Talking Out of Turn #17: Timothy Findley (1988)

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.

In one particular chapter of Talking Out of Turn (Landscape and Identity), I wanted to feature artists whose sense of self seemed to grow out of the place in which they lived. For writers like Richard Ford (Rock Springs), Canadian poet Daphne Marlatt (What Matters) and Timothy Findley (The Wars, Famous Last Words) portraits of lives lived seemed almost inseparable from the lives of the people who created them. In the case of Findley, who died in 2002, he had written towards the end of the eighties a book of short stories called Stones that explored both the emotional and physical geography of Toronto, Canada. It is a city that we both grew up in that, by the eighties, was undergoing a dramatic change with the beginnings of a massive urban sprawl. That growth would cause Findley to leave for more rural surroundings. While I think some of what he predicted in 1988 didn't come to pass, the interview did indicate how the climate of commerce, the elevation of taxpayer over citizen, did reflect a city losing sight of itself. What Findley, I fear, saw coming was a Toronto where its inhabitants lived to work rather than work so they could live.

Yoga is as Yoga Does

For a word that means “union,” yoga can be incredibly complex. In North America, our relationship with the ancient Indian practice has been influenced by everything from Scandinavian gymnastics to colonialist Indian politics to how amazing Lululemon’s Groove Pants make our butts look. Indeed, for such a solitary practice, modern yoga seems to attract exhibitionists. Undoubtedly you’ve spotted a self-important yogi on a subway platform, unaware (or uncaring) that the mat they have fashionably strapped to their back could push fellow citizens into oncoming trains. Ah, inner peace.

Tradition & Transcendence: The Royal Wedding

On the days leading up to the momentous occasion of Friday's Royal Wedding, if you were to frequent your favoured news outlet for updates on anything relevant: our country’s election, political unrest, nuclear meltdowns and ongoing economic woes, you may have had your patience tested. The royal nuptials seemed to take precedence over all other news and continued to captivate over a third of the world’s population up to, and after, the ceremony. Frustrating for many, yours truly included. However, as the day drew nigh, I found myself drawn to the new couple.

Love it or loathe it, the wedding of Prince William to Catherine Middleton went off without a hitch. The grandeur began shortly after 8am London time when the first of the guests arrived at Westminster Abbey. Soon many of the world’s societal elite – among them queens, kings, dukes, emirs and Sir Elton John – all decked out full regalia filled the seats under the magnificent gothic interior. In time for the 11am ceremony, the stunning bride pulled up with her father. In a magnificent white dress - designed by Sarah Burton of Alexander McQueen – Catherine walked down the maple tree lined aisle to her Prince. After the signing of the registry the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge bowed to the Queen and departed toward Buckingham Palace in a 1902 State Landau Carriage. They smiled and waved at the crowd of 750,000 cheering onlookers. Finally, they wrapped up a perfect wedding with a perfect balcony scene for the, estimated, three billion viewers.

Despite my best efforts to not care about the Royal Wedding; despite how irrelevant I find the monarchy; despite the fact that I have a doctor’s note confirming my serious allergy to weddings in general, especially anything with gag-worthy fairy tale features; I couldn’t help but let some information seep in these past few months. Touching personal portraits of the Prince and his lady led to not only tolerance, but appreciation of why so many couldn’t help but take a peek at royal vows.

Larger-Than-Life: Paul Taylor Dance Company

 "Polaris" Photo by Lois Greenfield

The wonderful thing about well-trained dancers? Just how wonderful they are. You can’t take your eyes off them, or stop marvelling at their ability to seem larger-than-life and super-human, creatures propelled into greatness by the strength and skill of bodies leashed to the hand of an expert teacher and choreographer. Such was the thought inspired by watching members of Paul Taylor Dance Company perform earlier this week at the Markham Theatre, located north of Toronto, as part of the New York’s troupe’s recent, four-city Ontario tour.

As soon as the curtain rose on Polaris, the first of three works choreographed by the masterful Paul Taylor, a one-evening-only program, it was evident that the dancers, posed like statues inside Alex Katz’s box-like set, were beyond the norm, even by their own modern-dance standards. To begin with, these barefoot dancers dressed in skimpy black-and-white bathing suit costumes (Katz did the costumes too) were super-muscular. No waif-like ballerinas, here. As if to emphasize that point, Taylor, the now 80-year old choreographer said to be one of the fathers of American modern dance, showcased them in a work he originally created in 1976 celebrating the interpretive and inspirational powers of dancers’ bodies. Divided into two parts, Polaris, with a commissioned score by Donald York, featured an exact sequence of movement that is repeated in the second half by a different cast of performers who are quite distinct from the first. At Thursday night’s performance, the second group looked angry where the first cast looked happy, their movements correspondingly staccato where the first group's were smooth. Call it a study in dynamics. Or, as Taylor stated in his program notes, “An opportunity ... to observe the multiple effects that music, lighting and individual interpretations by the performers have on a single dance.”

White Face, Black Shirt/White Socks, Black Shoes: Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll (2010)

I was not a child of Woodstock; I was too young. Sure, I loved the music of The Beatles, The Byrds and The Who, and many others, but it didn't define me. Instead, the music of my formative years was the music from 1976 to 1984 that is known as New Wave – particularly from Britain and Ireland. New Wave encompassed a vast array of musical styles, including rock, post-punk, ska, reggae, jazz, music hall and others. Bands like Elvis Costello and the Attractions, The Clash, Nick Lowe, Joe Jackson, Dave Edmunds, Ultravox (pre-Midge Ure), Joy Division, The Cure, Wreckless Eric, The Specials, Madness, English Beat, The Stranglers, The Boomtown Rats, Graham Parker and the Rumour, and Ian Dury and the Blockheads, were some of the ones that captured my ears. The music of these bands was a response to the blotted excesses of the just-passed prog rock (think Emerson, Lake and Palmer; or Rick Wakeman), but it was also an answer to the thrash and bash of punk, personified in bands like the Sex Pistols and The Damned (The Clash were punks at first too, but quickly abandoned the style). Instead of bashing away and ranting at the world, à la the punks, the New Wave artists wrote short, punchy pop, rock or ska songs played with a modicum of skill. They were equally angry (Costello's “(I Don't Want to Go to) Chelsea” and The Clash's “London Calling” were signature songs of the movement), but the melody and musical skills were far more appealing to me than the scream of punk. Many of the performers I'd admired got their start on a rebellious label Stiff Records, whose motto was “If It Ain't Stiff, It Ain't Worth a Fuck.” And of these bands, the one I held closest to my heart was Ian Dury and the Blockheads. Songs like “Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll,” “Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick,” “Sweet Gene Vincent” and “Wake Up and Make Love With Me” still play 'in heavy rotation' in my listening universe.

Making it Real: Three Strong Documentaries From Hot Docs 2011

When I was growing up in the late sixties, not only were good documentaries rare, there was very little difference in style and form to distinguish them. At times, with the exceptions of Robert Flaherty (Nanook of the North), Marcel Ophuls (The Sorrow and the Pity) and Frederick Wiseman (High School), they resembled magazine or newspaper articles with moving pictures added. We've obviously come a long way in both the diversity of content and the aesthetics of documentary style. But sometimes that ambition gets misplaced when the aesthetics overwhelm the content (The Thin Red Line, Manufactured Landscapes), or when directors break faith with the audience by becoming disingenuous in order to stir a partisan viewer's passions (Fahrenheit 9/11). But judging by what's being unfurled this year at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival in Toronto, which opens tonight with Morgan Spurlock's POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold and runs until May 8th, the wide range of fascinating subjects suggests a cornucopia of pleasures to behold. In particular, there were three very distinctly provocative films that immediately caught my attention.

Planetary Puzzle: Will the Circles Be Unbroken?

The Barbury Castle Crop Circle in Wiltshire – July 1991

While I’m vacationing in the United Kingdom this week, I hope to spot a gigantic crop circle or two – and visit Stonehenge, if the Druids will let me. But there might be a curse, something that dates back to a particular September day in 1970 when my husband and I woke up to rain outside our cozy Salisbury bed-and-breakfast. Just a typical English drizzle, though wet enough to make the morning’s planned trip to the fabled stone circle much less enticing. Married for three weeks, Bob and I had envisioned this trek as a centerpiece of our honeymoon in Europe.

We spent thirty minutes trying to hitch a ride, but finally gave in to the lure of bus that would take us to Amesbury, a town two miles away from Stonehenge. En route, I caught glimpses of the glorious Wiltshire countryside through befogged windows. About halfway there, we noticed smoke emanating from the vehicle’s muffler. Bob promptly alerted the driver. After pulling into a breakdown lane, he left the bus with the two of us on his heels. What we discovered was not only smoke, but flames shooting from the exhaust system. He went back to summon his other passengers with polite understatement: "I’m afraid we have a serious problem. Please file out in an orderly fashion."

A Better Scream: Criterion's DVD release of Brian De Palma's Blow Out (1981)

Contrary to popular opinion, there have been far too few good political conspiracy thrillers over the years. Most, like The Parallax View (1974), are so content creating faceless and sinister cabals that we become helpless pawns in a predetermined chess match. While there have been some imaginative and daring experiments like John Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate (1962), or fast-paced exciting melodramas like Costa-Gavras' Z (1969), none have had the prescience and the personal obsession of Brian De Palma's consummate thriller Blow Out (1981). Released today by Criterion (on both regular and Blu-ray DVD), in a sparkling new digital transfer supervised by the director, Blow Out is the sharpest, most devastating, American conspiracy picture. It's also one that audiences and critics either ignored (or dismissed) when it was first released thirty years ago.

Although Brian De Palma was part of the American film renaissance of the seventies, which brought us such gifted and original directors as Martin Scorsese (Mean Streets, Taxi Driver), Peter Bogdanovich (The Last Picture Show), Hal Ashby (The Landlord, Shampoo), Francis Coppola (The Godfather I & II), Steven Spielberg (Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind), he never quite achieved the critical (or audience) acclaim that his peers did. People weren't exactly indifferent to him. Often he would inspire scorn. Even violence. When I took a good friend on opening night to see Blow Out, at its conclusion, when I asked him what he thought, he took a swing at me. Luckily, I was quick to duck.

Director Brian De Palma.

Throughout his career, De Palma has had to do some ducking of his own. From his earliest underground political and social satires (Greetings, Hi Mom!) to his expressionistic horror thrillers (Carrie, The Fury) and the sexual reveries (Dressed to Kill), De Palma (unlike his contemporaries) presented himself sardonically as an ironist. Where Martin Scorsese treated violent dramatic subjects with a reverence for the art form, De Palma chose a more irreverent attitude. He treated film history as a form of farce pulling the rug out from under our more hopeful expectations. But unlike Michael Haneke (Caché), who plays intellectual abstract games with the audience (while emotionally distancing the viewer), De Palma brought a sweeping emotional intensity to his work that seductively drew you in. When he sprang sublime jokes in the climax, he cleverly implicated us in our very basic desire to watch, to indulge our forbidden desires.

Searching for the True Places: Clare Vanderpool’s Moon Over Manifest

We are pleased to welcome a new critic, Mari-Beth Slade, to our group.

I spent the past week visiting my in-laws in Myrtle Beach. Amid copious outlet shopping and chain restaurant overindulgence, I assumed there was no less intellectually inspired or engaging place on earth – until my mother-in-law handed me Wednesday’s paper. In the centerfold was a children’s newspaper. What a fabulous way to get children engaged in reading, current events and culture! To celebrate National Library Week, “The Mini Page” interviewed this year’s Newbery Medal winner, Clare Vanderpool, author of Moon Over Manifest (Random House, 2010). I confess I’ve not given children’s literature much thought lately, but thinking back to the emphasis my mother placed on the luxurious gold sticker than adorns Newbery Medal winners, I couldn’t wait to get to a bookstore and pick it up. I read it for nostalgia; I read it for fun; I read it because there is always a didactic element to children’s literature and I wanted to learn something; I read it because I am sick of pronouncing culture with a capital C.

Moon Over Manifest is the story of a preteen girl and her search for her home and family history. Both seem to elude her at the beginning. Her dad has just been sent to Manifest, Kansas, to live with old friends and once again, Abilene must make new friends for herself. But that doesn’t prove to be a problem for the curious and outgoing Abilene, who quickly finds her life full of people who have firsthand knowledge of both her father and the town secrets. Abilene’s self-directed quest is to uncover the truth about both.

A Platform For Sandals

Alexander Wang Platform

As the weather heats up, so does my craving for sandals. Like most women, I rejoice in the packing away of the ugly winter clunkers and slipping into thong flip flops and sleek open-toe stilettos that bring so much pleasure to both their owners and their admirers. This spring was no different, or so I had thought. Whether flipping through magazines, window shopping or browsing online, this year’s footwear options make any pair of chunky, salt-stained, winter boots seem sexy. The platform shoe and its contemporaries, the flatform and the wedge, have once again reared their ugly heads (or feet?) as a mainstream trend.

Just to give you a little history on the evolution of this footwear. Platform shoes were allegedly used in Ancient Greek theatre to help the actors appear taller. They were also a hot commodity among high brow sixteenth century Venetian prostitutes (I believe it was important to leave in the “high-brow” part, as these shoes need all the credibility they can get). Platforms have reappeared on and off again throughout history mainly in show business or among upper crusts who did not want to get their feet dirty. A particularly strong reappearance of the platform, for fashion rather than form, was in the 1970s when they were better known as their pseudonym: disco boots. Thanks to Elton John and a few other flamboyant performers, the platform crossed gender boundaries. There were also less flashy versions available for the more “rugged” types.

Taking Chances: The Red Bird Label Story

Record labels used to have a certain cache in the days before corporate takeovers and media-mergers began to happen in the eighties. To put it in contemporary marketing lingo, the labels once “branded” their music. Consider Motown: a distinct sound and style that stood for high quality performance and catchy pop R&B. Another might be Elektra records, the West Coast label featuring folkie Judy Collins and The Doors. Sun Records had Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins. What would jazz be without Blue Note, Impulse and ECM, each featuring their own distinctive styles? Labels meant something in the middle of the last century before larger companies scooped them all up. Their interest was more in profiting from sales rather than promoting the art form. But there was one label, Red Bird Records, that understood the relationship between good music and the profit motive.

In 1962, American songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, authors of hits for Elvis Presley ("Jailhouse Rock") and The Coasters ("Searchin'"), were ambitious businessmen eager to earn more money for their work. At the time, they were songwriters for Atlantic records earning 2 cents for every single sold of one of their songs. By forming their own company, they would earn 21 cents a record. So they decided it was in their best economic interests to form Red Bird records. Having their own company allowed them to take more risks with their music.

Neglected Gems #2: Watermarks (2004)

It’s a funny thing about movies. They may get critical acclaim, even score some box office success and years later they’re barely mentioned by anyone or even remembered. And there’s often no discernible reason for their fates. I really can’t tell why Neil Jordan’s terrific and accessible heist movie. The Good Thief, which got good reviews when it came out in 2002, has pretty much vanished into the ether. Or why Steve Jordan’s powerful documentary Stevie (2002) failed to match the impact of his earlier 1994 doc Hoop Dreams. Or even why impressive debuts like Jeff Lipsky’s Childhood’s End (1997) didn’t get half the buzz that considerably lesser movies (Wendy and Lucy, Ballast) have acquired upon their subsequent release. In any case, here is the second in a series of disparate movies you really ought to see.

Watermarks is the inspiring story of Hakoah Vienna, a Jewish athletic club formed in 1909 as a reaction to anti-Semitic policies that kept Jews out of gentile clubs in the country. The documentary, which is available on DVD, traces how some 65 years after they were forced to leave Austria, a group of Jewish women athletes return to where it all began. The goal of Hakoah (which means “strength” in Hebrew) was to prove that Jewish athletes could hold their own against their Christian counterparts, dispelling stereotypes of the weak Jew in the process. Hakoah succeeded in spades, with many of its members, in particular the women's swim team, dominating Austrian sports competitions in the 1930s. But the Anschluss, the Nazis' annexation of Austria in 1938, ended all that and forced the Hakoah members to flee for their lives.

Reuniting seven of the women swimmers, all in their 80s, Watermarks, which is directed by Israeli filmmaker Yaron Zilberman, lets them tell their history and that of their tumultuous era, illustrated with archival clips, interviews and footage of them revisiting their old haunts in Vienna. Watermarks succeeds in bringing a forgotten part of history to life. But best of all, it introduces us to some genuinely remarkable individuals who made a significant difference in their time and place.

– Shlomo Schwartzberg is a film critic, teacher and arts journalist based in Toronto. He teaches courses at Ryerson University's LIFE Institute.

The Process of Mourning: Conor McPherson's The Eclipse (2010)

Iben Hjejle and Ciarán Hinds in The Eclipse 

A few months before my Dad passed away last year, he was in the hospital recovering from a serious infection. On strong painkillers, he kept telling my sister to let “Uncle Maurice know” about something which I don't quite recall. Shortly after, he said something about 'seeing' Uncle Maurice. Uncle Maurice is my Mom's brother, and my father and he had a long, somewhat difficult, relationship. So why, while hallucinating from the painkillers, did he think he saw, or needed to tell Uncle Maurice something (whom he hadn't seen in about seven years)? We had no idea. A handful of days later, I received a phone call that my Uncle had died suddenly. I have always believed that certain people are 'visited,' shall we say, by those who are about to die, or have just passed. Why, nobody can tell, but it seems to happen again and again. This is the one of the ideas percolating in Conor McPherson's fine, neglected/ignored 2010 Irish film, The Eclipse.

A Long, Strange Trip: Life Among The Dead

It’s no coincidence, of course, that The Grateful Dead Movie will screen at more than 500 theaters across America on the night of April 20. That’s 4/20, dude! The cannabis holiday is celebrated every year throughout the continent. The Toronto festivities, with a march ending at Queen’s Park Circle, drew some 30,000 participants in 2010. The counterculture event is even more significant on Hippie Hill at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. The City by the Bay is where the Winterland Ballroom hosted the October 1974 concerts that are in this 1977 rockumentary, now being re-released with additional footage: never-before-seen interviews with Jerry Garcia, its director, and Bob Weir.

I haven’t caught either version, but did spend some time with the Dead in May of 1978 on assignment for a Vermont daily newspaper. Although backstage access had been arranged by some well-connected music business person, a big part of our plan was upended when a photographer named Charlie and I got to the Thompson Arena at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. Told no cameras, notebooks or tape recorders would be allowed, we were journalists without the necessary tools who managed to persevere. My memorization skills had to kick into high gear. Here’s what happened:

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.