Late-in-Life Renaissance: Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

Brett Dalton and Jason O'Mara (foreground), with Elizabeth Henstridge and Clark Gregg (background) in a scene from the 4th season of Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

Every once in a while, I find myself stopping in the middle of an episode of television and asking (occasionally aloud): “Why am I still watching this?” It’s a question that I’ve wrestled with before on this site, and one that has sometimes nagged me throughout the run of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., which is in the final episodes of its fourth season on ABC. Originally conceived as a spin-off of Marvel’s juggernaut superhero franchise, the show boasted an impeccable lineage, as it was a co-creation of Avengers director and Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator Joss Whedon, his brother Jed, and his sister-in-law Maurissa Tancharoen. The show also featured Clark Gregg, rather implausibly reprising his role as Agent Phil Coulson, who served as a liaison between his shadowy organization and its super-powered allies and who appeared to have met an untimely fate in the first Avengers movie.

When it premiered in 2013, S.H.I.E.L.D. was the most anticipated new series of its season. It met with a fair amount of critical acclaim and featured frequent tie-ins with the ongoing movie franchise. I found it an enjoyable but somewhat disposable entertainment: the early episodes felt cautious and non-essential, with a case-of-the-week structure, an appealing but rather anonymous cast, and an awkward need to serve a promotional role for whatever major theatrical release Marvel’s movie arm was cooking up. However, that latter function helped the show to make a startling leap late in its first season, when S.H.I.E.L.D. was destroyed in the course of the events depicted in the second Captain America film. The development highlighted some of the show’s quieter achievements, such its ability to build complex relationships among its various characters, and the fallout from that series of episodes helped to set in motion long-term conflicts that significantly raised the stakes and my emotional investment in those characters.

Podcast: Interview with Guy Vanderhaeghe (1982)

Author Guy Vanderhaeghe, with Canadian Governor General David Johnston, receiving his third Governor General’s Literary Award, in 2015. (Photo: Sgt Ronald Duchesne)

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. In 1982, one of those guests with Canadian short story writer (and soon-to-be celebrated novelist) Guy Vanderhaeghe.

When I sat down with Vanderhaeghe in 1982, he had just published his first book, a collection of short stories entitled Man Descending. That volume would go on to win the Governor General's Award for Fiction, making him one of the few first-time authors to achieve this. He won this award again in 1996 for his novel The Englishman's Boy. In 2015, his most recent published work, Daddy Lenin and Other Stories, was similarly honoured.

– Kevin Courrier.

Here is the full interview with Guy Vanderhaeghe as it aired on CJRT-FM in 1982.

Real to Reel: In Conversation with Documentarian Tony Palmer

Filmmaker Tony Palmer is the recipient of the 2017 Outstanding Achievement Award at Toronto's Hot Docs festival.

Legendary British documentarian Tony Palmer is the recipient of the 2017 Outstanding Achievement Award being handed out tomorrow, May 5, at Toronto’s Hot Docs Festival, and for good reason. Born in 1941 and the creator of more than 100 masterfully crafted arts films ranging from The Beatles and Cream to Igor Stravinsky, Richard Wagner and Ralph Vaughan Williams, Palmer is a director/editor as prolific as he is gifted and brazenly insightful. A critic once said of him that he is the poet of documentary filmmaking, and it is an apt description. His work is magnificent, poignant and honest. Through showing and not telling, it preoccupies itself with the stories of individual performing artists and the times in which they lived. Palmer, who has many accolades to his credit, including 12 Gold Medals from the New York Film Festival, draws a direct connection between environment and art making. It is what sets his movies about culture far above the mainstream.

This week, Toronto audiences can see for themselves why he is a giant in the field. Besides honouring his more than fifty years as a celebrated filmmaker, Hot Docs is showcasing a curated retrospective of Palmer’s extraordinary body of work, selected by programmer Michael McNamara and screening at TIFF Bell Lightbox until Sunday. Titles include Margot, Palmer’s 2005 searing analysis of the life of famed English ballerina Margot Fonteyn (Sunday May 7), Bird on a Wire, a behind-the-scenes look at Leonard Cohen on tour in 1973 which only now is getting theatrical release after being lost for more than four decades (Friday May 5 and Saturday May 6) and All My Loving (1968), Palmer’s groundbreaking BBC series on pop music (which John Lennon personally requested he make) featuring Eric Clapton, Eric Burdon, Jimi Hendrix and others against the backdrop of the Vietnam War and other explosive political events rocking the 1960s (Friday May 5).

In Toronto this week, and away from the home he shares in Cornwall with his Italian-born wife, a calligrapher, and their three school-age children, Palmer is introducing his films and, post-screenings, is signing copies of his work on DVD, among them The Beatles and World War II, his brilliant anti-war film, set to iconic Beatles songs as re-recorded by the likes of Tina Turner, Elton John and Jeff Lynne, just released last year after languishing in the vaults since the 1970s (when it was released as All This and World War II). It screened at Hot Docs on Wednesday, for one blistering showing only.

In advance of Wednesday’s screening, Palmer took time out for coffee and a chat touching on his early days as music critic for The Observer, his apprenticeship with Ken Russell and why Frank Zappa remains the bane of his existence. Here’s an edited version of that conversation:

Take it As it Comes: The Doors at 50

The Doors, Venice Beach, CA, 1969 (Photo: Henry Diltz)

On January 4, 1967, The Doors debuted with their self-titled album on Elektra records. To celebrate the 50th anniversary this year, Rhino, in association with Elektra (Warner Bros), has released a 3 CD + LP limited edition collection featuring the album in mono on LP and CD, the stereo mix and a previously unreleased live performance from the Matrix club recorded in March 1967.

The Doors’ recordings have never been out of print and, considering the number of hits they had that peppered FM radio after Jim Morrison’s death in 1971, their music continues to engage us. Their history has been well maintained in countless books, magazine articles, a feature film by Oliver Stone and documentaries. The most recent doc, 2014's People Are Strange, droopily narrated by Johnny Depp, is a chronological visual study of the group’s earliest years, their growing fan base and outrageous concerts. Consequently, Morrison, the charismatic, chemically altered front man, remains one of the most popular singers in the history of rock and, in my opinion, would remain so even if he hadn’t died in 1971 at the age of 27. His songwriting was unconventional, serious and rooted in the most peculiar places. He wasn’t a Florida beach boy dreaming about girls in bikinis or interested in drag racing. This was a guy who read the poetry of William Blake and the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche while dabbling in the mescaline-infused writings of Aldous Huxley, whose book The Doors of Perception suggested the name of Morrison’s band. All this by the time he finished high school and enrolled in the UCLA film school.

The Filmmaker Next Door: Jonathan Demme (1944-2017)

Filmmaker Jonathan Demme passed away last Wednesday, April 26, at the age of 73.

For a solid stretch of ten, maybe twelve years, Jonathan Demme had the distinction of being both the hippest and kindest film director in America. To appreciate the enormity of this accomplishment, it helps to concede that it’s somewhat paradoxical. There are no hard and fast rules for rating moviemakers according to their hipness, but the ones to whom the label sticks are likely to have an air of cultish exclusivity to them; interesting music choices help, but so does a challenging, threatening edge, a sense that, say, Jim Jarmusch or Alex Cox or Aki Kaurismaki is not from these parts, and may be talking over the heads of, or having a laugh at the expense of, those who do not get their work. Compared to them, Demme always had an open, smiling, corn-fed quality.

So did David Lynch, arguably the greatest and most original American director to cement his reputation in the 1980s, but after Blue Velvet hit, Lynch began to cultivate his own paradoxical public image as Captain Strange from Middle America. No doubt Lynch’s personality is his own – “authentically” his own, as the kids would say – but a man who unveils a movie as drenched in perverse sexuality and nihilistic violence as Wild at Heart at the Cannes Film Festival while releasing a press bio consisting of the four words “Eagle Scout Missoula Montana” is a man who knows that press attention helps to keep his career going and who has learned how to use what seems weird about him as a conversation starter. Demme never stopped seeming like the genuinely nice boy next door. He was just the boy next door who had more wide-ranging interests and better taste in music and movies than anyone you’d ever met.

Groundhog Day: Angling for the Big Score

Andy Karl in Groundhog Day. (Photo: Joan Marcus)

The 1993 movie Groundhog Day, written by Danny Rubin and director Harold Ramis, is a one-of-a-kind existential comedy with an inspired premise. Phil Connors, a misanthropic, self-involved weatherman, gets stuck in a time warp, reliving the same day over and over again. The day is February 2, and the setting of his private eternity is the tiny town of Punxsutawney, PA, where his bosses have sent him for the fifth year in a row, with a cameraman and an associate producer, to cover the Groundhog Day festivities. (It’s the town’s pet groundhog, also named Phil, whose annual encounter with his shadow the northeast looks to in order to determine how much is left of winter.) Of course Phil’s being forced to face the same day over and over again has a point. After he’s gone through a hedonistic phase – recognizing that his actions have no consequences because all remnants of them are erased with the dawn – and a phase of despair – he stages a series of elaborate suicides to release himself from his fate, but they don’t take either – he finally moves on, past himself, to a love affair with the citizens of the town and an embracing of the repetition of the day’s events. He realize that he can use his foreknowledge to help those around them over small and large obstacles and give his own life meaning.

Verve and Verisimiltude: Adrian McKinty’s Irish Police Procedurals

Crime novelist Adrian McKinty.

If we were to read only the sixth and most recent entry of Adrian McKinty's Sean Duffy series,   Police at the Station and They Don’t Look Friendly (Seventh Street Books, 2016), and his previous Rain Dogs (2015), we would be gripped by his outstanding opening chapters. In Police at the Station, we are dropped into a tableau that could have emerged from The Sopranos – except it is 1988 in Ulster, during the Irish “Troubles,” in which, over the course of thirty years, 3,600 people were killed by Republican and Loyalist paramilitaries, and the Security Forces. Detective Sean Duffy is being prodded forward with guns to his back through a patch of woods to dig his own grave. (The 2009 film, The Crying Game, is perhaps a better comparison.) He knows this scene well. He has been the responding officer on “half a dozen bodies found face down in a sheugh, buried in a shallow grave, or dumped in a slurry pit on the high bog." Before the reader can wonder whether this series is coming to an end, the next chapter veers back to the beginning of the mess in which Duffy finds himself, the investigation of the murder of a drug dealer shot in the back with a crossbow. In Rain Dogs, Mohammad Ali is visiting Belfast on a "peace tour" and Duffy is on security detail. Ali did visit Ireland twice, and this fictional scene has the feeling of verisimilitude, given McKinty’s description of the boxer and his face-to-face with a bunch of skinheads opposed to him on the grounds of the colour of his skin. It is a marvellously constructed opener even though it has nothing to do with the plot that follows.

Ghosting: Olivier Assayas' Personal Shopper

Kristen Stewart in Personal Shopper

In the last few years, when attending various parties and gatherings, I started noticing some unusual new social behaviour among people (often women) that I'd never encountered before. When engaged in a conversation that took on its own momentum from the various subjects it raised -- as opposed to the more careful chatter where familiar anecdotes and social gossip provided ample protection from revealing yourself -- there would reach a point when the person I was talking to would simply disappear without a word. Unlike in the past, where a fascinating conversation could lead to friendship, a relationship, or simply a nice evening that the person you were talking to recognized as she disappeared from your life, these folks would simply vanish. There was no way to discern whether it was something you said, fear of a particular kind of intimacy, or even a perfectly legitimate need to move on. The simple courtesy of closing a conversation was replaced by what someone who had acted towards me in this manner justified as 'ghosting.' The point of 'ghosting' seems to be to remove yourself from a conversation without acknowledging that you are in the process of having one. By asserting control in a situation not predicated on needing it, you can protect your sense of self by making yourself disappear. You experience each encounter as one in a series with equal value, where nuance and feeling are erased, or perhaps never even considered. It 's as if the conversation left no residue because the person who does the ghosting never offers a clue to why she needs to disappear. Just as I've started to wonder how much technology and social media and phone texting have had to bear on this capacity to control the uncontrollable, Olivier Assayas's new picture, Personal Shopper, picks up on this new phenomenon in a fascinating way.

Dancing Machine: Antony Hamilton & Alisdair Macindoe's Meeting

Alisdair Macindoe & Antony Hamilton in Meeting, at Toronto's Berkeley Street Theatre until April 30. (Photo: Gregory Lorenzutti)

In Meeting, man doesn't just encounter a machine; man is like the apparatus itself, a whirring, ticking, mechanized instrument measuring and maneuvering through space. Created and performed by Australian choreographer Antony Hamilton together with fellow Aussie Alisdair Macindoe, designer of the 64 custom-made robotic instruments encircling the performance on the stage floor, the roughly hour-long dance is a showcase of mental and physical stamina, utterly fascinating to watch.

Part of Spotlight on Australia, a six-week festival of interdisciplinary dance, theatre and circus art which Canadian Stage is presenting through May 7, Meeting opened this week at the Berkeley Street Theatre – the same night as Tamara Saulwick's Endings, an evocative and elegiac theatre piece about death. Meeting closes on April 30, and is a must-see for anyone interested in knowing why dance from Down Under is in a class of its own.

Driving It Home: The Fate of the Furious

Dwayne Johnson in The Fate of the Furious. (Photo: Matt Kennedy/Universal Pictures)

Thank god for The Fate of the Furious. Thank god for stick shifts, nitrous, and roaring engines. Thank god for fisticuffs, explosions, and cheesy one-liners. Thank god for beautifully toned bodies and huge flexing muscles. Thank god for Dwayne Johnson! Thank god that one of the highest-grossing worldwide franchises is as sensational, self-aware, and exciting as this. If you’re not on board, I understand – it’s easy to be cynical about the blockbuster movie market, and sometimes it’s hard to just relax and have a good time. But boy oh boy, are these Furious movies ever a good time. I don’t understand exactly how they keep getting better and better… but they do!

Palimpsest: The Overlapping Visions of Hans Sieverding

Untitled 16.1.2017 by Hans Sieverding. (Acrylic on Canvas, 2017)

“Like a great poet, Nature knows how to produce the greatest effect with the most limited means.” – Heinrich Heine

The accomplished Germany-based painter Han Sieverding is a senior-career artist whose overall body of work indicates both a purity of intention and a persistence of invention. The continuity in his image-making practice is very impressive in that it reveals an ongoing and restless search for new forms of expression which are all embodied within the tightly disciplined aesthetic approach of modernism. He possesses a vitality and energy which younger artists can only dream about as they struggle with their perpetual appetite for newness and novelty and are seduced ever further into the digital domain and its post-sensation agenda.

These vividly alive paintings palpitate: one can almost feel them breathing beneath their swirling liquid surfaces as they flow across the canvas and arrive at their whirlpool-like destinations. Executed in acrylic on canvas, a water-based medium that arose in the 60's and permitted more rapid drying and thus more effective ways of creating transparency and more multi-layered viewing experiences, they simply prompt me to call them palpable. They are definitely immersive and deeply sensorial: we are surrounded and enveloped by their presence and become drawn into their drama, which often appears to almost memorialize the moment in which they were made.

Out of Vogue: Joan Juliet Buck and The Price of Illusion

Joan Juliet Buck and her father, Jules Buck, in London, 1968. (Photo courtesy of Joan Juliet Buck)

The shiny surfaces in The Price of Illusion reflect a high-gloss world of celebrity and glamour which the author, former Vogue and Vanity Fair editor and writer Joan Juliet Buck, has polished to brittle brilliance. As the title of her recently published memoir suggests, the book is less a hedonistic romp through a high life made fabulous by the ubiquitous presence of Hollywood royalty and designer labels, and more an archly ironic reflection on the pitfalls of vanity and a preoccupation with appearances. Witty and stylishly written, it is an absorbing and entertaining read, a richly sashed window looking onto a whirlwind time. It has just the right amount of A-list love affairs (Donald Sutherland and Brian De Palma figure large) mixed in with insider fashion gossip concerning the likes of Karl Lagerfeld, Yves Saint Laurent, Pierre Bergé and André Leon Tally, to make it juicy, even as the narrative skirts the edges of personal tragedy.

"It is a morality tale," says Buck, 69, during a recent telephone call from her home in the Hudson Valley countryside outside New York. The bucolic setting is deliberate. Buck recently chose it over Manhattan to be as far away from her former life in the fast lane as she could comfortably get. A pop-culture chronicler whose four-and-a-half-decades-long career started at age 23 when she became the London correspondent for Andy Warhol's Interview Magazine and then features editor for British Vogue and a foreign correspondent for Women's Wear Daily the same year, she speaks through drags of an ever-present cigarette, a habit picked up around the time a young Tom Wolfe made her the subject of "The Life and Hard Times of a Teenage London Society Girl," his essay about the 1960s counterculture. Her voice sounds dry, and slightly gravelly. But her intelligent commentary is as sharp as her prose. "I was always looking for the truth,"she exhales. "But growing up I didn't have many guidelines."

Iconic Shows of the 1960s: Hello, Dolly! and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Bette Midler in Hello, Dolly! at Broadway's Shubert Theatre. (Photo: Julieta Cervantes)

Hello, Dolly! opened in January 1964 and stayed open for just under seven years. It wasn’t the best musical on Broadway in those years – it was no Fiddler on the Roof – but it represented, and continues to represent, the end of the golden age of Broadway musicals. It was a big, brassy star vehicle, built around the rather specialized talents of Carol Channing but flexible enough to be refitted for the long line of older women who made comebacks in the role of the widowed matchmaker Dolly Gallagher Levi. (The source material for Michael Stewart’s book was the Thornton Wilder comedy The Matchmaker.) There was some controversy when Barbra Streisand, at only twenty-seven, inherited the role in the 1969 movie, but her stupendous performance was its lifeblood; the movie, directed in a stifling, museum-piece style by Gene Kelly, would have sunk under its own weight without her. And it contained one of the great moments in movie-musical history: in the middle of the title song – certainly the best-known item in the Jerry Herman score – Streisand, decked out in a golden Gay Nineties gown with feathers on her head, harmonized with Louis Armstrong, whose cover had been as big a hit as the show itself.

The new revival, starring Bette Midler as Dolly and David Hyde Pierce as Horace Vandergelder, the wealthy but parsimonious Yonkers shop owner who is supposedly her client but really the object of her own romantic machinations, arrives with more anticipation than any Broadway show in years. Advance hype aside (and God knows there’s been plenty), how could it not? Midler hasn’t appeared in a book musical since she played one of Tevye’s younger daughters in the original run of Fiddler, before she became famous; aside from the (non-musical) solo performance I’ll Eat You Last: A Chat with Sue Mengers in 2013, her only New York appearances have been in a couple of revues – one of which, Clams on the Half Shell, I was lucky enough to see back in 1975. Her Broadway comeback, at seventy-one, is not going to disappoint her legion of fans. She plays Dolly with one foot firmly planted in the Jewish vaudeville tradition, grinning that famous cat-that-ate-the-canary grin, and the highlight of her performance is indeed culinary: in the middle of act two she dispatches a stuffed chicken with dumplings at a table stage right with hilarious gusto while most of the rest of the ensemble, gathered in a courtroom upstage after the evening’s hijinks at Manhattan’s Harmonia Gardens Restaurant, waits for her to finish so the plot can take its final turn. And she could hardly have landed a funnier scene partner than Pierce, who revivifies a role that has generally brought out little in the men who’ve played it besides a side of undernourished, overbaked ham. Pierce’s first-act number, “It Takes a Woman,” performed with a male chorus, is one of the evening’s surprising highlights – the choreographer, Warren Carlyle, has staged it wittily – and “Penny in My Pocket,” written for the original Horace, David Burns, but cut out of town, has been restored to give Pierce a second-act number.

Sugar and Spice: CBS's Superior Donuts

Judd Hirsch and Jermaine Fowler in Superior Donuts.

"You know, Fawz, in this crazy and uncertain world, what could be more comforting than a doughnut and a cup of coffee? To be the one to bring that to people … there could be no higher calling than that. " – Arthur, in Superior Donuts. 

I began watching CBS's new midseason sitcom Superior Donuts the night it premiered back in February, and at the time I never expected to enthusiastically recommend the show to anybody. Adapted from a 2008 stage play by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tracy Letts (August: Osage County ), for its first two episodes Superior Donuts seemed to be an entirely watchable, and not especially notable, multi-camera sitcom. Set in a struggling doughnut shop in urban Chicago, the show's main selling point seemed to be the welcome return of television veteran Judd Hirsch (Taxi, Numb3rs) to primetime comedy. Now 82 years old, Hirsch's last regular television role was the aged son to the immortal lead character in ABC's Forever (cancelled in 2015 after a single season). Though there are few gaps in the actor's almost six-decade-long career, you'd have to reach back to 1997's George and Leo (where he co-starred with Bob Newhart) to see him helm a network comedy series. Here, Hirsch slips almost too seamlessly into the role of Arthur Przybyszewski, the grumpy and grizzled 75-year-old doughnut shop proprietor. Joining Hirsch are an ensemble of other recognizable faces, including Katey Sagal (Married… with Children, Sons of Anarchy), as Randy DeLuca, a local beat cop and daughter of Arthur's now-deceased best friend; comedian Maz Jobrani as Fawz, an Iraqi-born self-made entrepreneur and real-estate developer; and David Koechner (Another Period), as underemployed shop regular Tush. If you watched only those first two episodes, you saw a sincere, well-delivered but entirely unremarkable example of the soundstage laugh-track sitcom – with the television veterans serving to make you feel like you'd seen this all before.

Recovering a Lost Treasure: The Criterion Blu-ray Release of Tony Richardson's A Taste of Honey (1961)

Rita Tushingham as Jo in Tony Richardson's A Taste of Honey 

Shelagh Delaney was only nineteen when she wrote A Taste of Honey, a 1958 coming-of-age play about a teenage girl set in Delaney’s home town of Salford, Lancashire, but it’s one of the treasures of its patch of British theatre, sometimes called the angry young man movement and sometimes the epoch of kitchen-sink realism. The heroine, Jo – played in the West End by Frances Cuka and on Broadway in 1960 by Joan Plowright – lives with her promiscuous mother, Helen, who sneaks them out of their digs whenever they can’t pay the rent and relocates so often that Jo never has a chance to make school friends. Helen cares about Jo, though they quarrel habitually and Helen’s attention has a habit of wandering. At forty, she finds a man eight years her junior who wants to marry her; he and Jo can’t get n so, she goes off to live with him and leaves her self-sufficient daughter behind. Jo has a fling with a sailor; after he goes off on his ship she discovers she’s pregnant. She sets up house with a gay man named Geoffrey who’s devoted to her, but when he decides to hunt down her mother because he thinks Helen should know about Jo’s condition, he finds himself displaced. Helen’s new husband leaves her for a younger woman (“his bit of crumpet”) and she’s drawn back to the daughter she traded in for a new life.

Here Be Monsters: The Comic Book Legacies of Bernie Wrightson, Jay Lynch and Skip Williamson

A panel from Swamp Thing, story by Len Wein and art by  Bernie Wrightson, November, 1972.

When comic book geeks gather to talk about the history of the medium and, as is the custom on such occasions, break it up into decades, the 1970s never get any love. In the conventional wisdom’s most widespread take on the subject, comic books caught fire in the 1960s, with the excitement and freshness of Marvel Comics’ re-invention of superheroes on one floor and the rude, gleeful explosion of the undergrounds on another, and solidified those triumphs in the ‘80s and ‘90s with the coming of such maverick genre creators as Alan Moore and Frank Miller and indie upstarts such as the Hernandez Brothers, Peter Bagge, Dave Clowes, Chester Brown, and Julie Doucet, but nothing much happened in between except exhaustion and false starts. There’s an alternate history waiting that mirrors the American moviemaking renaissance that accompanied the confused death throes of the studio system in the ‘60s and early ‘70s. It’s a story about how the major publishers – DC, which decisively lost its first-place status in the marketplace, and Marvel, which came out on top just as it was being abandoned by Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, the two artists most important (along with writer-editor Stan Lee) for its triumphs in the ‘60s – were left so confused that they were willing to try a little bit of anything just to see what might stick.

In the early ‘70s, DC and Marvel wound up showcasing the four-color pop visions of several up-and-coming artists whose distinctive, eccentric styles (and time-consuming, perfectionist work ethics) would have once made them very much at odds with an industry that valued hacks who could meet a deadline and stay within the confines of a house style. At least one of these artists, Neal Adams, with his cinematic compositions and dynamic character poses – every panel seemed to set off a sonic boom on the page – was perfectly suited to the bulging-vein action hyperbole of superhero comics. But many of the other new stars – Barry Windsor-Smith, Michael Kaluta, Howard Chaykin, Marshall Rogers – were oddballs whose baroque styles drew upon classical illustration and older magazine art. And except for Rogers – whose breakthrough came in his collaboration with the writer Steve Englehart on a series of Batman comics – most of them did their strongest work when assigned to characters (Conan the Barbarian, the Shadow, Chaykin’s Ironwolf) who were only “superheroes” by circumstance or association. And none of them left behind a stronger legacy than Bernie Wrightson, who, until his death last month at the age of 68, was Godzilla’s closest competitor for the title of King of the Monsters.

The Boy Who Slept – The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was published by Nintendo on March 3rd.

I finished the storyline of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild in an intensive three-week sprint, during which time I played, watched, and thought about pretty much nothing else, and since the day in late March when I watched the credits roll, the game has had another three weeks to settle into my brain. I was surprised to discover that I needed that remove; I needed time to adjust to the experience and realign my understanding of the global context of things. It sounds hyperbolic, but it’s true: I’m now measuring my gaming history in terms of “Pre-BotW” and “Post-BotW.” With this latest iteration of the storied Zelda franchise, Nintendo’s achieved nothing less than a personal best, which means that the rest of the gaming world – and the individual gamers like me within it – will be recovering for some time from the aftershocks of this seismic success.

A Kinder, Gentler Apocalypse: Don McKellar’s Last Night (1998)

Sandra Oh in Don McKellar's Last Night (1998).

I was glad to see that Don McKellar’s fine feature debut Last Night (1998) was part of the roster of the large list of Canadian films to be picked for free showings on National Canadian Film Day 150. This annual appreciation of Canada’s cinema is taking place on April 19 across the country, this year showing 150 different films among its 1,700 events, in commemoration of Canada’s forthcoming 150th anniversary. Last Night was originally commissioned by a French film company as one of a series of ten films from ten countries, entitled 2000, Seen By... (2000 vu par...), all offering cinematic views on the Millennium, though Last Night doesn't specifically indicate when it's taking place. McKellar’s Toronto-set, quietly apocalyptic drama, which he wrote and directed, is a unique take on the end of the world as we know it.  It’s also one of the strongest English Canadian film debuts from an outsize talent who, though he has not subsequently carved out a consistent film career, is still making his mark in his native land.

The initial brilliance of Last Night’s concept is that the news that the world is going to end has already been digested and accepted by humanity – the science-fictional aspects of the film’s premise thus don’t need to be explained in any possibly pedestrian or pretentious way – leaving only the remaining question: how will you spend your last hours on earth? The answer is: in many ways. A disparate group of Torontonians each selects a pathway to what some hope will result in something else after the end. (The movie never does spill the beans on that possibility. The only clue that something's off is that the sun never sets.) At the centre of the film is Patrick (McKellar), a lonely cynic who doesn’t want to spend time with his family or friends as the end looms. On the other hand, Sandra (Sandra Oh of Sideways and Grey’s Anatomy) wants merely to connect with her new husband Duncan (Videodrome director David Cronenberg) so she doesn’t die alone. Patrick and Sandra accidentally meet up and slowly bond even as Toronto’s residents go through various actions in their final hours. Some, like Patrick’s friend Craig (Callum Keith Rennie of Hardcore Logo and Battlestar Galactica), are intent in carrying out all their long-held sexual fantasies, and others simply finish their work. Duncan, who works at a gas company, is going through his customer data base and calling them to reassure them that their gas will stay on until the end, a very polite Canadian way of providing reassurance. As the clock ticks down, the movie’s strong emotions bubble to the surface, providing a mélange of poignant, comic, tragic and memorable moments, with the film as a whole leaving an indelible impression.

Singing with the Dead: Soulpepper's Spoon River Revival

Jackie Richardson (centre) and members of the cast of Soulpepper's Spoon River. (Photo: Cylla von Tiedemann)

A folk musical resurrecting the dead through song, Spoon River has itself come back to life. Since the beginning of the month, and continuing through April 21, Soulpepper has been giving the winner of the 2015 Dora Award for Outstanding New Musical a series of rousing performances at Toronto's Young Theatre for the Performing Arts, warming hearts all over again. Based on Edgar Lee Masters's Spoon River Anthology of poems first published in 1914 and adapted for the stage by company artistic director Albert Schultz and composer Mike Ross, this revitalized production of Spoon River has boundless stores of energy in it still.

After the Toronto run this same production, with its cast of 19 strong actor/singer/musicians, will make its New York debut as part of The Soulpepper on 42nd Street Festival taking place, off-Broadway, in July. You don't need a crystal ball to predict how that will go. Macabre the subject matter might be but oh how sweet is this deliverance from the grave. Despite its graveyard setting, Spoon River is so joyously life-affirming that the spirit soars along with the angelic high notes in Ross's strummable, hummable original score. 

Come from Away: Forging a Temporary Community

Jenn Colella (left) in Come From Away at Broadway's Gerald Schoenfeld Theater. (Photo: Sara Krulwich)

The enormously likable Canadian musical Come from Away, which recently opened on Broadway, dramatizes the role played by the citizens of Gander, Newfoundland, when American air space was locked down in the aftermath of 9/11 and nearly forty planes were rerouted to Gander’s small airport. (In the old days, we’re told, it had been a frequent refueling spot; airport personnel can recall crossing paths with Sinatra and The Beatles when their planes made pit stops there.) The locals reached out to seven thousand stranded strangers from all over the world – whose presence nearly doubled the population for five days – providing food and shelter and devising ways to communicate with those who couldn’t speak English. The most inventive, perhaps, is that of the bus driver (Chad Kimball) who notices that a distressed African couple are carrying a Bible. Though he can’t read the words, he has an intricate knowledge of scripture and he figures that chapter and verse are the same in all editions, so he finds an inspiriting passage to convey to them that they’ll be fine.

Irene Sankoff and David Hein, who supplied book, (folk) music and lyrics, are banal writers, but banality isn’t the worst of theatrical sins; emotional fakery is, and I didn’t detect any of it in Come from Away. The project itself may be sentimental in nature but the production, which was directed by Christopher Ashley, mutes the sentimentality as much as possible; it’s remarkably dry-eyed and its humor is wry and observational. When an Orthodox rabbi can’t eat any of the proffered food, and there’s no local synagogue to help him out, he’s set up in his own kitchen and invited to produce kosher meals – not only for himself and other Jews, but, as it turns out, for some Muslims and a gay vegetarian couple from L.A. The gay men, both named Kevin (Kimball and Caesar Samayoa), are hesitant to admit they’re a couple; they have no idea how redneck a small Maritime Canadian town might be. But when a few too many beers at a bar make them incautious, they’re amused to discover that half their fellow drinkers have gay relatives or friends and use that connection ingenuously to make the Kevins feel more at ease. Bob (Rodney Hicks), an African-American New Yorker, gets over his urban-bred paranoia when his host, the mayor of one of the nearby towns, encourages him to go from yard to yard borrowing his neighbors’ grills and finds that their owners are more than willing to part with them; in Bob’s words, they help him steal their own barbecues.