousness, but movies like Gladiator, American Gangster and Prometheus are humorless blockbusters that substitute layers of mass for layers of meaning. (At least his last, Exodus: Gods and Kings, had John Turturro camping it up Old Testament drag as Pharoah Seti, but the film killed him off early, Joel Edgerton inherited the throne, and any chance at fun went out the window.) Only occasionally does Scott turn out something I care about. Black Hawk Down is a conventional war picture but visceral and affecting; A Good Year, which got little attention, is a vivifying, sun-drenched comedy about an investment broker who inherits a vineyard in Provence and recalibrates his misdirected life. A Good Year is in the mold of the marvelous early-eighties Bill Forsyth movie Local Hero, where a corporate type sent by his Houston-based company to purchase an island off the Scottish coast falls in love with it, and Russell Crowe, as the main character, is supple and animated (his performance in Gladiator was paralytic); he seems turned on by both the bronzed light and all the beautiful women Scott has surrounded him with. Sensuality isn’t generally Scott’s forte, so you keep pinching yourself – and he’s done nothing remotely like it since. (It sank at the box office.) And I had a terrific time at The Martian, Scott’s latest, based on the Andy Weir bestseller about an astronaut on an exploratory trip to Mars (played by Matt Damon) whose crew abandons him on the mistaken assumption that he’s been killed in the sudden storm that leads NASA to abort the mission and send them back into space.

Southern Charm: Aziz Ansari's Master of None

Aziz Ansari and Noël Wells in Netflix's Masters of None.

There are a long list of reasons why you should check out Aziz Ansari's new Netflix original series, Master of None. In addition to its patient and low-key storytelling, the comedy also offers a host of charming and genuinely human characters, refreshing and pointed takes on race, identity, and gender, not to mention some very funny things to say about texting. But the best reason why Master of None is en route to become the sleeper comedy hit of this fall television is Aziz Ansari himself.

MTV’s Catfish Might be Fake and I Don’t Care

Machine Gun Kelly, Nev Shulman, and Hundra in a recent episode of MTV's Catfish: The TV Show.

November: the days are shorter, the nights are colder, and, especially for those of us who pay our bills by working retail, life gets a little bit more stressful as the December holiday season rapidly approaches. At the end of the work day, when my brain has inevitably turned to mush, sometimes bad reality TV is the only thing that speaks to me. We all have our vices. On one such occasion this week, I threw caution to the wind and indulged in my pet favourite garbage television show: MTV’s Catfish: The TV Show. I regret nothing.

Rock x 3: New Albums from The Sheepdogs, Los Lobos, and Keith Richards

Future Nostalgia (Warner), The Sheepdogs new album, could be considered classic rock for the 21st Century. It’s an album that has borrowed the template of classic Seventies rock music and re-fashioned it for a new audience. All the elements of Seventies music are on Future Nostalgia, minus the dread power-ballads. The Sheepdogs have written an album close to their musical hearts: a hybrid of Southern rock and Canadian mainstream rock once served by groups such as April Wine and The Guess Who.

Future Nostalgia launches with "I'm Gonna Be Myself," a song destined to express the freedom with which this band operates artistically. It's a healthy attitude uninhibited by corporate and critical expectations. Remember when this band appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine? They hit the mainstream rock audience with the five-track EP, Five Easy Pieces, released in 2011. At that time the band made frequent appearances on television (Late Night with Jimmy Fallon) and opened for Kings of Leon on their 2011 tour across North America. The following year they made a strong appearance at the South By South West (SXSW) music festival in the spring and released their third full-length album by the end of the summer. In 2012, the band won three Juno Awards including Best New Group and they even played the roof of the CBC Broadcast Centre in Toronto.

Back To Basics: SPECTRE

Daniel Craig as James Bond in SPECTRE.

This review contains spoilers for SPECTRE.
 
SPECTRE is not a great Bond film. It’s a decent standalone spy thriller, but that’s too charitable, as no Bond film exists in a vacuum. As the newest and “freshest” installment in Daniel Craig’s run as 007, it’s strangely discordant and slow. It discards nearly all of the audience goodwill and story momentum generated by Craig’s energetic reboot of the character, content to hit all the expected notes and attempt nothing new or challenging with the character or his world. It feels regressive, rather than classic – the most like an Old Bond movie of any of the Craig entries, but in all the worst ways.

Dada Woof Papa Hot: Gay Men, Married with Children

John Benjamin Hickey and Patrick Breen in Dada Woof Papa Hot. (Photo by Joan Marcus)

New plays deal so infrequently with the tensions of contemporary American life in any way that might be called complex that Peter Parnell’s Dada Woof Papa Hot, which is being given a fine production under Scott Ellis’ direction at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, makes you sit up a little straighter in your seat. I don’t want to overpraise this play and set up grandiose expectations: it’s small-scale and in a more exciting theatrical scene for new work, its intelligence and sensibility would be laudable but not extraordinary. But nowadays a new play in which the characters are well drawn and clearly differentiated by their dialogue, the themes are not only developed but dramatized, the point of view is fresh and the observation of human behavior is witty as well as precise really does seem extraordinary. I decided to check out the play because the selection committee at LCT seems to do a better job than that of any other theatre in Manhattan (both When the Rain Stops Falling and Blood and Gifts had their American premieres there) and because – having had no previous exposure to Parnell’s plays aside from his unfortunate rewrite of the already unfortunate book of the Alan Jay Lerner-Burton Lane musical On a Clear Day You Can See Forever in 2012 – I was curious. (The play he’s known for, QED, was a one-man piece that starred Alan Alda; LCT produced it following its run at the Mark Taper Forum.)

A ‘Feminist’ Fraud: Amy Schumer’s Trainwreck

Amy Schumer and Bill Hader in Trainwreck.

I must confess I hadn’t been familiar with standup comic Amy Schumer’s work before I saw her starring role in the Judd Apatow directed Trainwreck. Having seen this mediocre, forgettable movie, I can now say I don’t think I’ve missed much.

Buffy Sainte-Marie: She's Still Rocking!

Buffy Sainte-Marie's 18th album, Power in the Blood, was released in May. (Photo by David Gahr, 1960)

What can you say about Buffy Sainte-Marie? She appeared on the American game show To Tell the Truth in January 1966. Panelists Tom Poston, Peggy Cass, Orson Bean and Kitty Carlisle questioned the three contestants for ten minutes and guessed which one was the real Buffy Sainte-Marie. The questions were a bit insipid. “Do you have any musical training?” “Are there any more Indian singers?” “Where does Joan Baez live?” When they voted, Bud Collyer asked the panel to “Mark [their] wigwams.” Mr. Bean actually drew a cartoon war bonnet on his numeral 3. They were different times. I remember watching the show when it first played, and you can still watch it on YouTube. The best part is when Buffy does “Goin’ Up to Cripple Creek” accompanying herself on mouthbow, and then she picks up her guitar and sings “Until It’s Time For You To Go.”

Podcast: Interview with Scott Young (1984)

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show On the Arts, at CJRT-FM (today Jazz 91.1) 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. 

One of those interviews was with Canadian journalist, sportswriter, and novelist Scott Young (1918-2005). Along with publishing over 45 books in his lifetime, he was also the father of musician Neil Young. In 1984, McClelland and Stewart published his memoir, Neil And Me. I sat down with Scott Young to talk about the book, his life, and his famous son around the time of the book's publication. Often, as readers, we're used to devouring memoirs by the sons and daughters of famous people where they assess the legacy that parents leave their children. With Neil And Me, the reverse takes place, as a father takes stock of the famous son he helped raise with the added bonus of trying to glean from his songs when and where he might be a character within them.

– Kevin Courrier.

Here is the full interview with Scott Young as it aired on CJRT in 1984.

Tom Fulton was the host and producer of On the Arts for CJRT-FM in Toronto for 23 years, beginning in 1975.
 

Kevin Courrier is a freelance writer/broadcaster, film critic and author (Dangerous Kitchen: The Subversive World of Zappa, Randy Newman's American Dreams, 33 1/3 Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica, Artificial Paradise: The Dark Side of The Beatles Utopian Dream). Courrier teaches part-time film courses to seniors through the LIFE Institute at Ryerson University in Toronto and other venues. His forthcoming book is Reflections in the Hall of Mirrors: American Movies and the Politics of Idealism.  

Rebels With a Cause: Sarah Gavron’s Suffragette

Carey Mulligan in Suffragette.

Suffragette’s setting of 1912 East London is a strange paradox. Sarah Gavron’s film takes pains to distance itself from being a stuffy period drama; the action is so real and filmed in such a way that were it not for the bustles and fancy hats, the story could be taking place today. On the other hand, the political environment it showcases is so shockingly archaic that one can hardly believe it was just over a hundred years ago. Poverty is rampant. Working conditions are abject. Women are overworked, abused, and voiceless. More specifically, British women in 1912 are unable to vote. As iconic Suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst (played by iconic actress Meryl Streep) reminds them in the film, peaceful demonstrations in the name of “votes for women” have gone nowhere prior to 1912. Suffragette tells the story of a band of women who recognize this and, like many other women at the time who were longing for a better life, turn to civil disobedience in the pursuit of equality.

Something in the Way It Moves: The Restored Manos

The Master (Tom Neyman) in the newly restored Manos: The Hands of Fate.

Like most people, I knew nothing before January 30, 1993, of a low-budget, no-talent horror movie shot in 1966 by Texas insurance salesman Hal Warren. That’s when Mystery Science Theatre 3000 plucked Manos: The Hands of Fate from its obscurity for a ritual roasting, with astral exile Joel Hodgson and his mechanical sidekicks Servo and Crow T. Robot tossing barbs from the silhouetted theater seats of their spaceship prison, the Satellite of Love. Though fondly recalled by fans, it was a good-but-not-great MST3K episode. The premise of Manos was familiar—a Middle American family on vacation wander off the main road and drive straight to the hell house of a prairie cult—but everything about it, from the dialogue to the framing to the narcoleptic acting, was so hopelessly, unamusingly off that even these cleverest of cosmo-hecklers never quite found the funny zone. (The best joke came early: “What are we, about a half-hour into this movie?” “I’m afraid it’s more like a minute.”)

Walking The Path – The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

Writing a review of the phenomenon that is CD Projekt Red’s The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is a daunting task. How would you judge a film that took five months to watch, or a book you kept reading for hundreds of hours? How do you evaluate the success of a story that changes as you experience it, whose peaks and pitfalls are of your own making? The simple answer is: I don't. There's no question that The Witcher 3 was a wild runaway success, not just in terms of worldwide sales, but for me, personally, as one of the best gaming experiences I've ever had (and one which, thanks to the recently-released expansion, I'm still having). After such a period of time, I find it gratifying – and somewhat relieving – to finally have the chance to reflect on what it is that this game does to earn such dedication from me.

Nut Cases: Rear Window and Choice

McKinley Belcher III and Kevin Bacon in Rear Window at Connecticut's Hartford Stage.

Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 Rear Window is gripping and playful in equal parts. It puts us solidly on the side of a voyeur, “Jeff” Jefferies (Jimmy Stewart), who – amusing himself while laid up with a broken leg by peering at his neighbors across the courtyard through a pair of binoculars – determines that one of them (Raymond Burr) has murdered his wife and disposed of the body somehow, and nearly gets himself and his girlfriend Lisa (Grace Kelly) killed trying to uncover the evidence. Jeff and Lisa and Jeff’s part-time nurse Stella (Thelma Ritter) follow the lives of the people across the way, watching them as if they were characters in a play. The set design by Joseph McMillan Johnson and Hal Pereira is like an advent calendar revealing the honeymooners, the quarreling couple, the struggling songwriter, the perky, exercising young woman with a raft of suitors, and Jeff’s favorite, an increasingly desperate spinster whom he nicknames Miss Lonelyhearts. So it’s easy to see why a playwright might want to convert the ingenious John Michael Hayes script (out of a Cornell Woolrich short story) into an actual stage play.

Hail to the King: Ash vs. Evil Dead

Bruce Campbell (centre), with Ray Santiago and Dana Delorenzo, in Starz's Ash vs. Evil Dead.

“They're comin' in… and it ain't for Shabbos dinner.”

                  – Ash, in the premiere episode of Ash vs. Evil Dead.

Full disclosure: I began thinking about this piece months ago, right after the trailer for Starz's Ash vs. Evil Dead dropped in July. That trailer appeared at roughly the same time as the one for ABC's The Muppets, and both generated in me a bittersweet mixture of celebration and melancholy – because it turns out that before something can make you feel young again, first you have to be involuntarily reminded to feel old. The year was 1988 and, still a pup of 17 years, I had just arrived at college. My very new friend (and currently now one of my oldest) held up an already-battered video copy of Evil Dead II and soundly declared it to be the best movie he'd ever seen. The film had been in theatres the year before, but I had never heard of it. Perhaps it hadn't ever made its way up to Montreal, but even if it had, I doubt I would have gone to see it. Even as a teenager I was already a pop culture purist – how could I see a sequel before I'd seen the original? Most damningly, it was obviously a horror film, and, 80s monster romps like Gremlins and Critters notwithstanding, gore had never been my taste. (It still isn't.) Matt made a compelling case however, and I grudgingly sat down to watch it. My aesthetic sensibilities have never been the same.

Evil Dead II – with its low-budget special effects, over-the-top acting and cheesy dialogue, and Three Stooges meets Japanese horror movie qualities – was a revelation. For years I believed it to be the epitome of low culture perfection: it knew exactly what it wanted to be and it achieved it with a style and energy all its own. Cartoonishly gory as it was (the Evil Dead films are more Monty Python than Eli Roth in their use of blood), it awakened me forever to the unadulterated pleasures of gleeful camp and ironic self-awareness. (As a young man with creative ambitions of my own, I long felt a deep envy for Sam Raimi and company at what they'd accomplished so early in their respective careers.) Almost 30 years later, Evil Dead II still sits atop my list of favourite films of all time. I've rewatched it more than practically any movie, even Night of the Hunter (1955) which until recently I would screen almost every Halloween eve. That first viewing also set me off on a three-decade Sam Raimi/Bruce Campbell habit – both of whom thankfully have had remarkable and entertaining careers in the interval, even excluding their collaboration on the third Evil Dead film, 1992's Army of Darkness. Raimi would later helm such mainstream Hollywood successes like 1998's A Simple Plan and the rebooted Spider-Man films, and Campbell would make a healthy living harnessing the hammy energy he perfected as Ash in the Evil Dead movies. With equal enthusiasm, I would tune in to Bruce in his recurring role as Autolycus in the Sam Raimi/Rob Tapert-produced TV series of the 90s, Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess; to his title roles in single-season wonders like Fox's The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. and the tragically underseen Revolution-era romp Jack of All Trades (which Tapert produced on the heels of Xena); and his more recent co-starring turn on Burn Notice – not to mention some B-movie gems like the Elvis-themed zombie film Bubba Ho-Tep (2002). And last night, with the premiere of Ash vs. Evil Dead on Starz, I sat down to watch our one-handed working class hero return to fight off evil with smarmy comments and a chainsaw. Fortunately, the whole gang returns with him – and it looks like we are in for one heckuva ride.

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.