Black Panther: Watch the Throne

Danai Gurira and Chadwick Boseman in Black Panther.

Ryan Coogler elevated the debased Rocky franchise with his 2015 Creed, injecting intelligence as well as brio into the narrative of the second-generation fighter who finds a mentor in Rocky. Creed was an exciting boxing movie, a moving coming-of-age story and a satisfying romantic drama with the talented and stunning Tessa Thompson as a bracing match for Michael B. Jordan’s charismatic Adonis Johnson. It was a first-rate entertainment – and Coogler coached a fine performance out of Sylvester Stallone that refurbished his reputation, too.

Coogler’s follow-up to Creed, the Marvel adventure Black Panther, is every bit as good. The Marvel pictures are often mash-ups of comic-book and classical mythology; Coogler and his co-writer Joe Robert Cole, adapting the Marvel Comics by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, mix in a little James Bond, a little J.R.R. Tolkien by way of the Peter Jackson movies, and cleverly seed in some contemporary political references. The story begins by reprising, from last year’s excellent Captain America: Civil War, the death of T’Chaka (John Kani), the king of a small African nation called Wakanda, in a U.N. bombing. Following tradition, before he can succeed his father T’Chaka’s son T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman) must best any challenger. He triumphs over M’Baku (Winston Duke), the leader of the mountain-dwelling Jabari tribe, who feels T’Challa is callow and untried. But then another opponent announces himself: Erik Stevens (Michael B. Jordan), a.k.a. Killmonger, the abandoned son of T’Chaka’s brother N’Jobu – killed in a skirmish with T’Chaka and his best friend Zuri in Oakland, California (where he was working undercover). Erik was raised in America and trained as a black-ops agent, and now he demands his right to fight T’Challa for the Wakandan throne. The issue that divided T’Chaka and N’Jobu was isolationism. The discovery of a metal called vibranium has permitted Wakanda to make staggering technological advances, but it has been the country’s policy for years to maintain absolute secrecy about them and have little contact with other nations. N’Jobu urged his brother to join the world and offer to share its vibranium. Erik wants to use the substance to make himself an unprecedentedly powerful leader. Both he and T’Challa have supernatural powers as a result of a forest herb, so in Marvel terms they’re also fighting to carry the name Black Panther.

Put a Cork in It

The cork forests of the western Mediterranean region are among the most biodiverse ecosystems on the planet. They are home to over 13,000 species of plants and animals, and several endangered species; and they are wintering grounds for the migratory birds of northern Europe, including virtually the entire European population of common cranes. They are key to defending the arid climates of southern Europe and North Africa against forest fires and erosion. And we should be exploiting them more.

Idiot Savants: Netflix’s Game Over, Man!

Blake Anderson, Anders Holm, and Adam Devine in Game Over, Man!.

The Comedy Central sitcom Workaholics was brilliant for a number of reasons, not the least of which was the fact that almost all of it – co-creation, writing, directing, and acting – was the brainchild of just four people: Anders Holm, Blake Anderson, Adam DeVine, and Kyle Newacheck. The collective drug-fueled lowbrow ingenuity of this self-proclaimed “Friendship Family,” formed in the mid-2000s as a sketch group called Mail Order Comedy, made Workaholics a uniquely hilarious take on situational stoner TV, and catapulted several members of the crew to much bigger careers in film and television.

As barely-fictionalized versions of themselves, the trio of Anders, Blake, and Adam smoked, drank, and slacked their way through seven seasons of insanely unhinged comedy, centering around this inseparable triumvirate of dumb-ass stoner man-children. Taking notes on everything from Napoleon Dynamite to It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia to Seinfeld, Workaholics was the proof of concept for a winning comedy formula that hinged on the lovable, self-effacing personalities of its leads and their natural, effortless chemistry with one another. I’m pleased to say this formula maintains its staying power through the transition to a larger platform and a bigger budget with the Netflix film Game Over, Man!, which is chock-full of the same extreme gross-out slapstick as Workaholics, but, crucially, also contains just as much cleverness.

Only the Brave: Under the Radar

Josh Brolin (left) in Only the Brave.

Perhaps it was the generic action-movie title that buried Only the Brave, Joseph Kosinski’s account of the Granite Mountain Hotshots, Prescott, Arizona’s firefighters. Behind that title is one of the most poignant films of last year, which I missed in theatres last fall and caught up with recently on DVD. Josh Brolin (in the best performance I’ve seen from him) plays Eric Marsh, whose exasperation with the way his uncertified crew get shunted to the side whenever official hotshots are summoned to the scene of a fire – though his expertise on the subject of managing fires has proven, over and over again, to be superior to theirs – provokes him to fights to obtain the official seal, and he succeeds. That effort takes up roughly the first half of the movie. The second half is about what happens to them after they become the Granite Mountain Hotshots. (Diehard movie buffs may recognize Prescott as the setting of Sam Peckinpah’s 1972 rodeo movie, Junior Bonner .)

Heartbroken: Tom Petty’s American Dream

Stevie Nicks and Tom Petty, October 27, 2006, Greek Theater Berkeley, California. (Photo: John Medina)

“The men and women who produced works of genius are not those who live in the most delicate atmosphere, whose conversation is the most brilliant or culture the most extensive, but those who have had the power, ceasing to live only for themselves, to transform their personality into a kind of mirror.” – Marcel Proust

Celebrity is s mask that eats into the face. Although it was the novelist John Updike who made that marvelous observation, I’ve always felt it was something that the incredibly well-known musician Tom Petty may have wholeheartedly believed. He seemed to rather enjoy being popular, but he also seemed to absolutely hate being famous.

I have to admit, it really pisses me off that another great talent has bitten the dust as a result of a severely avoidable folly. First Prince, now Tom Petty: the scourge of prescription medications and their intentional or accidental abuse seems way worse than the imaginary threat of psychedelics, alcohol or massive pot use in the musical world ever did.

I mean, those of us who followed Petty's long career of course knew about the challenges he faced as a heroin addict in the '90s, perhaps even across that whole decade, but once the 21st century dawned and he was still here, having achieved a kind of elder rock statesman status, it appeared to the more hopeful amongst us that maybe he had outrun the shadowy demons that had pursued him. But alas, instead it was those industrially legal and insidious substances that took this great one away from us, and nothing nearly as tragically romantic as the loss to junk of so many other rock, blues or jazz titans from Charlie Parker to Jerry Garcia.

Julius Caesar: Crowd Scenes

Ben Whishaw as Brutus in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar. (Photo: Marc Brenner)

Nicholas Hytner’s modern-dress Julius Caesar at London’s snazzy new theatre, The Bridge, goes by like a shot. It runs for a slimmed-down two hours without an intermission, barreling from one location to another as the story line zips along; the scene shifts are so boisterous and eruptive that there’s no chance that an audience will lose interest. (The one that takes us from Caesar’s home to the Senate, which is signaled by a scarlet sheet hauled over the main playing area, is especially theatrical. Bunny Christie designed the set and the lighting is by Bruno Poet.) In any case the crowd at The Bridge never gets a chance to lag behind the action, since they – at least the spectators you can see in the HD transmission – are on their feet like the standees at Shakespeare’s Globe, being hauled and shoved around as if this were a piece of immersive theatre. (Strictly speaking, it isn’t.) I wouldn’t enjoy having to stand (and be manipulated) for a couple of hours, but from my comfortable movie-theatre seat I had a pretty good time.

Podcast: Interview with Biographer David Robinson on Charlie Chaplin (1985)

(from left) Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin and D.W. Griffith.

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 writers and artists from all fields. In 1985, I sat down with film critic and biographer David Robinson about the recent publication of his book on the life of Charlie Chaplin, Chaplin: His Life and Art (originally published by McGraw-Hill in 1985, revised in 1992 and 2001, and currently in paperback by Penguin).

Along with Chaplin's own My Autobiography (1964), Robinson's official biography would later be used as source material for Richard Attenborough's 1992 biopic Chaplin, which starred Robert Downey Jr. as the famed comedian and film director. Robinson was the main film critic for The Times of London from 1973-1990, and his books include Hollywood in the Twenties (1968), a 1970 volume on Buster Keaton, and World Cinema: A Short History (1981).

– Kevin Courrier.

Here is the full interview with David Robinson as it aired on CJRT-FM in 1985.

Class Clown: NBC’s A.P. Bio

Glenn Howerton as high school teacher, Jack Griffin, in A.P. Bio.

There’s a forced wholesomeness to some network television that’s enough to make you want to puke. The commercially motivated impulse to create entertainment that appeals to some imaginary Middle-American audience easily suckered by anodyne content and blatant moralizing can often lead to a product that feels cynically calculated, rather than the genuine result of a sincere outlook.

That’s part of why I’ve found NBC’s A.P. Bio so refreshing, at least insofar as its early episodes have proven willing to buck that trend. Created by Saturday Night Live alum Mike O’Brien, the comedy follows Jack Griffin (It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’s Glenn Howerton), a former Harvard philosophy professor who’s been forced to retreat in ignominy to Toledo, Ohio, where his old friend Ralph Durbin uses his role as principal at a local high school to get Jack a sinecure teaching Advanced Placement Biology. The concept is fairly straightforward but nevertheless promising: O’Brien is obviously reversing the well-worn trope of the enthusiastic teacher who takes a group of apathetic and often underprivileged kids and gets through to them, inspiring them to achieve their full potential. Instead, the kids are all nerdy, straight-arrow overachievers and the teacher’s an unrepentant asshole (there’s a running gag in which Jack will finish whatever he’s eating as he enters the classroom and then carelessly hurls the remnants in the general direction of the garbage can, which he misses every time).

Psychoanalyst as Sentimentalist: Julia Kristeva's The Samurai

Julia Kristeva in 2008.

Celebrated as the Simone de Beauvoir of our time, Julia Kristeva is a well-known psychoanalyst, literary critic and bi-continental professor whose first novel, The Samurai (Columbia University Press, 1992), a thinly disguised roman à clef, first appeared in Paris just over 25 years ago. Since then the semiotician of desire, as she has also been called, has published five more works of fiction. But this first foray, a not entirely satisfying effort which Barbara Bray translated into English, remains noteworthy for having recreated, in literary terms, the turbulent intellectual atmosphere of Paris in the mid-1960s, along with its pitfalls.

The period of the novel mirrors the time Kristeva, born 1941, first arrived in Paris from Bulgaria as a young research student. Not long after, she became an integral part of the vibrant scene of literary critics, semioticians and psychoanalysts then taking literary theory and criticism in a new, some might say convoluted, direction. Not surprisingly, her novel is steeped in post-modern murkiness. It is deliberately obfuscating and, at times, also obtuse. Kristeva wrote it as a philosophical meditation on the meaning of life, even though, at its heart, it is a love story whose autobiographical elements suggest but never quite deliver on a promise of subjective truth.

Endurance Test: Tomb Raider

Alicia Vikander in Tomb Raider.

The cross-pollination between video games and cinema is something I’ve spoken about here before. A generation of filmmakers raised on games has started to make those influences more immediately apparent in their work, which is to say nothing of the way cinema has informed the way modern games are designed and presented. This evolving media genealogy makes director Roar Uthaug’s Tomb Raider feel less like an anomaly and more like an inevitability.

As an almost direct adaptation of 2013’s game of the same name, which also sought to reboot the Lara Croft brand from scratch, Tomb Raider is a film infused with the language of video games, but unfortunately much is lost in translation; you could say the film’s dialect is clumsy and uneducated. It lifts action sequences wholesale from the game (featured heavily in the film’s marketing) which retain none of the tension imparted by actually controlling Lara; it borrows characters and storylines from the game but fails to mine them for the same entertainment value; and it discards some of the only narrative and tonal elements that made the game feel distinct from its source material (namely, the Indiana Jones franchise). The result is a film that will appeal neither to fans of the game, who have already paid for a richer version of the same experience, nor to general moviegoing audiences, who will be bored by the film’s cut-and-paste plot and generic action sequences.

Time for Another Round – The Legendary Horseshoe Tavern: A Complete History by David McPherson

 

As a life-long Torontonian and former clubgoer in my youth, I was enthused to learn that a book about one of my favourite venues, the Horseshoe Tavern, was finally being published. The Horseshoe is one of Toronto’s most important musical treasures, having graced the city’s culture since 1947. But while I share David McPherson’s excitement around the famous club and its revolutionary music programming, I cannot say the same about his book, The Legendary Horseshoe Tavern: A Complete History (Dundurn Press). His writing is inconsistent, graced with too many clichés, section breaks using (* * *), and wiseguy remarks that undermine his extensive research so much that his book has little impact.

McPherson’s conversational style is well-intended. He’s a fan and his respect for the place is sincere, but his niceness often undermines his storytelling. I’ve never understood why self-conscious writers feel they have to endear themselves to the reader in order to place their argument into context: “Come with me now dear reader, on this journey . . . ” Considering all the research and first-person interviews McPherson has done, it makes no sense for him to pare down the 80-year history of the Horseshoe into fewer than 200 pages. Why not savour the experience rather than race through it as quickly as possible? One should be proud of one’s efforts, not embarrassed by them; after all, until another book is written about the Horseshoe, this is the authoritative one.

Unrelated Weirdnesses: Ryan H. Walsh’s Astral Weeks

Van Morrison performing on Boston Common in 1968. (Photo: Dick Iacovello)

The title of Russell H. Greenen’s 1968 novel It Happened in Boston? would have done perfectly for Ryan H. Walsh’s nonfiction narrative Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968 (Penguin; 357 pp.). Any reader who knows the Greenen book – a comic fantasia about art forgery and one man’s demand that God account for Himself – suspects that Walsh will engage with it sooner or later. He has to: his book is about cultural developments in and around Boston in the late 1960s, with ’68 as ground zero; the confluence of time, place, and weirdness is too good not to pursue. And indeed, Walsh not only talks about the novel; he interviews the nonagenarian Greenen about actual Boston locations used in it. But disappointingly, the meeting of visions catalyzes no real sparks. If something deeper than happenstance connects the respective matter of the two books, Walsh doesn’t dive for it, while the connection he does reveal is quirky but flat, more of a “huh” than a “wow.” The confluence here, we’re forced to realize, is merely one of time, place, and weirdness – and not all weirdnesses are related.

Skeleton Crew and The Threepenny Opera: The Working Class and the Underclass

Toccarra Cash and Jonathan Louis Dent in Skeleton Crew. (Photo: T. Charles Erickson)

Dominique Morisseau’s Skeleton Crew is performing at Huntington Theatre’s second space in the Calderwood Pavilion, and indeed there are productions currently or scheduled all over the country, including elsewhere in New England. (Dorset Theatre in Vermont has announced it as part of its summer season.) It’s no surprise. Morisseau’s drama, about four Detroit auto factory workers in 2008 dealing with the imminent closing of their plant, is a finely crafted piece of work with distinct, complex characters and plausibly shifting relationships. And under Megan Sandberg-Zakian’s direction, the Huntington production is vivified by four splendid actors, staking out Wilson Chin’s subtle, grounded set: the plant’s locker room-cum-kitchen and break room, with an expressionistic backdrop of elevated car doors that swing into action during scene shifts. Adam Honoré’s lighting and the character touches in Ari Fulton’s costume design also merit commendation.

Podcast: Interview with Philip Glass (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 writers and artists from all fields. In 1984, I sat down with celebrated American composer Philip Glass.

Widely recognized as one of my influential composers of the 20th century, over the course of his 50+ year career Glass has composed numerous operas, symphonies, and film scores – including Godfrey Reggio's experimental feature Koyaanisqatsi in 1982. (Three of his film scores have been nominated for Academy Awards: Kundun [1997], The Hours [2002] and Notes on a Scandal [2006].) Earlier this month, the 81-year-old Glass performed at Washington, D.C.'s Kennedy Center, as part of its new Direct Current festival.

– Kevin Courrier.

Here is the full interview with Philip Glass as it aired on CJRT-FM in 1984.

The Poetics of Space: The Big, Big Pictures of David Burdeny

David Burdeny, Rockpool, Australia 2016, 5 x 5 feet.

 “The poetic image is a sudden salience on the surface of the psyche." – Gaston Bachelard

Well, I know that “they” always say that size doesn’t matter, and also that we know others who counter that with a rhetorical flourish and an easily understood "Size does matter." Both are clearly true. But in the case of visual art after the official invention of photography in about 1840 – and subsequently the inception of an art form that I consider to be not just a highly pertinent part of formal art history but actually its progressive culmination, leading eventually to the ultimate medium of expression, cinema – size tends to impact our perception in very valid ways.

Burned in Memory: Napalm Girl Kim Phuc’s War Story

Phan Thi Kim Phuc, with Nick Ut's 1972 photo. (Photo: Stephen Uhraney and CNW Group/MISTMA Consulting Inc., 2012.)

Kim Phuc was just nine years old when, on June 8, 1972, a U.S.-sponsored air attack on her village of Trang Bang, about 30 minutes north of Saigon, engulfed her in flames.

Running naked down a road, her arms outstretched and her mouth open in agony as napalm burned holes through her tiny body, she, in that moment, moved from the anonymity of a rural peasant existence and into the spotlight of international headlines.

Associated Press photographer Nick Ut (himself Vietnamese) captured her horrifying image in a shot that would become one of the century's most infamous portraits of wartime suffering.

Just how much that little girl suffered that day has often been left to the imagination. Kim, who today lives in a bedroom suburb of Toronto after coming to Canada in 1991 as a political refugee, has rarely spoken of the depths of her ordeal, nor discussed the full extent of her victimization. That is, until she she opened up to Canadian writer Denise Chong, bestselling author of The Concubine's Children (1995), who put the first authorized account of Kim Phuc's story into a book as remarkable as the subject herself.

Load Checkpoint: Metal Gear Solid 3 (2004) – Virtuous Mission

"Naked Snake" in Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater.

“Light is but a farewell gift from the darkness to those on their way to die.” – The Boss, Metal Gear Solid 3

The release of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater in 2004 was met with the same fevered anticipation that many franchises experience on their third entry: trepidation about the new material that’s needed to keep the series fresh, hope that missteps from the second installment might be addressed, and general excitement at the property's being back at all. By this point, whatever its perceived flaws, the Metal Gear series had established itself as one of the most singularly creative and expressive franchises in video-game history. Anyone with even a passing interest in the industry looked to Snake Eater’s release with wide-eyed curiosity. How could director and writer Hideo Kojima possibly follow up the expansive, mind-bending experience of Sons of Liberty?

Podcast: Interview with George Miller (1985)

Tina Turner in a scene from George Miller's Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985).

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 writers and artists from all fields. In 1985, I sat down with Australian filmmaker George Miller.

With George Miller celebrating his 73rd birthday earlier this month, it feels timely to revisit this conversation from 1985, which took place as the director was promoting the release of his third Mad Max feature, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. Mad Max (1979) marked Miller's debut as a feature-film director. His other credits include the "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" chapter of Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983), The Witches of Eastwick (1987), Babe (1995) and Babe: Pig in the City (1998). In 2006, he won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature for Happy Feet. In 2015, Mad Max: Fury Road garnered him Oscar nominations for Best Picture and Best Director.

– Kevin Courrier

Here is the full interview with George Miller as it aired on CJRT-FM in 1985.

The Cinema of Stillness: Painting With Film

Above: some of the uncanny overlaps between frames from films by the Russian cinema poet Andrei Tarkovsky (left) and the great American realist painter Andrew Wyeth (right).

"What is art? . . . Like a declaration of love: the consciousness of our dependence on each other. A confession. An unconscious act that reflects the true meaning of life – love and sacrifice."
– Andrei Tarkovsky

Recently, culture critic and film scholar Hava Aldouby illuminated a unique zone of viewing pleasure by reminding us that the great Federico Fellini professed a desire to create “an entire film made of immobile pictures.” For me, the most tantalizing of films are those that draw extensively on art history, and particularly painting, as a reservoir for their highly retinal and idiosyncratic visual imagery. David Lynch, for example, said he liked making “moving paintings.” Something like Goya in action.

Hello, Dolly! Redux

Bernadette Peters in Hello Dolly! (Photo: Julieta Cervantes)

I had a great time watching Bette Midler and David Hyde Pierce in Hello, Dolly! last fall, but Bernadette Peters and Victor Garber, who have replaced them in Jerry Zaks’s gleaming Broadway revival, bring something new to the roles of Dolly Gallagher Levi and Horace Vandergelder: heart. Up to now my favorite Dolly has been Barbra Streisand in the otherwise bloated and worn 1969 movie version. She gave a sensational showmanlike performance – like Jimmy Cagney in Yankee Doodle Dandy or Robert Preston in The Music Man. But she was so absurdly young to be playing the widowed Dolly, who fastens on Yonkers shopkeeper Vandergelder as a way to refurbish a life grown dull, that the semblance of naturalism that’s meant to undergird musical comedy, even in something as stylized as Guys and Dolls, vanished utterly and you watched Streisand as if she were starring in her own revue. (And that certainly wasn’t the case with Cagney or Preston.) Peters, who, like Midler, is the right age to play Dolly, gives her a core of vulnerability from the get-go – from the moment she apostrophizes to her beloved dead husband, Ephraim, that she’s tired of living life as she has since he passed on. Both Streisand and Midler played Dolly’s bid for remarriage to Horace as situation comedy and farce; Peters motivates it psychologically.