Counterbalance: The Clarity of Costas Picadas

"Hyperbola 3", from the Hyperbola series by photographic artist Costas Picadas. (Photo: Odon Wagner Gallery)

“The photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.” – Diane Arbus

Welcome to the future history of photography: a utopia of pure images, a somewhat surreal realm in which our presumed yet arbitrary borderlines between the real and the imagined are deftly erased by the aesthetic prowess and technical skill of the artist. These splendidly pale gems are chromogenic prints, colloquially known as c-prints, but they are digital c-prints, where the image content is exposed through lasers rather than chemicals. Created in limited editions of five, with variable scales, and face-mounted to plexiglas, they are also invitations to a fresh kind of visual experience consisting of crystal-clear clarity. What Arbus did for faces and figures the Greek-born and New York-based Picadas seems to do for places and buildings: he reveals their inner essence by scratching gently at their surfaces to unearth their architectural facades, either their secret countenance or their psychic landscape. His dream-like vistas, with portions either fading into or out of optical focus, offer the viewer a whole new and vastly expansive dimension of hidden significance. They are retinal balms that soothe the weary eyes of our digital age, and yet they too are digital gifts, pulling us into the otherworldly architectonic realm of the everyday world we inhabit.

Neglected Gem: Ma Saison Préférée (1993)

Catherine Deneuve and Daniel Auteuil in Ma Saison Préférée. (Photo: IMDB)

The family dynamics in André Téchiné’s Ma Saison Préférée (My Favorite Season) are messy, complicated, and utterly plausible. Émilie (Catherine Deneuve) is married to her law partner, Bruno (Jean-Pierre Bouvier); their kids, Anne (Ciara Mastroianni) and Lucien (Anthony Prada), who’s adopted, are grown, though still in residence. The marriage has become perfunctory, and when Émilie’s estranged younger brother Antoine (Daniel Auteuil), a neurologist in another town, comes back into the picture, he initiates an argument between them that provokes a separation. Antoine has a habit of inciting arguments. He and Émilie have a close, eruptive relationship; at this point they haven’t spoken in three years, but when their mother (Marthe Villalonga) has a stroke and comes to stay with Émilie and Bruno, Émilie seeks Antoine out. The thinking among the members of Émilie’s family is that he’s crazy, and that he gets her acting crazy too; Bruno can’t abide him. So she lies to Bruno that she happened to run into him on the street and invited him to dinner to patch things up between them. Antoine tries to act like the perfect guest and not stir the waters, but he slips and exposes the lie. Bruno’s fury provokes Émilie; she’s so fed up with his disapproval that she says the worst things she can think of to hurt his feelings – she tell him that he suffocates and exhausts her, that she tells him lies to give herself a break from him. It isn’t true, but it does the trick.

Neglected Gem: David Lynch's Dune (1984)

Kyle MacLachlan as Paul Muad'dib in Dune. (Photo: IMDB)

In any list of the worst book-to-film adaptations, you’ll find David Lynch’s Dune somewhere near the top – universally acknowledged as a shallow, baffling, unsatisfying adaptation of Frank Herbert’s seminal novel, which suffered from an infamously tortured production process. In fact, to even call it “David Lynch’s Dune” is to invoke the spectre of this troubled development, which left Lynch so disgruntled that he hid behind the “Alan Smithee” pseudonym and even modified his writing credit to read “Judas Booth” (a mash-up of Judas Escariot and John Wilkes Booth) in subsequent cuts of the film. Pointing the finger at studio interference and a lack of creative control – including being denied final cut – Lynch seemed to respond to Dune’s critical and financial failings by dodging the issue of quality within the material itself and instead focusing on the ways in which he had been stifled. Dune remains a strange black mark on his filmography, frequently cited as his worst film and a disaster from top to bottom – which I think does a tremendous disservice to the things that make it not just a worthy addition to the Lynch canon, but to the epic fantasy genre as a whole.

Larger Than Life: The Big Note by Charles Ulrich

Frank Zappa, whose legacy is catalogued in Charles Ulrich's The Big Note. (Photo: IMDB)

This coming December 4th marks the 25th anniversary of the death of Frank Zappa. Just before he died of cancer at the age of 52, he was interviewed by NBC Today Show correspondent Jaime Gangel, who asked him how he wanted to be remembered. “It’s not important to be remembered” was his direct reply. Nevertheless, when you’re dead, you have no more say in the matter. The Big Note (New Star) by Charles Ulrich could be described as the final say in the matter of Frank Zappa’s music, a scholarly 800-page encyclopedia of all things Zappa.

To Seek and Be Called: Nostalghia (1983)

Oleg Yankovskiy in Tarkovsky's Nostalghia. (Photo: Getty)

Nostalghia (1983) is often considered, along with Ivan’s Childhood (1962), to be a minor Tarkovsky, the latter due to its relative conventionality, the former because of how far it goes in the other direction. Written by Andrei Tarkovsky with famous Italian screenwriter Tonino Guerra, this film is a mood piece in the strictest sense of the term, in that its core theme is the feeling of “nostalghia,” which alludes to a Russian emigrant longing for the fatherland, and in the fact that every cinematic element is either sacrificed for this theme or indentured into its service. What results is a work of devastating beauty just ripe for the GIFing.

Fanny Brice: Brains and Talent

Fanny Brice, born Fania Borach, pictured in 1928. (Photo: Getty Archives)

In William Wyler’s 1968 Funny Girl, Barbra Streisand gives one of the two or three greatest musical-comedy performances ever put on film as Fanny Brice, the Brooklyn burlesque comic who became a Broadway star when Florenz Ziegfeld tapped her to appear in his Follies in 1910. But Streisand’s is a reimagined Brice – more crafted, funny in a more modern mode, and more of a camera creation (even though Streisand had originated the role on stage and this was only her first picture). The real Fanny Brice, who can be glimpsed in only a handful of movies – Hollywood didn’t seem to know what to do with her, so when she retired from the stage in the 1930s she wound up on radio, where she played Baby Snooks for years – and heard in a couple of dozen recordings. (Jasmine Records has collected them all, including a couple of Baby Snooks routines, on Fanny Brice: The Rose of Washington Square. The song “Rose of Washington Square,” which she performed in Ziegfeld’s Midnight Frolic in 1920, is not, alas, among them.)

Donny Osmond Does an Encore

Donny Osmond, in his prime. (Photo: Billboard)

The story of Donny Osmond is not an easy one to tell in a short space. A book might be better. Although the former teen idol seems to have been around forever, he just this year turned 60. Yet his life has had as many chapters as someone twice his age.

The first, and the most widely known, is filled with descriptions of his life as a jet-setting member of the internationally known Osmonds. You remember, the singing brothers from Utah? The Mormons in bell bottoms, sequins and big-collared shirts? The guys whose squeaky-clean image helped push them to the top of the recording industry? At one time, they scored nine gold records in a single year. Their rivals were The Jackson 5, brothers too, but black. The teen magazines pitted one against the other.

Podcast: Interview with Tom Laughlin (1985)

Tom Laughlin and Delores Taylor in the 1971 cult hit Billy Jack. (Photo: Handout/NY Daily News)

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 actor, director and screenwriter Tom Laughlin.

At the time of the interview, Tom Laughlin was in Toronto filming The Return of Billy Jack, a planned follow-up to his Billy Jack films of the previous decade, in which he bucked the trend of 1970s film antiheroes by portraying a genuinely positive heroic figure who protected animals and children against racist thugs. The Return of Billy Jack would unfortunately never be released.

– Kevin Courrier

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

Refugees: Leave No Trace

Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie and Ben Foster in Leave No Trace. (Photo: IMDB)

Intimate, graceful and sorrowful, Debra Granik’s Leave No Trace is the best movie I’ve seen so far this year. And it’s a total surprise, because I found Granik’s last picture, Winter’s Bone, phony pretty much from start to finish. A study of an adolescent girl (Jennifer Lawrence) growing up in abject poverty in the Ozarks, it was relentlessly gray and cheerless, the characters reduced to editorial signposts proclaiming the director’s vision. The whole movie reminded me of the scene at the end of Brokeback Mountain where Heath Ledger visits his clandestine lover Jake Gyllenhaal’s parents after Gyllenhaal’s death: Ang Lee wanted to make the point that these people were dirt poor, so the walls were bare. But it’s an elemental human impulse to try to import some comfort to even the grimmest surroundings – a hospital room, a jail cell. The only scene in Winter’s Bone that felt lived-in was one where a group of people gather to make music. By contrast, there isn’t a single moment in Leave No Trace – the coming-of-age story of a teenage girl, Tom (Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie), who lives, homeless and itinerant, with her father, Will (Ben Foster), in the woods of the Pacific Northwest – that seems inauthentic. It has a varied and rich emotional palette. Perhaps the magnificent visual palette of the landscape (shot by Michael McDonough) helped keep Granik honest.

Through an Architect's Eyes: A Conversation About Columbus

John Cho and Haley Lu Richardson in Kogonada's Columbus. (Photo: IMDB)

Columbus, the indie debut feature by renowned video essayist Kogonada, is widely considered one of the best films of 2017 and garnered a rapturous response at this year’s Ebertfest. Set among the world-famous modernist buildings of Columbus, Indiana, it tells the story of two people stuck in an in-between phase of their lives: Casey (Haley Lu Richardson), a nineteen-year-old architecture fan and daughter of a divorced former opioid addict (Michelle Forbes), and Jin (John Cho), the estranged son of a celebrated Korean architecture professor who suddenly collapses. They meet by chance and spend their days together talking about architecture. Both Richardson and Cho give superb performances, Complemented by the assured direction and the formalist cinematography of Elisha Christian, shooting on location in the eponymous town. Columbus stands out for its many gorgeous and moving shots of well-known modernist buildings, including the Miller House, the Columbus Regional Hospital Mental Health Center, the Cleo Rogers Memorial Library, and the Irwin Union Bank building. In her review for RogerEbert.com, Sheila O’Malley writes of the film, “What is remarkable is how intense it is, given the stillness and quiet of Kogonada’s style, and the focus with which he films the buildings.” And Nathan Knapp’s heartfelt analysis of Columbus for the online magazine Bright Wall/Dark Room is one of the best pieces of film criticism I’ve yet encountered.

As architecture is such a prominent part of the film, I was interested in how someone with formal architectural training might see it. Humphrey Yang is a high-school classmate of mine who received his degree in architecture not too long ago and is now pursuing graduate studies in computational design at Carnegie Mellon. Our discussion below, which has been edited and condensed, covers the art and engineering aspects of architecture, how to shoot an architectural film, why Columbus isn’t one, and how it might have turned out in a non-Western context.

Portugal/Brazil: Melancholy Redux – The Shared Literary Ethos of Assis, Pessoa, and Lispector

Machado de Assis's Collected Stories, Fernando Pessoa's Book of Disquiet, and Clarice Lispector's Collected Stories. (Photo: Getty Images)

This is an appreciation of three new translations of seminal works by perhaps the greatest writers in a shared language in the late 19th and early to mid 20th century. But these three remarkable writers, all of whom specialized in creating scintillating short stories of extreme structural brevity and emotional precision, had much more in common than only writing in Portuguese. They also shared a deep subterranean conduit of melancholy realism and occasionally a surreal current of open-hearted embrace for the uncanny aspects of everyday life. They each documented waking dreams: everyday life under a magnifying glass.

For my purposes, and for the purposes of this brief study of their work (which is not a review of all three new translations at once but rather is a celebration of their radical stylistic spirit) there is a kind of metaphysical conveyor belt running directly from Machado through Pessoa and leading powerfully into the lap of the almost unbearably glamorous Lispector. (A lap-dance for intellectuals, perhaps.) That conveyor belt also operates in the gloomy nocturnal geographical navigations traveling from Portugal to Brazil and back again, fueled by the quirky and deceptive simplicity of their native language (to which I, alas, have no access apart from the seemingly brilliant handiwork of three gifted translation artisans) as it mysteriously runs uphill into a passionate yet tautly restrained English.

All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Florida Project (2017)

Brooklynn Prince and Valeria Cotto in The Florida Project. (Photo: IMDB)

Mothers are infallible. They’re the safety net, the locus of belonging that makes everything else okay. This is the secret of childhood. The secret of growing up is learning that this isn’t true. The Florida Project (2017) is about a little girl named Moonee (Brooklynn Prince) who learns this at way too young an age.

In many ways, the entire film is built around the idea of waiting for the other shoe to drop. Moonee lives with her very young single mom, Halley (Bria Vinaite), at the Magic Castle Motel right outside Disney World. The motel, and similar ones nearby, serves as home and community for families rendered homeless by the Great Recession, including Moonee’s friends Scooty (Christopher Rivera) and, from the Futureland Motel next door, Jancey (Valeria Cotto). The film follows these kids in their world as they while away the early days of summer vacation by getting up to shenanigans, running around screaming, begging for change for ice cream, exploring the nearby (and surprisingly beautiful) empty fields, and basically just doing what kids throughout pre-internet history have always done.

The Member of the Wedding: How Not to Stage an American Classic

Roslyn Ruff and Tavi Gevinson in The Member of the Wedding. (Photo: Daniel Rader)

There isn’t an iota of poetry in the Williamstown Theatre Festival production of The Member of the Wedding. Carson McCullers’s adaptation of her own 1946 coming-of-age novel was produced on Broadway in 1950 and filmed – unforgettably – by Fred Zinnemann two years later with the original stars: the great actress and jazz singer Ethel Waters, the child actor Brandon de Wilde, and in the role of the protagonist, twelve-year-old Frankie Addams, the phenomenal twenty-six-year-old Julie Harris. Except for A Streetcar Named Desire, this is, I believe, the most lyrical play ever written by an American. Frankie, lonesome, motherless, desperate for connection, latches onto the idea of going off with her brother and his fiancée after their imminent wedding because she has no group to belong to and decides that “they are the ‘we’ of me.” The speech in which she conveys this notion – to her little cousin and next-door neighbor John Henry, who, of course, has no idea what she’s talking about – is the first-act curtain, and it’s utterly remarkable. The language shimmers; the revelation it frames, fantastic as it is, is pellucid and profound. At several points in the play Frankie – though she is trembling on the razor’s edge of adolescence, pulled as much backwards as forwards – offers perceptions that are both touchingly and terrifyingly mature for a girl of twelve and that, more astonishingly, she articulates with the clarity of a poet. She’s like the little girl in Elizabeth Bishop’s “In the Waiting Room” who stumbles into an adult vision of the improbable co-existence of disparate segments of humanity. She’s also a portrait of the writer as a young woman.

Lessons for the Home Baker

A loaf of sourdough bread. (Photo: Liliana Fuchs)

In New England, everybody knows King Arthur Flour. It’s on the shelves in most grocery stores and it’s generally on the more expensive side. Their all-purpose flour is higher in protein than most brands – within the range of traditional bread flours – and that makes for a good, elastic dough and a delicious loaf. The King Arthur Flour Baking Center is situated among the green hills of Vermont, immediately across the Connecticut River from Dartmouth College. While the company that eventually became King Arthur has been in operation for over 200 years, the Baking Center only opened in 2012. It includes a bakery, a café, a baking supply store and a small school that offers classes for both professionals and amateurs. The question is, with so many recipes and Youtube videos available on the internet for free, why would you sign up for a class to learn how to make something like sourdough bread or croissants? Because yeast is a living creature; and because many home bakers find croissant recipes daunting just to read. Baking, in other words, can be tricky business, and some skills are most easily learned with the help of experts.

Moulin Rouge! Really Leans Into its Exclamation Point

Danny Burstein in Alex Timbers' 2018 staging of Moulin Rouge! (Photo: Matthew Murphy)

The “new” musical Moulin Rouge! is very keen for you to know what an exuberant, exciting show it is! From the moment you walk into the theatre, there is a lot going on! You get a whole bunch of set (courtesy of scenic designer Derek McLane) for your money! There’s a large, lightbulb-studded windmill! An enormous elephant looms from one of the boxes! Below that, a scantily-clad performer dances on a pole! Two other dancers come down front and center to swallow swords! And the show hasn’t even technically started yet!

If you were hoping the show would include the cover version of “Lady Marmalade” from the original 2001 Baz Luhrmann movie, good news: it starts out with that number! It goes on for a very long time! Sonya Tayeh’s choreography is very intense and fun to watch, and it’s performed by a diverse, energetic cast of performers! Catherine Zuber has designed lots of bright costumes, including a dazzling array of multicolored can-can dresses!

Neglected Gem: Moon Over Parador (1988)

Richard Dreyfuss in Moon Over Parador. (Photo: IMDB)

In Moon Over Parador, a New York actor named Jack Noah (Richard Dreyfuss), who’s just completed a spy thriller on location in a mythical Central American nation called Parador, is kidnapped and forced to impersonate the country's dictator, Simms, who has just keeled over from a heart attack. With the help of his double’s mistress (Sonia Braga), Noah outwits the Secretary of the Interior, Roberto Strausmann (Raul Julia), who runs the secret police and thinks he’s still pulling the dictator’s strings, and ushers in a new, humanistic regime. Paul Mazursky’s film, which he co-wrote with Leon Capetanos, was probably suggested by a 1939 comedy called The Magnificent Fraud, starring Akim Tamiroff and Lloyd Nolan, and it bears some resemblance to Roberto Rossellini’s General della Rovere, in which Vittorio De Sica gave an unforgettable performance as a con man, hired by the Nazis to imitate an executed Resistance fighter, who undermines them by turning into the man he’s playing. But the absurdist-farce style of Moon Over Parador is entirely Mazursky’s, and so is the sensibility. In his movie, the emphasis isn’t on politics or even on character transformations; it’s on role-playing. Moon Over Parador is a comedy built around an actor’s vision of the way the world works.

Improving on Perfection: Mission: Impossible – Fallout

Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson, Tom Cruise, and Ving Rhames in Mission: Impossible – Fallout. (Photo: Polygon)

Tom Cruise was always instrumental to the Mission: Impossible series, right from the jump, not just as its star but as its primary producer. He collaborated with some of the greats of genre cinema, using the distinct cinematic voices of creators like Brian de Palma, John Woo, JJ Abrams, Brad Bird, and Christopher McQuarrie to create new visions of action-oriented spycraft. Ethan Hunt was his answer to 007, and in crafting this franchise at both the macro and micro scales – he’s involved at every level, from script to stunt choreography – he has made sure to execute it at such a high degree of quality that it’s now James Bond who’s running to catch up with Cruise’s signature straight-backed sprint, and not the other way around. While Daniel Craig’s tenure as 007 hit its lowest point with the regrettable misfire that was SPECTRE, Cruise’s run as Ethan Hunt is approaching its zenith, with 2015's Rogue Nation setting the bar so high, I wasn't sure it could be surpassed. Fans of action cinema miss the latest installment, Mission: Impossible – Fallout, at their peril: it’s the spy thriller honed to its deadliest razor-sharp edge, about as perfect an action movie as you could ask for. I've never been happier to have my skepticism proved wrong.

Chamber Folks: All the Things That I Did and All the Things That I Didn't Do

The Milk Carton Kids. (Photo: Joshua Black Wilkins)

In the prologue of Robert Hilburn’s new biography of Paul Simon, he tells the story of Simon’s early working method as a composer, relaying how “Simon took his acoustic guitar into the family bathroom, where the tile made the sound all the more alluring, and he turned off the lights so that he could relax and feel totally at one with the music . . . as he sat alone, these words eventually burst forward: ‘Hello darkness, my old friend.’” I’m going to review Hilburn’s book in a few weeks but I couldn’t help but think of this description in appreciation for the alluring and introspective music of The Milk Carton Kids, an American duo featuring Kenneth Pattengale and Joey Ryan. Their new album on ANTI, produced by Joe Henry, has a long, explanatory title, All The Things That I Did and All The Things That I Didn’t Do  which brought to mind William Blake’s “Songs of Innocence and Experience,” and it consists of twelve carefully written and arranged songs about adulthood. Ironically, the California duo has only been together for seven years, yet seem like old souls addressing the perils of aging.

Moral Quagmires: Kate Plays Christine (2016) and American Animals (2018)

Kate Lyn Sheil as Christine Chubbuck in Kate Plays Christine. (Photo: Variety)

My last week's piece on The Disaster Artist (2017) brought to mind two other films in the genre of quasi-documentary: Kate Plays Christine (2016) and American Animals (2018). All three films place the viewer in a morally awkward position – for The Disaster Artist, the position is that of identifying with not Tommy Wiseau but those working for him.

Kate Plays Christine is a case of docudrama as moral entrapment. Director Robert Greene hires Kate Lyn Sheil to prepare to play Christine Chubbuck, a real-life newscaster in the '70s who shot herself in the head during a live broadcast and later died. But though it's made in documentary style by Greene (a documentarian), it's not strictly a documentary, because it documents the making of a film that was, in fact, never made. That nonexistent film serves as the MacGuffin for the whole enterprise. (Coincidentally, a biopic of Chubbuck called Christine was made the same year.)

Something New, Something Old: Seared & The Petrified Forest

Michael Esper and Hoon Lee in Seared. (Photo: Daniel Rader)

The glimpse of the restaurant world proffered by Theresa Rebeck’s new play Seared (at Williamstown Theatre Festival) is just as delicious as the dishes credited to the chef, Harry (Hoon Lee). Harry is misanthropic, egotistical and neurotic. His partner in this small but impressive Brooklyn restaurant, Mike (Michael Esper), who furnished the cash for the venture and handles the finances, has to put up with his endless quibbling, his eruptions of temper, his perverseness (the moment a critic praises his scallops Harry stops cooking them), his anxiety (Mike avoids telling him they’re expecting a major food critic until the last possible minute – and then the results are disastrous), his expectations of privilege, and his endless pseudo-philosophizing. Mike does so because Harry is a culinary genius – but his partner’s conduct, in addition to the stress of keeping a restaurant afloat, is making him crazy and preventing him from sleeping at night. When he hires a consultant named Emily (Krysta Rodriguez) to, as they say, take the place to the next level – adding more tables, printing menus rather than settling for a chalkboard so that Harry can make last-minute decisions about the offerings – Harry views it as a betrayal and an outrage. But she stays, and it’s clear that her contributions are having the desired effect, even if everything she suggests strikes Harry as pandering. The fourth member of the crew is the waiter, Rodney (W. Tré Davis), who is almost always in the impossible position of trying to stay loyal to both Harry and Mike when they’re on different sides of an argument.