Tripping Down The Rabbit Hole: Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland

Don't be afraid by the Disney logo preluding Tim Burton's latest film -- be worried knowing that the logo will try to leap off the screen in 3D. Burton isn't a stranger to Disney, nor is he a stranger to family friendly entertainment. After all, he had his start with Disney as an animator on films such as The Fox and the Hound (1982) and has found popularity with contemporary fables like Edward Scissorhands (1990), Big Fish (2003) and Tim Burton's Corpse Bride (2005). On the other hand, grandiose 3D epics are new territory for him. So it comes as a bit of a shock that he would use the technology to neglect the hand-crafted set pieces which have become a more appealing staple of his usual style. Burton may want us to follow Alice through the rabbit hole, but instead of going on a marvelous exploration into the surreal, we find ourselves tripping along a path paved with only green screens. The problem Burton has isn't with Alice, it's in Wonderland.

Book: Stephen King's Under the Dome

There's an old joke about Stephen King: He sits at his typewriter, pounding out reams of pages for his latest book. He freezes for THREE SECONDS and then starts typing like mad again. "I hate writer's block," King mutters. Okay, I didn't say it was funny. Forgetting this joke about his prolific ways for a second (he's written/co-written over 65 novels, short-story collections or works of non-fiction since 1974 - I've read over 30 of them), I think that Stephen King is the Charles Dickens of the late 20th/early 21st centuries.

Both were/are successful populists, both wrote/write about societal ills (Dickens' set in a version of the real world of England; King's generally from within the horror or science fiction genres), both were/are always concerned with writing a good story that would appeal to the largest number of readers. Most of Dickens 20+ books have never been out of print and to date neither has King's. I predict in a century they will still both be widely read and studied. Why? If you want to understand the era these books were written in, I submit you will come away with a better understanding reading Dickens or King than trying to wade through most literary fiction or history books published at the same time.

New Maps for a New Land: Frank R. Rossiter's Charles Ives & His America (1975)

“The quest for identity runs through American music like a leitmotif,” writes music critic Veronica Slater. “Long before musical nationalism became an issue in Europe, native-born composers in the New World were trying to speak with a voice recognizably theirs and theirs alone.” Americans, according to Slater, rebelled against the rules in both politics and music for good reason. They were after an indigenous art rooted in their own experience of the new land, not what they inherited from the Old World. The map of that rebellion and quest is aptly provided in Frank Rossiter’s rare and illuminating study of American composer Charles Ives in his book Charles Ives & His America (1975).

Germs R Us: The Crazies (1973) (Part Two)

A scene from George Romero's The Crazies (1973).

Even someone who’s not exactly keen on the genre is likely to admire George Romero’s brand of horror. Along with the inevitable bloodletting, his work boasts an incisive social conscience. In 1973’s The Crazies, he made ordinary folks homicidal -- or, in some instances, just exceedingly goofy -- when their town water supply is contaminated by mistake with an experimental bio-warfare toxin. Nicknamed Trixie, it comes courtesy of the Army, which establishes a quarantine but never thinks to tell panicky locals to stop drinking from the tap.

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe: The Crazies (2010) (Part One)

*SPOILER ALERT* IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THE CRAZIES, THIS ARTICLE GIVES AWAY THE ENDING.

One thing you can say about The Crazies (2010), it isn't trying to hide the fact that we've already seen our world at the brink of its own destruction many times over. It's also not particularly concerned with presenting a cautionary tale on how to avoid such a catastrophe. While there is definitely a running commentary rampant throughout the narrative, it's the same message we've been getting from many zombie films over the past decade. Films such as Danny Boyle's 28 Days (2002) and the grisly follow-up 28 Weeks Later (2007) both gave us a glimpse at military and government incidents which damn near brought the entire world to its knees. The politics at play have been dealt with more aptly in some of George A. Romero's earlier works from the late 60s and 70s (one of which this is a remake of) and in some of the apocalyptic thrillers churned out during the Bush administration. But once the tired (but timely) message is loose, the politics of the human spirit prove to be far more engrossing and this is where The Crazies finds its legs.

Five Reasons I Like Oscar: An Unfashionable View

Of all the many awards shows currently airing on TV, I only regularly watch one, the Oscars, which are trumpeting their 82nd edition on Sunday March 7. I don’t for a second consider The Academy Awards to be a benchmark for excellence, and all those film critics who regularly cite Oscar worthy performances ought not to be reviewing films. However, after suffering through the recent Grammy awards, which are supposed to honour excellence in music but are as mainstream as can be, I appreciate the virtues of the Oscars more than ever. Here are five reasons why.

Song: Family Snapshot

My colleague Kevin Courrier's analysis of Harry Chapin's "Sniper" put me in mind of Peter Gabriel's assassin song, "Family Snapshot", from his Peter Gabriel 3 LP; also known as the 'Melting Face' album. Where Chapin's song was an examination of sniper Charles Whitman, Gabriel's song, Family Snapshot is loosely based upon Arthur Bremer, who attempted to assassinate presidential candidate, George Wallace in May 1972. Gabriel was inspired to write the song after he read the published version of Bremer's diary, An Assassin's Diary (1973). Starting with a low-key piano and synth line, Gabriel sings:

The streets are lined with camera crews/
Everywhere he goes is news/
Today is different/
Today is not the same

Canada - Made in China

This is a slightly odd piece for Critics At Large, but I think it has relevance because what we are dealing with is the Vancouver Olympics and the promotion of Canadian patriotism through clothing. Except the things they want us to buy to make us feel good about ourselves and our country were not made here.

This issue began awhile ago with wine. Vincor, a major wine company that owns wineries such as Inniskillin and Jackson-Triggs, became one of the corporate sponsors of the 2010 Olympic Games in Vancouver. They released their first commemorative Olympic wine about 18 months ago, and the shit immediately hit the fan.Instead of releasing a wine that was made with British Columbia grapes, they instead slapped the label on one of their "Cellared in Canada" wines. Cellared in Canada is a series of wines made by several Canadian wineries that allows them to import wines in bulk from countries such as Chile. The percentage can be anything from 70% in Ontario to 100% in BC. The only requirement is that the wines are indeed 'cellared in Canada', but contain little or no local wine. Long story short. When these commemorative wines were released, the wine press and regular media went into a frenzy, attacking Vincor for not releasing a VQA BC wine (VQA is Canada's appellation system that guarantees the wines come from the region stated) as their 'Olympic' wine instead.

Possession: Harry Chapin's Sniper

My good friend Adam Nayman and I were once discussing people who you always expect to miss the point. But we agreed that sometimes - maybe just once in their life - they got it right. That lead me to think about the late singer/songwriter Harry Chapin. Chapin was a composer of short-story songs and they often centered on society’s “little people.” Whether it was the poor sap wistfully remembering a lost love affair in “Taxi,” or the DJ who’s time has faded in “WOLD,” or (worst of all) the dad who doesn’t take time to pay attention to his growing son in “Cats in the Cradle,” Chapin was pop music’s Paddy Chayefsky. All everyone needed was love and attention and the world would be fine.

Right.

Drew Barrymore's Revelatory Performance: Grey Gardens

Maybe Drew Barrymore has her grandfather's (John Barrymore) acting chops after all. Over the years, I've avoided watching most of what she's appeared in because it was either lame rom-coms or outright trash such as the god-awful Charlie's Angels movies. So, when I first heard she would star as Edith 'Little Edie' Bouvier Beal in a fictionalized version of the Grey Gardens documentary by David and Al Maysles, I cringed.

Grey Gardens (1976), the doc, tells the story of 'Little Edie' and her mother 'Big Edie', relatives of Jackie Bouvier Kennedy Onassis who lived as recluses in a decaying, filth-filled mansion in the Hamptons. Some called the documentary voyeuristic, while others were drawn to these two eccentrics as they lived for and off each other. Leonard Malton, in his yearly Movie And Video Guide (1993 edition) liked the film, but gently condemned it as shallow because he said we learned nothing about their lives prior to their retreat into hermitage. Grey Gardens (2009) the HBO-produced docudrama addresses these shortcomings.

Bad Moon Rising: Universal Studios' The Wolf Man - Then and Now

The one thing that director Joe Johnston (Jurassic Park III) has actually improved upon from George Waggner's 1941 original The Wolf Man is that we're made well aware that the wolf man's transformation from man to blood thirsty beast is a gruesome and horribly painful ordeal (though let's be honest, 1981's An American Werewolf in London showed us first). The shame is that we no longer care about Talbot's struggle against the animal within.

Much has changed since the 1940s when the wolf man first prowled the moors of England, and this goes far beyond the aesthetics of his transformation. In 1941, Jon Chaney Jr.'s monster stemmed from the repression of his perversions. While his transformation from man to wolf involves but a few fades revealing the growth of hair on his legs, the turmoil ran far deeper than the pain he might have experienced in transit. This man's pain comes from the mayhem he knows he is capable of, and the harm he fears he'll bring upon those he loves. By contrast, Benicio Del Toro's wolf man appears to enjoy every act of carnality, or at least hopes we get a kick out of the spectacle he creates.

Memories of Miriam

Back when I was about nine, my family lived in the small suburb of West Rouge, Ontario (which used to be part of Pickering). Our house was located right down at the bottom of Island Road which overlooked the sprawling Rouge Valley. Our backyard was quite long and it connected to the backyard of the Fisher household on Rouge Hills Drive. One day, while I was playing out there, I saw this young black girl in the adjacent property. Since there weren't any black people that I recall living in West Rouge in 1963, I knew she was from somewhere else. When I went over to talk to her, she spoke only a little English and in an accent that I didn't recognize. But one thing I did understand perfectly was when she told me that her mother was a singer named Miriam Makeba.

My parents owned one of Miriam Makeba's albums having recently gone to see Harry Belafonte perform at the (then) O'Keefe Centre in downtown Toronto. (Makeba was one of the guest singers in his concert troupe.) She had one tune on her record that was referred to as the "click song." Coming from South Africa, Makeba sang in her native tongue which contained a sound that resembled a clicking in the back of the throat. I remember one time even putting my ear against my parents' stereo speaker so I could try and figure out what it was and how she did it. Now I saw myself having a chance to solve this dilemma and see her do it in person. So the girl invited me in to meet her mother. But I wanted to tell my folks first. So I went home and immediately informed them that Miriam Makeba was visiting just around the corner. Even though I wasn't prone to lying, my parents didn't believe a word I was saying. But I wouldn't back down. I insisted they phone the Fisher home and find out. When they did, we were told that she was indeed staying there during Belafonte's concert run and they invited us over.

Robert Richardson's Shutter

Salvador Dali isn’t available these days to craft a surreal dream sequence, as he did for Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound in 1945. But director Martin Scorsese had talented contemporary artists -- among them, cinematographer Robert Richardson -- to help him fashion the freakish cerebral terrain of Shutter Island. Each of those psychological thrillers is set in a mental hospital where the lead character arrives confused and eerie conspiracies abound. But it’s the stunning Vertigo, which opened in 1958, that seems aesthetically similar to the current film by Scorsese -- who has suggested that all of his work taps into much the same “sense of obsession” evident in Hitchcock’s oeuvre.

Produced and Abandoned: Ripley's Game

Liliana Cavani's Ripley's Game (2002) is both a 'produced and abandoned' and an 'off the shelf' candidate. I've now watched it three times over the last five years, and this picture gets better with each viewing. Each visit to Ripley's world pulls back layer after layer after layer of what it means to be human. It is almost criminal that this picture was never released in North America, because Ripley's Game is everything Anthony Minghella's much-praised, but inferior, The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999) was not: disturbing, compelling, funny (in a rather sick way) and wonderfully acted. It also holds a mirror up to the rest of us and dares the viewer: Take a look. This, too, is humanity.

Scorsese's Labyrinth: Shutter Island

 

Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island is less an adaptation of author Dennis Lehane’s mystery thriller than it is a virtual funhouse of the director’s favourite film noir tropes – only there’s no fun in it. As he did in his ridiculous re-make of Cape Fear (1991), Scorsese gets so absorbed invoking the work of various film stylists - including Jacques Tourneur's I Walked With a Zombie (1943), Vincente Minnelli’s The Cobweb (1955), Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) and Sam Fuller’s Shock Corridor (1963) - that he can’t find a style of his own to take us inside the drama. Working from a dense but convoluted script (by Laeta Kalogridis), Shutter Island is a cluttered labyrinth that begins as an ingenious detective story but slowly shifts into a psychological character study. However, Scorsese gets so jazzed on creating a surreal atmosphere, aided by the atonal sounds of Ligeti, Penderecki and John Adams, that he clouds the clarity of the story. If it wasn’t for the good work by many of the performers, desperately breathing life into their stock roles, the picture would sink under the weight of the director’s B-movie fetishes.

Salty Dogs: Ewan MacColl & A.L. Lloyd's Handsome Cabin Boy

I’ve always loved sea shanties (much to the amusement of my friend David Churchill). Maybe this odd affection dates back to my childhood because the first record I ever owned was “Blow the Man Down.” But I’ve always been taken by their mournful melodies, the unusual tales they told (sometimes ghostly, often times weird) and the singers sounding like long, lost adventurers dead drunk on the sea.

Sea shanties would appear in odd places, too, like The Byrds doing “Jack Tarr the Sailor” on The Ballad of Easy Rider (1969), or Harry Nilsson performing the mock shanty “Black Sails” on Pussy Cats (1974). But my favourite sea shanty album is Blow Boys Blow (1960) by Ewan MacColl & A.L. Lloyd. This collection of classic tunes has a number of uproarious salty stories ("Do Me Anna"), sea adventures ("Banks of Newfoundland") and character portraits ("Old Billy Riley"). The most memorable song, though, is "Handsome Cabin Boy." The story in this tune falls into the category of strangely funny. A young girl finds her way onto a ship by disguising herself as a boy. The disguise works fine until, one day, she becomes pregnant. So...who impregnated the Handsome Cabin Boy? MacColl and Lloyd explore the dilemma with self-conscious bemusement and a crooked smile.

Deviation From the Norm: Irwin Chusid's Songs in the Key of Z (2000)

"You can't have progress without deviation from the norm," composer Frank Zappa once wrote. Glancing back on the history of popular music, it shouldn't come as any surprise that it contains a long list of deviators. Out of their time, and breaking and remaking all the rules, these innovators dauntlessly set out to change history. While gleefully altering our perceptions of the world, these artists deviate most from the norms we take for granted. American outsiders are the most compelling to watch since they tend to transform themselves along with their work.

In 1925, Louis Armstrong, already a major jazz performer, decided to turn the music on its ear with a series of masterful recordings with the Hot Five and Seven. By reconstructing jazz into a soloist's art form, Armstrong was conveying a secret to all Americans: It's more exciting to stand out from the crowd than it is to join it. A few decades later, a young saxophone player from Kansas City named Charlie Parker decided to answer Armstrong's invitation by breaking the rules of standard harmony. While riffing at lightning speed, Parker ingeniously played within the chords themselves. Soon after, a young truck driver named Elvis Presley walked into Sun Studios in Memphis and made the cocky claim that he sounded like nobody else. Within a few years, he effortlessly altered the face of American music.

Catch Us If You Can: An Appraisal of Having a Wild Weekend (1965)

Although The Beatles got all the credit for spearheading the British Invasion into America in 1964, the first rock band to literally tour the United States was The Dave Clark Five. Driven by a heavy sound that Time Magazine compared to an air hammer, The Dave Clark Five sold in excess of 50 million records and appeared a record 12 times on The Ed Sullivan Show. So, given these accomplishments, why didn't they reign supreme? First of all, musically the band was nowhere near as talented as the Fab Four. Their songs ("Glad All Over," "Bits and Pieces") were driven by a pounding Big Beat, but their timbre ultimately grew deeply monotonous. They were also a colourless group, indistinct in comparison to the madcap Beatles. "Sure they were crude and of course they weren't even a bit hip, but in their churning crassness there was a shout of joy and a sense of fun," wrote critic Lester Bangs in appreciation. Given that their greatest appeal was in that spirit of simple fun, it was a huge shock to discover that in their first movie, Having a Wild Weekend (1965), they would end up providing such depth. To borrow film critic Andrew Sarris's comparison: Having a Wild Weekend is to A Hard Day's Night (1964) what Sarris says Orson Welles' Citizen Kane (1941) is to The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), an uneven, but emotionally richer experience than the former.

Lovably Loony: Tobe Hooper's Lifeforce

I said in a previous column that I would occasionally pull down a DVD from my personal collection, re-view it and see if it still deserves a place on my shelf. Today it’s Tobe Hooper's Lifeforce (1985). The film is crackpot, insane, daffy, goofy, ridiculous and, what can I say, an absolute tub of fun. Bear with me as I try to describe the plot. It's breathtaking in its insanity.

The film begins as the space shuttle, Churchill (and no, I don't love the film because they named the space shuttle after me), is on a mission to Halley's Comet on one of its rare visits through our solar system. Within the comet's corona, they find a gigantic spaceship. Colonel Carlsen (Steve Railsback) and his team discover inside the ship two sets of apparently dead life forms: thousands of giant desiccated bat-like creatures and three seemingly perfectly preserved humanoids (one female and two males). They radio to Earth that they have collected the humanoids and will return with them. Then, radio silence. The Churchill returns to Earth, but nobody answers the hail. Another shuttle is sent up to investigate. They find the crew dead, Carlsen missing, but the three humanoids still aboard, untouched.

Produced and Abandoned: Death Defying Acts (2008)

There are few directors who can capture the fragile nuances of human emotion quite like Gillian Armstrong. In Mrs. Soffel (1984), she dipped into the deep well of longing that a repressed wife (Diane Keaton) developed for an incarcerated man (Mel Gibson). In High Tide (1987), Armstrong elicited, with great subtlety and sadness, the unrequited yearnings a young daughter (Claudia Karvan) had for a mother (Judy Davis) who had abandoned her years earlier. In her adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1994), Armstrong went even farther than the previous adaptations of the classic novel. She captured, with both compassion and insight, the strong family bond of the March family while delicately illustrating the diverse desires and hopes of the growing sisters. In her best work, Armstrong’s great gift is for working between (and within) the lines of the story.

Her latest film, Death Defying Acts (2008), is also about emotional bonds – between mother and daughter; men and women – only it’s not nearly as cohesive, or as satisfyingly worked out. Yet there is still something shimmering about this picture, something ghostly that helps compensate for some of the movie’s dead spots. Part of the picture’s alchemy has to do with the fact that the story is about magic – both what is real and what is fake. Magician Harry Houdini (Guy Pearce) is visiting Edinburgh, Scotland in 1926 to offer $10,000 to anyone who can help him contact his dead mother and reveal to him her last words. Thirteen years after her death, Houdini is still possessed by the fact that he wasn’t at her side when she passed away. Meanwhile, two con artists, Mary McGarvie (Catherine Zeta-Jones) and her daughter Benji (Saoirse Ronan), have been desperately making their living fleecing customers with a bogus psychic show. (While Mary performs the tricks, Benji sneakily gathers information from the audience needed to help her mother pull off the scam.) When Houdini comes to town, they immediately zero in on the possibility of winning the money. What ensues is a romantic entanglement between Mary and Houdini that’s interrupted by the knowledge that Benji may possess magical gifts that go far beyond scamming.

One Night of Sin

Although Elvis died over thirty years ago, he’s still very much alive in many parts of the popular culture and always turning up in the most interesting ways. Whether he's brought up in comparison to Michael Jackson’s recent death, or alluded to in television dramas, novels, songs and visual art, Elvis continues to mutate into every kind of wish fulfillment. He never really left the building.

The list of pop culture references is too long to indulge here, but one notion clearly fascinates me. I always think of Elvis in relation to Marlon Brando. While both emerged out of the rebellion of the ‘50s, they also embodied America’s noblest democratic principle, the idea that a man can make of himself anything he desires. With that goal, or course, comes the eventual failure to live up to that quest for pure freedom that both men created in their work. Their failure to do so came, in part, because of our need to tame in them what we loved most in their distinctiveness; that is, we sought to make them ordinary, to be more like us. But their failure is also due to their own inability to maintain their distinctiveness, the very quality that attracted us to them in the first place. Although both became iconic figures in mass culture, they each ended up horribly isolated and trapped. They even at times became parodies of themselves as if to deny that iconic status, as if to mock it and make it less real. Perhaps that why it’s no accident that these charismatically handsome men would, in succumbing to those pressures, eventually become bloated.

The Plague of Digital Cinematography

Is digital photography the wave of the future for all motion pictures? I, for one, hope not.

My point of view has changed over the last nine years after having an initially favourable reaction from seeing my first digitally shot motion picture in 2001 -- Zacharias Kunuk's Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner. Set in the Arctic at a time well before the arrival of the white man, Atanarjuat tells the slow, but very compelling story of an evil spirit making mischief for an Inuit warrior as he tries to return to his family and break the spell the spirit has inflicted upon them.

Of Schulberg and Hughes

Budd Schulberg

Within 24 hours last summer, two very different Hollywood legends passed away. Novelist and screenwriter Budd Schulberg (What Makes Sammy Run, The Disenchanted, On the Waterfront), who died peacefully at the age of 95, was one. The other was John Hughes, writer and director of The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, who had created a veritable industry of teen comedies during the ‘80s. Both men became part of very different Hollywood zeitgeists.

Schulberg invoked an age and political climate still left fully unresolved. The era of the Hollywood Blacklist and McCarthyism, where both he and Elia Kazan (who would direct Schulberg’s script of On the Waterfront) would testify before the House of Un-American Activities. The notion of ratting on your friends, the theme of Waterfront, was key to understanding a time where McCarthy’s virulent paranoia was destroying lives and turning the Red Menace into a careerist’s game of watching some backs while knifing others. Yet there were those, like Kazan and Schulberg (as well as many others), who had earlier been part of the Communist movement with its hopes of fighting injustice at home and fascism abroad. But they came to see its true face in the ideology of Stalinism. In that moment, some of these same idealists quickly became realists. But the question arose, to paraphrase Victor Navasky (Naming Names), of what is the greater sin: Stalinism or McCarthyism? Some chose Stalinism as the bigger evil because they watched writers, composers and artists whose work they loved testifying at show trials and often later being executed. The American version of show trials, they felt, was certainly destructive, but ultimately not as lethal. In any event, choices were made and the era was challenged by men like Budd Schulberg.

New Orleans: August 29/05 Destruction, February 7/10 Resurrection

Can something as simple as a football game save the psyche of a city? After Hurricane Katrina came and laid New Orleans low there was talk, a lot of talk, of not rebuilding her again, of just letting her go. Was it worth it, the talk went, to spend millions, nay billions to rebuild a city that was likely to be flattened again at some point in the future? But there is something about the resilience of people, even after the worst catastrophe. They bury their dead, treat their wounded, clean up and start again (just ask Haiti, right now).

Spike Lee's brilliant four-part documentary, When the Levees Broke, about the aftermath of Katrina, outlined this harrowing story with an eye so clear that you can forgive its occasional lapses into proselytizing. In the film, we are introduced to a group of people from all walks of life who tell their story as honestly as they can. At the end, even as the city still lies in ruins, you get a hint of hope; a hope that by the end of 2005 seemed terribly misplaced. But it was there nonetheless.

Israeli Cinema: Anything But Propaganda

The recent Oscar nomination for the Israeli drama Ajami marks the third year in a row that a movie from Israel has been nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film award. (Beaufort and Waltz with Bashir were the other recent nominees.) That’s pretty impressive for such a small country, a testament to the quality and vitality of recent Israeli cinema.

In truth, Israeli films have been nominated for Oscars before; six of them, including good movies like Sallah, The House on Chelouche Street and Operation Thunderbolt, received nods between 1964 and 1985. Those nominations, however, came about at a time when far fewer foreign language films were submitted to the Academy – sixty five such movies were entered this year – and, I suspect, were also the result of a favourable bias towards Israel,  which used to be viewed a lot more sympathetically around the world than it is now. The current crop of nominations for Israeli films is more a recognition of just how good Israeli cinema has become of late.

Produced and Abandoned: Broken English (2007)

I can't think of another movie where a woman's desperate need for a relationship is dealt with both comically and painfully quite like Zoe Cassavetes’ Broken English. There is probably no other actress, either, better than Parker Posey who could delicately negotiate the shifting mood swings that such anxiety inspires. Broken English, which had a very limited release in 2007, isn’t simply about the neurotic funk of being lonely. It’s about an attractive and intelligent woman whose ability to find a passionate and compatible relationship gets impaired by her rash decisions to mate. Cassavetes, who is the daughter of the late actor/director John Cassavetes, has definitely inherited her father’s love of actors but (thankfully) without imposing all his heavy-spirited psycho-dramatics on the picture. Broken English comes closest to invoking the suffused moods of Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation, or maybe Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset (to which Cassavetes pays tribute here).

Understatement: Jason Schneider's Whispering Pines

The Band

“There is no music that you can say, ‘Oh, that’s Canadian – know what I mean? It’s North American music – different countries, but you hear the exact same music, from blues to cowboy. So rather than talking about Calgary or Montreal, we talked about places that we played in."
– Robbie Robertson quoted in Whispering Pines: The Northern Roots of American Music.

It’s been commonly held for years that Canadian musical performers only achieve their due recognition when they go south of the border. While that remains something of a simplification, there are still many examples to choose from – Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Gordon Lightfoot, just to name a few. Fortunately, in his recent book Whispering Pines: The Northern Roots of American Music…From Hank Snow to The Band (ECW Press, 2009), author Jason Schneider develops a more substantial rendering of this phenomenon. By examining the Canadian songwriting tradition as a national narrative, he’s able to illustrate how our musical artists subtly permeate the American experience rather than seek out our neighbour’s validation. In a series of essays that chart the careers of Hank Snow, Wilf Carter, Ian & Sylvia and Leonard Cohen, Schneider (Have Not Been the Same: The CanRock Renaissance) draws a delicate map of our cultural influence in popular music. He doesn’t so much examine how our identity as Canadians is felt in American music, but rather how American popular music has been enriched by our Canadian sensibilities.

David’s Mini-Masterpiece Addendum: Cruise into Terror

Cruise Into Terror is a completely insane and stupid MOW (movie of the week) from 1978 that starred Dirk Benedict (original Battlestar Galatica's Starbuck) and, lord help him, Ray Milland. The plot? Something about an Egyptian sarcophagus aboard a luxury liner that actually contains, um, the son of Satan. His presence starts to influence those on the ship to do bad things.

I kid you not.

So, what could there possibly be in this alleged film for me to allow it into the 'pantheon' of MMWinMM? Not a scene, just one line of narration. And to save you all the trouble of actually watching this frakking catastrophe, I'm going to tell you what it is. You're welcome.

It has been so long since I've seen this (do NOT ask me why I watched it; I have no excuse), but I have always remembered the line. I don't recall who said it, or why (it may have been 'end of movie' narration), I just remember it, and it is pretty damn good (it may not be original to this MOW, but I've never found it attached to anything else).

"There is a devil, there is no doubt, but is it trying to get in, or is it trying to get out?"

It's a creepy line and someday somebody should write a screenplay or novel that tells the story of that line. And obviously, it wouldn't have to have anything to do with the supernatural or satanism.

--David Churchill is a film critic and author. He is currently putting the finishing touches on his first novel, The Empire of Death.

Prophetic Voices: Mahalia, Muddy & Martin

Mahalia Jackson

Back in the late fifties, my parents frequently took me to the Drive-In. My formative movie experiences were forged there. I saw a lot of bad films on those excursions (Butterfield 8, anyone?), but one of them found a way of staying with me for years. David Churchill attested to yesterday in his piece on The Abyss, there are sometimes scenes within terrible movies that are mini masterpieces. For me, a perfect case in point is Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life (1959), the second Hollywood adaptation of Fanny Hurst’s famous weeper.

Sirk made a number of glossy melodramas for producer Ross Hunter in the fifties including All That Heaven Allows and Written on the Wind. These soaps would later be acclaimed as subversive by auteur film critics in the ‘80s who were basically enamoured with the rather turgid work of the German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder (who used Sirk's style as his model particularly in The Marriage of Maria Braun). Imitation of Life is ostensibly about an aspiring actress (Lana Turner) who is also a single mother. While trying to develop a career and raise her young daughter, she gets help when she befriends a jobless black maid (Juanita Moore) and her young daughter (Susan Kohner). Once they come to live with the actress, however, the story shifts to the problems of two generations of black Americans and Lana Turner’s issues become comparatively minor.

Mini Masterpieces Within Mediocre Movies: The Abyss

At the end of the 1980s, my career as a film critic was coming to a self-imposed end. I knew it was time to move on because I was beginning to hate the politics, hate what you had to do to get published, hate everything I was watching and, frankly, hate what I was writing. Philip Kaufman's exceptional 1978 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers was the movie that made me want to write criticism. So many ideas pounded through my head after seeing that film for the first time that I just had to write them down. Eleven years later, I'd had enough. But before I drew a curtain around that part of my writing and working life, I looked for ways to still be engaged by what I was seeing on the screen. For my own amusement, that was when I created what I called Mini Masterpieces Within Mediocre Movies (MMWinMM).

The Perilous Future of Bookstores

The recent announcement that Vancouver’s Duthie Books, which has been in business for 52 years, is closing shop at the end of February, has shaken book lovers in that city. While Duthie’s Cathy Legate admitted not owning her store was a liability and also blamed the strengthening Canadian dollar for her store’s demise, it was Chapters / Indigo and the Internet that took the lion’s share of the blame for Duthie’s demise. This view was expressed by both the press and Duthie’s loyal patrons, even though Duthie’s overeager expansion first led the company, which once had ten outlets, to declare bankruptcy in 1999 before rebounding with the one Vancouver outlet that was left.

Glorious Bastards: Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds

Although it's unlikely to win Best Picture at this year's Academy Awards (the best film on the list of nominations that I've seen is The Hurt Locker), Inglourious Basterds still comes as something of a happy surprise. Director Quentin Tarantino works from a movie-fed imagination, one that's completely soaked in a love of genre films – art movies, Asian action films, and exploitation pictures. But in his most celebrated works, like Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994), he made a fetish out of movie love. If Jean-Luc Godard had, according to author Paul Coates, once transformed movie audiences into film critics, Tarantino chose to turn his audience into pop culture junkies who savoured his insider movie references. In recent years, with the hubris of Kill Bill Vol. 1 and 2, and more recently, the torpor of Death Proof, Tarantino was pretty much swallowing his own tale. But Inglourious Basterds, an alternate World War II action drama, shows Tarantino bringing his movie intoxication to bear on something more than just indulging a fetish. Without question, it’s his best film.

J.D. Salinger's Cultural Exchange

I'm glad that I read J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye outside of any high school English class. Due to that fluke of good fortune, I was free to dip into Salinger’s tale of adolescent frustration without all the mythical baggage that comes with it. There's no question that his first novel had an indelibly profound impact on young readers (including very disturbed ones like Mark David Chapman). But the book’s influence also extended to movies as well (most notably in both The Graduate and Rushmore). But Salinger’s novel examined teenage misery with an acute eye. He didn’t enshrine his protagonist Holden Caulfield’s world view – rather he revealed that, in the world of ‘phonies,’ Holden was just as culpable as anyone he criticized. The Graduate (1967) and Rushmore (1998), in their blatant attempt to win over the outsider adolescent fringe of two very different generations, chose to pander to youthful narcissism instead. Both movies dubbed their rebel heroes as vulnerable, but they were largely self-righteous. They made dubious claims, too; since the adult world is automatically corrupt, by extension, it also corrupts its young.

TV Thrills with Brains: MI-5/Spooks

In this day of the quick cancellation of TV series, it is probably best to wait until a season or two has gone by before you risk taking a chance. Too often, I've latched onto a new TV series, especially ones with a continuing storyline, only to have it cancelled. Recent examples: Invasion, Boomtown, Pushing Daisies, Jericho and Day Break, amongst several others. One of the worst examples was back in 2000 when I watched the first season of the remake of The Fugitive, starring Tim Daly as Richard Kimble. It was surprisingly good, but a little series called CSI, debuting in the same season and time slot, came along and kicked its ass. The Fugitive was cancelled at the end of the first season. How did the series end? With bullets flying at Kimble's head. I can only assume he ducked.

A Man of the People's: Farewell Howard Zinn

Lanky Howard Zinn, who died this week at the age of 87, bore a sort of passing resemblance to Abraham Lincoln and spoke with much the same impassioned eloquence. “People I meet all over the country have a great reservoir of common sense and common decency,” the historian said during a 2004 phone interview from his home in the leafy Boston suburb of Auburndale. “That gives me hope.”

Zinn’s abiding faith in humanity is evident in You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train, a profile co-directed by Vermont resident Deb Ellis and Denis Mueller of Chicago. The documentary, released six years ago, traces the extraordinary life of a man whose teaching, writing and activism have influenced generations. One contemporary young acolyte is Pearl Jam singer Eddie Vedder, who contributed a song (“Down”) to the film. He later shipped his mentor two custom-made skateboards emblazoned with Zinn’s image -- both of which the octogenarian then regifted to Ellis’ adolescent son. Matt Damon, who narrates the documentary and Ben Affleck were Massachusetts teenagers when they first became entranced by Zinn’s landmark publication A People’s History of the United States. The successful actors long wanted to produce a TV mini-series based on the myth-busting 1980 tome, which has sold more than one million copies. In it, Zinn details many shameful episodes, beginning with Christopher Columbus and the Arawak Indians that ordinary textbooks have covered up or not covered at all.

Helen Mirren's Thrilling Countess: The Last Station

The Last Station is not a great movie by any means but Helen Mirren’s performance as writer Leo Tolstoy’s wife, the mercurial Countess Sofya, is certainly great acting. It’s also a timely reminder that sometimes it’s the acting alone that makes a film worthwhile.

As the film begins, in the early 20th century, Sofya, who has been married to Tolstoy (Christopher Plummer) for nearly fifty years, is warring with writer Vladimir Chertkov (Paul Giamatti), who as Tolstoy’s secretary, has become the writer’s premiere acolyte. Devout followers of Tolstoy, Chertkov and many others call themselves Tolstoyans, and influenced by Leo Tolstoy’s writings, espouse vegetarianism, the sacredness of all life and advocate for a world free of war. Sofya doesn't buy into any of the Tolstoyans’ new age beliefs, nor does she even concede that they bear any relation to anything her husband, who is widely known for his novels Anna Karenina and War and Peace, has ever written. More significantly, she is convinced that Chertkov is pressuring Tolstoy to change his will so that his royalties will go the Russian people and not to her and her children. Her fear of losing the family mansion and not having anything to live on, after Tolstoy dies, sends her on a trajectory of rage, hysteria, duplicity and finally a nervous breakdown, even as her worst fears come to fruition.

Shooting for Success: The Messenger

On February 2nd the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announces its contenders for 2009‘s best film, a list traditionally with five selections now expanded to ten. Hopefully the change means there’s room for The Messenger, a stunning drama that has yet to open widely. After a limited release in November to qualify for the awards season, the distributor -- Oscilloscope Laboratories, brainchild of Beastie Boys rapper Adam Yauch -- seems to be slowly unveiling this exquisite cinematic examination of how war hits home. Literally.

U2's Beautiful Day: The Changing Masterpiece

In June 2001, my wife and I were lucky enough to have a four-day weekend in Paris, France. It was a magical trip that was great on almost every level. The hotel we stayed in was quaint, the meals we ate were spectacular and our touring around the City of Light was nearly perfect. Heck, even the Parisians were mostly well mannered. Upon my return, I managed to maintain those good feelings, at least once a day, by listening to U2's "Beautiful Day" off their All That You Can't Leave Behind album. Why did I use that song? Firstly, its hugely uplifting and yearningly romantic lyrics:

It was a beautiful day
Don't let it get away
Beautiful day.

Touch me
Take me to that other place
Reach me
I know I'm not a hopeless case.

Et Tu, NBC! The Unlearned Lessons of the Leno/O'Brien Affair

I have no sympathy for NBC’s head Jeff Zucker over the imbroglio he’s currently involved in over the network’s decision to scrap Jay Leno’s weekly 10 PM hour long talk show slot, mere months after launching it, and bumping him back to 11:35 pm. Zucker and the network brass had fully expected that Conan O’Brien, the current host of The Tonight Show, would thus agree to having his show move back to 12:05 am, to accommodate Leno’s return to late night TV, albeit in a shortened half hour time slot. The problem for Zucker and the network is that O’Brien, who was promised The Tonight Show gig five years ago in order to entice him not to go to another network, didn’t agree with that programming decision and has decided to leave the network instead, accepting a massive million buyout from it in the process. He had made it explicitly clear, on air, that he would rather leave NBC altogether than give in to his network boss’s wishes.

The reason, of course, for overhauling NBC’s primetime schedule, is that Leno's ratings were low, reportedly dropping from 18 million viewers at 11:35 pm to an astounding 5 million at 10 pm, and, most important, also adversely affecting the newscasts following his show, the ones airing on NBC’s many affiliate stations, who count on viewers staying on to watch the news after the 10 PM show is over. Audiences used to do that when one of NBC’s dramas occupied that time slot but with Leno in that slot, they were jumping to other networks or tuning out altogether. This occurred despite the fact that, reportedly, ad revenues weren’t any lower for NBC with Leno in prime time.

NBC should have seen the risks inherent in its decision to placate and keep both Leno and O’Brien by adopting the strategy they did. James Poniewozik, for one, in his Time magazine cover story on Leno’s move to primetime last September, pointed out that the network’s affiliates would be furious if the ratings went down when Leno moved to 10 pm, so obviously these affiliate concerns would have been transmitted to Zucker at the time and, obviously, ignored by him. (He had to browbeat Boston’s affiliate station to stay with Leno or lose its status as an NBC station.)

The Lonely Passion of Jean Simmons

The sad thing about British actress Jean Simmons’s death this past weekend is that she never truly had the career she should have. While some today often complain about the diminishing roles for older women in motion pictures, many of those aging actresses – Christine Lahti, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Angelica Huston - at least have had careers worthy of their talent. Simmons was trashed and mostly forgotten before she could even fulfill her ambitions.

Jean Simmons was the most graceful, quiet beauty who ever gently commanded the screen. She began acting at the age of 14, but she was quickly relegated to appearing in largely terrible and forgettable pictures. (When she went to Hollywood with her actor husband Stewart Granger in 1950, Howard Hughes bought out her contract from J. Arthur Rank. Hughes then stuck her in rank pictures like She Couldn’t Say No and Angel Face.) She began as a sprightly adolescent as Estella in David Lean’s Great Expectations (1946), but as she grew into adulthood, she developed into a more ethereal screen icon. Besides Great Expectations, and her heartbreaking Ophelia in Olivier’s Hamlet (1948), her best roles came towards the end of the fifties in Richard Brooks’ potboiler Elmer Gantry and Stanley Kubrick’s exciting and moving sand-and sandal epic Spartacus.

Remembering the Talking Man

“Critics call me a monologist,” explained Spalding Gray. “But I refer to myself as a storyteller – no, not a storyteller. The Talking Man, that’s what I say.”At that moment, eight years ago, the acclaimed 60-year-old performer was talking on the telephone from New York’s Long Island. His minimalist one-man shows -- such as Swimming to Cambodia, filmed by Jonathan Demme in 1987 -- were wildly entertaining even though Gray would remain seated at a table. He used props for emphasis, while animatedly exploring the world’s foibles and the humor in his own neurosis.

The Church of the Cultured Mind: The Cinematheque's The Best of the Decade List

“I have had enough serious interest in the products of the ‘higher’ arts to be very sharply aware that the impulse which leads me to a Humphrey Bogart movie has little in common with the impulse which leads me to the novels of Henry James or the poetry of T.S. Eliot…To define that connection seems to me one of the tasks of film criticism, and the definition must be first of all a personal one. A man watches a movie, and the critic must acknowledge that he’s that man.”

--Robert Warshow, The Immediate Experience, 1955.

We seemed to have come a slippery distance from the time when critic Robert Warshow eagerly expressed curiosity about an impulse, or a justification to make a connection between what is often deemed “high culture” and “low culture.” One look at the TIFF Cinematheque Best of the Decade list tells you that there is no desire, or curiosity, to connect with anything but their own church of refined taste. This is why it is really immaterial to discuss what’s on their list of the best films of the past decade. In examining their choices, I’m sure that we can all find things we love (The Gleaners and I, Yi Yi), things we dislike (Syndromes and a Century, Caché), even things we didn’t see – and perhaps might want to (Songs from the Second Floor). What is more important, as the previous writers on this site attested, is to discuss what isn’t on it – and why.

Where is Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings Trilogy on the 'Best of the Decade' lists?

Since I stepped away from regular criticism more than 20 years ago, I freely admit that my ability to see more 'challenging' films has declined (made more difficult by the fact I live outside of Toronto now and these films never make it to either my local cinema or DVD shop). So it would be unfair and dishonest to address the shortcomings (or strengths) of TIFF Cinematheque's Best of the Decade List since I've only seen a small handful of the pictures. Besides, my cohort Shlomo has already done a fine job eviscerating it, so what's the point of repeating?

I'll only make one comment before I get to the point of my piece: a major work of art that is missing from the List. Critics or curators who make lists that refuse to even acknowledge commercial cinema are as ridiculous and narrow-minded as people who only go to the movies so they can 'check their brains at the door' and think flicks like Transformer 2: Revenge of the Fallen, or The Dark Knight, are The. Best. Movies. Ever. There is no difference. On one hand, the James Quandts of the world will turn up their noses at anything that might be considered 'commercial,' while the others would run screaming from the theatre at the first sign of a subtitle. Me? I can get just as jonesed by a cinematic essay by Chris Marker, such as Sans Soleil or La Jetée, as I can by zombie flicks like Shaun of the Dead or 28 Weeks Later.

Buyer Beware! TIFF Cinematheque's so – called Best of the Decade

The Best Films of the Decade list recently unveiled by TIFF Cinematheque (formerly Cinematheque Ontario), is problematic in many ways, not just in terms of what was picked (and not picked) as the finest of the past decade but more significantly, for what it says about the stagnant view of movies held by those who chose the 54 films on the list. (See http://www.cinemathequeontario.ca/newsrelease_detail.aspx?Id=678 for all the titles, not all of which will be shown in Toronto).

That film list, which begins showing today, is put together solely by curators and programmers (and not film critics), as TIFF Cinematheque Senior Programmer James Quandt, who shepherded the list to fruition, is quick to point out. The collection is chock full of many films that would try the patience of most film-goers, movies that often have words like rigor attached to them in the film notes. (Rigor mortis would be more accurate.) They deliberately go out of their way, it seems, to eschew any cinematic energy or zip. Resembling museum pieces rather than entertaining works of art, they remind me of that old joke about movies being called moving pictures, which many of the films on this list decidedly do not.

Love As An Open Argument: Remembering Kate McGarrigle

When I heard the news yesterday about the death of Kate McGarrigle from cancer, it really cut to the quick. “It’s like getting kicked in the gut, you know,” Sylvia Tyson remarked upon hearing the news. I know what she meant. Over the years, Kate and Anna McGarrigle, the folk singing siblings from Quebec, had written and performed a distinct body of beautiful songs that had the capacity to share wounds and open sores that their soaring voices could quickly heal. Their temperaments were radically different – Anna the hopeful romantic; Kate the skeptic – but the blending of their differences often created a harmony unique to popular song. Calling the McGarrigle sisters’ material “tart and tuneful,” J.D. Considine in Rolling Stone said their work married “the resonance of folk to the emotional immediacy of everyday life.” What Kate and Anna McGarrigle did was give the genre a different lease on everyday life. They wrote personal songs without resorting to solipsism. They wrote romantic songs without bending to sentimentality. They could be funny and sarcastic without being smug.

A Consideration of The Lovely Bones

I grew up in Parry Sound in the 1960s. I was part of a big pack of kids who would play outside until after dark throughout the summer, completely unconcerned about our safety, not oblivious to it, just unconcerned. However, we also all knew to 'stay away from Johnnie'. Johnnie was probably a pedophile. He was a man in his forties who lived alone in a big house up the street from our home. We would always see him walking quickly through our neighbourhood, a hand always in his pocket, watching the kids as we played. We nicknamed him Johnnie Walker (no offense to the fine scotch producers). We just all knew to stay away from him. Creepy and weird, he certainly was, yet our parents were seemingly oblivious to him and what he might be, but we weren't. Yet we sure as hell never told our parents about him. We wanted to be able to play unfettered. Granted, he didn't, that we know of, ever actually act on his obvious compulsions, so the light of adult suspicion was never cast upon him. These reflections came to mind as I watched Peter Jackson's The Lovely Bones, because there is a major character in the film that reminded me of Johnnie.

Ad Men & Women

The characters on Mad Men tend to lack integrity in both their personal and professional lives. AMC’s perceptive and award-winning series, set in the early 1960s, broadcasts consistent proof of that pitiful human condition into my living room. This miasma of mendacity, which most often comes during breaks for commercials and TV promos, reflects the output of contemporary Don Drapers, Peggy Olsons and Pete Campbells.

The tasteless deception is so pervasive that undiscriminating viewers can no longer differentiate between genuine information and the cesspool of artful lies. In enumerating some of the many atrocities, let’s not preface these peeves with the word pet because that would be offensive to my two lovely cats:

Rohmer Passes

The recent death of French filmmaker Eric Rohmer, at age 89, reminds us not just what a significant director he was but how the French revere their artists, from allowing Rohmer to work into his late eighties, something which rarely happens in America, to the moving eulogy given him by French President Nicolas Sarkozy when word arrived of his passing. Sarkozy’s comments, calling him a "great auteur who will continue to speak to us and inspire us for years to come” is more than apt but it might prompt those who are suspicious of the praise meted out to any celebrity who dies, to think Sarkozy is exaggerating. He’s not. Rohmer really was one of the greats.

His films, the best known of which were unveiled in his series’ Six Moral Tales, Comedies and Proverbs, and Tales of the Four Seasons, spanning the 60s to the 90s, usually featured young people, women more often than men, talking about, seeking and finding love, with an emphasis on the romance behind most hookups. But Rohmer never simplified his characters' search for love and his affection for the people at the center of his films was such that they achieved a humanity and generosity that is still a rare commodity in the cinema. They also influenced everyone from American filmmakers Richard Linklater (Before Sunrise, Before Sunset) and Whit Stillman (Metropolitan, Barcelona) to his fellow countryman Oliver Assayas, whose Summer Hours (L'heure d'été), owes much of its tone and structure to Rohmer’s way of seeing. For me, his films were often the highlights of the Toronto International Film Festival, movies I eagerly looked forward to seeing, especially because I knew it was likely my only chance to see them as they often wouldn’t open commercially in Toronto. And I rarely felt short changed by any of them, right through to the end of his career and his final 2007 film, the sweet Les Amours d'Astrée et de Céladon (The Romance of Astrée and Céladon.).