Showtime’s Episodes: The One Where the Brits Get Shafted by Hollywood

Some of the biggest news in TV this winter (long before Charlie Sheen began his distracting antics) was the return of some old Friends to the sitcom world: Matthew Perry on ABC’s Mr. Sunshine and Matt LeBlanc’s on Showtime’s Episodes. Since I’ve already weighed in positively on Mr. Sunshine, today we’re taking a look at Episodes.

Episodes is far more than a Matt LeBlanc comeback vehicle. Co-produced by Showtime and the BBC (and airing simultaneously on both of sides of the pond), Episodes tells the story of Sean and Beverly Lincoln (former Green Wing co-stars Stephen Mangan and Tamsin Grieg), a British husband-and-wife writing duo whose BAFTA-award winning TV series is optioned by an American network. The 7-episode first season takes place over a period of only a couple of weeks, taking us step-by-step from the couple’s disorienting arrival in Hollywood to the end of the filming of their show’s pilot. This slow corruption of the Lincolns’ professional integrity is mirrored in the concurrent decay of their relationship. The two are compelled to make compromise after compromise in the production of their show, including being forced to (mis)cast Matt LeBlanc (credibly played by Matt LeBlanc) as the show’s lead. Within hours of landing in L.A., their show’s title shifts from “Lyman’s Boys” to “Pucks!”, transformed from a genteel, if biting, boarding school comedy about an aging headmaster with a wistful crush on a middle-aged, lesbian librarian into a middle-of-the-road romcom-sitcom about a hockey coach wooing the school’s young, sexy, and very heterosexual librarian.

Tamsin Grieg and Stephen Mangan

Taking on show business from the inside raises the bar considerably for a comedy series, and so Episodes gave itself a steep hill to climb. (The gold standard will always be HBO’s The Larry Sanders Show, but Ricky Gervais’ much more personal approach in Extras comes in a close second.)  But even if making a TV show about making a TV show is as old as television itself, Crane and Klarik do bring something new to the table: the dramatization of the difficult translation of a successful UK series into the very different culture of American TV. In that sense, it could hardly be timelier. In the very same week that Episodes first aired, 3 US versions of popular UK shows premiered: Skins (on MTV), Being Human (on SyFy), Shameless, which aired immediately following the first episode of Episodes on Showtime itself. As each of these shows struggles in its own way to translate very popular (and still on-going) British series for an American audience, Episodes offers a dark and satirical look behind the scenes at a comparable, if fictional, effort. If you’ve ever seen a favourite UK series be painfully adapted to the US network model (NBC’s limp re-creation of Steven Moffat’s Coupling comes to mind), Episodes is definitely a must-see.

A Post-Modern Love Child: Tumblr

Just imagine if Wordpress were able to seduce both Facebook and Twitter one evening. And it then had a happy accident. The post-modern love child would probably look a lot like Tumblr (http://www.tumblr.com/). This free blog hosting platform has been operating in the shadows of its mainstream social media giants for four years now. While it hasn’t reached the popularity of its peers, it still proves to hold its own as an innovative blogging alternative, especially attractive to those in arts and media.

In 2007, David Karp, a New York City entrepreneur, founded Tumblr. With the help of lead web developer Marco Arment, the site quickly expanded from friends and family members to a community of millions. The latest member tally, as posted on Tumblr on March 12, 2011, reflects 3.8 billion posts and 14.9 million blogs. Not too shabby, especially considering the current Web 2.0 oligopoly. Even more impressive is Tumblr’s loyalty rate, preserving 85% of its users, in comparison to Twitter’s 60% retention rate. So what is it about this little platform that could that makes it so attractive to both social media junkies and traditional bloggers alike? The answer lies in one’s Tumblr account.

To the Next Level: Joe Lovano & Us Five’s Bird Songs

Be-bop music occasionally sounds tight and tense. In some cases, of course, it's supposed to. Be-bop jazz reflected the post-war times in which it developed. Then, it was new, challenging and difficult for audiences to appreciate on a wider scale, probably because you couldn't dance to it. Now, some 50 plus years since the death of Charlie Parker, Joe Lovano & Us Five, one of the great ambassadors of be-bop, has channeled Bird and taken him to the next level on Bird Songs (Blue Note, 2011). It's exciting music arranged in such a fresh way that it gives us a whole fresh perspective on the form. For Joe Lovano, Bird Songs captures the past with a lighter, intellectual touch. Everyone in the band is listening and following while simultaneously moving forward. They create a dynamic sound that has an inner-strength easily accessible to the listener.

Not willing to simply play Charlie Parker’s music in a straight-ahead fashion, Lovano shapes the compositions to reflect Bird but not to copy him. His arrangement of "Barbados" is a perfect example of keeping the basis of the tune but mixing it up rhythmically to become something other than an outdated be-bop tune. In other words, it takes on a shape of its own.

Off the Shelf: Lantana (2001)

The Australian psychological thriller Lantana, like Ang Lee's The Ice Storm (1997) and P. T. Anderson's Magnolia (1999), is a movie that examines the emotional torpor and malaise of an ensemble. But this drama by director Ray Lawrence (Bliss) and screenwriter Andrew Bovell (based on his play Speaking in Tongues) doesn't make its individuals such easy targets of scorn and moral judgment (like The Ice Storm). It doesn't provide condescending views of spiritual bankruptcy either (as did Magnolia). Lantana, which is named for a spiky weed that covers Australia, is thought-out in more dramatically compelling and complex ways than Magnolia. It develops the connections between these disparate characters rather than imposing those connections for the sake of its own conceits.

Leon (Anthony LaPaglia) is an unhappily married detective who is having an affair with Jane (Rachael Blake), a recently divorced woman. Leon's wife, Sonja (Kerry Armstrong), is seeing a psychiatrist, Dr. Valerie Somers (Barbara Hershey), because she suspects that Leon is seeing someone else. Dr. Somers, meanwhile, is still recovering from the shock of the murder of her daughter. She even has her own suspicions that her emotionally remote husband (Geoffrey Rush) is being unfaithful. The only happy couple appears to be the unemployed but genial Nik (Vince Colosimo) and his sturdy wife Paula (Daniela Farinacci). But when a disappearance and possible murder takes place, everyone's life becomes affected and altered.

Carrey's Triumph: I Love You Phillip Morris (2009)

Over the years, Jim Carrey has been the most exhausting of prodigious talents. From Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1994) to The Cable Guy (1996), Carrey could quickly wear a viewer down. With his vast collection of quick-witted jack-in-the-box character masks, he was the Tasmanian Devil of comic actors, spinning madly out of control and wiping out everything in his path. But he wasn't just some dervish comedian chewing the scenery. Carrey became the scenery. Often loudly dominating the action, he left his co-stars (especially poor Matthew Broderick in The Cable Guy) looking like they were desperately trying to escape the picture to avoid being run over.

To me, Jim Carrey always worked best served in small doses (as he was brilliantly on TV's In Living Color); or perhaps, had he been around in the thirties, he would have been perfectly electrifying featured in those review skit comedies like The Big Broadcast of 1932. But most of his feature films were either broadly aggressive burlesque comedies, or painful attempts to make him into a normal guy (The Majestic); broaden his appeal (The Truman Show), or sanctimoniously tame him (Liar Liar). Except for his perfect pairing with Jeff Daniels in the hilarious Dumb and Dumber (1994), Jim Carrey has been an overheated comedy machine rather than an actor. But in his latest film, I Love You Phillip Morris, Carrey has finally found a part that integrates with perfect precision his multiple character roles into one coherently whole person. It's Carrey's triumph. Unfortunately, due to its subject matter, distributors have done their damnedest to make sure an audience never discovers it. Don't make their mistake.

Nothing New Here: And Everything is Going Fine

Spalding Gray: And Everything is Going Fine (2010)

I was lucky enough to see the late monologist Spalding Gray on three different occasions when he came to Toronto with his shows, Gray’s Anatomy (1994), It’s a Slippery Slope (1997) and Morning, Noon and Night (1999), where he wittily expounded on a wide variety of subjects ranging from the pains of aging to becoming a father late in life. (I still remember with relish his encounter with the elderly Richard M. Nixon in a doctor's office and his initial thought that someone was wearing a Nixon mask in the waiting room.) His monologues were fast-paced, insightful and cleverly laid out, especially considering that they were in effect just Gray usually sitting behind a desk and talking for 90 minutes or so. And yet, despite his frankness on stage, particularly about his mother’s suicide and his own thoughts and worries that he, too, would end up doing the same, his finally ending his life in early 2004, at age 62, still came as a shock to me. I figured, as I’m sure so many other people did too, that Gray was successfully utilizing his monologues as a therapeutic catharsis to help keep his demons at bay. And truth be told, for many years, he did. Of course, no one could have foreseen the 2001 car accident in Ireland, which left him with physical and mental injuries and eventually drove him to the permanent despair that is suicide. Critics at Large’s Susan Green got a taste of what was troubling Gray when she interviewed him in 2002.

Last year, filmmaker Steven Soderbergh (sex, lies and videotape, Ocean’s Eleven), who had cast Gray in King of the Hill (1993), playing ironically enough a suicide victim, and directed the film adaptation of Gray’s Anatomy (1996), premièred his documentary on Spalding Gray, entitled And Everything is Going Fine at the Slamdance Film Festival. It’s now in general release, but sad to say, it likely won’t please Gray’s legion of fans, or Soderbergh’s for that matter.

A Tale of Two Alfreds: Fiction and Fact

The most curious object I inherited from my late father is a skeleton key attached to a round metal tag that reads “Bates Motel,” along with the room number 1. I’m not sure how he came to own this movie memento, although his admiration for Alfred Hitchcock – they shared the same first name – predated the 1960 release of Psycho by at least two decades, with big-screen thrillers such as Suspicion (1941).

Beginning in 1955, every Sunday night Dad was glued to our black-and-white Zenith with a round picture tube for the half-hour anthology program Alfred Hitchcock Presents on CBS. A year later, he began subscribing to the legendary director’s monthly Mystery Magazine. 

My father would have been happy to learn that there’s a plan afoot for a film based on the 1990 nonfiction book by Stephen Rebello, Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho. Anthony Hopkins reportedly is in talks to star as the portly filmmaker; Sacha Gervasi (Anvil! The Story of Anvil) might direct from a script by John McLaughlin (Black Swan). An earlier attempt to launch this project, with Helen Mirren playing Hitchcock’s wife Alma and Ryan Murphy (Eat Pray Love) at the helm, failed to come together for some reason.

Saturday Matinee Redux: Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

Producer Jerry Bruckheimer's big-budget extravaganza Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2010) is a throwback to Saturday matinee adventure movies. I didn't catch up to it on the big screen because the thought of sitting through a sprayed-on copper-skinned, muscled-up Jake Gyllenhaal (usually a scrawny actor in indie films) in an action film was not on the top of my list. It didn't help that the critics had been generally unmerciful in their attacks. What I had forgotten, though, is that there is a herd mentality amongst some film critics. Not wanting to appear unhip, or not with it, too many of them thrust their, um, thumbs into the sky to see which way the wind is blowing. The early critical opinion was not good, so those upraised thumbs quickly turned down and the film's fate was sealed.

Talking Out of Turn #14: Richard Ford (1989)

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show, On the Arts, at CJRT-FM in Toronto. With the late Tom Fulton, who was the show's prime host and producer, we did a half-hour interview program where we talked to artists from all fields. In 1994, after I had gone to CBC, I had an idea to collate an interview anthology from some of the more interesting discussions I'd had with guests from that period. Since they all took place during the eighties, I thought I could edit the collection into an oral history of the decade from some of its most outspoken participants. The book was assembled from interview transcripts and organized thematically. I titled it Talking Out of Turn: Revisiting the '80s. With financial help from the Canada Council, I shaped the individual pieces into a number of pertinent themes relevant to the decade. By the time I began to contact publishers, though, the industry was starting to change. At one time, editorial controlled marketing. Now the reverse was taking place. Acquisition editors, who once responded to an interesting idea for a book, were soon following marketing divisions concerned with whether the person doing it was hot enough to sell it.

Tom Fulton of On the Arts.

For a few years, I flogged the proposal to various publishers but many were worried that there were too many people from different backgrounds (i.e. Margaret Atwood sitting alongside Oliver Stone). Another publisher curiously chose to reject it because, to them, it appeared to be a book about me promoting my interviews (as if I was trying to be a low-rent Larry King) rather than seeing it as a commentary on the decade through the eyes of the guests. All told, the book soon faded away and I turned to other projects. However, when recently uncovering the original proposal and sample interviews, I felt that maybe some of them could find a new life on Critics at Large.

One of my favourite books of criticism is D. H. Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature (1924) in which he addresses the varied works of American writers James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. In this panoramic and illuminating study, Lawrence examines how a number of gifted authors came to terms with the experience of a young country still in the process of finding its identity. "The world fears a new experience more than it fears anything," Lawrence wrote in the opening chapter. "It can't pigeon-hole a real new experience. It can only dodge. The world is a great dodger, and the Americans the greatest. Because they dodge their very own selves." What he was describing was the elusive spirit of place invoked in the American literary experience. Some sixty years later, another American writer, Richard Ford, was also trying to invoke some idea of the American identity in the bleak landscape of Montana. It was there that he explored the sensation of being rootless and what that revealed of the American character in the eighties.

author Richard Ford

This particular chapter of Talking Out of Turn, curiously enough, was the only one to feature only writers (it also included Timothy Findley and poet Daphne Marlatt). As for Richard Ford, in one of my last radio interviews at CJRT-FM, we discussed that spirit of place in a series of short stories titled Rock Springs.

Remembering Kenneth Mars

Actor Kenneth Mars died recently, at age 75, after a long career in show business. He is best known for starring in films such as Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein (1974), where he played the persistent police inspector with the prosthetic arm. He also had roles in TV shows, ranging from guest spots on such varied series as Harry O and Will & Grace to a regular part on Malcolm in the Middle. He also did voice work on the animated TV series The Little Mermaid and Fievel's American Tails. But it’s in two specific parts that I’ll always fondly remember him.

One of those roles, as the Nazi playwright Franz Liebkind in Mel Brooks’ uproarious 1968 film The Producers, was one of his earliest appearances, but I can’t imagine anyone forgetting the actor once they saw him do his stuff.  Liebkind is the fulcrum of the movie wherein shady producer Max Bialystock (Zero Mostel) and wound-up accountant Leo Bloom (Gene Wilder) plot to sell multiple shares in the worst theatrical production they can conceive. Their expectation is that it will tank and they can then run away with all the investors’ monies. Unfortunately for Bialystock and Bloom, the musical, provocatively called Springtime for Hitler, is a big hit. The scene where Liebkind, a former Nazi and current pigeon breeder, and the musical’s creator, entertains his two Jewish guests (who need him to sign onto the project) and fulminates about how ‘the fuhrer’ was a better house painter than Winston Churchill, is hilarious. Mars plays it straight in this comedy – a deranged guy who really believes in his cause and, somehow, dare I say it, makes this unlikely character, a Nazi no less, likeable. It’s a gusty performance in a bold satire that is usually acknowledged for its remarkable musical finale, with dancers forming a giant swastika on stage. It is Mel Brook’s raspberry to the all-WASP Busby Berkeley musicals of his youth. But it’s Mars, in his deft incarnation of Liebkind, who even more so than the perpetually hysterical Bloom and entertainingly conniving Bialystock, stands out in a performance for the ages.

No Fun: Wanda Jackson's The Party Ain't Over

In 2004, former White Stripes band member, Jack White produced Loretta Lynn's Van Lear Rose. The album was an excellent mix of traditional country and contemporary pop. At age 70, Lynn also proved to be a versatile singer as White shaped the sound of the songs to reflect her experience and yet capture something new in her voice. Van Lear Rose succeeded on so many levels that it was one of the most successful selling albums in Lynn's career. At the 2005 Grammy Awards, it won Best Country Album and it peaked at number 24 on the Billboard 200 chart.

Looking to capture some of that same magic, White hooked up with veteran rockabilly singer Wanda Jackson last year to record The Party Ain't Over, an album whose best intentions sadly fall short. Jackson was born in 1937 in Oklahoma and was encouraged to take up music at an early age by her father. By 1956, she had learned to sing and play guitar earning a regular radio show in Oklahoma City. After graduating high school, she launched a full-fledged career in music that was a mix of country and rock 'n roll. She was known as the “Queen of Rockabilly.”

Adjusted: The Adjustment Bureau

The Adjustment Bureau is not your ordinary mess of a movie. Based on a short story by Philip K. Dick, the plot deals with material pretty familiar from much of science-fiction. It delves into the idea of fate versus free will and whether or not our destiny is our own. But what looked from the trailers to be your typical paranoid thriller turns out to be essentially a romantic story. But the many styles at work in this film ultimately cancels the movie out. The Adjustment Bureau is too busy adjusting itself.

Matt Damon plays David Norris, a young rising star running for the Senate in New York, who keeps finding ways to mess up his career ambitions. On the night he loses the election, he happens upon Elise (Emily Blunt) in the men's room (hiding from security) while he's practicing his concession speech. Within seconds, he believes he's met the love of his life. Unfortunately, their brief tryst is interrupted by aides whisking him to the podium. But one day, he meets Elise again on a bus heading to work and he seeks to hook up with her. The problem however is that he soon encounters a bureau of men dressed in fedoras who work for "the Chairman." These dapper business folks zap people's memories to keep them on their destined path in life. Apparently, Norris and Elise were never supposed to meet again after that first encounter. The rest of the film features David trying to outwit the Bureau while the fedora brigade keeps trying to throw roadblocks in his path.

Fifty-Two Years and Countless Cats: Good-Bye, My Friend

Bob Dylan and Suze Rotolo, January 1963.

Someone very close to me died last week. Suze Rotolo, whom I met in 1958, had been diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer shortly before publication of her book A Freewheelin’ Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties (Broadway, 2008). The autobiography includes details of her several years with Bob Dylan. She was known around the globe as the pretty girl on the iconic cover of his second album, 1963’s A Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. To me, Suze was a politically savvy, artistically inventive, thoroughly unpretentious, loyal, smart, warm, witty, whimsical, mischievous kindred spirit. And we shared an unbridled passion for kitties, many of which found homes with us over the decades.

           

We met when she was 14 and, 11 months older, I already had turned 15, both of us counselors-in-training at the leftie Camp Kinderland in Upstate New York. Every Sunday afternoon in the fall, we would head for the Village together to rendezvous with our like-minded pals at Washington Square Park, where young bohemians gathered by the hundreds to sing and play folk music. As high school seniors in 1960, Suze and I spent our Saturdays picketing Woolworth stores in Manhattan to support the sit-ins by black college students at segregated lunch counters in North Carolina. We’d find sympathetic passersby willing to boycott the retail chain, take our leaflets and sign petitions provided by the Congress of Racial Equality. On May 19 that year, we volunteered as ushers at a Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy rally in Madison Square Garden. Before it even started, someone invited us backstage to shake hands with one of the speakers, Eleanor Roosevelt – a photo op and unforgettable moment of personal history.

Camp Kinderland: Suze, next to Susan, on the far right.

A Poet's Touch: Johanna Skibsrud’s The Sentimentalists

Memories. They can provide refuge or anguish. But they can also protect or betray their owners. Memories can spark nostalgic laughter between friends, or can be so sad they make one want hide carefully away from it all. Johanna Skibsrud’s Scotiabank Gillar Prize winning novel The Sentimentalists (Douglas & McIntyre, 2010), beautifully examines the profound affect memories can have not only an individual, but all those close to him.

The novel is guided by an unnamed narrator who, following a personal crisis, returns to the stay with her father, Napoleon Haskell, a Vietnam War veteran living in the fictional town of Casablanca, Ontario. Napoleon shares a house owned by Henry, the father of Owen, a fellow soldier who served beside Napoleon, who was mysteriously killed on an evening in October 1967. The town itself serves as a backdrop for ghosts, sitting by the shores of a man-made lake, and what lies beneath is the former town, where houses rest like sunken ships. The story moves between the present and the past, between Fargo, ND, the fictional Casablanca, ON, and the battlefield. The first half of the novel is a series of reflections presented by Napoleon's daughter. The narrator reminiscences over her childhood, her sister Helen, their mother and their travels between Fargo and Casablanca. There are bittersweet motifs of a loving, but distracted father; once a simple man who was complicated by the horrors of war. But those memories create a tribute of misunderstandings and misgivings that eventually lead to the demise of his relationships with others and himself.

When Criticism Backfires: I Spit On Your Grave (1978/2010)

Roger Ebert’s review of Meir Zarchi's 1978 film I Spit On Your Grave (aka, Day of the Woman) in 1980 created both the controversy and the reputation this film holds to this day. How does a critic do that? One, by either giving the micro-budgeted film a rave review and the film finds its audience from there. Or two, he rips it to shreds, calling it, “A vile bag of garbage.” He then goes on to tear the film to such ribbons that over the years a certain type of film-goer thinks, “Let me see that for myself.”

Guess what? Scenario two is the one that occurred. In fact, this film would never have been remade in 2010 without Ebert's eviscerating review of the original. In hindsight, he would have been better off ignoring it entirely. The problem with Ebert's review (it's available online) is that what he was really reviewing was the vile audience he saw it with, not the film. Briefly, both versions of I Spit On Your Grave tell the story of a young woman, Jennifer Hill (Camille Keaton, in the 1978 version; Sarah Butler, in the 2010 version), who rents a cottage on a river outside of very small town. She's a writer seeking privacy to write; she doesn't get it. Instead, she attracts the attention of four losers in the town who at first taunt and then rape her repeatedly. After they fail to kill her, she recovers and enacts a brutal revenge on all of them. In early February, Anchor Bay released both versions of the film, with commentary tracks and short documentaries, on DVD and Blu-ray.

Master Shot: Roman Polanski's The Ghost Writer

While most of the hubbub at last night's Oscars concentrated on such worthy pictures as The King's Speech (which won Best Picture) and The Social Network, one of the best movies from last year actually didn't get a nod of recognition from the Academy. Roman Polanski's The Ghost Writer, based on Robert Harris's best-selling political thriller, The Ghost (2010), is a shrewd suspense drama which demonstrates that Polanski still has some clever tricks up his sleeve. And he's having a ball unveiling them. The fact that the film barely caught the imagination of the Academy, or the audience (except for a number of critics), just adds to the irony of the story itself.

The plot revolves around a British ghost writer (Ewan McGregor), whose name we never know, who has been given the assignment of completing the memoirs of his country's former Prime Minister Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan). Although his agent tells him it's the opportunity of a lifetime, the previous ghost, a former aide to the PM, recently turned up mysteriously dead on the beach. Hence, the current job opening. Making matters worse, on the day the new ghost arrives, Rycart (Robert Pugh), a former British foreign minister, accuses Lang of authorizing the illegal seizure of suspected terrorists and handing them over for torture by the CIA (which, according to Rycart, leaves the former leader open to charges of war crimes). While Lang seeks refuge to avoid the reach of the International Criminal Court (which turns out to be the U.S.), his ghost writer begins to uncover clues in the memoir left by his predecessor that might possibly implicate Lang.

On Good Terms with the Muse: Bruce Cockburn’s Small Source of Comfort

Bruce Cockburn’s 30th album is called Small Source of Comfort. It’s an interesting title taken from the song “Five Fifty-One” by a musician and songwriter who’s been making consistent, high quality music since the late 1960s. But Cockburn is a rather nomadic artist keen to challenge himself as much as he challenges his fans. Consequently, this new album, his first in five years, is a mix of familiar sounds while simultaneously looking forward. It features poignant songs about love, loss, and what you could call introspective instrumentals. (As usual for a Cockburn release, it also features printed lyrics in English and French, plus the date and geographic location of each song.)

Not typical of a Cockburn release, though, is humour. It’s to be found on the song “Call Me Rose” which is about Richard Nixon being re-incarnated as a single mother. Written in Montreal in 2009, it’s a track that speaks about Karma in a most original way. Who would have thought that Richard Nixon would ever be re-incarnated, let alone as a single mother with two kids? Well, Cockburn did. According to his notes, it came easily to him. Which begs another question, after 30 years, how does he keep coming up with new songs? Perhaps he’s on good terms with his muse or, to be more practical, he’s constantly thinking, dreaming and writing it down, as is the case with “Call Me Rose” as a fully- formed song.

A Counterculture Chick: Melissa Leo's Half-Century

Ever since her first bona-fide professional acting gig on All My Children, an urban myth has dogged the 1984 casting of Melissa Leo: that she got the part during an audition process in which Julia Roberts was a fellow contender. The untruth has been repeated over the years on any number of celebrity web sites.

“It’s a bogus story,” Leo said during a February telephone interview from New York City, where she had gone to find a gown for Sunday night’s Academy Awards. ”While I was working on the show, I had the same manager as Eric Roberts, her brother. She was 15 then and visiting from Georgia. He asked if I’d take Jules to the set. She was a delightful, wacky teen who had no idea what to do with her life, except meet Sting.”

Leo’s progression from a one-year stint on the ABC soap opera to a best supporting actress Oscar nomination – for playing the feisty mother of two sons with prizefighting dreams and their many sisters in The Fighter – has followed a sometimes rocky road. After more than 70 films and TV programs, at 50 she is finally on the Hollywood A-list.

Off the Shelf: Laurent Cantet's The Class (2008)

Most movies about idealistic teachers who inspire their charges are usually sappy (To Sir, With Love and Dead Poet’s Society), brutal (Lean On Me), or sometimes self-consciously instructive (Freedom Writers). In short, they remain painfully predictable. Rarely do they delve into the dynamics of the educational process, but instead fall back on the more inspirational side of learning life’s "important lessons." Put another way: People don’t learn in these pictures; they get ennobled. Entre les Murs (The Class) is that rare exception. It examines the complex dynamic that develops between an inspired teacher and a motley group of students.

LA's Rashomon: Graham Yost's Boomtown

Growing up in small-town Ontario north of Toronto, I didn't have much to do when it came to the arts. In the 1960s and 1970s, except for some regional theatre, the only way to gain exposure to the arts was through movies or television. In my early years, most of my 'education' came from the movies because in Parry Sound in the 1960s we received only one television station (the CBC affiliate in Barrie, now part of CTV). That education was rather slight: Disney flicks, James Bond double-bills, the latest Don Knotts comedy, plus the occasional interesting picture, such as Patton (1970) and Woody Allen's Take the Money and Run (1969). By the time my family moved to the nearby town of Bracebridge I had yet to see any of Hollywood's great films from the so-called Golden Era. When we finally got cable in Bracebridge (about six months after we moved there), I began to discover the history of Hollywood films. My education really began thanks to TV Ontario (aka, TVO, a Canadian version of the US's PBS) and the shows Magic Shadows and Saturday Night At the Movies. Hosted by Elwy Yost, Magic Shadows was a Monday through Friday show that presented classic movies, uncut, broken into thirty minute chunks. In this pre-video/PVR era you either made sure you were in front of the set by 7:30 or you would miss a segment.

Orson Welles in Citizen Kane

On Saturday nights, Elwy returned with a two-complete-movies theme night. Again showing the films uncut, Yost would offer two movies connected by theme or director or actor. Between each film, he would offer interviews he'd conducted about these films with the stars or directors or critics. To say that Yost was an enthusiast was an understatement. His questions were often simple, never probing, but I didn't care. I was filling my head, finally, with some of the great films of Hollywood and seeing interviews with the people who had made them. I know that thanks to Elwy Yost my appreciation of films developed. At first, I reacted like he did: a fan grooving on Hollywood. It was only later that I understood movies were an art form and I began to develop a critical voice. Yost turned his son, Graham, into a film fanatic too. Elwy told the story on more than one occasion that he let his son stay up late to watch Citizen Kane (1941) for the first time. Elwy even let Graham skip school. The day after, Graham showed up at school with a note explaining that Graham had missed school because Elwy kept him up way past his bedtime watching what many still consider the greatest film ever made.

Acting Heaven: Blue Valentine

For a movie to succeed, usually all its most important elements, from the direction to the screenplay to the acting have to gel. A weak screenplay can sink a good concept, indifferent direction can undermine a strong story and problematic or bad acting can ruin a movie that might otherwise have been a fine effort. Yet sometimes superb performances can either enhance an otherwise mediocre film or occasionally bring an ordinary movie to heights that it would otherwise not scale. In the former category, Lucy Punch’s work in both Woody Allen’s You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger and in Dinner for Schmucks, the American remake of the French film Le Diner de Cons, is an exemplar of that dictum. As an avaricious British prostitute in Allen’s lame film and as Steve Carrell's crazy American stalker in the uninspired remake, Punch, who is English, ran the gamut from drama to comedy and did it successfully and memorably in two accents. (The same compliment can be laid at the foot of James Franco for his diverse performances in 127 Hours and Howl; he’s the only reason to check out 127 Hours, the slight but fact based tale of a man driven to a desperate act when pinned under a rock in a deserted mountain area and he commands the screen in Howl, an otherwise uneven recreation of the 1950s obscenity trial of avant garde poet Allen Ginsberg.) In the latter category, Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams are so amazing in Blue Valentine that they elevate the film to many moments of greatness, particularly in the half dozen or so scenes where they’re at their rawest or most vulnerable.

Blue Valentine, the second film from writer – director Derek Cianfrance (his debut was Brother Tied (1998), which I have not seen) tells the story, jumping back and forth from the present to the past, of a married couple, Dean Pereira (Gosling) and Cindy Heller (Williams). As the film begins, it’s apparent that their relationship is collapsing, despite their having a little girl who will be affected by their divorcing. In a bid to save their marriage, Dean convinces Cindy to leave their daughter with her father and check into a motel for a romantic idyll, which does not come off as expected. In the sequences set in the past, five years or so earlier, we see the genesis of their marriage, when they were still in love and where everything seemed promising vis a vis a happy future for the couple.

Smoke Without Fire: Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 (1953 & 1966)

Books used to scare me. Ray Bradbury’s famed science-fiction masterpiece Fahrenheit 451 recently reminded me of why. Books are highly influential especially when you let them fester. I remember nights in elementary school spent past my bedtime re-reading line after line of Mark Twain, or Robert Lewis Stevenson, to the point where Long John Silver and “Injun Joe” would chase me in my sleep. These works were brimming with creativity and adventure and sparked a curiosity that was bewildering, but their painted words also had the misfortune of scaring me stiff. Bradbury’s novel was set in a future where firemen reek of kerosene and burn books rather than cherish their beauty. Upon reading it, for the first time, I, too, re-discovered my worn out love for the printed page. I also discovered, quite accidentally, that a film adaptation made in 1966 existed. Initially I thought the film’s existence alone was contradictory to the book’s divine message. But after watching the film, I realized I was both right and wrong.

Poignant Stoicism: Amos Lee's Mission Bell

If only everyone could articulate their heartaches and breakdowns like Amos Lee. Mission Bell, the fourth album from this former elementary school teacher, offers a polished blend of country, blues, folk, gospel and soul all wrapped up and presented with the upmost poignant stoicism. In this sombre memoir, Amos offers twelve introspective reviews of everyday life, loss and learning. He also confirms his diverse and prolific abilities to cascade musical genres.

Mission Bell’s lead off tracks, with the brooding “El Camino” and “Violin,” displays Lee’s talents in contemporary folk and country. “El Camino” – yes, what would a country singer be without an automobile reference – radiates images of memory, moving on and spiritual cleansing. Lee revisits this tune, arguably the best one on the album, later with idol Willie Nelson. “Violin” visits the pain of living in the moment, surrounded by the pressures of the world while hoping for someone to pull you through. He admits that, “Lately I have been heading for a breakdown,” while watching a number of (all too common) heartbreaking scenes such as “lovers using words as ammunition.” All the while, the musician never loses his composure, or delivery, assuring the listener that Amos is never going to lose it himself. Lee continues to explore various sounds and styles through the haunted folk ballad “Out in the Cold.” He even explores his Bill Withers side as he belts out “Jesus,” and applies his bluegrass, gospel abilities with “Cup of Sorrow.”

Mirror Man - Phil Ochs: There But For Fortune

Kenneth Bowser's absorbing documentary, Phil Ochs: There But For Fortune, examines the life and tragic death of a political troubadour whose music perfectly mirrored the rise and fall of the sixties counter-culture. He does so by suggesting that Ochs, whose songs included "I Ain't Marching Anymore," "Draft Dodger Rag," "Love Me, I'm a Liberal" and "There But For Fortune," helped define the protest song movement. But the movie also shows how Ochs was undone by his affliction of manic depression that only escalated with the collapse of the left-wing idealism of the sixties. Bowser's view isn't wrong, exactly, but there's an even larger theme that lies unexplored (even though it's touched on) throughout the movie. In telling the story of a mirror man, Phil Ochs: There But For Fortune also suggests that, by being a mirror who reflects, Phil Ochs was more a reflection of his times rather than a man who could help define and shape them. When those times were over, the personality - and the man - disappeared.

Phil Ochs

The topical song culture of the sixties, in which Ochs became an integral part, grew out of the Civil Rights and anti-war movement. The music of Dave Van Ronk, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Peter, Paul & Mary and Odetta was literally ripped from the headlines of the daily news. Their songs, which spoke of injustice, racism and inequality, also carried the hope of building a new nation, one they felt lived up to the democratic principles that laid within the country's founding documents. Building on the spirit of Kennedy's New Frontier in 1960, the folk music movement, that percolated in the bohemian enclave of New York's Greenwich Village, dedicated itself to the idea that songs could actually change society. By drawing on the socialist realist legacy of the old left that included Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, they believed that the songs themselves took prominence not the singers. To this community of activists, the performer was merely an instrument who brought forth both change and political awareness through their music. In true socialist realist fashion, the artist was defined more by the composition rather than the other way around. While some folk artists, like Joan Baez and Dave Van Ronk, had strong enough personalities to prevent themselves from disappearing into their topical music (and Dylan simply cut himself loose from the ideological strait-jacket of the movement by embracing the Golden Calf of pop music where his individuality could thrive), Phil Ochs found himself a world - and a cause - that gave him a personality (and a purpose) that he might otherwise have lacked. As the movie finally reveals, too, his devotion to the cause obviously hid his personal problems. And when the movement died, so did Phil Ochs.

Voices That Pine: The Civil Wars' Barton Hollow

The Civil Wars is a new duo featuring singer/guitarist John Paul White and singer/keyboardist, Joy Williams. He is from Alabama and she is from California and they debuted 2 years ago at a club called Eddie’s Attic in Atlanta, Georgia. Barton Hollow is their first full-length studio album and it’s a very impressive debut.

I was immediately charged by their sound, which is a delicate balance of Nashville country and Mississippi swamp. The song “Barton Hollow” talks about a “dead man walking” with no hope of forgiveness or redemption: “Won’t do me no good washing in the river/Can’t no preacher man save my soul.” The last line is not in the form of a question with its double-negative despondency. The vocal rather draws you in with great empathy; it’s a tribute to White and Williams’ sensitivity as singers. This is particularly true, as well, for the opening track, “20 Years,” where the character in the song asks for deliverance, even if it takes 20 years. It’s a thoughtful number and one that first appeared on their debut album Live at Eddie’s Attic in 2009.

Pop music has always had male-female duos such as Ian & Sylvia and the more recent Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, aka The Swell Season. The dynamic usually works when the sexual chemistry of the couple is heard in the music. For Williams and White, who are married, but not to each other, that chemistry is remarkably strong. On the song “Poison and Wine,” first heard on their EP in 2009, we feel every yearning note as Williams and White trade alternate lines in the verses. It’s a song about a couple connected at the hip (for better or worse) as they sing in unison, “Oh, I don’t love you/ But I always will.” I’ve never heard a song about the rawness of love quite like this one. The performance is at once intimate and painful.

Good News: Four Promising New Sitcoms of 2011

Click here for a look at the sitcoms of the September 2011 fall season.

While the 2010-2011 television season has given us some extraordinary new dramas, comedy lovers haven’t been as lucky. In 2009-2010, the US networks gave us a number of critical and popular successes, most notably Modern Family, Cougar Town, and Community. But this past fall, the only comedy standout has been NBC’s Outsourced. And Outsourced, despite doing consistently well in the ratings, has generated an almost unanimously poor critical reception – one which, in my opinion, is wholly undeserved. Considering the largely disappointing crop from the first half of the season, I awaited this new batch of sitcoms with a mixture of both eagerness and trepidation. Fortunately, it would seem that the networks were saving the best for last!  Below, I review some of the sitcoms that have debuted in 2011 that I believe are worth checking out: Bob’s Burgers (Fox), Traffic Light (Fox), Mr. Sunshine (ABC), and (for our Canadian readers) CBC’s new spy spoof, InSecurity.

Newfoundland's Finest: In Praise of The Republic of Doyle

Never has a show made a city look so lovely. One of the many pleasures of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's TV series The Republic of Doyle is that it has made the city of St. John's, Newfoundland look absolutely gorgeous. From Signal Hill to the multi-coloured downtown buildings to the charm of the harbour and landscape around it, St. John's looks ravishing. It makes you want to go visit it like now, right now.

But that's not the only attraction. Pretty pictures does not a TV show make. What is so appealing about The Republic of Doyle is its wonderful combination of comedy, action, mystery and heartache. Created by and starring native son, Allan Hawco (his co-creators are Malcolm MacRury and Perry Chafe), the show is, as Hawco freely admits, inspired by the classic James Garner series The Rockford Files. Jake Doyle (Hawco) is – along with his father, Malachy (Sean McGinley) – a private investigator working on whatever cases he can get in the small city of St. John's. Sometimes it's a missing person, sometimes it's a blackmail case, and occasionally it's a murder mystery. The plots, such as they are, are often very incidental to the relationships between Jake and a terrific cast of characters that surround him. What's more important here is his gentle bickering with Malachy, his often moving but so-far unconsummated relationship with police detective Leslie Bennett (the effortlessly beautiful and charming Krystin Pellerin – she's currently on stage in Toronto in Soulpepper Theatre Company's production of the musical The Fantasticks), his attempts to protect his young niece, Tinny Doyle (Marthe Bernard), or his constant rescuing of his screw-up older brother Christian (Jonathan Goad) from himself.

Talking Out of Turn #13: William Diehl (1982)

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show, On the Arts, at CJRT-FM in Toronto. With the late Tom Fulton, who was the show's prime host and producer, we did a half-hour interview program where we talked to artists from all fields. In 1994, after I had gone to CBC, I had an idea to collate an interview anthology from some of the more interesting discussions I'd had with guests from that period. Since they all took place during the eighties, I thought I could edit the collection into an oral history of the decade from some of its most outspoken participants. The book was assembled from interview transcripts and organized thematically. I titled it Talking Out of Turn: Revisiting the '80s. With financial help from the Canada Council, I shaped the individual pieces into a number of pertinent themes relevant to the decade. By the time I began to contact publishers, though, the industry was starting to change. At one time, editorial controlled marketing. Now the reverse was taking place. Acquisition editors, who once responded to an interesting idea for a book, were soon following marketing divisions concerned with whether the person doing it was hot enough to sell it.

Tom Fulton of On the Arts. 

For a few years, I flogged the proposal to various publishers but many were worried that there were too many people from different backgrounds (i.e. Margaret Atwood sitting alongside Oliver Stone). Another publisher curiously chose to reject it because, to them, it appeared to be a book about me promoting my interviews (as if I was trying to be a low-rent Larry King) rather than seeing it as a commentary on the decade through the eyes of the guests. All told, the book soon faded away and I turned to other projects. However, when recently uncovering the original proposal and sample interviews, I felt that maybe some of them could find a new life on Critics at Large.

Author William Diehl

The interview with author William Diehl (Sharky's Machine, Chameleon, Primal Fear), a writer who wrote luridly powerful pulp with a political tinge, became a fascinating exercise in self-examination. When I discovered that Diehl was a pacifist who once marched with Martin Luther King in the South during the demonstrations against segregation, I was compelled to find out how such a peaceful man reconciled his polar opposite. To both my surprise and satisfaction, he was more than happy to comply while providing a vivid examination (through his thriller Chameleon) of the growing political mercenary movements in the eighties that would ultimately lead to Waco and Oklahoma City. Diehl would die at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta on November 24, 2006, of an aortic aneurysm. At the time of his death, he was working on his tenth novel.

Looking Within and Without: An Experimental Artist

The back of Wafaa Bilal’s head, for The 3rd I.

The tiny digital camera has been removed from the back of Wafaa Bilal’s skull.

Let’s allow that image sink in for a moment.

OK. The 44-year-old Iraqi, an assistant professor of art at New York University, is a creative provocateur. For an entire month in 2007, for example, visitors to his website were able to splatter him with a remote-controlled paint gun and watch as he tried to dodge the yellow-colored attacks while sequestered in a small room at a Chicago gallery. The piece was titled Domestic Tension. In the anti-Arab fervor still sweeping the country after 9/11, many strangers gleefully wielded this symbolic Internet weapon of personal destruction.

But Bilal’s latest project, called The 3rd I, surely ranks even higher on any pushing-the-cultural-envelope meter. At the end of 2010, he had a waterproof titanium plate inserted in his head. That made it possible to magnetically attach a camera that could transmit photos minute-by-minute to the notebook computer he carried at all times, a process the world could observe online. (On campus, he agreed to protect the privacy of students and faculty with a lens cap.) But, recently, his body began rejecting part of the apparatus, which caused constant suffering despite the steroids and antibiotics he took in hopes of solving the problem.

Philip Roth’s Nemesis: The Way We Live, Then and Now

Author Philip Roth.

Is Philip Roth’s America’s greatest living novelist? He's certainly one of them. Although there are other contenders for that title, including Richard Ford and Richard Price, without question, I'd argue that Roth is the U.S’s most significant writer. He has created an ambitious body of work that, as he enters his late 70s, seems determined to lay bare all the significant eddies and flows of American history in the years since his birth in 1933. His latest novel Nemesis (Penguin, 2010) continues in that incisive vein, revisiting a little remembered slice of American life: the devastating polio epidemics of the 1930s and 40s.

The fourth and final book in a series called Nemeses: Short Novels; Nemesis is, as indicated, a short novel (280 pages) but it's not a slight one. Having read only one of the other three books in that series, Indignation (2008), I can safely say that their themes are what occurs when bad things happen to good people. Roth, however, doesn’t examine that idea in a trite or obvious way but in such a manner that you’ll ponder the disturbing vicissitudes of fate and the supposed existence of a god who allows horrible events to happen to innocent people. That, at least, is the thinking of one Eugene Cantor, better known as Bucky, an athletic 23 year old, who in 1944 is a playground director in Newark, New Jersey (not coincidentally Roth’s birthplace, too).

Because of his weak eyesight, Bucky has been deemed ineligible for combat during World War Two, a state of affairs which troubles him deeply. He’s determined, though, to do right by his young charges, and teach them lessons in good health and fitness. That goal, however, is impacted when some of Newark’s young teenagers come down with polio, with two of them dying of the disease. (The disease is not always fatal, but it often cripples or maims those who get it.) A panicked Bucky now has to weigh his options; does he stay put in Newark out of responsibility and risk getting polio himself or listen to the increasingly desperate entreaties of his loving girlfriend, Marcia, and take up a post in a Jewish summer camp in rural Pennsylvania, far away from the disease that is laying waste to his city? His decision will play out in an unpredictably tragic manner.

Impressive Impressions: Ted Nash's Portrait in Seven Shades

Composing for jazz orchestra is not for the timid. You have to be original, accessible and most importantly, the music has to swing. The challenge of composing music based on the visual arts is even more intimidating. Duke Ellington was a master of writing and arranging for his orchestra and coming up with suites for people and places. One his most interesting was the Degas Suite written in 1968, based on the artist’s racetrack paintings. Ted Nash has now raised the bar one more time with his remarkable composition called Portrait in Seven Shades, a suite about 7 painters: Claude Monet, Salvador Dali, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Vincent van Gogh, Marc Chagall and Jackson Pollock.

Imagining music for artists obviously wasn't intimidating for Ted Nash. "Many parallels can be drawn between the two forms of art,” he remarks. “Like painters, musicians talk of colors, layers and composition." On this recording, Nash was asked to compose a long-form piece for the Lincoln Center Orchestra led by Wynton Marsalis. The only requirement from Marsalis was that it should have a theme. Nash, who's been a member of the band for the past ten years, was ready for the challenge. "It didn't take me long to come up with a concept that would truly inspire me to write an hour-long piece of music...each movement would be dedicated to a different painter." The challenge was narrowing down the list to 7 and going from there. For Nash, the criterion was simple: select an artist over the past 100 years that reflected transformative changes in painting. The character of the artist was then reflected in the music.