David's Punk Poem Send-Off: R.I.P Malcolm McLaren

"NOOOOO Future.....NOOOOO future......NOOOO Future FOR YOU!"

-- Johnny Rotten, Sex Pistols, God Save the Queen.

Malcolm McLaren dead.
Dead as a dodo.
Pining for the fjords,
Left this mortal coil.

The Truth is Out There: Frederick Wiseman's La Danse

These days, documentaries that tend to get commercial release are usually one of three kinds. There are the docs that feature the director as star, notably the films of Michael Moore (Capitalism: A Love Story, Sicko) and Morgan Spurlock (Super Size Me, Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden?). There are the documentaries that really prove that truth is indeed stranger than fiction (Capturing the Friedmans, Crazy Love, Grizzly Man). There are the docs that are tied into current societal concerns and issues (An Inconvenient Truth, Food Inc., The Cove). And then there’s Frederick Wiseman.

Ironic Groove: Robyn Hitchcock & the Venus 3's Propellor Time

I’ve always found Robyn Hitchcock’s music to be mystical, but not in the LSD sense of the word. His albums create a world that is ethereal and often filled with sadness. As a songwriter, he always succeeds in blending melancholy lyrics with uplifting music. On his new release with his current touring group, the Venus 3 (Peter Buck, guitar, Scott McCaughey, bass and Bill Rieflin, drums), Hitchcock sounds inspired and positive. Recorded in 2006, Propellor Time has a similar feel to Goodnight Oslo (2009) and Ole Tarantula (2007) a steady, consistent groove with great harmonies and ironic lyrics. The album opens with a trip to the "Star of Venus," a song about love and its ideals: “You must have seen it coming, a long long time ago, the ship of all your feelings, shipwrecked in one go.” The title track has a Syd Barrett-like delivery, a song so dreamy that you’re caught up in its 'psychedelic' despair. The last track, "Evolove," is a deliberate shot at creationists, done with humour and great phrasing. But the most positive song is "The Afterlife" where “everyone is made of meat/They’re full of life and life is sweet.” Hitchcock’s mystical world comes full circle on Propellor Time.

-- John Corcelli is an actor, musician, writer, broadcaster and theatre director.

An Equally Important Performer: S Epatha Merkerson Departs Law & Order

She has outlasted four district attorneys, six prosecutors and eight pairs of detectives, but Lieutenant Anita Van Buren will soon follow in their footsteps when she departs from her Manhattan NYPD job. What’s not known is if that exit might come in the form of a resignation or death, since the longtime Law & Order character has been battling cancer in the most poignant subplot of this NBC show’s twentieth season.

Feel free to insert that familiar scene-separating electronic interlude here: Cha-chung!

Actress S. Epatha Merkerson, 57, who has portrayed Van Buren since 1993, recently announced her decision to quit the series after 16 years. But she actually goes further back than that with the program, having appeared as the mother of a very young victim in “Mushrooms,” about a cruel mistake that leads to a child’s murder. Written by Robert Palm, this stunning first-season episode reveals illiteracy as a culprit in the case of an adolescent who shoots an infant; unable to read, the boy went to the wrong place when a drug lord hired him to assassinate someone at another address written on a scrap of paper.

The Mozart of Mayhem: Spike Jones and His City Slickers

While re-watching The Marx Brothers in Monkey Business (1931) last week on TCM, I was trying to think of who might possibly be their musical equivalent. (Of course, The Marx Brothers had their own fair share of musical absurdity in their comedies.) Ultimately, I didn’t have to look too much farther than Spike Jones and His City Slickers. From the early forties to the mid-fifties, Spike Jones and his group tore into the pomposity of high culture with a savage intent. Jones implemented a storehouse of rude sounds that made composer Erik Satie’s experiments in Parade (1916) seem polite.

Jones turned musical history into a broadly satirical farce. He made a mockery of honoured classics like Rossini’s William Tell Overture, which he recast as a ridiculously hysterical horse race. The unbearably dippy standard “Love in Bloom” was torn to shreds in much the same manner that The Marx Brothers laid waste to Il Travatore in A Night at the Opera (1935). Johann Strauss’ delicate Blue Danube waltz was transformed into a drunken brawl (in contrast to the lame reverence shown by Stanley Kubrick in 2001: A Space Odyssey). In their assault on Bizet’s Carmen, the group’s “messy-soprano” Eileen Gallagher is heard frightening off three bulls with the mere shriek of her opening aria. Michael “Cub” Coda, of The Brownsville Station (who once sang about "Smoking in the Boy's Room"), remembers his father seeing Spike Jones at the Michigan Theatre in Detroit back in 1945. “They were crazy,” he recalled his dad telling him. “The stage went black and all these sirens and gunshots started going off. Then the stage lit up and it was Spike Jones and His City Slickers…They had a guy playing a toilet seat with strings on it, people onstage wearing wigs and crazy outfits – oh geez, they were nuts.” This nutty group spent their career blowing raspberries at High Art. And they did it with an all-American gusto.

Spike Jones & His City Slickers

Hailing from Long Beach, California, Jones first put together a college dance band that he patterned after Red Nichols’ Five Pennies. But performing standards bored him to pieces. When he met the multi-talented Del Porter, who played xylophone, violin, sax, and clarinet, and had hung out with the great impressionist Mel Blanc, Jones saw the possibility for integrating a little mayhem into the mix. They began as the Feather Merchants, but by the end of the thirties, they became Spike Jones and His City Slickers and their distinct lunacy caught the attention of RCA Records. By this time, the group included violinist Carl Greyson, whose tenor vocal style displayed a twisted grin in songs like “Cocktails For Two”; Red Ingle, who mutilated the sentimental weepie “Chloe,” turning it into a beautiful act of desperate desecration; Winstead “Doodles” Weaver, a former comedian who created the droll voice of the race-track announcer on the William Tell Overture; Freddie Morgan, a goofy-faced, mad banjo player; “Babyface” George David Rock, a trumpet player with the sweet kid voice in “All I Want For Christmas”; and Dr. Horatio Q. Birdbath (a.k.a. Purves Pullen) who contributed mightily to the massacre of “Love in Bloom.” Sir Frederick Gas (a.k.a. Earl Bennett) provided ample demonstrations of his peculiar emissions on songs like “Happy New Year” and “Knock Knock.” The City Slickers dressed like inebriated renegades out of a Preston Sturges comedy, with loud clothes and goofy hats. Their stage presence was a dada explosion from Dogpatch.

Casablanca's Dark Angel: Confidential Agent (1945)

Sixty-eight years after its release, Casablanca (1942) still continues to justifiably enthrall audiences. Born out of difficult casting (George Raft and Hedy Lamar was one scenario; Ronald Reagan and Ann Sheridan was supposedly another) and a catastrophic screenplay that had no ending, Casablanca has gone on to become a film that many consider one of America's finest ever made. However, the other night, I stumbled across a film on TCM (thank God for Turner Classic Movies) that I had never heard of, but after seeing it I think it should have become a dark companion piece to Casablanca (or perhaps Casablanca's dark angel). It's called Confidential Agent (1945) and it was pretty damn good - but I understand why it's not remembered, even though it's a pity it isn't. Based on a book by Graham Greene and starring Charles Boyer and Lauren Bacall, it told the story of Luis Denard (Boyer) a representative (confidential agent) of the Spanish republican government who in 1937 came on a desperate mission to England to buy millions of £ in coal that his government would then use to create munitions. All of this was done in an attempt to defeat the fascists led by Francisco Franco and Hitler's air force. At every turn, he was either looked at with suspicion by the naive Brits because he was a "foreigner," or he was threatened by fascist agents who had followed him to - or resided in - England.

Chloe Sevigny's True Confessions: More On Big Love's Worst Season

Chloe Sevigny’s recent candid comments on how bad this past season Chloe Sevigny's recent candid comments on how bad this past season of HBO’s Big Love was confirms what I wrote recently about the sad decline of the series. (See Big Love: Or the (Sometime) Tyranny of the Cable Networks from Thursday, March 11/10 on Critics at Large.) I was wrong only about the reasons for the show being handed a short slate of nine episodes instead of the ten it got last season (and the 12 each for seasons one and two). I had speculated that HBO was trying to jazz up the show and insisting its creators cram more storylines into the series - from Bill Henrickson running for political office to a gothic incest / artificial insemination plot - to make it move faster. But Sevigny, when asked on the A.V. Club website why it was so over the top this year, had this to say:

21st Century Be-Bop: Dave Holland Octet's Pathways

Dave Holland’s latest album is a triumph of ensemble playing and composition. But this statement could have been written about his last 4 recordings either with his Big Band or Quintet. This album, recorded live at New York’s Birdland club over 4 nights in January 2009, is the first featuring an Octet. The title track written by Holland is built upon a driving rhythm that sets the tone for the entire record. Gary Smulyan gets the first solo on baritone sax and it’s an earthly delight. Holland’s funky bass line on “How’s Never?” sets a pattern and the band plays against the pulse for the duration. But like most of the music written by Holland, the path is never smooth or straight. There’s variety in the musical journey that’s full of surprises which is why Holland and his first-rate groups are so great to hear. It’s music written to make you lean forward in your chair - or turn up the volume on your iPod. This is particularly true on a composition called, “Ebb and Flow”, which is nicely arranged to accommodate the ensemble and soloists, Kevin Eubanks [trombone] and Chris Potter [tenor]. The album closes with “Shadow Dance” which works a steady, slow groove before jumping into hard-bop drive. Pathways is Be Bop for the 21st Century.

--John Corcelli is an actor, musician, writer, broadcaster and theatre director.

The Declining Art of the Movie Poster

In 1979, on Markham Street, behind Honest Ed's in Toronto, I found my mecca. As a movie-mad university student, Memory Lane -- a film poster, lobby card shop and general treasure trove of pop culture paraphernalia owned and operated by "Captain" George Henderson -- was a godsend. I'd fallen in love with the posters used to promote the films I loved, hated, or had never seen. The artistry of the posters immediately caught my eye and I was instantly hooked.

George's place was a cluttered paradise featuring piles of posters and lobby cards stacked in no particular order. You just picked a pile and dug away. Over the years, I unearthed some real treasures for next to nothing (all lobby cards were $1 and posters were $5 - the exception was the year Ronald Reagan was elected. George hauled out all his old Reagan posters, put a $15 to $20 price tag on them and watched what had been gathering dust disappear). Amongst my finds were a full set of lobby cards from The Manchurian Candidate (1962), a set of 20 lobby cards from Barry Lyndon, a huge three-sheet poster for Dr. Strangelove, a lobby card for Bogart's The Desperate Hours, a lobby card for Preston Sturges' Christmas In July, the one-sheet for Hitchcock's Marnie, another - but badly torn - of Hitch's North by Northwest, lobby cards for Lolita (a good friend of mine spotted the stack of cards before I could, but he graciously gave me one). It went on and on. The posters in particular were often outstanding hand-illustrated works depicting scenes or characters from the films. Artists, such as Frank Frazetta, who went on to great fame as a comics and poster illustrator, worked their magic in this field too (Frazetta's poster for a film I don't even like, Hotel Paradiso (above), is still a favourite). If I wanted an image of the actors, I bought the lobby cards.

Wake of the Flood: Louisiana,1927

Louisiana, 1927

Before the tragic events of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the worst flood of the Mississippi River took place on Good Friday, April 15, 1927. When the levee broke, just above Clarksdale, water inundated the state. New Orleans in particular was hit with 14 inches of rain in 24 hours, although the city itself survived. What was most significant about the calamity was the transformative effect it had on the culture of Louisiana.

Greasy Pan: Cooking with Stella

I'd like to think that Canadians have a sense of humor -- after all, we poke fun at ourselves as if it's second nature. No doubt this is due to our undefined national identity toppled by a vast amount of strikingly absurd stereotypes, ones that are ripe for comedy. Canadians know this, just watch an old rerun of SCTV or even try to catch an episode of Degrassi Junior High. Americans definitely find the joke funny; the academy of voters even went so far as to nominate a song called "Blame Canada" for an Oscar. The Canadian film industry doesn't mind tossing out grants to have our culture mocked so long as our cultural diversity shines through. The problem inherent through Cooking with Stella is that we're not in on the joke. Canadians are presented as little more than friendly idiots with deep pockets.

Cooking With Stella is a slight comedy about a Canadian diplomat (Lisa Ray) and her husband Michael (Don McKellar) living in New Delhi with their cook, Stella (Seema Biswas). All through Dilip Metha's film, she works overtime to build a positive relationship between Michael and Stella. But Stella, who is at first kind and willful, quickly gets transformed into the villain of the picture, gleefully stealing thousands from Michael (and others) through a very profitable black market business. What is problematic about this is that Metha doesn't view her as the story's antagonist. Allegories instead get drawn to Robin Hood, but unlike that prince of thieves, Stella's hand is merely a selfish one.

Produced and Abandoned: Redacted

When The Hurt Locker won Best Picture at this year’s Oscars, it was a refreshing choice. Instead of going with the manufactured posturing of Avatar, the Academy voters instead were drawn to a more original subject: the addiction of war. (The only other recent film that tackled this subject with intelligence and imagination was the 2008 Israeli picture Waltz with Bashir.) While some decried that The Hurt Locker by-passed the political issues surrounding the Iraq War, I think the examination of a different kind of technological war, where cell phones do as much damage as an air strike, has a political aspect that transcends dogma.

Although we've already seen dozens of movies about the Iraq War, few have come close to making sense of its meaning. Allowing that people of different political persuasions will have separate views of just what that meaning is, most dramas (like 2007's Rendition and In the Valley of Elah) have only reduced the conflict to tired platitudes, or banal melodrama. Perhaps The Hurt Locker succeeds so well because it doesn't attempt to summarize what is still in process, but rather, seizes on an aspect of the war that can now be understood. (Let's not forget that during the Vietnam era there were no Hollywood movies about Vietnam - not, at least, until the conflict was over.)

The Ties That Bind: Bong Joon-Ho's Mother

Bong Joon-Ho’s Mother is devastatingly good. It begins as a story about a middle-aged single mother in a small South Korean town with a mentally-challenged son who gets incarcerated for the murder of a young woman. But it ultimately goes far beyond the basic mechanics of melodrama. For Bong, the director of Memories of Murder (2003) and The Host (2007), genre is merely the starting point for a more searing examination of the family ties that bind.

The umbilical chord that holds a mother to her son is also the link between a country divided and a society not far removed from the rituals of authoritarianism. Like Germany in the post-war and Berlin Wall years, Korea is also a severed nation. But unlike the post-war German directors, like Wim Wenders and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who used genre pictures as a means to express their guilt and hopelessness, Bong Joon-Ho uses conventional narrative to uncork the violence and pain of being estranged. Given that authoritarianism imposes ritual, Bong is naturally drawn to genres that have rules – but rules he feels compelled to break. The Host, for example, begins as a humorous, wily tribute to '50s monster movies like Creature of the Black Lagoon and Godzilla, but it quickly becomes a surprisingly stirring drama about family honor and loyalties. When a slimy reptilian monster (a product of chemical pollution) kidnaps the daughter of a rather dim-witted father, he goes on a torturous mission to get her back. The Host evolved into that rare horror film, one that became inconsolably poignant. Mother shares many of The Host’s virtues, as well as some aspects from his first film, Memories of Murder, a procedural about a Korean serial-killer.

Cougar Jazz: Carol Welsman with Peter Appleyard at the Markham Theatre

Two weeks ago, I wrote how Jamie Cullum had a huge set of cojones by letting the very talented Imelda May open for him. He trusted his abilities enough to let a very talented unknown wow his audience before he hit the stage. Last Friday, jazz singer/pianist Carol Welsman did a variation on the theme. She wisely invited the brilliant veteran jazz vibraphonist, Peter Appleyard to not open for her, but play with her as her 'special guest'. Somebody had to come on and wake things up.

Before inviting Appleyard on stage, Welsman ran through three or four songs supported by a trio of very talented musicians: Jake Langley on guitar, Mark Rogers on double bass and bass and Jimmy Branly on drums and cajón (essentially a wooden box that Branly massaged magic out of). The songs she picked (from her new tribute album to Peggy Lee, I Like Men) were fine, but the problem on this night was Welsman herself. I'd heard her on record, and she was a credible singer and pianist, but on stage she was well, frankly, dull. Her playing was ordinary, her singing was just okay. And her dancing? The less said about that the better. In fact, the title of this piece came to me during the sleepy portion of first act before Appleyard came on. As Welsman noodled through these first few songs, she reminded me of a cougar who enjoys this type of smooth jazz as she sits at a jazz lounge sipping a martini or two. Harsh, perhaps, but that was the vibe (pun intended) she was putting out. I thought I was on an ocean liner watching the jazz act go through the motions, albeit a jazz act with talented musicians but saddled with an uninspired leader. And then a tidal wave hit the stage and his name was Peter Appleyard.

Imitation of Life: Bob Kuban & the In-Men's The Cheater

Most pop songs are inspired by personal stories and contain observations about a variety of subjects (although love is generally the prominent one). There are a few tunes, though, that seem to foretell future events - for instance, Jan & Dean's prescient "Dead Man's Curve," where Jan Berry almost fatally encountered it. But then you have the downright eerie - as in Bob Kuban & the In-Men's 1966 hit, "The Cheater." Maybe you have to be of a certain vintage to remember this white soul track, but it still occasionally pops up on Oldies radio programs. While many of us can think of many pop performers whose lives would make great material for movies (let's say, Queen Latifah playing Aretha Franklin, or Andre Braugher as Louis Armstrong), the story of "The Cheater" would make a great procedural drama.

Arthur Miller's The Price: Reflections From a First-Time Director

“…everything has to be disposable. Because you see the main thing today is shopping. Years ago a person, he was unhappy, didn’t know what to do with himself; he go to church, start a revolution, something. Today you’re unhappy? Can’t figure it out? What is the salvation? Go shopping.”

--Arthur Miller, The Price.

When I read those words, I knew I had to direct The Price, a play written in 1968 from the hand of the great American playwright Arthur Miller. They were spoken by Gregory Solomon, a 90-year-old furniture salesman who is about to purchase a huge room of furniture from Victor Franz, a man unloading a burden, in more ways than one.

The Price is one of Miller’s most under-recognized and least appreciated works. It’s the story of two brothers who, after 16 years of estrangement, try to reconcile in the attic of the family residence, where their old furniture is to be sold. Debuting in 1968, the play ran on Broadway for about a year before closing and toured a number of countries before being retired from the stage. I don’t think it was intentional. Miller’s other plays such as The Crucible, All My Sons and the most familiar, Death of a Salesman, became part of the American canon of drama, appearing on student reading lists for years. His plays also became part of the standard repertoire of amateur and professional theatre companies around the world and more recently on television and motion pictures. The Price is in the same company as those works because it offers insight into the relationships between fathers and sons, memory and the consequences of making choices.

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.