Greenberg: Less Than Meets the Eye

Noam Baumbach’s Greenberg is, unlike his other features, a movie where, ultimately, there’s much less than meets the eye. Of all the directors toiling in the American independent movie scene, Baumbach, with movies like Kicking and Screaming, Mr. Jealousy and The Squid and the Whale, has managed to be one of the savviest and most entertaining of filmmakers. He eschews the heavy handedness of self-conscious movies like Lance Hammer’s Ballast and Lee Daniels’ Precious, while opening a window on characters who warrant the attention. Baumbach's protagonists also have little in common with the mopey whiners in Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy, or any of the caricatured, grotesque folk at the centre of the films of Todd Solondz (Welcome to the Dollhouse, Happiness). Greenberg, however, will likely test the patience of even Baumbach’s staunchest fans.

In Memoriam: Robert Culp and Jim Marshall

One was an iconic 1960s TV star, the other was unknown as a personality, but the photographs he took captured the musical icons of 1960s in a way few others have. Robert Culp and Jim Marshall passed away on March 24th -- one 79, the other 74 -- yet for some reason, Culp's passing, though sad, had no impact on me. He was an actor I enjoyed in repeats only. Because I grew up in one-TV-channel small town Ontario, I never saw his best known works (I Spy, the legendary “The Demon with the Glass Hand” from The Outer Limits) when they first ran. He always seemed more of my parent's era than mine. But reading about Jim Marshall’s death, even though he was only five years younger than Culp, left a deeper impression. Ironically, I never knew his name until today, but his images have been with me (in one way or another) all my life. Many of his most famous shots became record album covers, magazine and newspaper spreads, and they were flashed on TV in the 1960s right up until the present day. The two Marshall pictures posted above are not only part of my permanent memory bank; they have always been two of my favourite musician photographs.

Cherry Bombs: The Runaways

Given that The Runaways, a new film about the late ‘70s all-girl hard rock band, is written and directed by Floria Sigismondi, who cut her teeth doing videos for Marilyn Manson, David Bowie, Christine Aguilera and The White Stripes, it’s rather surprising that The Runaways’ music ends up so secondary to their story. Their story doesn't come to much either. Sigismondi gets so caught up in art school impressionism that she loses touch with the theme of the material. Instead of providing the propulsion needed in depicting a young rock band finding its chops, The Runaways gets lost in a haze of rock video clichés and amorphous trysts between lead singer Cherie Currie (Dakota Fanning) and lead guitarist Joan Jett (Kristen Stewart). The picture develops about as much fizz as stale ginger ale.

The Runaways were a group of underage Southern California female misfits who were molded by L.A.’s freak Svengali Kim Fowley into a pre-punk outfit that confronted their audience, in both song and image, with a provocative jail-bait allure. What they provided was a clever reversal of the male rockers’ sexual obsession with young girls that was often depicted in songs like Andre Williams’ hilarious “Jail Bait,” Chuck Berry’s “Sweet Little Sixteen” and The Rolling Stones’ “Stray Cat Blues.” These brash and provocative girls turned that prurient fascination back on the audience with trashy rock like “Cherry Bomb” (a saucy re-write of “Wild Thing”) and “You Drive Me Wild.” While clearly influenced by the polymorphous glam of David Bowie and Sweet, The Runaways also had some of the tough effrontery of The Ramones and The New York Dolls. Fronted by Cherie Currie, a blond punk chanteuse in lingerie, The Runaways had solid back-up with Joan Jett’s surly rhythm guitar, Lita Ford’s stinging lead runs and Sandy West’s kicking-over-the-trash-can drumming. Kim Fowley brought together a group of disaffected middle-class teenagers and made their disaffection part of their group identity. But, the irony is, that fierce independence was built on their total fealty towards him.

Part of this theme does get into the movie, but Sigismondi lacks the dramatic instincts to shape the material in such a way that the group – as a group – makes any sense. We don’t really get to see how the girls bond under Fowley’s sadism. She not only takes great liberties with their story (the film is based on Cherie Currie’s memoir), Sigismondi doesn’t develop that core relationship with Fowley which would ultimately lead to the band’s break-up. Sigismondi chooses instead to focus on the dynamic between Currie and Jett so that the rest of the band becomes invisible supporting players. For the first third of the picture, though, both Fanning and Stewart give credible performances. Fanning has a quiet insolence that makes her a shrewd choice to play Currie. (It’s a shame, though, that she gets stuck playing out conventionally dramatic family scenes with her jealous sister and alcoholic father.) Stewart thankfully loses some of those mannerisms that marred her starring roles in Twilight and Adventureland. She downplays Jett’s tough-girl image and illuminates instead the pleasures she gets from her impudent behaviour. Michael Shannon is on hand to play Kim Fowley and though it seems like the ideal Shannon role, he devours so much scenery that the camera has to duck. Michael Shannon is too perfect for Fowley and his abusive attributes come across more as an actor’s stunt than a true performance. (He looks like a brooding Lurch doing Max Cady out of Scorsese’s Cape Fear.)

The Imperfect Art of the Adaptation

Adapting a work from a novel, graphic novel or any other source for a movie or TV show is a challenging problem. So many decisions are required when the writer approaches the original work. Neither the complete plot nor all the characters can be used, but what do you reject and what do you keep? These were clearly the issues facing the writers of the new adaptation of John Buchan's The 39 Steps (broadcast on the BBC in December 2008 and on PBS in March 2010) and the 2003 version of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, based on writer Alan Moore and illustrator Kevin O'Neill's 1999 graphic novel (it is now in seemingly permanent repeat on AMC), when they approached these works.

Toiling in the Trenches: For the Love of Movies

People who toil in the trenches of film criticism know what it’s like to be courted or dissed by publicists and festival organizers. There’s also that love-hate thing with readers. Moreover, it’s a lonely line of work to sit for hours in a darkened theater and then tap away on a keyboard while staring at another screen. Your eyes and tush begin to ache.

Boo hoo.

Produced and Abandoned: Vince Vaughn's Wild West Comedy Show

Before I saw Vince Vaughn's Wild West Comedy Show at the Toronto International Film Festival a couple of years ago, what I'd hoped for was a highly entertaining look at an old-fashioned traveling festival. Surprisingly, the picture turned out to be even broader than I imagined. While taking his inspiration from Buffalo Bill's famous tent shows, Vaughn also set out to tour young talented stand-up comics across the United States where they could ply their trade on a nightly basis. Vince Vaughn's Wild West Comedy Show is an entertaining, yet poignant examination of the makings of a comedian.

Although Vaughn is the presiding spirit over the tour, which took place in September 2005, he serves more as the impresario of the event. Helmer Ari Sandel, who directed the ingeniously funny comic short West Bank Story (that parodied West Side Story within the Arab-Israeli conflict) provides more than just an inside look of the tour. He goes within the very dynamics of how a comedian makes things funny - even issues that under other circumstances wouldn't be funny at all. Vaughn first pays tribute to the many performers who have been a huge part of his career, including director/writer/actor Jon Favreau, actor Peter Billingsley, and country singer/actor Dwight Yoakam. But most of the picture is about a number of novice comedians who are trying to find their footing on a nightly stage.

Soul Deep: In Consideration of Alex Chilton

“Sometimes failure is more rewarding,” wrote Bill Reynolds in The Globe and Mail yesterday in concluding his obituary remembering Alex Chilton, who died last Wednesday of a heart attack in New Orleans at the age of 59. Chilton, the former lead singer of the ‘60s pop group The Box Tops ("The Letter," "Soul Deep") and co-founder of the influential 70s power pop band Big Star ("September Gurls," "In the Street"), was certainly no stranger to both failure and reward in his short life. In a sense, he took both extremes and created what critic Jason Anheny called “a poignantly beautiful sound which recaptured the spirit of pop’s past even as it pointed the way toward the music’s future.” Chilton was part of pop’s past and future in ways that became as much paradoxical as he became largely influential on later groups like The Replacements and (especially) R.E.M.

The Wonders of Ruth

One of the most vibrant and skilled percussionists in Frank Zappa's early '70s version of the Mothers of Invention was Ruth Underwood. Ruth had auditioned for Zappa in the late '60s after seeing the Mothers play their Absolutely Free revue at the Garrick Theatre in New York. "Sometimes there were more people on stage than there were in the audience," she told the BBC. "And because of that Frank even got to know some of us by name…there were so few hard core Mothers freaks back then that we were all very noticeable to him...I remember droning music going on for ages. It shocked me… how such beautiful music could come out of such strange looking people.”

Produced and Abandoned: Under Fire

When I pulled Roger Spottiswoode's Under Fire off the shelf recently to see how it stood up, it had been 15 years since I'd last seen it. In the interim, I'd owned it on video (which I never watched) and when DVDs came along, I replaced the video with the DVD. Yet, again it sat on my shelf for another nine years until finally this past weekend I rewatched it. Does it still stand up as the thought provoking, well-made political thriller I took it for when I saw it originally in 1983? Yes and no. The problem is that when it came out in 1983, a scant four short years after the film's events - the Nicaraguan revolution of 1979 - it was close enough to the events of that violent and bloody tumult to be a perfect example of the first draft of history. And first drafts always need a rewrite.

Nick Nolte, Gene Hackman and Joanna Cassidy play American journalists (photo journalist in Nolte's case) who are as rootless as gypsies as they move from crisis to crisis in search of a great story or image. Nolte is crafted very much in the Humphrey Bogart mold from Casablanca: a neutral observer who refuses to take any sides; Hackman is the old veteran who is ready to move behind the news anchor's desk after one more foreign assignment; and Cassidy is the woman in love with both of them. They find themselves in Nicaragua as it blows apart from a revolution that, for all intents and purposes, had begun in the 1930s. As their objectivity drops away, they find themselves starting to take the revolutionaries' side in the chaotic events. Nolte in particular has his journalistic ethics hugely tested when he's asked by the revolutionaries to take a certain photograph that could turn the tide of the revolution.

Dystopian Dreams: Larry Kirwan's Liverpool Fantasy

In my book Artificial Paradise: The Dark Side of The Beatles' Utopian Dream, I was trying to answer a question: How did a group like The Beatles, who wrote songs about love and helped to build a popular culture based on pleasure and inclusion, also attract hate and murder. To do so, I realized that I'd have to answer another key question: Was The Beatles' utopian dream worth it?

Given that the state of the world, in the wake of the band's demise, is not the one they sung about - and hoped for - in "All You Need is Love," it was tempting to ask whether or not The Beatles truly mattered. I thought I was going to have to justify the group solely on the strength of their music until I came across, quite by chance, a book by Larry Kirwan called Liverpool Fantasy (2003). In his book, Kirwan (who was the lead singer of a New York-based Irish rock group called Black 47), imagines England without the emergence of The Beatles. Liverpool Fantasy is a dystopian, yet comical, look at the absence of The Beatles from history. It doesn't spare the reader, but it doesn't ridicule the dream the band created either.

In Liverpool Fantasy, Kirwan asks what might have happened had The Beatles broken up before their thunderbolt song "Please Please Me" had not hit the airwaves and broke them in England in 1962. Their manager Brian Epstein and producer George Martin believe that their cover of the quiet ballad "Till There Was You" will do better. While Lennon balks at the suggestion, McCartney is happy to go along (after all, he sings on it). At which point, Lennon storms out of the studio taking George and Ringo with him. The Beatles are no more. Kirwan next cuts to 1987 where the picture of England isn't an artistic renaissance, but a fascist state where the National Front, bearing the slogans of the ultraright Enoch Powell, has struck a coalition with the Tory government. Unemployment is high. Racism is pervasive. And The Beatles never happened.

Two Actors, One Man: Albert Finney & Brendan Gleeson as Winston Churchill

Winston Churchill has been portrayed hundreds of times in various films and television shows, yet he still remains, in the visual medium anyway, very much an enigma. Here's a man who was not trusted nor respected (he had a tendency to change political parties seemingly on a whim and then change back again), yet it is not overstating it that without him we would not have won World War II. To defeat someone like Hitler you needed somebody as single-minded and stubborn as he was. No one else in England's power elite, except Churchill, could have achieved that. Lord Halifax -- who was considered Neville Chamberlain's replacement when he stepped down -- was passed over in favour of Churchill to become PM. Based on Halifax's desire to offer further accommodations to Hitler, thank God that Churchill was chosen.

The Whaling Blues of Robin Trower: Procol Harum's In Held T'Was In I

Although they became widely known, and defined by their 1967 hit “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” Procol Harum has a long musical history dating back to the days of the British Invasion when they were known as the R&B band The Paramounts. Nevertheless, with a classical baroque sound, they took up the piano/organ combination made popular by Bob Dylan on Blonde on Blonde (1966) and released a succession of albums filled with cryptic tales of sea journeys, death and conquistadors.

On their second album, Shine on Brightly (1968), they attempted an epic cantata called “In Held T’Was In I” (an acronym that uses the first word of each movement's lyrics in order to create the title) that chronicled a descent into madness and its affirmative resolution. While Bach was the presiding spirit here, the wild card in the band (dating back to The Paramounts) was guitarist Robin Trower. In the concluding section, where the narrator affirms his quest for salvation, Trower’s guitar reminds you of salvation’s price. In the cantata's finale, his solo sounding, as critic Paul Williams once accurately described it, like “a banshee trapped in Hell but vainly crying for release,” Trower introduces the whaling blues of Albert King to the stately measure of Bach.

Dead End: Paul Greengrass's Green Zone

In his sane and sobering book The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq (2005), The New Yorker’s political correspondent George Packer opened up one’s perspective on the Bush Administration’s argument for invading Iraq on the danger of their using weapons of mass destruction:

“[Bush’s] 'axis of evil’ speech, coming just weeks after the fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan, signaled the next stage in the war on terrorism and the basis for further action. The speech dramatically expanded the theatre of war, but it also did so on relatively narrow grounds. As [Paul] Wolfowitz told an interviewer after the fall of Baghdad, WMD was the least common denominator: ‘The truth is that reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on, which was weapons of mass destruction.’ Wolfowitz suggested that he himself had bigger ideas – a realignment of American power and influence in the Middle East, away from theocratic Saudi Arabia (home to so many of the 9/11 hijackers), and toward a democratic Iraq, as the beginning of an effort to cleanse the whole region of murderous regimes and ideologues…Resting on a complex and abstract theory, it would also have been much harder to sell to the public.”

It’s a shame that Paul Greengrass in his new film Green Zone also resists such complexity because the movie turns out to be as single-minded in its approach to the Iraq War as the Bush Administration’s.

Produced and Abandoned: The Children of Huang Shi

It’s bad enough when good movies get dumped on DVD without first getting a theatrical release. But it’s even worse when the DVD release also gets ignored. (DVD reviewers often miss these films because they either don’t know they exist, or their editors don’t care enough to HAVE anyone know they exist.) Whatever the reason, The Children of Huang Shi certainly deserves a better fate than its remaindered status in the Blockbuster cut-out bin.

Based on the true story of George Hogg (Jonathan Ryhs-Meyers), a British photo journalist during the early days of the Japanese occupation of China in 1938, The Children of Huang Shi is about how an opportunistic journalist turns into a true humanitarian. After pretending to be a Red Cross aid worker (in order to sneak into Nanjing to get a big story), Hogg confronts horrific Japanese atrocities and gets captured after photographing them. He gets rescued by a Communist resistance fighter (Chow Yun-Fat) who arranges to have him sent to an orphanage in Huanghshi to assist Lee Pearson (Radha Mitchell), the American nurse who is running it. While he’s initially reluctant to care for the 60 orphan boys living there (and they are alternately not too pleased to have him caring for them), he gains their respect by giving them the kind of attention they’d long given up hope of ever getting again.

Happily Disrespectful: Jamie Cullum at Massey Hall (March 9/10)

You have to have either supreme confidence in your abilities or sport quite a large set to let somebody as amazing as Imelda May and her tight, tight band open for you. Jamie Cullum, the young British jazz pianist and singer did that just this past Tuesday at Massey Hall in one of those concerts that will always be in my memory bank.

Imelda May is an Irish rockabilly singer who's relatively unknown over here, but after her high-energy opening act, she made 2000 new fans. With a voice that is a mix of Dusty Springfield, Janis Joplin and Amy Winehouse and a bit of Loretta Lynn, May got Massey Hall humming and did what any opening act should do, warm us up and leave us wanting more. As my wife said after May's brilliant 40-minute set "what the hell was that?" And she meant it as the highest compliment. We were here to see Cullum and we were given an amazing gift for showing up on time. At the mid-point of her set, May told us that the up-coming Cullum would "blow your minds". She was right. He had little choice after her performance.

Big Love: Or the (Sometime) Tyranny of the Cable Networks

Earlier this year I wrote in Critics at Large that HBO’s Big Love, the series about a polygamist family in Utah, was likely the best show currently on television - at least it was when I wrote the piece. But the series’ truncated fourth season, which ended on Sunday, was, regrettably, mostly a bust.

More to the point, the show was reduced to nine episodes this year, after being allotted ten of them last season and twelve each for its first two outings. I don’t know why HBO has taken this tack regarding the slowly shrinking lengths of the series’ seasons – I can’t imagine that its creators Will Scheffer and Mark Olson want fewer episodes to play with – but this season was definitely affected by its shorter run. I also suspect that the network may have tampered with the show, insisting that it move faster, be less subtle and cram more plot points onto its storyline, in order to garner higher ratings by attracting audiences who want a glitzier, more dramatic product. That’s the only conclusion I can come up, without being privy to the behind the scenes machinations of the series, but for whatever reason, Big Love this season was no longer the smooth, flawlessly plotted and carefully laid out series I had come to love.

Thrillington (1977)

It’s been commonly assumed over the years that it was John Lennon who was the true avant-garde performer in The Beatles and Paul McCartney was - literally - the straight man. That view developed mostly out of Lennon’s bold outspokenness in both his personality and music, while McCartney submerged his personality in the craft of writing songs. Lennon possessed a romantic spirit, but it was one that made his art real and intimate to the listener. McCartney however was perceived as whimsical and impersonal (i.e. a light-weight). Of course, this is a rather simplistic perception because Lennon was equally whimsical in “Bungalow Bill”; just as McCartney could rock hard in “I’m Down.” It was McCartney after all who came up with the tape-loop experiments that Lennon incorporated into “Tomorrow Never Knows.” McCartney was also the first to create a sonic collage called “Carnival of Light” (still unreleased) before Lennon and Ono did their own “Revolution #9” on the White Album. During that period, John Lennon stayed home to live a more isolated domestic existence, while Paul McCartney was going to art shows and listening to Stockhausen.

Roland Emmerich's Putrid Popcorn: 2012

A scene from Roland Emmerich's 2012.

Roland Emmerich is a sadist and his film 2012 is reprehensible. Strong words for what is ostensibly a 'popcorn movie', but the words are earned. This is the third time now that he has destroyed the world (Independence Day (1996), The Day After Tomorrow (2004) and this), fourth time if you include his earlier film, Moon 44 (1990), where the world is already basically destroyed and maybe fifth if his first picture, The Noah's Ark Principal (1984), is included, and I doubt whether he's done yet. In one other picture, Godzilla (1998), he only leveled New York City. Emmerich seems to take some sort of twisted glee in watching the world laid waste. In the post 9/11 and 2004 Tsunami world, there's something deeply wrong with someone who repeatedly returns to this material, especially the films that were made after these catastrophes. Isn't it enough that we are witnessing it in the real world? Do we need to be 'entertained' by this?

Emmerich is on record saying that he views these films as a warning. He's even been wrong-headedly embraced by the environmentalist movement for this and his previous destructo-pic, The Day After Tomorrow. In 2012, he essentially steals the premise of the far-superior movie The Core (everybody seems to be stealing from this little-seen picture, James Cameron stole the word 'unobtainium' from it). In 2009, a brave, misunderstood scientist (Chiwetel Ejiofor) discovers the earth's core is heating up caused by catastrophic sun flares, and the earth will essentially destroy itself in the very near future (The Core's Aaron Eckhart and 2012's Chiwetel Ejiofor are interchangeable). A plan to save as much of humanity as possible is launched. Ejiofor's prediction is off, however. It turns out that centuries before, the ancient Mayans had predicted that the world would end on December 21, 2012, and of course they are right. The mad scramble is then on to get 'the lucky few' to the 21st century equivalent of Noah's Ark, or in this case Arks.

The Day After: Some (More) Thoughts On Oscar

Sometimes, there is indeed justice in the world. Watching The Hurt Locker beat out Avatar for the Best Picture Academy award last night was gratifying, not only because Kathryn Bigelow’s war movie is by far the superior film but also because James Cameron’s dopey science-fiction epic Avatar never deserved anything more than special effects awards and that is just what it got. Interestingly enough, The Hurt Locker’s unlikely win seems to be a direct result of the one of the major changes that The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences made with this year’s edition of the show, which was increasing the field of Best Picture nominees from five to ten movies. That wasn’t an innovation exactly but a return to the early days of the awards, when eight to twelve nominees were the norm. But the motives for doing it again were slightly different. Stung by complaints that the Best Picture award wasn’t being given out to popular Hollywood movies, going instead to independent or relatively unpopular films like Crash and No Country for Old Men, and strongly criticized last year for omitting the top grossing movie of the year, The Dark Knight, from the Best Picture category, the Oscar folk decided to broaden the field. They allowed box office hits such as The Blind Side and Avatar to compete alongside the artistic likes of The Hurt Locker and Inglourious Basterds, as well as lesser known movies like An Education and A Serious Man. The hope was that more viewers, especially younger ones, would start watching the Oscars, which had been declining in the ratings in recent years, and thus make the show more relevant to ordinary moviegoers, instead of appealing solely to cineastes. Early indications are that ratings for the Oscar telecast were up significantly, but I suspect the results, i.e.: The Hurt Locker’s triumph, were not the result the Academy would have wanted them to be.

Reel to Real: Oscar's Docs

Every year at the Oscars, people concentrate primarily on the Best Picture and Acting categories. But I always like focusing on the Best Documentary Feature section because the people who make them – good and bad pictures alike – have something more at stake than the box office results. This is often why their speeches are either the most moving (or the most proselytizing). Of the five nominated films this year, I’ve only seen three of them.

It’s often been said that you are what you eat, but after seeing Robert Kenner’s incendiary documentary Food Inc. — which examines how the fast food industry radically transformed food production in North America into a stomach-churning enterprise — you just might want to redefine those terms. While Food Inc. is thankfully not alarmist in tone, the facts it uncovers are nevertheless alarming. Using as his guides author Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal) and UC Berkeley School of Journalism Professor Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Delight), Kenner examines how the mass-produced food we now consume is not only lacking in proper nutrients; it may also contain potentially harmful bacteria.

The story begins with McDonalds, who set the template for cheap assembly-line food production, then shows how American farms have now become equally uniform — and at the horrible price of creating unhealthy working conditions for both workers and livestock. We may end up spending less for the food, but we pay dearly for it with increasing cases of diabetes, obesity and E. coli outbreaks. It’s unfortunate, though, that because many of the corporate industrial heads like Monsanto refused to be interviewed for the film, Food Inc. ends up lacking a larger dimension than its agit-prop intent. (Thankfully, due to the co-operation of Walmart, they come across far more ecologically minded than usually assumed.) Like An Inconvenient Truth, Food Inc. lays out its argument clearly, but it’s only one side of the story. To be a truly great documentary, Food Inc. needs a few other conflicting morsels of thought to chew on.

On the other hand, The Cove, a documentary that exposes the slaughter of dolphins in the Japanese fishing town of Taiji, has nothing going for it but its agit-prop intentions. It clobbers the audience so intensely that you may experience caution about raising any objections to the film. It’s as if by questioning the movie’s aesthetic you’ll be found guilty of handing out the spears and harpoons to the killers. But that’s exactly the paradigm The Cove sets up – an Us vs Them dynamic that I believe weakens the story. To quickly transform the movie audience into instant activists (just add melodrama and stir), The Cove by-passes a contemplative investigation of the hunt and instead uses nakedly visceral techniques to outrage its viewers.

Director Louie Psihoyos (who is a former National Geographic photographer) and animal rights activist Ric O’Barry (a former dolphin trainer) are appalled by the cruelty taking place in the cove (where dolphins are rounded up and either killed for food, or sent to a living death in marine parks), but due to government and fishing industry collusion, they can’t prove it. (Apparently, close to 23,000 dolphins are driven into the cove each year.) So Psihoyos and O’Barry decide to organize a team with thermal cameras and night-vision goggles to slip by the secured location and (with hidden cameras) capture the hunt in order to expose the fishermen. Since The Cove borrows the methods of a thriller it has a certain dramatic kick when we watch the team organize their battle plan like a commando team. And the footage they get is as horrifying as you can imagine. But given our anthropomorphic identification with dolphins, it seems crudely manipulative to use that footage to stir those sentiments in the viewer while simultaneously indicting the hunters. (I somehow doubt that footage of the group massacring electric eels would have the same impact on the movie audience.)

As well as directing the film, Louie Psihoyos is also the co-founder of the Ocean Preservation Society. So The Cove has an ecological agenda that it proudly wears on its sleeve. Now I’m not suggesting that because of this the movie traffics in the bad faith that Michael Moore’s pictures do. What I’m saying is that the film is trying to be a recruitment poster as well as a criminal indictment – and the two don’t mix very comfortably. The Cove is powerful and effective and it outrages and disgusts. But it also gets the audience cheering when the bad guys are outted. The one thing The Cove doesn’t do is encourage you to think.

The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers not only encourages you to think, the picture’s subject – the ethics of political activism – stands in sharp contrast to what passes for activism today. When Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971, he wasn’t just staging guerrilla theatre (as were Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies), he set out to show how American foreign policy towards Southeast Asia and Vietnam was built on a series of lies. Ellsberg had originally been part of what became the strategy behind the Vietnam War, as both an analyst for the Defense Department and a marine, who first held that if the country went communist, it would be part of a domino theory that would ultimately plunge the region into Stalinist totalitarianism. While it turned out that the country eventually did plunge into Stalinist oppression after the Americans left in 1975, with more than one million Vietnamese fleeing by boat (half of whom, ironically, would land in the U.S.), Ellsberg’s change of heart towards the war was justified. He spoke out because a series of Presidents, from Truman to Nixon, had cooked the facts to support the need for U.S. involvement. (His first day working for Defense Secretary Robert McNamara was the same day of the Gulf of Tonkin incident when North Vietnamese ships were believed to have fired torpedoes at U.S. boats. Although the attack was known to be false, President Johnson decided to use this episode to expand the war.) The Pentagon Papers, which were released to The New York Times and other publications, were essentially the secret history of the Vietnam War. Ellsberg went public – risking prison and career – with these documents on the principle that supporting fabrications and brutal dictatorships in order to fight communism was immoral.

The Most Dangerous Man in America (the phrase Henry Kissinger used to describe Ellsberg) is told largely from Daniel Ellsberg’s point of view, along with supporting interviews with the late Howard Zinn and self-damning comments from Richard Nixon’s famous secret tapes, but the film-makers Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith have also fashioned another crusade. Besides being a compelling historical saga, it is also a personal story of how a man of conscience was motivated to act on the principle of positive rebellion and how those actions changed him from the man that he once was. It’s a little bracing to recall a time when mainstream journalists were after more than just the careerist desire to be hip and consumer friendly. No doubt that careers got made doing groundbreaking stories like The Pentagon Papers, but the risks were also more dangerous. (The Pentagon Papers inspired Nixon to set up his secret government and led to his downfall with Watergate.) Of course, it would be too easy and too simple today to equate Vietnam with the war in Iraq and how pack journalism (like cliques in high school) prefers to go with the flow, but The Most Dangerous Man in America gives one pause over what was gained by Ellsberg’s actions and what’s been lost since.

--Kevin Courrier is a writer/broadcaster, film critic, teacher and author. His forthcoming book is Reflections in the Hall of Mirrors: American Movies and the Politics of Idealism.

Un prophète: Jacques Audiard’s Thrilling ‘Ride’

Jacques Audiard’s Un prophète (A Prophet) is one of the most strikingly original French movies of recent release and in a country that regularly puts out superb films, that’s saying a lot. It’s also unusual in that its antecedents aren’t the typical art house fare that most current French filmmakers pay homage to and excel at. Un prophète (A Prophet) draws instead from the commercial prison dramas that have long been the staple of Hollywood and independent American cinema.

The film begins with a young fresh faced North African Muslim man, Malik el Djebena (Tahar Rahim, making his film debut), entering the rough French prison system. He’s been convicted of fomenting violence against the police – a charge which may or may not be true – sentenced to six year of jail and thrown into an environment that will see him used a pawn in a long running internecine and low level war between Arab and Corsican prison inmates. Both those groups have their grievances against the larger French society, within and without the prison walls. The Corsicans, whose country is technically occupied by France but given semi – autonomous status as one of the country’s 26 regions, are agitating for full independence, with the inmates from Corsica demanding to be treated as political prisoners. The Muslim prisoners and the community at large face the brunt of French discrimination and their own inability or refusal to fit into France’s secular culture and society. Malik, who is illiterate, begins in the film as an ‘innocent’ who likely will face a difficult time in the stir, but as the movie ends is revealed as a master manipulator and fixer. How he gets that way is the gist of this complex, ragged and intricate drama, which recently won the César award for Best French film at home and is up for Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars on Sunday.

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.