Louise Lecavalier: Still Crazy (But More Glorious) After All These Years

We are pleased to welcome a new critic, Deirdre Kelly, to our group.

Louise Lecavalier & Keir Knight (Photo : Massimo Chiarradia)

Dancer Louise Lecavalier's new company is Fou Glorieux, which roughly translated as "glorious craziness." And the craziest thing about it? How mind-blowingly good it is. Fou Glorieux is contemporary Canadian dance at its most kinetically expressive, if not poetically potent. The reason is Lecavalier, the diminutive dynamo whose kamikaze dance style helped make Édouard Lock's La La La Human Steps an international cause célèbre throughout the 1980s and 1990s when she was the Montreal choreographer's hard-bodied, platinum blonde star and muse.

More than a decade after breaking with Lock, the fiftysomething mother of nine year old twin girls is today using her energies to propel her own engine forward. As such Fou Glorieux, which she founded in 2006 to enable her to collaborate with a new and rotating crop of international choreographers, represents her comeback, and with a bang. Her company's Toronto debut last week at the Fleck Dance Theatre, as part of Harbourfront Centre's ongoing World Stage series, was greeted by capacity crowds that erupted in standing ovations for each night of the four-performance run. Their enthusiasm was understandably directed at Lecavalier, a dancer of incomparable style and presence – a true original – whose physical prowess, not to mention unstoppable energy, kept the eye riveted.

When Andre Met Shawn: A Meal To Remember

Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory in My Dinner With Andre (1981).

Have you ever been in a restaurant and tuned out your companions in order to eavesdrop on a more interesting conversation taking place at the next table? Such behavior is taken for granted by the late director Louis Malle in his eloquent My Dinner With Andre (1981), which remains an appetizing treat. Three decades later, the talk is still illuminating as playwrights Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn, also an actor, portray some semblance of themselves when they discuss everything from the universal to the intimate. Permitted to listen in, the audience can satisfy its nosiness while being nourished by the encounter.

There is virtually no physical activity in the 110-minute film, generating the satirical collection of My Dinner with Andre action figures in Christopher Guest’s Waiting for Guffman (1996). After an initial journey from New York City’s Lower East Side on the subway, Shawn arrives at a posh eatery (actually shot in Virginia!) to meet Gregory. The two men just sit, savor the food, drink wine and chat, with a few brief interruptions by a slightly disdainful waiter (Jean Lenauer). What keeps it all lively is the sparkle of the dialogue, written by the duo and culled from hours of their taped discussions. 

Always With a Little Humour: Tina Fey’s Bossypants

I think Tammy Wynette phrased it quite well when she said that “sometimes it’s hard to be a woman.” Despite of how far we’ve come and how some insist that the war on sexism is over, it’s still hard out there for a chick. (Perhaps on planet Margaret Wente it’s already won, but the rest of us are still huddled in the trenches.) In her recent memoir Bossypants (Reagan Arthur, 2011), Tina Fey brilliantly explores how many battles still exist and proves that it is sometimes hard to be a woman. But with the right mind set, it can also be downright hilarious.

In Bossypants, the former SNL writer, actress, and creator of 30 Rock, confronts the trials, tribulations and hilarities of growing up, going for it, getting it, and dealing with the consequences of getting it, in the male-dominated world of comedy-writing and show business. Each of her challenges is approached with a combination of dignity, toughness and, of course, humour. When having to answer those who asked her “Is it hard for you, being the boss?” Fey points out that Donald Trump is probably never asked that same question. Bossypants is part memoir, part self-help guide, and part satirical retort to the absurdities that still exist in gender politics. And Tina Fey rolls it all up into one package. She shows how many of the struggles faced by women can still be dealt with, and overcome, by applying just a little funniness.

Love and Fame: Country Strong

Just about the easiest thing to do is create melodrama out of country music. It's built right into the songs. Breaking hearts, lost families and wounded pride are about as common to the genre as the soft crying twang of a steel guitar. In Country Strong (Sony, 2011), which was just released on DVD earlier this week, writer/director Shana Feste (The Greatest) tells a typical story of the price of love and fame in the world of country music, but she distills the melodrama of its tabloid fascination. Feste instead develops an openly relaxed approach to the material which brings us closer to the essence of the music and how its stars cope with the cynicism of the industry.     

Gwyneth Paltrow as Kelly Canter.

The movie begins as country star Kelly Canter (Gwyneth Paltrow) is recovering in a rehab clinic from alcohol abuse which led to her falling off stage during a show in Texas and having a miscarriage. While drying out, she is being cared for by Beau Hutton (Garrett Hedlund), a country singer who wants no part of stardom. But he loves both her and her music, which leads to them carrying on an affair. Her husband, James Canter (Tim McGraw), meanwhile wants her out of rehab so that she can pick up her career. So he books her into a three-show tour which includes an opening act featuring both Beau and a young, aspiring singer, Chiles Stanton (Leighton Meester). The tour not only unravels Kelly's own demons (including the dissolution of her pained marriage), but also the end of her affair with Beau who becomes romantically drawn to Chiles, the talented ingénue who hasn't yet been corrupted by the industry.

Susanne Bier's Trite and Middlebrow In a Better World

In a Better World/Haevnen

Twenty years ago, I happened to catch a debut feature at the Montreal World Film Festival called Freud Leaving Home. I was so impressed by Danish filmmaker Susanne Bier’s powerful and caustically funny tragedy of a very dysfunctional Swedish Jewish family that I, and another film critic, called the head of the Toronto International Film Festival to strongly urge that, if there was still room, they add Bier’s movie to their upcoming festival lineup. The call was to no avail and for awhile, at least, Bier’s films didn’t find their way to TIFF. I caught her third movie, Like It Never Was Before (1995), in Montreal, too and appreciated the provocative and moving tale of a middle-aged man who leaves his family for another, younger man, at least in part to recapture his youth. So, by the time, Toronto’s film festival began showcasing Bier’s work, with Open Hearts (2002), she was something of a known quantity to me. Toronto has chosen to feature her work since then, including presenting her eleventh film, In a Better World (2010), which won this year’s Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars. But something’s been increasingly lost in recent years. As Bier’s critical and popular star has risen, conversely her films have diminished in impact and quality. In a Better World continues in that disappointing vein.

Pragmatic Spiritualism: Paul Simon's So Beautiful So What

I’ve always admired the single-mindedness of Paul Simon. To me, he’s always been a songwriter who starts with memorable pieces that magically blend the new with the familiar. Simon's So Beautiful or So What (Universal, 2011), his first new album in six years, continues in that vein. His songs tap an open pallet of musical history that only a man of 70 years can possess. You can hear within this work his entire catalogue which is an expansive experiment in musical genres. On this album, his ear for rhythm, context and popular song is essentially a hybrid of street wise rock & roll, gospel and folk that features an African, or South American tilt.

There's also a quest for spiritual fulfillment first heard on the opening track "Getting Ready For Christmas". First released last November as a single on NPR, it features the Reverend J. M. Gates preaching about Christmas Day ("...when Christmas come/Nobody knows where you’ll be/You might ask me/I may be layin’ in some lonesome grave/Getting ready for Christmas Day”). But his slightly caustic comments aren’t filled with false piety for Simon recognizes this falsehood. “The music may be merry/But it’s only temporary,” he sings. The song is a much deeper exploration of the hereafter which I'd prefer to call a kind of pragmatic spiritualism. So Beautiful or So What explores questions of God, Mother Earth and the Great Beyond. For instance, on “AfterLife”, Simon humorously reports that a ticket to the afterlife isn’t as easy as it may seem. (“You got to fill out a form first /And then you wait in the line.”) That number is followed by a love song, “Dazzling Blue”, a tale of two idealistic lovers. (“Dazzling blue, roses red, fine white linen /To make a marriage bed /And we’ll build a wall that nothing can break through /And dream our dreams of dazzling blue.”)

A Crowded Sunday Night: The Amazing Race, Mildred Pierce, The Killing and The Borgias

I know Sunday night is a 'good' night for TV networks to program their more adult fare, but must they put them all on at the same time? I know, in this age of PVR and On Demand, etc., etc., the need to watch a show when the networks plan it is greatly reduced. However, if you are like me and are one of those dinosaurs who still uses his VCR, what need do I have for PVR? (I've got tape, I've got a working VCR, why would I give the cable companies even more money a month for a PVR box?) Sure, there's On Demand, but I've found it unreliable (the image breaks up or it takes forever to download), and unlike the past, now that I've gone digital, I can't watch one show and tape another, so I'm stuck. It's either watch them while they're on, or at least in the case of AMC's The Killing tape the 1AM repeat and watch it the next day. Full confession, one of the shows, Mildred Pierce, was given to me on disc by a friend who actually gets HBO Canada, but I'm still in a quandary. You see, the one and only reality show, The Amazing Race, I watch is also on on Sunday evenings. So, from 8pm until 12am, it's a marathon.

So, here is how the schedule would be if I had to watch Mildred Pierce on initial broadcast: 8pm, The Amazing Race; 9pm, Mildred Pierce; 10pm to 11:10pm, The Borgias; 11pm (and miss 10 minutes) or 1am repeat, The Killing. It's a bit wearying. Fortunately, my other favourite adult show, Endgame -- starring Shawn Doyle as a sort-of Russian Nero Wolfe who suffers from agoraphobia and solves all his the mysteries by never leaving the hotel he's holed up in -- broadcasts on Monday nights. Endgame works because of Doyle's wonderful performance, but that's for another day. To my Sunday shows. I like them all, although none of them are perfect. But they are adult and are trying to get at some interesting things. They don't always succeed, but this one evening is far more entertaining than the last four months of feature film releases.

Cinéfranco 2011: French comedies run the gamut of quality

The 14th edition of Toronto's Cinéfranco film festival recently ended, offering, as per its mandate, a glimpse into the commercial reaches of French language cinema, showcasing mostly movies from France, of course, but also from Switzerland, Belgium, Morocco and the French-Canadian province of Quebec. That commercial emphasis is deliberate on the part of the festival's founder and executive director Marcelle Lean, who recognized that French genre pictures are usually shortchanged at the Toronto International Film Festival and in regular release, which tend to the art house end of things. That does present something of a qualitative problem with Cinéfranco in that the best films from France are usually art house movies, like Summer Hours (L'Heure d'été) and A Christmas Tale (Un conte de Noël) , and not the country’s genre pictures.

That said, some art house movies that shade into accessible psychological thrillers, such as Fred, La moustache, Le petit lieutenant and The Beat That My Heart Skipped (De battre mon cœur s'est arrêté), have played Cinéfranco in the past demonstrating that even within the confines of Gallic genre pics, quality can be found. The festival’s comedies this year ran the gamut from quality to crap, but almost all of them displayed enough thought and intelligence to make them worthy of your time.

The Intelligent Art and Meticulous Craft of Sidney Lumet

Director Sidney Lumet (1924-2011)

Note: the following article contains spoilers.

Back in 1983, I went to a screening in Montreal of Daniel, the Sidney Lumet adaptation of E.L. Doctorow's novel The Book of Daniel, which was loosely based on the case of the Rosenbergs, the Jewish spies executed for treason in the United States in 1953. The film wasn’t very good, politically simplistic and hobbled by an overwrought performance by Mandy Patinkin. But I still remember, upon coming out of the movie, my good friend Arnie's comments, said with some measure of relief, that finally here was a Jewish story that was not about Israel or the Holocaust. Arnie wasn’t commenting so much as a filmgoer but as a Montreal Jew, like myself, who felt the community’s pre-eminent, dominant concerns were fixated on only those two subjects, leaving little room for anything else. (Nearly thirty years later it’s still pretty much the case.) In that regard, Daniel was embarking on virgin territory, offering a different take on an aspect of the (American) Jewish community, its long-lived political activism and involvement with communism, that hadn’t been really dealt with onscreen before. (The 1976 ‘blacklist’ comedy The Front, which starred Woody Allen, wasn’t really a Jewish film.) When I heard of the death of director Sidney Lumet on Saturday April 9 at age 86, I realized that Daniel was indicative of most of his films. Whatever their quality; they tended to focus on subject matter and issues that most other filmmakers eschewed, beginning with Lumet’s impactful feature film debut, 12 Angry Men (1957). He routinely staked out his own cinematic territory, offering up more than a few gems and, more often, shepherding some great performances along the way.

Scaling the Fourth Wall: TV Shows about TV Shows

Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld in Curb Your Enthusiasm.

I've always been a sucker for self-referential media: be it celebrity cameos, intentional genre-busting, fictional characters meeting fictionalized versions of themselves, and everything in between. (My favourite Woody Allen film is The Purple Rose of Cairo, I continue to believe that Last Action Hero is an underrated masterpiece, and no-one probably applauded more than I did for Nathan Fillion’s Firefly shout-out in last season’s Halloween episode of Castle, walking on-screen in full “Captain Mal” gear.) And the most popular and entertaining form these stories have taken is the show about a show: films and TV about making film and TV. It’s a conceit that's been around since Shakespeare, and whether it’s A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Dick Van Dyke Show, or 30 Rock, there will always be something especially compelling about a show within a show.

Last month, I wrote about the recent Showtime sitcom Episodes. This dark comedy stars Friends alum Matt LeBlanc as Matt LeBlanc, and tells a story as old television itself: the trials and tribulations of making a television show. In this case, it was the story of a married British comedy writing team who had the misfortune to have a hit series of theirs optioned by an American network. As I wrote, Episodes, for the most part, works well (in large part due to the talents of the BBC television veterans who play the show’s leads), and is definitely worth checking out.

But some of the weaknesses I identified in Episodes have got me thinking about just how tricky it can be to make a television comedy about making television comedy.  It’s one thing to dramatize or satirize the process (from Singin’ in the Rain to The Player, Hollywood has long been its own favourite subject), but it is quite another to film a comedy about how empty and compromised sitcom production can often be. Episodes mostly held its own, but it’s swimming next to some big fish: The Larry Sanders Show, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and Extras. Here we're going to look at why I believe these shows, in particular, are so successful.

The Wages of Combat: Triage – A Movie About Lingering Anguish

With nothing else of interest on television late one recent night, I decided to check out Triage on the Showtime cable channel. The 2009 drama had premiered at the Toronto Film Festival, but never opened theatrically in the United States despite the clout of Colin Farrell in the lead role. Generally not one of my favorite actors, he plays a seasoned young Irish photojournalist who experiences post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after covering Saddam Hussein’s Kurdistan genocide in 1988. The premise sounded intriguing to a news junkie like me; especially when I discovered that the director was Danis Tanovic, a Bosnian filmmaker whose Oscar-winning No Man’s Land (2001) used black comedy to effectively depict the futility of war.

There is no comic relief in Triage, which probably renders its tragic tale more realistic but less commercial. People witnessing the world’s many barbaric conflicts on television may seek a little pacifist escapism in their entertainment choices or at least opt for make-believe action punctuated by jokey one-liners like “Hasta la vista, baby.” Tanovic adapted his screenplay from a 1999 debut novel by Scott Anderson, a writer all-too-familiar with mayhem after a quarter-century documenting intrigue, corruption and carnage in dangerous places. He based The Hunting Party (2007), starring Richard Gere, on his misadventure with fellow scribe Sebastian Junger: The two got involved in a crazy scheme to capture Radovan Karadzic, the Serbian war criminal, but it all fell apart when they were mistaken for CIA agents.

Overkill: Joe Wright's Hanna

Saoirse Ronan as Hanna

Director Joe Wright (Pride and Prejudice, Atonement) might display an abundance of skill in his new espionage action adventure thriller Hanna, but there is little in the way of sense and sensibility. Working from a script by Seth Lochhead and David Farr, Wright abandons the lyricism of his earlier work for the steely visceral rush of pictures like The Professional, La Femme Nikita and Run Lola Run. But he goes at this pulpy material with such earnest intent that the movie collapses under the weight of its own artful seriousness.

The story, which has the fairy-tale overtones of Little Red Riding Hood and (more explicitly) those of Grimm's, is about the coming of age of a teenage killing machine. The 16-year-old Hanna (Saoirse Ronan) lives alone with her ex-CIA father (Eric Bana) in the remote mountains and forests of Finland. While he trains her to kill wildlife to survive, perform martial arts for self-protection, and to memorize languages for adaptability, we soon learn that this hermetic education is also to prepare her to go out into the world and kill his former CIA handler Marissa (Cate Blanchett). Years earlier, when he tried to flee the Company, Marissa took aim to stop him and killed his wife and Hanna's mother. When Hanna finally sets out to seek vengeance, she ultimately intends to lock horns with her father's nemesis.

Together Again: Johanna Adorján’s An Exclusive Love

Johanna Adorján launches An Exclusive Love 

On the evening of October 13th, 1991, dressed in their best night clothes, Vera and István, crawled into bed for the last time. Holding on to each other’s hand they waited for the end to come. A note lies on their bedside table: “We have lived together, we are dying together. We loved you very much. Mami.” Lived they had. Married nearly fifty years, the Jewish Hungarian couple survived the Holocaust and fled their motherland during the 1956 uprising in Budapest. Making a new home for themselves in Denmark, they continued raising their family and living life to the fullest until the end.

So begins Johanna Adorján’s account of her grandparents’ lives and death in An Exclusive Love: A Memoir, translated by Athena Bell (Knopf Canada, 2011). The author was 20-years-old when her grandparents took their lives in their Copenhagen home. Her 82-year-old grandfather, a former orthopaedic surgeon, was slowly losing a battle with heart disease. His wife, a still vibrant 71-year-old, refused to carry on without him. Sixteen years after their death, Adorján began her quest to reveal how and why this fateful decision was carried out.

An Exclusive Love pragmatically, but tenderly, recounts the lives and deaths of these unassailable lovers. Adorján compiles a beautiful collection of testimonies from friends and family members, the author’s memories, and her own fabrication of that final day. “What does one do on the morning that they know is their last? I imagine that they tidy up, get things done.” The author lets us in on the life journey of two people who were somehow both immensely passionate lovers of Wagner’s operas and chain-smoked Prince of Denmark cigarettes. Yet they were also extremely practical, thrifty, orderly, and responsible until the very end.

Dreaming: Songs of Woodstock

Back in the summer of 2009, as some of you close to my age may recall, the 40th anniversary of the Woodstock Festival was being celebrated. Looking back, it's probably clear to most of us now that it was hardly the beginnings of an idyllic community, or the heralding of a new society. But as a cultural event, no question, it was certainly something significant to note. A number of artists also wrote interesting songs about that legendary swoon in the mud: two who performed there; and another who didn’t quite make it. Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Who'll Stop the Rain" begins simply by describing the torrential rain and the crowd's determination to outlast it. But then songwriter John Fogerty, quite movingly, leaps into larger concerns at work in the country. Those concerns took in the real storms to follow in the subsequent years ahead, the sense that the freedoms sought at Woodstock were not only illusory, but that a bigger price would soon be exacted out of all the frolicking. "Who'll Stop the Rain" went on to also provide both the title and emotional leit motif of Karel Reisz's film adaptation of Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers, a story about dashed ideals, the cost of loyalty, Vietnam, and the darker implications of the drug culture in the seventies.

The Many Charms of Downton Abbey

Downton Abbey (ITV, PBS) is now available on DVD

I must admit I’ve always been fascinated by British dramas and documentaries about that country’s class system. I was too young to be interested in the hit miniseries Upstairs, Downstairs, which chronicled the relations between servants and their masters in a stately manor house. It was an influential show that just celebrated its fortieth anniversary with the release of a box set, and whose sequel premieres on PBS on April 10.  But once I was old enough. I became riveted by everything from Michael Apted’s seminal Up documentary series, which examined the lives of select subjects every seven years in a series that’s reached to 49 Up, to Robert Altman’s 2002 Gosford Park, which meshed the vagaries of the British class system with an American-style murder mystery. Invariably, those shows and films depicted a hierarchy that was pretty rigid (especially the Up films) and suggested that you generally were stuck in whatever class you were born into for life. Unlike the American class system (yes, it does exist), which more often than not is based on wealth, the British class apparatus was (and is) always about who your ancestors are, a fact of life that influenced your education and where you could live in London. (Wealth is also a factor but not the dominant one.) There’s a great scene in Mad Men’s most recent season whereby Layne Price (Jared Harris), Sterling Cooper’s British partner, extols his love of America by expressing relief that upon coming to New York, he stopped being asked what school he went to. The fine, entertaining recent British mini-series Downton Abbey, created by Gosford Park’s screenwriter Julian Fellowes and co-written by him with Tina Pepper and Shelagh Stephenson, puts that system under a microscope, showcasing how ‘modern’ times begin to slowly change and erode the traditional way of doing things.

Measure of a Man: Danny Boyle's Frankenstein

No. Director Danny Boyle (127 Hours, Slumdog Millionaire) has not done a new film version of Frankenstein. Currently on the boards in London's West End, Boyle's brilliant play Frankenstein (it was written by Nick Dear) is a monster hit sell-out (it closes, or is supposed to, on May 2^nd). I was fortunate to see it four days ago without having to drop a fortune for an airline ticket, or scalper prices at the theatre.

Beginning in 2009, the National Theatre Company in London began offering live broadcasts of shows on their stages to movie theatres around the world. It is a fabulous idea. The National Theatre attracts some of England's finest actors and actress, such as Helen Mirren, Judi Dench (I was able to see her live in London in 2009 in the scintillating play, Madame de Sade – and, gushing fan moment, got to meet her briefly at the stage door after), Derek Jacobi and Jude Law. There are risks involved in these broadcasts. Since they are sent via satellite to the cinemas around the world, there is a chance that you might pay your money and see nothing if the signal is lost. I thought that was going to happen on the night I saw Frankenstein. Before the play started, on screen there was a hostess setting up the night, followed by a short documentary on the making of the play. The sound wasn't working. After twice springing out of my seat to complain, they fixed the problem just before the play itself was to begin. The show was mildly marred all evening long by occasional sound drop-outs (something they warn about at the start), but compared to not seeing it at all because of no sound, it was something I was happy to live with.

Identity Crisis: The Source Code Switcheroo

“It was a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen.”

That’s the opening line in George Orwell’s classic book, 1984. Here it is once more the “cruelest month,” as poet T.S. Eliot contended in The Waste Land, and a similarly bright cold day. Not so sure about the clocks, but the foreboding in those 20th century literary works surely resonates today. The 1949 novel concerns a totalitarian dystopia where the term “memory hole” refers to enforced amnesia and “Newspeak” is language dumbed-down to foster lack of logical thought. Eliot’s twisty 1922 verses include “I will show you fear in a handful of dust,” “One must be so careful these days” and other despairing observations.

Two new films, The Adjustment Bureau and Source Code (released on April 1st), suggest Big Brother-like societies. In the former production, adapted from a Philip K. Dick short story, Matt Damon plays a politician who encounters the unseen forces – all wearing fedoras! – that manipulate our lives. Source Code, cleverly written by Ben Ripley and smartly directed by Duncan Jones, is a sci-fi thriller starring Jake Gyllenhaal as U.S. Army Captain Colter Stevens. His last memory is of flying a helicopter mission in Afghanistan when he’s suddenly transported onto a commuter train heading for Chicago with a bomb onboard.

Rango: Brilliant and Adult

There’s been a recent fuss made by some parents’ groups about the fact that some of the characters in Gore Verbinksi’s brilliant new animated movie Rango are actually, shudder, smoking. They feel that the movie is setting a bad example in that regard and will entice their kids into taking up the deadly habit. I think their concerns are misguided as most of the small fry watching the film will be too busy enjoying the antics of the anthropomorphized creatures on the screen to pick up on that aspect of the movie. But I also feel that maybe, at heart, this isn’t really a children’s movie in the first place. Rango, despite the fact that it’s animated, is actually a really smart and decidedly grown-up send up and homage to classic westerns and other movie genres, one that is chock full of obscure movie in-jokes and adult references and situations. There’s even a mention of brothels in the Los Lobos song that plays over the closing credits of the film. In that light, I’d recommend that adults leave their kids at home or find another animated movie – there’s no shortage of them out there – to take their kids to instead. Leave Rango for us old folk who can best appreciate it.

I must confess I never thought I’d use the words brilliant and Gore Verbinski in the same blog. This is, after all, the director of the lame Pirates of the Caribbean movies (2003-2007) and the annoyingly shrill Mouse Hunt (1997). He also directed The Weather Man (2005), an ambitious but ultimately unsuccessful Nicolas Cage drama. Thus, none of his previous credits prepared me for how flat out inventive, original and entertaining Rango actually is.

Not Mischievous Enough For Me: Jill Barber's Mischievous Moon

By the time you read this, chances are I will have been clubbed over the head with a Vinyl Café mug, my hands and feet bound and my unconscious body stuffed into a trunk. When I come to, I’ll find myself in a seemingly abandoned warehouse, which serves as a re-education facility funded by the Canada Council for the Arts. What I’m about to declare is extremely dangerous, contentious, and down-right scandalous: I just don’t understand the appeal of Jill Barber. For this sweet, beautiful, and talented singer has converted everybody to her quivering coos. Everyone but me. Unfortunately her latest album, Mischievous Moon, has failed to change my mind.

Originally based in Halifax, Nova Scotia, the popular singer-songwriter now calls Vancouver, B.C. home. Barber first broke into the music scene in 2002 with her debut album A Note To Follow So. An EP, Oh Heart, was then released in 2004. For All Time followed in 2006. Her folksy sound, her signature warbly voice, and (very) mellow acoustics caught the attention of the industry, which nominated her for both the East Coast Music Awards – she took home two in 2007 including Female Artist of the Year - and the Juno Awards. In 2008, Jill released her prolific endeavor, Chances, abandoning the coffee shop folk scene and replacing it with old-fashioned, jazz tinged, romantic melodies. Mischievous Moon (like Chances) also includes collaborations with its producer, Les Cooper, as well as a track co-written with legend Ron Sexsmith.

Neglected Gems #1: Solitude (2001)

It’s a funny thing about movies. They may get critical acclaim, even score some box office success, but years later they’re barely mentioned by anyone or even remembered. And there’s no discernable reason for their fate. Neglected Gems will regularly highlight some of these films, which either saw their only showings at film festivals or cinematheques, had shortened commercial runs, or somehow just never made the impression they ought to have made when they came out. Some of them aren't even on DVD. Here's the first in the series.

Solitude 

Solitude is a quiet Canadian film, directed and co-written by Robin Schlaht, about three people trying to find themselves while in retreat at a Saskatchewan monastery. It is as unique as its subject. Based on Connie Gault's short story "The Fat Lady with the Thin Face," the film revolves around Michele (Vanessa Martinez), an aimless 19-year-old girl sent to the monastery by her mother; Linda (Wendy Anderson), a distressed 35-year-old woman fleeing a troubled home life; and Brother Bernard (Jesus of Montreal's Lothaire Bluteau), a monk who is not sure he still believes in God. Each of the characters gets a few scenes (the film is divided into chapters) but there are no great cinematic revelations here. Intriguingly, Solitude is more interested in raising questions about faith, love and spirituality than in answering them. The result, except for Bluteau's overly-mannered mopey performance, is remarkably affecting and authentic.

– Shlomo Schwartzberg is a film critic, teacher and arts journalist based in Toronto . He will be teaching a course on science fiction in the movies and on television beginning in late April at Ryerson University's LIFE Institute.

You Can Never Go Home: Duran Duran and R.E.M.

Duran Duran

There was a time in the world of pop music when two bands, Duran Duran from Birmingham, England and R.E.M. from Athens, Georgia, became the reliable supply to radio stations interested in being hip, yet still accessible with their formats. Both groups started in the late 70s just as punk and new wave music were emerging on commercial radio. These groups basically came to represent what we now call “alternative.”

Duran Duran, who were named after the villain in the 1968 film, Barbarella, directed by Roger Vadim, charted their own course by shaping their music and their appearance in what was called the “New Romantic” movement of British bands such as Spandau Ballet. I simply considered them now a British dance band with good hooks and high production values. To their credit, Duran Duran was one of the first acts to issue 12-inch extended re-mixes to club DJs.

R.E.M.

R.E.M. was the genuine, original, college radio rock band. They launched themselves in 1980 with one of their great hits, “Radio Free Europe,” a song that garnered them a lot of attention from the get-go. They, too, had a string of great singles all peddled by the new video channels around the world. The kicker was the fact that R.E.M. made the slow, steady climb to pop stardom, while Duran Duran had immediate success following the release of the soft-porn video, “Girls on Film.” It featured topless women mud wrestling, fighting with pillows among other suggestive sexual depictions. It was released originally as a closed-circuit video for dance clubs, but the newly launched MTV was desperate for content before the video directed by Godley & Crème was released. It was a smash hit leading to a string of singles by the group that brought them international attention.

Talking Out of Turn #16: Robert Stone (1984)

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.

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.

Surpassing the Original: Alexisonfire's Take on Midnight Oil’s "The Dead Heart"

Alexisonfire

The Australian activist band Midnight Oil has been with us in one form or another since 1972. Over those years, they have always worn their liberal hearts on their sleeves. What I've always liked about the band is that they have walked the walk even when I disagreed with their point of view. For example, bald, tall, lead singer Peter Garrett has probably done more for Australian aboriginal causes, through his music and politics, than any other white man in the country's history. He was elected to parliament for the Labour Party in 2004 and, as with many activists who have moved into politics, has softened some of his more radical stances. Yet, there is still no debate that his and Midnight Oil's hit songs such as “Beds Are Burning,” “Dreamworld,” “Blue Sky Mine,” and, of course, “The Dead Heart,” have done plenty to bring recognition and exposure to some of the more horrific things that the modernization of Australia has caused.

Electric Ladyland: Elizabeth Taylor 1932-2011

A few months ago, I was beginning a lecture series on the evolving role of women in Hollywood cinema from the pre-censorship Hays Code era of the early thirties to the present. To begin the talk, as a way to introduce my overall theme of the enduring power of the female image, I quoted from an essay by feminist scholar Camille Paglia on Elizabeth Taylor from her book, Sex, Art, and American Culture (1992). In that piece, Paglia called Taylor "the pre-feminist woman" who she described as a more substantial screen actress than Meryl Streep. "Cerebral Streep was the ideal high-WASP actress for the fast track yuppie era, bright, slick and self-conscious," she wrote. Whereas, Elizabeth Taylor "instinctively understands the camera and its nonverbal intimacies." Paglia went on to write that Taylor "takes us into the liquid realms of emotion" where "economy and understatement are essential." She says that "an electric, erotic charge vibrates the space between her face and the lens."

While I couldn't claim, in technical terms, that Taylor was the better actress, I understood why Paglia preferred her to Meryl Streep. With Streep, every acting movement is highlighted in the same manner that an operatic diva's high C's are designated to get massive applause. She transforms the fluidity of human emotion into a catalogue of mannerisms: the flick of the hair, an accent, a hand gesture, they all become tics and inflections that call attention to her acting abilities rather than revealing more about the character she is playing. (This is why I usually prefer Streep in comedy where she relaxes her steely control.) Elizabeth Taylor, on the other hand, is so sexually charged that she becomes (to borrow the Jimi Hendrix title) electric ladyland.

When They Were Young: A Coming-of-Age Saga

In any category for failed films with a fascinating premise and stellar cast, 2008’s Flashbacks of a Fool deserves a spot at the top of the list. Although the title perfectly describes the narrative structure and the protagonist, it creaks with obviousness. Daniel Craig plays the fool, a British actor named Joe Scot who has destroyed his once-enviable career with booze, drugs and non-stop anonymous sex – a role model for Charlie Sheen! He lives in a sterile California mansion, where his black housekeeper, Ophelia (American rapper Eve), seems to be the only person who cares enough about him to say: “You’re a disgrace to white folks.”

When his agent drops him around the same time Joe learns that an old chum has died back in the United Kingdom, he hits bottom by getting drunk and wading into the surf off Malibu. Suicide? Apparently not. That watery sequence provides an awkward segue, as the script by writer-director Baillie Walsh suddenly lands on the English coast 25 years earlier. The Scot family – Joe’s mother Grace (Olivia Williams), his Aunt Peggy (Helen McCrory) and little sister Jessie (Mia Clifford) – lives on the beach in a sprawling, slightly funky cabin. The nearest neighbor is a cranky busybody, Mrs. Rogers (Miriam Karlin). Two doors down: the flirtatious Evelyn Adams (Jodhi May), her rarely-seen husband and their neglected daughter Jane (Jodie Tomlinson), who is about eight.

Win Win: Thomas McCarthy’s Moving, Memorable American Tale

Paul Giamatti and Alex Shaffer in Win Win.

Win Win, the latest film from writer-director Thomas McCarthy continues in the same pleasing vein of his two previous movies, The Station Agent (2003) and The Visitor (2007). It, too, is concerned with the lives of ordinary people who sometimes do extraordinary things, much like the recluse (Peter Dinklage) in The Station Agent who affects a motley group of people when he moves to their neighbourhood; to the lonely college professor (Richard Jenkins) in The Visitor who changes lives, not least his own, when he befriends a pair of illegal immigrants in New York. Win Win revolves around Mike Flaherty (Paul Giamatti), a lawyer/wrestling coach in New Jersey, who reluctantly takes in Kyle (Alex Shaffer), a young man  who has left his Ohio home to be with his grandfather Leo (Burt Young). The only problem is that said relative, suffering from early-onset dementia, is now in a nursing home, which leaves Kyle with few options but to move in with Flaherty and his family. What McCarthy does with this seemingly thin tale is nothing short of miraculous.

Eye of the Tiger: In Defense of Amy Chua's Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother

As a relatively new mother, I was unable to escape the hype surrounding Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (Penguin, 2011). For weeks, my eyes inadvertently wandered to reviews, mostly scathing, of this alleged “Freudian nightmare” treatise on parenting. While Chua is a successful law professor at Yale, has authored numerous articles and two compelling books on political history and economic issues, she is recognized in most households as mean mommy. Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother shocked a nation of parents and non-parents alike over Chua’s “Chinese” method of parenting. Her philosophy encompasses strict rules such as: no TV, no video games, no drama class, and no sleepovers. Children must honour their parents, play either the piano or the violin (perfectly), and they must never receive a grade less than an A. Before the book hit the stores, endless tear-stained reviews poured into the media, many accused Chua of taking her tough-love tactics too far, of being abusive, of being a fanatic and worst of all, of stealing the childhood of two innocent girls.

While the hype seemed very entertaining, I had no intention of reading another parent’s latest musings, mainly due to my strong aversion to the rise of mommy-literature and mommy-bloggers. I feel no need to publicize my child-rearing methods, nor do I have a desire to read the same philosophies of mass-marketed pseudo-intellectuals. Alas, my efforts to avoid the debate came to an end one evening when one especially cheeky rascal tossed a copy of the book in my lap over dinner. As he sat there quite proud of his gag gift, I managed an underwhelmed “thanks,” while I struggled to decipher whether it would fit in my purse with my more important books. When I finally committed to reading –  what I was expecting to be sanctimonious garble – I was incredibly surprised. Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother was frustrating, inspiring, thought-provoking and above all entertaining. It was not filled with the mere tirades of a matriarchal maniac, but instead featured the courageous journey of one tremendous woman determined to create the best life for her daughters as humanly possible. I found myself wanting to defend Amy Chua to the bleeding heart masses.

Produced and Abandoned: The Soloist (2009)

Jamie Foxx and Robert Downey Jr in The Soloist

I was just about ready to give up on Jamie Foxx. Everything he'd done since his rightly celebrated turn as Ray Charles was utterly forgettable. It’s not that he'd been necessarily giving bad performances, but that his acting was begining to resemble doing chores. For example, while playing a composite of Berry Gordy in Dreamgirls (2006), he was so dull that it was hard to believe that the founder of the exuberant Motown Records could have been so dour. Portraying the homeless schizophrenic musician Nathaniel Ayers in The Soloist, however, brought Jamie Foxx back to life.

Beauty in Simplicity: Buddy Miller's The Majestic Silver Strings

Americana has become the fashionable label for music that's defined as too country for L.A. and too pop for Nashville. But long before the new definition entered the vernacular, Buddy Miller had already established a sound and feel to his music that was at once a blend of those two different musical sensibilities. On his new release, The Majestic Silver Strings, Miller (with fellow guitarists Marc Ribot, Bill Frisell and Greg Leisz) has re-imagined the music while still remaining true to its roots.

Miller's new album is his first since hooking up with Robert Plant a few years ago and it is a beautiful sounding work that defines "Americana" without paying lip service to the genre. Sure, The Decemberists put out a decent record last month (The King is Dead), but this is the real deal. An album equally at home in the traditions of American roots music, The Majestic Silver Strings sways from the traditional country heard in "Cattle Call," to the rockabilly of "No Good Lover," to cowboy songs such as a tasteful version of the Lefty Frizzell hit "I Want To Be With You Always," sung by guest vocalist, Patty Griffin. Like most of the music on this album, the song is long on charm and short on pretense. Everybody plays with a casual approach that brings out the considerable talent in the band.

Talking Out of Turn #15: Heather Robertson on MacKenzie King (1984/86)

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.

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 genre that came into prominence in the eighties was the pop biography. Due to the growing influence of celebrity shows on television and tabloid journalism, the pop biography transformed the literary form into an open field of speculation where we could imagine aspects of the life told, not just read about the facts in the subject's life. If Christina Crawford's shrill and exploitative examination of being Joan Crawford's daughter represented one pole of this change, there were other writers who brought a playful and more thoughtful perspective to biographical journalism.

 

author Heather Robertson

In the chapter Icons Revisited, I included a number of writers who re-examined iconic figures in styles less formal than previous work. Some of the writers included Barbara Branden on Ayn Rand, historian Doris Kearns Goodwin on the Kennedy family, former leftist David Horowitz on the Ford family, John Malcolm Brinnin on Truman Capote and Heather Robertson's fictionalized biographies on former Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King (Willie: A Romance in 1983, Lily: A Rhapsody in Red in 1986, Igor: A Novel of Intrigue in 1989).

Prime Minister William Lyon MacKenzie King

King, a member of the Liberal Party who was first elected Prime Minister in 1921, came under scrutiny in the eighties for his claim to having clairvoyant powers and the rather bizarre relationship he had with his mother. Rather than skirt the claim, Heather Robertson's trilogy, drawn out of both fact and fiction, delved into the psychological underpinnings of the Canadian leader without exploiting any of the prurient fascination in the subject. In this interview, I've cheated somewhat by editing together two different conversations with Robertson in order to provide a wider scope of her perspective on King.

An Unexpected Problem: Rodgers & Hammerstein's South Pacific

The touring production of the 2008 Tony-winning revival of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II's South Pacific wrapped its second Toronto production in a year yesterday (it's part of the local company's, Dancap, subscription series). Normally, I wouldn't bother reviewing a show that has closed, but since it will likely set up tent in another city soon (though that city has not yet been announced), I felt there was an issue I had to address.

Full disclosure: I've never been a fan of musical theatre, whether it's on stage or on film, with the exception of Singin' in the Rain (1951), so I attended a little reluctantly. Based on James A. Michener's World War Two-set Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, or rather series of linked stories, Tales of the South Pacific (1947), the musical tells the story of Ensign Nellie Forbush, an American nurse stationed on a fictitious island near the Solomon Islands in the South Pacific. She's attached to a Navy command post located there. The military men and nurses have not seen combat and while away their time flirting, falling in love and carousing. Well, the men do the carousing, in such songs as “There's Nothing Like a Dame” and “Bloody Mary.” Nellie has fallen in love with an ex-expatriate French man, Emile de Becque. De Becque is a plantation owner on the island who has more than one secret. She's conflicted because de Becque's mysteries are irritating and he's a lot older than her. They sing about their love, break up, fall back in love, break up, make up, bicker, are separated and then finally reunite. The subplot features a navy flier, Lieutenant Cable, who has fallen in love with a local Polynesian girl.

Oh-So-French: Francois Ozon’s Potiche

Given Hollywood’s prolific record of remaking French comedies, any day now we’ll probably hear that someone is about to start shooting Potiche. The English translation: “decorative vase.” Idiomatically, it becomes “trophy wife,” even though the story’s middle-aged protagonist actually seems more of a grande dame in denial while her unfaithful husband routinely romps with his trophy mistress. But no need to parse words when it comes to cheating hearts. Vive la difference!

Perhaps Jane Fonda, Diane Keaton, Susan Sarandon or another mature American celebrity would replace Catherine Deneuve, who stars in the original as Suzanne Pujol, the bourgeois spouse of tyrannical Robert (Fabrice Luchini). In their provincial town, he runs the family umbrella factory. Get the in-joke? The actress first rocketed to fame in Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, Jacques Demy’s 1964 musical masterpiece. She even sings again in the new film’s Bollywood-like final scene. This time around, the director is Francois Ozon, who was born in 1967 – the same year Deneuve gave another iconic performance, as a theoretically virtuous young woman who often slips away from marital bliss for anonymous, masochistic sex in Luis Bunuel’s Belle de Jour. Vive la difference! 

Noir Lite: Neil Burger's Limitless

There are clever visual bits littered throughout Neil Burger's sunlit noir Limitless, but the experience is noir lite. Eddie Morra (Bradley Cooper) is an unemployed aspiring writer who is mired in inertia. He can't write a word, can't hold onto his girl (Abbie Cornish), and can't even comb his hair. When his former brother-in-law introduces him to an experimental drug NZT (before being murdered for possessing it), Eddie discovers easy access to every square inch of his brain. He recalls everything he's read, learns every language he hears, becomes a piano prodigy, wins back his girl. And he learns to comb his hair. Soon Eddie becomes a genius in the world of high finance, too, drawing the attention of business mogul Carl Van Loon (Robert De Niro). Van Loon sees Eddie as a potential means to making a ton of cash. But NZT also has its downside for Eddie, giving him headaches, lost moments, forgotten homicides, attracting Russian mobsters and facing a dwindling supply of pills to keep him hopping. Luckily, he finds a way to keep his luck running and his ambitions fulfilled.

It's daring to set a film noir drama almost entirely in the daytime and Burger provides a clever subtext of linking the use of drugs to the world of high finance (high, or course, being the operative word). But Limitless still ends up being a rather limited drama. As he proved though in his dreamy and seductive The Illusionist (2006), Burger knows how to think with his eyes. In Limitless, however, it's his brain that fails him. Most good noirs show how good men make bad choices by giving in to desires that destroy their lives. Their lives, in fact, spiral downward in their attempt to succeed. Limitless shows Eddie instead creating a lot of wreckage while becoming upwardly mobile, but he's never left accountable for it. Eddie's insider trading and metaphysical manner of cheating his way to the top is presented as something victorious.

Gerald Pratley: One of the Real Guys

Gerald Pratley (1923-2011)

Before the Bell Lightbox, Cinematheque Ontario, TIFF, the Festival of Festivals, there was Gerald Pratley. Having discovered the other day that he had died from a lengthy illness in a Belleville hospital at the age of 87, I was immediately struck by the fact that I had known Gerald as both a friend and a colleague for most of my life. Over the years, we had shared a love of movie music, undervalued directors (William Wyler) and days spent at the NFB screening room watching movies destined for the Toronto Film Festival. Although I hadn't spoken with Gerald in over a year, I realized upon hearing the very sad news of his passing that I never expected a day when he wouldn't be here. For if there was one strong trait that I always admired in him, it was his ability to accept you on the grounds that you loved and cared for the work you produced.

As a film critic, it didn't really matter to him whether he agreed with you or not (as Gerald's tastes were often more conservative than mine). What mattered was your sense of integrity, or perhaps, the idea that he still had things to learn from others, just as he could impart to others much of what he knew from a different era with different values. In a profession today that has its share of poseurs and careerists, Gerald was one of the real guys. He didn't set out to be a star which may be why he doesn't have a stronger presence in contemporary film culture. (Like me, he didn't have much patience for film theory, either, which represents another pole of contemporary film culture that he's exiled from.) But Gerald Pratley did build a foundation here for film culture and Canadian movies that made possible all that we see vibrant today. Ironically, I suppose, Gerald wasn't Canadian born.

Produced and Abandoned: OutKast's Idlewild (2006)

Here is another case where the critical herd mentality destroyed a film. Leading up to its release in 2006, Idlewild, the 1930s-era musical set in an African-American speak-easy/nightclub in a small town in the southern US, was already being strafe bombed by critics as an unreleasable catastrophe. Conceived by video-director Bryan Barber as a project for the two-man funk/hip-hop band, OutKast (Barber directed their videos, including their endlessly creative “Hey Ya” clip), Idlewild committed the cardinal sin of ... well, I'm not sure what.

Sure, the story is clichéd. Rooster (Antwan A. Patton – aka, Big Boi in OutKast) is the manager/singer in the aforementioned night club in the backwater town of Idlewild. Through the course of the picture, he has to contend with mobsters (especially the psychopathic Trumpy – Terrence Howard) who want to take over the club and use it for their own nefarious purposes. He is also juggling a bevy of beauties (including his wife), convincing the recently arrived girl singer, Angel (Paula Patton – no relation to Antwan), to stay, and keeping his talented but conflicted pianist, Percival (André Benjamin, aka André 3000 in OutKast), in the band. Percival is torn between helping his widowed father (Ben Vereen) in his business (Vereen's the local mortician) and composing great music that will let Percival escape the town and the club. Of course, he sees Angel, and her beautiful voice, as the final key to help him leave. Trouble happens; people die.