A Few Brief Thoughts on Just a Few More Interesting Short Films

My coverage of short films has fallen off a bit lately, but I’m still keeping an eye out for interesting ones. Here are eight more since my last roundup that I think are worth talking about, listed in the order in which I saw them.

The poster for Drew Marquardt's Act of War.

American Drew Marquardt’s Act of War (2022) is the perfect no-budget student film. On the morning of 9/11, an accountant (David Theune) working at the World Trade Center’s insurance company discovers a loophole that can help them avoid bankruptcy due to payouts: if the attacks are declared an act of war, then military conflict voids the policy. For most of the 8-minute runtime he debates with an in-house lawyer (Johnny Ray Meeks) in a bare office with only a desk, two chairs, and a phone, first about whether to get their Washington lobbyist (Richardson Cisneros-Jones) to act on this information, then about who should call him. The moral weaseling and self-justifications are compellingly scripted and enthralling to watch. Ultimately, they decide to do it, the call is made, and we hear George W. Bush use the key phrase in his televised address to the nation. An opening title card elevates the proceedings: “This really happened.”

Mixed Media Report

This round-up includes reviews of Adolescence, Good Night, and Good Luck and Mission: Impossible: The Final Reckoning, as well as a tribute to Charles Strouse.

Stephen Graham and Owen Cooper in Adolescence. (Photo: Netflix.)

It’s a confirmed truth that British actors can do just about anything, but the consistency and range of performances in the recent four-part English series Adolescence (streaming on Netflix) is so impressive that it may have set a new standard. The style of the limited series, created and written by Stephen Graham, who plays one of the principal roles, and the prolific playwright and screenwriter Jack Thorne and directed by Philip Barantini, is documentary realism, and the characters are etched in such precise psychological detail that they register more as figures in an Impressionist group painting come to life than as actors at work. You carry them away with you; I watched the first half at the end of the evening and woke up early the next morning with them still crowded into my brain. (I couldn’t get back to sleep until I’d finished the series.) My praise is meant to extend to the young performers, who give performances of unwavering authenticity on a par with the adults. Those of us who love watching English TV drama – and that includes almost everyone I know – have our favorite actors, but the only member of the cast of Adolescence I recognized was Graham, whom I’d admired as the captain of the whaling ship in The North Water and as Jamie Bell’s brother in the movie Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool. I assume that my lack of familiarity with the others enhanced the freshness of the experience, but then British actors are chameleons anyway.

A Poet’s Search for Mary MacLeod: More Richly in Earth

(McGill/Queen's University Press.)

“Much we long for what we lack,
for what is closed within the grave,
our treasure and triumph, our glee without gloom.
What I myself have received thereof I shall remember long.”
                    --Mary MacLeod, “Marbhrann / Dirge”

New from Criterion: In the Heat of the Night and Killer of Sheep

Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger in In the Heat of the Night. (Criterion Collection.)

Mark Harris’s wonderful book Pictures at a Revolution ingeniously uses the five 1967 films nominated for the Best Picture Oscar to chronicle the shift from the old to the new Hollywood. They covered the spectrum at the moment when a new sensibility – countercultural, free-spirited, ironic about the filmmaking shibboleths – had begun to slip in and captivate young audiences for whom the new retreads of old-fashioned movies held no appeal. Within a couple of years the studios, exasperated and baffled by filmgoers’ lack of interest in the latest expansively budgeted musicals and adventure spectacles and their preference for off-the-beaten-path items like Easy Rider and M*A*S*H, had turned the asylum over to the inmates: hipster writers and directors who shared a view of the world with their audiences. But in 1967 both Hollywoods were represented in the nominations. At one end were the leaden Doctor Dolittle, occupying the spot unofficially reserved for a lavish musical that was assumed to reflect big-studio production values (some years there were two) and the social problem drama Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, both of which offered embarrassing evidence that the old ways had stopped working. At the other end were Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate, which the youth of America had turned into enormous hits. Bonnie and Clyde was the movie of the year, but in 1967 there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that it would walk away with the statuette. However, it was already too late for Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, with its simple-minded civics-class approach to the topic of race. The film that won the award was Norman Jewison’s In the Heat of the Night, adapted by Stirling Silliphant from a John Ball novel about a northern Black homicide detective (Sidney Poitier) who finds himself between trains in a small Mississippi town during a murder investigation and is hauled in reflexively for questioning by the local white cops. Released after producing his badge and calling his chief in Philadelphia, he winds up helping the sheriff (Rod Steiger) solve the crime.

Truth in Consequences: Anna Karenina Mesmerizes at the National Ballet of Canada

Heather Ogden and Ben Rudisin in Anna Karenina. (Photo: Karolina Kuras.)

Christian Spuck’s Anna Karenina made its North American debut with the National Ballet of Canada on June 13, launching a sold-out week-long run at Toronto’s Four Seasons Centre and marking a major addition to the company’s repertoire. First staged in Zürich in 2014, Spuck’s adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s 1878 novel distills its epic sweep into a series of charged encounters, shaped by choreography that fuses classical line with contemporary weight and dramatic urgency. Spuck, now artistic director of Staatsballett Berlin, brings a focus on the psychological to choreography that is both fluid and inherently dramatic.

Berlin Alexanderplatz: Döblin Meets Fassbinder Meets Lewis

“It’s only because of their stupidity that they are able to be so sure of themselves.”
                        --Franz Kafka (to Max Brod)

Not so long ago I was discussing the compelling and distressing works of four Japanese novelists in terms of a special category I rashly called the scariest narratives ever written. And while it’s true that Kenzaburo Oe, Osamu Dazai, Kobo Abe and Yukio Mishima are right up there in terms of writing seemingly elegant and restrained tales while secretly scraping off the thin psychological veneer of civilization to reveal the throbbing savagery beneath, now I might have to retract my assessment in light of recent re-readings of two novelists who are even more pertinent and sadly applicable to these harrowing times we’re all trying to live through. They were written historically close to each other, one by a German author, Alfred Döblin in 1929, when his country was witnessing the demise of the wistful Weimar Republic and the rise of National Socialism, while the other was an American novelist in 1935, Sinclair Lewis, who was witnessing a threat to his own country’s democratic principles under the paranoid banner of white nationalism.

Good Education: Whisper of the Heart

Studio Ghibli’s 1995 Whisper of the Heart (Mimi o Sumaseba / 耳をすませば) is one of those films about nothing in particular that end up being incredibly moving. The major directorial effort by Kondō Yoshifumi before his sudden early death, adapted by Miyazaki Hayao from the one-volume manga by Hiiragi Aoi, Whisper portrays the free-range childhood – vanishingly rare today outside of a major metropolitan area with ubiquitous public transport (such as Tokyo) – of outspoken fourteen-year-old girl Shizuku (Honna Yōko). Like most other Studio Ghibli entries, it’s a fantasy, but mostly because it’s such an ideal childhood.

More on the Broadway Musical Season: Dead Outlaw, Buena Vista Social Club and Just in Time

Andrew Durand (left) and Company in Dead Outlaw. (Photo: Matthew Murphy.)

The general complaint about Broadway musicals in the twenty-first century is that too many of them recycle the plots of old movies. But ever since the advent of the sophisticated book musical with Show Boat in 1927, composers and librettists have looked to other media for source material, though during the golden age of American musicals they more often began as straight plays or novels. Did critics and aficionados bemoan the fact that My Fair Lady adapted Pygmalion, Guys and Dolls was derived from a pair of Damon Runyon stories and Kiss Me, Kate was based on The Taming of the Shrew? The proof, as always, is in the pudding. The recent history of the musical would be significantly poorer without Hairspray, The Band’s Visit and, God knows, The Light in the Piazza. Anyway, the evidence suggests that musicals are becoming more imaginative, not less so. This season’s crop included a Korean import about two robots in love, a nineteenth-century whaling tale that ended in shipwreck and cannibalism, and, weirdest of all, the new Dead Outlaw, a rock musical conceived by David Yazbek, who also penned the music and lyrics along with Erik Della Penna.  

Guillaume Côté’s Adieu: A Daring Farewell at the National Ballet of Canada

Guillaume Côté in Grand Mirage. (Photo: Karolina Kuras.)

After 26 years at the National Ballet of Canada, Guillaume Côté could have chosen the easy road: a swan song in a signature classical role, a nostalgic backward glance. Instead, the Québec-born, Toronto-trained principal - whose artistry has shaped the company for a generation - delivers a bold, forward-looking program, Adieu, which opened Friday at the Four Seasons Centre and continues through the week. The evening featured three premieres and a reprise of Côté’s slow-burning Bolero, first created in 2012, making for a heady mix.

Life is a Game of Go: The Enigmatic Literature of Yoko Tawada

(New Directions.)

“It is the second job of literature to create myth. But its first job is to destroy it.”

--Kenzaburo Oe

Yoko Tawada’s beautiful and strange literary work is totally saturated with mythology, both the public and the private sort, mixed together through a frantic postmodern blender to shake up a truly startling smoothie of poetic insights about the odd sensations that accompany our situation as human beings in a weary century. True, Tawada’s novels, often written in both German and Japanese before being deftly translated into the only language I can access, are what we might quaintly refer to as an acquired taste. But then, so is sake. But sake, once tasted, and whether hot, chilled or room temperature, alters our senses forever after. And so it is with Tawada’s marvelous and marvel-filled stories. They have the capacity to inalterably change the open-minded reader, in the way that only great literature can, and after reading her surreal, dreamlike reveries about our relationship to words and language, most other literary beverages feel slightly bland by comparison. So we won’t compare them, any more than we would compare sake to tapwater.

The Extraordinary Adam Guettel: The Light in the Piazza at The Huntington and Floyd Collins on Broadway

Emily Skinner in The Huntington Theatre's The Light in the Piazza. (Photo: Julieta Cervantes.)

The new Huntington Theatre mounting of The Light in the Piazza is the fourth production I’ve seen of this show, and except for Bartlett Sher’s spectacular original staging, at Lincoln Center in 2005, it’s the best. I think that Piazza, with its first-rate Craig Lucas book derived from Elizabeth Spencer’s 1960 novel and its soaring impressionistic score by Adam Guettel, is the greatest musical written in the twenty-first century. (Yes, I love Hamilton.) It’s an unconventional romantic musical in which the leap of faith made by the wife of a North Carolina tobacco executive named Margaret Johnson, who brings her daughter Clara to Florence on vacation in 1953, is a symbol for all of our attempts to find happiness in love, even though we know that the effort is reckless because as often as not it ends in shambles. One of the elements that make the play unusual is that though the lovers are Clara and a young Florentine named Fabrizio Naccarelli, the son of a shopkeeper, who fall in love at first sight. Margaret is the protagonist, and it’s finally she who has to overcome personal obstacles, not her daughter. She has been Clara’s protector since, at twelve, the girl was kicked in the head by a pony, apparently halting her emotional development. So when she and Fabrizio become entranced with each other, Margaret – encouraged via long distance by her husband Roy back home in Winston-Salem – attempts to stop it before the humiliating moment when the Naccarellis figure out something is wrong. But no one in the Naccarelli family is put off by Clara’s childlike nature, or even by her explosion when Fabrizio’s flirtatious sister-in-law, Franca, gets too close to him at a family get-together. The Naccarellis find her refreshingly old-fashioned; even Franca, whose attention-getting behavior is a response to her husband’s sexual duplicitousness, defends her; she thinks that Clara is right to fight for her man she loves and even wishes she had done so. Margaret has to confront the fact that the greater block to her approving Clara’s union with Fabrizio is the fact that her own marriage has been a disappointment, that she long ago ceased to believe in love.

Confusion of Purpose: Branden Jacob-Jenkins' Pulitzer Prize-Winning New Play

Jon Michael Hill and Harry Lennix in Purpose. (Photo: Marc J. Franklin.)

I’m a fan of the African-American playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, but he strikes out with his latest work to hit Broadway, Purpose. It’s another dysfunctional family play, like his last-season hit Appropriate. That one was about a nutty white family coming to terms with apparent evidence that the recently deceased patriarch was an especially baroque brand of racist: he collected photographs of lynchings. In Purpose the family is Black, and not just Black – they belong to an aristocracy distinguished by political celebrity. Solomon (known as Sonny) Jasper (played by Harry Lennix) is a minister and Civil Rights activist who was a close confederate of Martin Luther King, whose portrait hangs on the living-room wall, and Jacobs-Jenkins borrows some of King’s personal details for the character. Sonny’s wife Claudine (LaTanya Richardson Jackson) is a lawyer, fiercely protective of her family and its legacy. Their elder brother Junior (Glenn Davis), a politician, has just finished a two-year prison stint for the misuse of campaign funds and other white-collar crimes, and his wife Morgan (Alana Arenas), is about to follow him into jail as an accomplice, though she claims that she had no idea what she was signing her name to, and possibly she’s telling the truth. These consecutive sentences are the result of a negotiation with the justice system, so that their kids wouldn’t be left without a parent to take care of them. Junior’s kid brother Naz (Jon Michael Hill) has kept himself distanced from the family: he lives in Harlem while they’re in another state (the playwright doesn’t tell us where the Jaspers live, but Chicago is a good guess), and he hasn’t even kept them apprised of his career as a photographer. The occasion for the family gathering is a delayed birthday celebration for Claudine. The unexpected guest is Naz’s friend Aziza (Kara Young), a single gay woman for whom Naz has offered to serve as a sperm donor. He’s carefully hidden his family background from her, so when she stumbles into the lush Jasper home she’s stunned to discover that he’s the progeny of one of the most famous Black families in the country.

The Beat Goes On: The Yardbirds Chart the Course

“1966 was the high point of British pop art, and with hits like The Yardbirds’ 'Shapes of Things,' there was an incredible compression of ideas and emotions about mass media, consumption, perception and gender, all poured into those three-minutes-long forty-five r.p.m. records.”

                        --Jon Savage, Faber Book of Pop

Reaktion Books, University of Chicago Press.

A Baroque Drama of Biblical Proportions: Opera Atelier’s David and Jonathan

The artists of Atelier Ballet in Opera Atelier's production of Charpentier's David and Jonathan. (Photo: Bruce Zinger.)

Opera Atelier’s 40th anniversary staging of Charpentier’s David and Jonathan at Koerner Hall is not just a local milestone but an international event, rooted in the Canadian company’s acclaimed presentation at Versailles’ Opéra Royal—a version that returns to Versailles this May, underscoring its global prestige and resonance.

Doppelgänger: Barry Levinson's The Alto Knights

Robert De Niro and Robert De Niro in The Alto Knights. (Photo: Warner Bros.)

Witty, gripping and grandly entertaining, Barry Levinson’s The Alto Knights centers on the complicated relationship of two legendary Mafiosi, Frank Costello and Vito Genovese, who were both recruited to work for bootlegger Giuseppe Masseria in the 1920s alongside Lucky Luciano. After the murders of Masseria and his successor, Salvatore Maranzano, Genovese became Luciano’s second in command with Costello, who claimed to have abjured violence at the end of the First World War and stopped carrying a gun, as his consigliere. Genovese took over in 1936 when Luciano went to prison and expanded the operations of the organization Luciano had reconfigured as the Commission into narcotics. But he had to flee the U.S. to avoid a murder charge and took sanctuary in Italy. (Both men had been born there: Costello in Naples, Genovese in Calabria.) Costello took over, trading drugs for gambling. When Genovese returned to the States after the war – neatly bypassing conviction for that old killing when two key witnesses against him turned up dead – he didn’t take well to being his former colleague’s underboss. All of this narrative is background, much of it unstated or understated, to Levinson’s picture, which takes place in 1957, the year Costello appeared before the Senate Committee investigating the Mafia, and the year Genovese engineered the assassination of the former head of Murder Inc., Albert Anastasia, and attempted unsuccessfully to eliminate Costello.

Form and Legacy: Jane Corkin’s Vision of Photography as Fine Art

A display wall from Between Life and Light at the Jane Corkin Gallery.

The Jane Corkin Gallery’s 45th-anniversary exhibition, Between Life and Light, begins with the space itself: a historic tank house in Toronto’s Distillery District. The oak floors and wooden beams, reimagined in 2003 by architects Shim-Sutcliffe, create a gallery of light and levels that feels both expansive and intimate. This architectural transformation mirrors the exhibition’s premise—photography as a continuum of history and innovation, spanning nearly two centuries from 1857 to 2024.

Two Visionaries Walk Into a Bar: Huysmans and Huxley

(Both titles: Reaktion Books/University of Chicago Press.)

“This was the attraction of the abyss over which one is leaning, that of a life lived at white heat. It was a deliberate abdication of day to day struggles, the removal of the difficulties of existence.”

--J .K. Huysmans

“We live together, we act on and react to one another but always we are by ourselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.”

--Aldous Huxley

As T.A. Brown pointed out in the article “The Technology That Actually Runs The World” last December in The Atlantic Monthly, the most dominant algorithms aren’t necessarily the ones choosing what songs Spotify serves up to you supposedly based on your personal tastes, but rather the ones that control everything you see, hear or read by controlling all the art the even gets made before it’s made, as a result of prevailing consumer taste mechanisms that it can interpret more efficiently than the most canny culture critics ever could. The article suggested that these algorithms dictate everything, from which books are published and what art gets seen, in a revolutionary paradigm shift that has become entrenched in the arts and media. The essential premise was that in 2024 culture became boring and stale due to these thuggish algorithms’ calling the shots on what gets first produced, and then gets praised. The idea is that Big Tech has flattened culture into a facsimile of its former self, and that algorithmic recommendation engines have created what amounts to a lack of all forward momentum. But long before computers ever existed, except in the minds of visionary science fiction authors such as Yevgeny Zamyatin (author of the mindblowing 1922 novel WE) and Aldous Huxley (author of the book Zamyatin inspired, Brave New World in 1931), concerns were already beginning to float to the surface of our consciousness. Or at least to the consciousness of a few heroic prescients.

Potpourri: Love Life, Don’t Eat the Mangos and Beckett Briefs

Kate Baldwin and Brian Stokes Mitchell in Love Life. (Photo: Joan Marcus.)

The review of Don’t Eat the Mangos contains spoilers.

The great Jewish Weimar composer Kurt Weill fled Berlin for New York in the early thirties. Nothing he wrote for Broadway earned him the fame he’d garnered as Bertolt Brecht’s collaborator in Germany, but he produced the music for eight shows between 1936 and 1949 (he died in 1950 at the age of fifty while he was working on a musical based on Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) with a fascinating range of librettists including Moss Hart, Ira Gershwin, S.J. Perelman, Ogden Nash and Maxwell Anderson. And though the shows were a mixed bag, his music was usually glorious. The 1947 opera he and the poet Langston Hughes fashioned from Elmer Rice’s play Street Scene, set in a Manhattan tenement, may be the most exquisite score anyone has written for Broadway besides Porgy and Bess.

Lost and Found: Christine Byl’s Lookout

(Deep Vellum/A Strange Object.)

A few weeks ago, somewhat bored by what I was currently reading, I rummaged through my pile of unread books, and picked up a novel called Lookout, by Christine Byl. It was a signed copy, but I have no idea how I acquired it. I think it might have been in a swag bag handed to me at a literary gala. In other words, by pure chance. The book was published in 2023 by a small, independent Texan press called Deep Vellum, under their A Strange Object imprint. I thought I’d read a few pages and see if it was any good. 273 pages later, I was in tears, moved and entranced by this tale of the loving but precariously dysfunctional Kinzler family living in rural Montana. The book spans the years from 1985 to 2009, mainly focusing on their younger of two daughters, Cody.

You Wouldn't Want to Live There: Chaos: The Manson Murders

Errol Morris’s Chaos: The Manson Murders is a shallow dip in a deep pool of conspiracy and weirdness. The book it’s based on—CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties (2019), by Tom O'Neill, with Dan Piepenbring—is only one of many in the last thirty years or so whose title promised “secret history”; unlike others, it delivered. O'Neill found a multitude of buried facts and forgotten documents. He highlighted existing holes in the standard version of the Manson murders, and punched many new ones. What he didn’t do was offer a unified-field theory, with all questions answered, all contradictions squared; and that, aside from the evidence he presented, was O’Neill’s edge over other conspiracists. The sum of his unearthings, as he readily admitted, was a mound of irreducible mystery, uncanny remains forming no definitive shape. CHAOS was both enormous fun and disturbing to the point of nightmare.