Love, Fire and Misty: Ratmansky at the Met

Misty Copeland in Alexei Ratmansky’s Firebird, at New York's Metropolitan Opera House. (Photo: Andrea Mohin)

Misty Copeland, the most popular ballerina in the land right now, and one of only a handful to have become a household name even among non-balletomanes, reprised her lead role in Firebird at The Metropolitan Opera House in New York last week. True to her billing, she burned up the stage. Dressed in a cherry bomb red unitard and a plumed headdress of different coloured feathers, Copeland attacked Alexei Ratmansky’s incisive choreography with an incendiary technique that propelled the dancer forward through a series of searing shapes that electrified the imagination. Partnered by the wonderfully assured and attentive Marcelo Gomes, Copeland’s explosive performance flew upwards on air-borne jumps and galvanic leaps that seemed as supernatural as the magical bird at the heart of this most vivid retelling of the Russian fairy tale. Her percussive pointe work pecked and pawed and her expressive porte de bras fluttered and unfurled in an amazing display of bodily acting that brought the mythical creature to life.

Off the Shelf: Bruce Cockburn's Inner City Front (1981)

Bruce Cockburn, 1972. (Photo: Ron Bull)

In 1970, Bruce Cockburn had launched his first solo album. On it, he happily celebrated the virtues of rural life. In the years to follow, as his records evolved, he even began to introduce jazz (Night Vision) and reggae rhythms (Dancing in the Dragon's Jaws). On his album covers, Cockburn was occasionally seen perched under a tree with his acoustic guitar and surrounded by a gentle sprinkling of snow, or maybe next to a warm fireplace, as he was on his third album, Sunwheel Dance. His songs were both poetic and spiritual – at times, even mystical – as he discovered Christianity, yet they were continuously evocative and sly glimmers of quiet intelligence sparkled through the lyrics. Until 1980, Bruce Cockburn seemed happy to continue personifying the quiet comforts of Canada’s untamed landscape. But then, one day…. he moved to Toronto. After some personal changes in his life, including a divorce, Bruce Cockburn came to the city and his music was transformed dramatically with a record called Inner City Front – the first album he’d produce himself. It was a full-out electric record featuring a full band rather than just some guest musicians. The music within the grooves of Inner City Front was also a hybrid of rock, jazz, electronica and reggae. There was only one ballad – and it was right at the end of the record. Inner City Front had signalled a shift in the life and art of one of Canada’s most original and gifted performers. And the album would provide the groundwork for many of the sophisticated pop songs that Bruce Cockburn would record during the Eighties.

Mate or Die: Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Lobster

Jessica Barden and Colin Farrell in The Lobster.

LOBSTER: A clawed crustacean of the order Decapoda and family Nephropidae. Characterized by muscular tails and large front claws, lobsters have been known to live upwards of 70 years due to their unusual expression of the DNA-repairing enzyme, telomerase, into their adult lives. Widely consumed as seafood.

THE LOBSTER: Not to be confused with an actual lobster (although they share some similarities, namely their astonishing longevity), The Lobster is the English-language feature debut of Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos (Dogtooth, Alps). The dystopian dark comedy was filmed in Ireland and co-produced by companies in Ireland, Greece, France, the Netherlands, and the UK. With an incredible score borrowed from the likes of Beethoven, Stravinsky, and Shostakovich, it is consumed selectively by small audiences with a taste for absurdity and cultural criticism.

Critic's Notes and Frames Vol. XVIII

Looking as androgynous and funky as Little Richard in Jimi Hendrix's duds, Prince wrote music that was sexually charged, playfully lewd and enthusiastically impudent. In other words, he was precisely the tonic the Eighties needed. "Prince is bad," Johnny 'Guitar' Watson once remarked. "It's like seeing Sly [Stone], James Brown and Jimi Hendrix all at once." Right at a time when sex was again becoming a mortal sin, Prince turned sex into a quest for salvation. His album, Dirty Mind (1980), was a blissfully torrid celebration of eroticism. His band, both racially and sexually integrated, was supercharged, just as Sly & the Family Stone had been before them. Also like Sly, Prince mixed musical genres which caused mass confusion at radio stations that couldn't decide whether he was R&B or rock. By the time his third album, 1999, came out in 1982, however, it didn't seem to matter. The infectiously coy "Little Red Corvette" shot into the American Top 10. Thanks to MTV and the video culture it bred, Prince became the first black crossover artist (along with Michael Jackson) to help broaden the network's musical palette.

At the height of his success in 1984, Prince made his movie debut in the R-rated Purple Rain. James Dean had made his astonishing debut in East of Eden almost thirty years earlier, playing a misunderstood loner. Prince (calling himself 'the Kid'), followed the same pattern, portraying a moody, struggling artist. Purple Rain mythologized his status in the pop world, and one song from its soundtrack ("Darling Nikki") generated the type of controversy that captured the attention of Mary Elizabeth 'Tipper' Gore. She was so horrified when her young daughter bought the record with a song about a guy who meets a woman masturbating with a magazine that she helped launch the PMRC in order to toilet train pop performers. So in both memory and tribute to the artist known as Prince, it seems fitting to send him off with one of what Gore would call the "Filthy Fifteen" songs which launched the censorious body that Frank Zappa, Dee Snyder and John Denver stood before Congress to fight.

On Finishing Last: Shane Black’s The Nice Guys

Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe in Shane Black’s The Nice Guys.

Shane Black has been operating, to use the gaming term, on "god mode" for most of his career. He's one of those filmmakers whose most dismal failures (see: 1987’s The Monster Squad) are still sharper, funnier, and cleverer than anything else on the marquee. This isn't to say he's immune to failure, far from it; even when his films are as smart and compelling as The Long Kiss Goodnight, for example, they're likely to do just as well at the box office as that one did (which is to say, not at all). In lieu of significant financial returns, Black has carved out a nonetheless comfortable niche as a purveyor of genius-level shlock, a peddler of pulp with aspirations of grandeur that, like the characters in his noir-tinted screenplays, never gets the riches and recognition he (probably, mostly) deserves.

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005) is one of my favourite films, and it’s hard not to see The Nice Guys as a spiritual successor. They’re similar on the surface: a washed-up detective takes a rough-and-tumble type under his wing to help uncover a mystery lurking at the edge of civilized society, set against the glitz, glamour, and hidden agendas of the City of Angels. Everyone has a secret. And everyone has a price. It’s a noir potboiler setup so familiar that, were it not for Black’s talent at executing this kind of stuff (and the relative lack of noir mysteries in cinemas, especially at this time of year), it would be downright boring. Thankfully, a tight script, a great cast, and a consistently charming sense of humour save it from the same fate that Black’s other works have suffered.

Complications: Lucy Prebble's The Effect

Susannah Flood and Carter Hudson in The Effect, at New York City's Barrow Street Theater. (Photo: Sara Krulwich)

In The Effect by the young British playwright Lucy Prebble, a woman and a man in their twenties who have volunteered to take part in a six-week clinical trial for a new anti-depressant fall in love and start breaking the rules governing the procedure: first they wander out of bounds and then they have sex. The play, which is being given a fine production under David Cromer’s direction at the Barrow Street Theatre in the West Village, is intriguing and enjoyable, though – at least at a first viewing – a bit elusive. The first act takes the form of an unorthodox romantic comedy in which Connie (Susannah Flood) and Tristan (Carter Hudson) struggle to interpret their feelings, and each other’s feelings, when they’re aware that their emotional and sexual responses may be the consequence of the drug they’re being fed every morning, the dosage of which is being increased gradually. That is, the drug they may be taking, or only one of them may be ingesting, because some of the volunteers are in fact being given placebos. Dr. Lorna James (Kati Brazda), who is administering the trial for Dr. Toby Sealey (Steve Key), is also aware of these variables, though not, as it turns out, of all of them. She and Toby debate the other possibility – that it’s sexual attraction that is altering Connie and Tris, not the drug, and if that’s the case their incipient relationship may be corrupting the data. Love is so complicated and unpredictable to begin with that the idea of a play where drugs may be adding another layer of lunacy to romantic chemistry is irresistibly playful. There are more complications too. Lorna and Toby once had an affair, at a moment when her life was falling apart. And – unlike the subjects of the trial – she has a history of depression.

Cold War, Warming Up: FX’s The Americans

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

One of the unique aspects of television as a popular medium is its ability to foster and deepen longstanding relationships between a given program’s audience and characters. Whereas a movie generally has to establish a connection within a two to three-hour time frame, TV shows can build on our emotional ties to characters and the situations in which they find themselves over years. Done properly, this sustained engagement can lead to especially satisfying – or devastating – payoffs to long-running plot or character dynamics, as well as an increasing sense of connection to shows that might initially come off as a bit distant and chilly. This has especially been the case for me with FX’s superb The Americans.
 

Coming of (a New) Age: The Diary of a Teenage Girl

Bel Powley and Alexander Skarsgård in The Diary of a Teenage Girl (2015).

In 2003, the movie Thirteen, written by fledgling actress Nikki Reed (Twilight) and Catherine Hardwicke garnered critical acclaim for its bold, provocative portrayal of the seedy secret lives of early teens experimenting with drugs, sex, and alcohol. While films like American Pie (1999) offered a frank but socially acceptable look at the first sexual forays of young men, Thirteen followed the trajectory for exploring budding sexuality in young girls set by a long history of grim, moralizing tales from Samuel Richardson’s 1748 novel, Clarissa, to Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac (2013). Although still largely regarded as one of the more honest and realistic glimpses into what teens are up to behind closed doors, Thirteen did nothing new for women’s sexuality or autonomy – it reminded us, as stories have told us since time immemorial, that young women who give in to sexual desire, who dare to experiment with sex or drugs, are opening the door to a world of victimhood, shame, and regret.

Tackling almost exactly the same subject matter as Harwicke’s Thirteen, Marielle Heller’s The Diary of a Teenage Girl differs only in setting, critical buzz, and, most importantly, tone. Adapted from a semi-autobiographical graphic novel by Phoebe Gloeckner, the 2015 film offers a candid and refreshing story of a teen girl’s incredibly messy first sexual experiences growing up in 1970s San Francisco. Minnie Goetz (newcomer Bel Powley) is a 15-year-old who likes drawing (the film is embellished with 70s-inspired, Monty Python-esque comic drawings from Minnie’s imagination), doesn’t love school, and lives in a cozy, liberal household with her free spirit mother (Kristen Wiig), gawky but adorable little sister, Gretel (Abby Wait), and any number of mom’s party friends who’ve come to crash for the night. After he accidentally grazes her boob with his hand, mom’s handsome underachiever boyfriend Monroe (Alexander Skarsgård, complete with bell-bottoms and porn-star mustache) becomes the object of Minnie’s overwhelming teenage lust. The two embark on an ill-advised affair behind her mother’s back which Minnie chronicles in an audio diary comprised of a series of unmarked cassette tapes carelessly strewn about her bedroom. Naturally, Minnie’s sexual awakening via Monroe leads her to satisfy her curiosity about a slew of other taboo subjects which she also records for posterity, alongside her musings about standard 15-year-old topics like whether or not losing her virginity makes her look different, if paramour Monroe masturbates thinking about her, and, less directly, about the complex and often confusing overlap between a good lay and actual love. The diaries, like Minnie, are unreserved and unashamed; her voice is clear, direct, and distinct while being unmistakably teenage.

Rachel & Alice & Obama

Anne Hathaway in Rachel Getting Married (2008).

In a campaign year which has been filled with anger, violence and rancor, there hasn't been a spirit of hope that many drew from Obama's first ascension to the Presidency. What we have been witnessing in the primaries so far is an ugly reaction to it. Donald Trump, a demagogue Paul Bunyan, lumbers across the land promising walls – both real and figurative – to keep out Muslim and Mexican immigrants and restore America to a greatness he perceives as a land that never had Barack Obama as President. (Trump is the paranoid Truther who first began assailing the presidency by challenging the legitimacy of Obama's citizenship.) The Republican Presidential hopeful isn't stoking the ideals in his country but playing instead to its discontent. Stirring and seeking anger wherever he finds it, especially in the white working-class, he isn't interested in salving the sources of their wounds, but marshaling the power of their rage to vote him in. On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton talks and conducts herself as the power broker politician. If Trump speaks to the ugly underside of American exceptionalism, Clinton addresses the unidentifiable masses that make up the country. Given that she comes across like a high-powered CEO who has a demographic sense of her own constituents, it's understandable that she hasn't convinced many disenchanted younger voters to hop on board. They've chosen instead the populist caboose of socialist Bernie Sanders who reaches out to their despair like a crotchety Woody Guthrie and invokes a Promised Land that will build bridges rather than Donald Trump's walls. But his own campaign has been lately doing its own share of erecting walls especially in the face of Clinton's ascending victory as the Democratic choice for President. Unless these two sides truly make peace, a Trump victory is not only highly possible, it will most certainly be a reality. And we'll have as the new President, the anti-Obama.

Cuban Missiles of the Human Kind: The Ballet Nacional de Cuba's Don Quixote

Photo by Nancy Reyes, courtesy of Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal & Ballet Nacional de Cuba.

The castanets heard clicking through Don Quixote, the ballet that opened at Place des Arts on May 4 for a three-night run, echoed the rat-a-tat-tat of heartbeats thrilling at the return of Ballet Nacional de Cuba to Montreal following a five-year absence. The Ludwig Minkus score might have been canned, but the pulse of the Iberian rhythms felt vivid enough for the capacity audience to stand on its feet and clap along, simulating the passions of the fiery fiesta erupting on stage.

Prima ballerina assoluta Alicia Alonso – and rare is the dancer in the history of ballet who owns that superlative title – created her version of the 19th century classic to restore the ballet to its Latin origins. While based on the Spanish novel that Miguel de Cervantes first published in 1605, Don Quixote has been in foreign hands since first appearing as a ballet in 1869. Transplanted Parisian Marius Petipa adapted Cervantes' story for the Imperial Ballet of Russia, working closely with composer Minkus to produce a four-act Spanish-accented extravaganza that many companies around the globe have since included in their repertoires. Alexander Gorsky updated the Petipa ballet for Moscow in 1900, and this is the version Alonso relied on when creating her version of Don Quixote in 1998. She likely learned it growing up, instructed by Russian teachers.

Barron and Charlap: The Art of the Jazz Trio

In 1961, at 19 years of age, a young pianist named Kenny Barron broke into the heart of the jazz scene just as it was peaking in popularity and innovation. Barron (born in Philadelphia, the city of John Coltrane) moved to New York and free-lanced with the young lions Roy Haynes, Lee Morgan and James Moody, three different and yet distinct voices in American music. As the jazz form stretched out, he enriched his musical vocabulary and became a working sideman. Barron proved himself worthy of such stellar company by cutting his first record in 1962 with James Moody. Moody recommended the young piano-player to Dizzy Gillespie. Gillespie was infatuated with the Afro-Cuban sounds in those days and his influence on Barron was profound. Between 1962 and 1968, Barron had steady work with either Gillespie or Moody in a rich repertoire of standards, be-bop and Afro-Cuban music. By 1971 he joined the truly adventurous reed-player Yusef Lateef for six albums released on Atlantic Records. Barron’s talent lie in his ability to fuse all these musical styles (be-bop, Latin, Avant-Garde) while building his own voice, making him one of the most versatile pianists in jazz. As the decades followed, Barron quietly made his mark as a soloist and bandleader. Over the years, he’s cut some memorable records with Stan Getz and Charlie Haden. His splendid 2014 release with bassist Dave Holland, called The Art of Conversation (Impulse), was marvelous recording.

Kenny Barron’s new release is called Book of Intuition (Impulse) and it’s everything one would expect from this veteran musician: passion, joy and sensitivity. Kiyoshi Kitagawa, bass, and Johnathan Blake, drums, round out the trio on this occasion.

One Last Adventure – Uncharted 4: A Thief's End

A Thief's End is the fourth and final game in Naughty Dog's Uncharted series.

I’ve never reviewed an Uncharted game, because I’ve found it to be a mostly disposable series. Nathan Drake (Nolan North) going off on his light, fun, Indiana Jones-style adventures resulted in some eye-catching setpieces but few lasting memories for me (and, in hindsight, it may have been that same resemblance to Indiana Jones which failed to charm me; you have to work real hard to beat Indy at his own game). The high level of visual polish and cinematic flair of Drake’s globetrotting quests provided some temporary “wow moments,” and the characterization and mo-cap performance of Drake and his companions were definite touchstones in turn of the century storytelling in games, but these elements were hamstrung by lackluster combat sections, which interrupted the smooth linear flow of story and gameplay (mostly revolving around traversing the lush environments and solving ancient puzzles). The Uncharted series always struck me as a series of impressive, if slightly forgettable games – until the fourth iteration, that is. Drake’s adventures came to an end, and it was there at the edge of the map that Uncharted and I finally made communion.

Do I Hear a Waltz?: An Encores! Misstep

Melissa Errico and Richard Troxell in Do I Hear a Waltz? (Photo: Sara Krulwich)

Stephen Sondheim’s only collaboration with Richard Rodgers was the 1965 musical Do I Hear a Waltz?, adapted by Arthur Laurents from his 1952 Broadway success The Time of the Cuckoo. Shirley Booth had starred in the play, as a lonely Midwesterner who comes to Venice on vacation in the hopes of enjoying a romantic fling, and Katharine Hepburn took over the role in David Lean’s 1955 film version, Summertime. Though Sondheim’s early musicals were partnerships with other composers – West Side Story with Leonard Bernstein and Gypsy with Jule Styne – he had established himself as a composer-lyricist with A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and Anyone Can Whistle at the beginning of the sixties. But Rodgers was, of course, the fabled writing partner of Sondheim’s adolescent mentor Oscar Hammerstein II, and Laurents was the man who wrote the book for Gypsy, so he agreed to the collaboration. But these two men of strikingly different sensibilities didn’t get along, and though the musical had a modest run it didn’t make much of an impression. (Neither did the leading lady, Elizabeth Allen.) And Sondheim has never thought much of it; in interviews and in his book Finishing the Hat he’s referred to it, quoting his friend, Rodgers’ daughter Mary a “why?” musical – as in “Why bother turning this material into a musical?”

Last weekend’s revival by Encores! marks the first time Do I Hear a Waltz? has been produced in New York since the original production. I saw the show as a teenager and know the cast album well, and I’ve always thought that the material was interesting and the score had considerable charm. Except for a couple of songs in No Strings, it’s the only late Rodgers score worth listening to; the ballads are especially lovely. Leona, the protagonist, thinks of herself as independent and resilient, but she’s febrile, with an all-or-nothing romantic fervor and fragile sensibilities; “Why is it I get so easily hurt?” she asks herself in one lyric, and the answer seems to be that she alternates between asking too much and not having the flexibility or the courage to accept what she’s offered if it’s not perfect. “Throw the dream away,” the Venetian shopkeeper Renato Di Rossi, who courts her, pleads in another song; he’s married, but in a union that has long since passed from passion into a state of mutual respect, and he doesn’t have money. The musical pits Leona’s Yankee puritanism with a more relaxed European attitude toward sex, embodied not only in Renato but also in Signora Fioria, the middle-aged proprietor of the pensione where Leona stays with two American couples. Signora Fioria seduces the younger of the two men, a painter named Eddie Yeager, whose marriage to the naïve, trusting Jennifer has begun to fray at the edges. When Leona spots Eddie going off in a gondola with the hotelkeeper, her moral shock is piled on top of her difficulties in taking Renato as he is, for good and for ill. The second act is overloaded: Laurents introduces one too many plot strands and the climactic scene teeters on the edge of melodrama, or perhaps goes over that edge, depending on your point of view and, I would think, the quality of the production.

Truth and Consequences: Reflections on the Jian Ghomeshi Scandal

Jian Ghomeshi (right) exiting a Toronto courthouse with his lawyer Marie Henein. (Photo: Frank Gunn/AP)

As I was writing about Kirby Dick’s disturbing, albeit flawed documentary, The Hunting Ground, that profiles several women who were victims of sexual assault on American campuses and the apparent official indifference they confronted, it was hard not to think about the outcome of the Jian Ghomeshi trial and the firestorm that it created here in Canada. As most people know, that trial was a high profile case of a former marquee radio host for the CBC that publicly terminated him in the midst of several allegations of disreputable behaviour towards a number of women. The juxtaposition of the American film and the Canadian trial is unsettling because my responses are complicated. Initially, I experienced an almost visceral antipathy toward the male perpetrators. It was easy to feel a sense of outrage about what happened to these young women in The Hunting Ground and the suffering they endured, exacerbated by the blaming-the-victim rhetoric and hostile responses they encountered, even though I believe that the filmmakers could have done a better job at vetting at least one of the women. At the outset of the Ghomeshi trial, I was quite prepared to jump on the media bandwagon and consign the accused to Dante’s Second Circle of Hell for “carnal malefactors.” My feelings of antipathy toward Ghomeshi deepened after reading a powerful online account by Jessica Knoll, who recounts her own gang rape that inspired her novel, Luckiest Girl Alive, and the subsequent vicious treatment she received by her peers and at least one teacher who regarded her as a slut. That essay is of course totally unrelated to the Ghomeshi trial but it did contribute to my mindset that the justice system in general does not always serve women who are the victims of sexual assault.

However, as the Ghomeshi trial unfolded with the cross-examination of the three witnesses and the revelations of sandbagging the media, the police and Crown prosecutors, it became apparent that the Crown’s case was imploding. The inconsistencies between what they told the authorities and what was revealed in the court, their behaviour after the alleged attacks, that included the email collusion among the complainants who were determined to “cook his goose” and “make the predator pay for all the shit he has done” had impeached their credibility. A not guilty verdict was not unexpected and neither was the outraged reaction.

Off the Shelf: Arthur Kent's Risk and Redemption (1996)

Like many television news viewers, I didn't truly become aware of journalist Arthur Kent until 1991 when he was ducking Saddam Hussein's explosive little presents over Dhahran during the first Gulf War. At that time, while decked out in his leather jacket, and his sweeping dark hair blowing in the night air, he emerged with the sexual panache of a movie star. He was America's own Mel Gibson from Peter Weir's The Year of Living Dangerously, caught in the hail of rocket fire, and barely letting it ruffle his locks. This striking image not only won him the moniker "Scud Stud" from female fans rooting for him all over North America, it also won him no end of grief when he refused to be NBC's answer to Geraldo Rivera.

The great story behind Arthur Kent's 1996 memoir, Risk and Redemption: Surviving the Network News Wars (Viking), is how a reputable correspondent, who covered some of the biggest news events in his era, was forced to take the NBC television network to court in a $25 million dollar defamation and fraud suit because the corporate climate of turning hard news into celebrity worship rendered him unable to do his job. But Arthur Kent was also caught in a profoundly ironic trap because it was becoming the "Scud Stud" that actually brought him to international prominence. Risk and Redemption is Kent's attempt to separate what makes a journalist from what makes a luminary. And although you come away from the book cheering Kent's integrity, intelligence and victory, there is still something romantically self-serving about it. He comes across as someone beyond the temptation of stardom – even though television news, the profession on he's chosen, invites it. The incongruity of how the image of the "Scud Stud" (which Kent himself created) shaped a network's perception of him as a journalist, and perhaps implicated him in their corporate plans, doesn't envelop the book as much as I hoped it would.

Big Big Love in Small Places: Sky 1's After Hours

Rob Kendrick, Jaime Winstone, and James Tarpey star in After Hours

Some things you'll do for money /
And some you'll do for fun /
But the things you do for love are gonna come back to you /
One by one.

– "Love, Love, Love" by The Mountain Goats.

Last fall, as audiences worldwide were gearing up for the new Star Wars film, Netflix subscribers were immersed in the dark reality of Jessica Jones' Hell's Kitchen, and our (morbid) fascination with Donald J. Trump was still in its near infancy, the UK channel Sky 1 premiered the first six-episode season of After Hours – a small comedy, set in a small town. After Hours is part coming-of-age story, part love letter to indie music, and it was one of the most delightful things I watched on television in 2015.

Set in Shankly, a fictional northern English village in decline (named, likely, in homage to The Smiths), After Hours is the first television project of John Osborne – poet, radio writer, Edinburgh Fringe-alum – and fellow poet Molly Naylor. Their story centres on recent high school graduate Willow Hannigan, played by James Tarpey (The World's End) in his first television role. When his girlfriend Jasmine (Georgina Campbell) breaks up with him and his short-term travel plans fall through, Willow finds himself suddenly stuck in Shankly with little to look forward to beyond the nightly pleasure he derives from tuning into a local Internet radio program called After Hours – finding solace and friendship in the show's hosts long before their paths ever cross. Broadcasting off a ramshackle canal boat, radio hosts Lauren and Ollie (Jaime Winstone and actor/musician Rob Kendrick) send their laid back joie-de-vivre out to the world, one streaming kilobyte at a time. After witnessing his break-up, Lauren takes Willow under her wing and brings him – literally – on board to help produce their radio show. Before long, Willow finds a new confidence and begins to realize that his small town still offers real opportunities – even if few of the financial sort.

Holiday in Oregon: Jeremy Saulnier’s Green Room

Alia Shawkat and Anton Yelchin, in Jeremy Saulnier’s Green Room.

Horror stories have a long history of using seemingly bland, everyman characters as their protagonists: the college sorority girls (Black Christmas), the nice, normal family (Sinister, The Amityville Horror), the young attractive co-eds (Until Dawn, The Cabin in the Woods). There’s no denying that the formula works. Seemingly “normal” characters not only serve as an anchor in the unpredictable, swirling insanity of horror movie plots, they also force us to consider the absurdity of “normal people” through the revelation of some inevitable character flaw (e.g., both Nick and Amy Dunne in Gone Girl, or Jason Bateman in the sorely underrated 2015 thriller, The Gift); they’re the quintessential blank canvas upon which filmmakers paint any number of issues, hang ups, or dark pasts.

Green Room, Jeremy Saulnier’s latest thriller (Murder Party, Blue Ruin), does not do this. Instead, Green Room takes the time to open on atypical characters and establish a story for them, independent of the madness that follows. The Ain’t Rights are a punk band composed of singer Tiger (Callum Turner), bassist Pat (Anton Yelchin, Star Trek Into Darkness), guitarist Sam (Alia Shawkat of Arrested Development fame) and drummer Reece (English actor Joe Cole, Skins). They’re the model of punk life, living out of a van, siphoning gas to get around, and crashing at random promoters’ homes as they take their act on the road in search of good times and a handful of cash. As their tour hits a dead end, an acquaintance hooks them up with a gig at a Nazi skinhead roadhouse in rural Oregon with the assurance that, as long as they don’t talk politics, doing a show there should be just fine – should being the optimal word, here; as we can tell from the trailer, obviously things do not proceed in a manner even vaguely resembling “fine.”

Neglected Gem #93: The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1976)

Robert Duvall as Watson and Nicol Williamson as Sherlock Holmes in The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1976).

Of all the large-screen versions of Sherlock Holmes stories, perhaps the best is The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, which arrived at the end of 1976. Sumptuously encased in some of the most luxurious costume and production design and cinematography ever lavished on an adventure story, it was the best of that year’s Christmas presents, the one that – depending on your modus operandi – you either wanted to unwrap right away or else save for last. (Oswald Morris’s lighting, Ken Adam’s production design and Alan Barrett’s costumes have been lovingly preserved on the Blu-ray disc.) Truth to tell, 1976 didn't offer such a tantalizing Christmas for movies: the other big releases were Rocky, Network, The Last Tycoon, A Star Is Born, Silver Streak, Bound for Glory, Nickelodeon and The Pink Panther Strikes Again. The only other movie that offered audiences a treat was John Guillermin’s remake of King Kong – and its delights were buried in a pile of disparaging reviews. But King Kong and The Seven-Per-Cent Solution were alike in that they were both witty and unstinting in their determination to treat the viewer’s senses.

Captain America: Civil War – A Situation Pointed South

Chris Evans and Robert Downey Jr. in Captain America: Civil War.

If you had told me in 2011, after I had just seen Captain America: The First Avenger, that not only would Steve Rogers become one of my favourite superheroes, but that his third sequel would be the absolute gold standard for all superhero movies to follow, I would have laughed in your face. Who gives a crap about Mister Stars and Stripes and his magic shield? But you should cut me some slack – in 2011, there was no way to know yet that Marvel’s plan to dominate the comic book movie market would be such a grossly profitable global success. Captain America: Civil War is pretty much as good as it gets – and I don’t mean that in an equivocating, “we’ll take what we’re given” kind of way. I mean that the ensemble superhero movie has never been done this well before, and likely won’t ever be again. For Marvel and the world of comic book cinema at large, Civil War is a triumph.

Pasek & Paul: Dear Evan Hansen

Ben Platt and Rachel Bay Jones in Dear Evan Hansen. (Photo: Matt Murphy)

Dear Evan Hansen, which is selling out at New York’s just-off-Broadway 2econd Stage Theatre, is just about the damnedest musical I’ve ever seen. Steven Levenson’s book focuses on a teenage boy – the title character, played by Ben Platt – who struggles with self-image and anxiety problems so severe that he trips over himself whenever he tries to make contact with anyone besides his overloaded, trying-to-stay-positive mother (Rachel Bay Jones), who is raising him alone, and his classmate Jared Kleinman (Will Roland), the son of family friends, whom he’s known all his life. (Presumably Evan is so used to Jared’s sarcasm and casual insults that he barely hears them.) Evan’s therapist has given him an assignment to write cheerleading letters to himself to start his day, but the one he prints out at school on the first day of the new year isn’t positive; it lays bare his defeated state of mind. When another young man, Connor Murphy (Mike Faist), whose own depression manifests in erratic, explosive bursts of unpredictable behavior, takes the letter away from him in school and later kills himself, his parents (John Dossett and Jennifer Laura Thompson) assume that it’s a suicide note left for Evan, a close friend they had no idea he had, and they go to see him. Too nervous and cowed to set them straight, Evan winds up weaving a complicated fantasy scenario around this secret friendship. When he finds himself invited into their family as – increasingly – a kind of idealized substitute for their lost son, he can’t resist the attention he’s getting, attention that he’s never had from his father (who’s remarried and lives across the country with a new set of children) or even his mother (who, for all her concern for Evan, is trying so desperately to keep them afloat financially that she’s scarcely ever at home). And Connor’s sister Zoe (Laura Dreyfuss), whose name is embedded in the “Dear Evan Hansen” letter because Evan has a crush on her, is an added bonus.