Gesundheit: A Big Dose of Fear On the Big Screen

Jennifer Ehle as a research scientist in Contagion

There was no way I could remain objective at a recent matinee of Contagion, the star-studded thriller by Steven Soderbergh about a new virus strain that decimates humanity. A few decades ago, I was stricken by the kind of flu that keeps moving from one part of the body to another. Down for the count, I spent five weeks malingering in bed. A friend intending to cheer me up dropped by with a gift he didn’t realize would, in fact, have the opposite effect. It was a paperback copy of The Stand – Stephen King’s 1978 post-apocalyptic novel, in which humanity is decimated by a new virus strain.

I finally recovered back then, of course. As an ardent believer in flu shots now, I rarely even come down with a cold any more. Earlier this month, though, I returned from a visit to Toronto with a whopper (Thank you, Canada!) that still has me hacking and sniffling more than a week later. And that’s how I slipped into a dark movie theater the other day, hoping not to frighten the few other patrons enjoying a good old-fashioned Hollywood blockbuster with hordes of protagonists and extras hacking and sniffling and foaming at the mouth and experiencing convulsions.

Staying Power: Jerry Granelli’s Let Go

Jerry Granelli can best be described as a drummer who keeps moving forward. Now 70 years-of-age, Granelli is more prolific than he was 30 years ago. Let Go (Plunge Records, 2011) is his 12thalbum in the past ten years; a remarkable achievement for a musician not signed to a major label. It's also his first trio recording where he’s leading the band. Let Go is as much about what happens in the space between the notes as it is about collaborative composition.

Born in 1940, Granelli was a commercially successful musician in his mid-twenties. His claim to fame was the Vince Guaraldi Trio and the music of the Charlie Brown animated TV shows, in particular A Charlie Brown Christmas first broadcast in 1965. He later played with Mose Allison and Denny Zeitlin (who also scored Philip Kaufman’s 1979 Invasion of the Body Snatchers) associating himself with theSan Francisco music scene in the late ‘60s and ‘70s. It was a fruitful experience for Granelli who seemed to be headed in a direction that would make him a preeminent drummer in jazz along the same lines as Elvin Jones and Jack DeJohnette.

But a conversion to Buddhism in 1970 changed Granelli’s focus and consequently his pursuit of music towards commercial success. Those years were a mix of live performance, teaching and spiritual practice that probably paid the bills but gave Granelli the kind of peace-of-mind he needed. By 1999, after visiting Halifax, Nova Scotia, he decided to leave the United States and immigrate to Canada’s east coast. It was a powerful decision that led to furthering a productive career.

A Giddy Thing: Much Ado About Nothing at London’s Wyndham’s Theatre (August 29, 2011)

There are worse ways to spend a summer night in London than in a lush West End theatre watching a high-octane Shakespeare production, but I have to confess that my girlfriend and I hadn’t actually planned for it. Coming on the heels of a much more orderly two and a half weeks in France, our time in London had a satisfying seat-of-your-pants feel to it, since it was essentially a pit stop en route from Paris to our final destination in Scotland  But even months earlier, when all we’d confirmed about our time in the UK were our arrival and departure dates, there was one thing we were certain of: we knew exactly where we would be on Saturday August 27 at 19:00 GMT. That night we’d be sitting in front of a TV screen watching the much-anticipated fall premiere of Doctor Who. The preceding episode of the season had aired way back in early June, and I have no shame in confessing that our twin geek hearts were genuinely aflutter with the mere idea of watching the show’s return live on British soil. (Europe is lovely yes, but we’d let our travelling interfere with our TV watching quite enough at that point in our month-long trip!) And so perhaps you can imagine our excitement when, while looking for the entrance to the Charing Cross tube station, Jessica and I stumbled serendipitously upon Wyndham’s Theatre. There, on the marquee, were the shining faces of David Tennant and Catherine Tate – both of Doctor Who fame! – headlining as Benedick and Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing. No doubt all the stars in heaven had conspired to bring us to this very moment: these were our last two days in London, and it turned out to be the last week of the show’s 3-month run. We simply had to see this play.

David Tennant and Catherine Tate in Doctor Who

And so, on the morning of Monday August 29, Jessica and I got up early and stood in line for that day’s lottery, hoping to secure two of the few remaining seats for that evening’s sold-out performance. We weren’t alone, it turned out. The line outside the theatre that morning was well populated, but buoyant. Many were coming to see the show for a second time, and true to form, the conversations we had were less about Elizabethan theatre than that Saturday’s Doctor Who episode. In the end, we left with two standing room tickets, and were grateful for them! We spent the rest of the day enjoying the Tate Modern and following a quick visit to a nearby pub, we got to the theatre a half hour early (as we’d been advised to do by the lovely woman, and rabid David Tennant fan, we’d met in line that morning) in order to secure a good standing spot for ourselves. It turned out we needn’t have worried: Wyndham’s is a fairly intimate space (especially in the Stalls), and the back of the house had a clear, unobstructed view of the whole stage. And so we waited, and watched, as every seat in the sold-out house slowly filled up.

Off the Shelf: Slither (2006)

Slither is the kind of grossly entertaining B-horror movie that gets you giggling right from the opening scene when a flaming alien-infested comet hurtles rapidly to Earth. (This chattering chunk of rock has the worst possible intentions when it arrives.) The biggest joke on the audience, though, is that when these critters finally get hatched, things get much worse than anyone could possibly imagine. Slither in quick order becomes horror trash without a trace of solemnity.

Set in the quiet rural town of Wheelsy, S.C., Grant (Michael Rooker of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer) is a strapping he-man who may be losing the affections of his generally devoted wife, Starla (Elizabeth Banks of The 40-Year-Old Virgin). While ruminating the state of his marriage late one night in the woods, Grant gets rudely invaded by a slithery slug-like creature. Before long, Grant begins mutating into a whole different species of he-man. He first impregnates a woman (who becomes a host for a litter of slimy beasts) and then later devours dogs and cattle. (These aliens come with a generous and purposeful appetite.) As Grant soon begins to resemble Jabba the Hut with a bad case of psoriasis, Nathan Fillion (the sardonic space captain from Joss Whedon's Firefly and Serenity) as the town police chief demonstrates some of the funniest straight-faced double-takes in movies while tackling both this mutant infestation and his hidden lust for Starla.

The Horse and His Boy: War Horse

War Horse is a piece of high-voltage populist theatricality, like The Lion King – the kind of show that underlines the uniqueness of the live theatre experience and can make lifelong theatergoers out of young audiences. It’s an adaptation by Nick Stafford of a children’s novel by Michael Morpurgo that opened five years ago at the National Theatre of Great Britain and is still playing to full houses in London’s West End, where it transferred after its NT run. The production, co-directed by Marianne Elliott and Tom Morris, opened in the spring at Lincoln Center with a fresh cast (considerably fresher than the one I saw in London in June).

The play begins in Devon, England in 1912, where a farm boy named Albert Narracott (Seth Numrich) falls in love with a beautiful chestnut horse that his father, Ted (Boris McGiver), buys impulsively at auction, really just to get a leg up on his older brother Arthur (T. Ryder Smith), who’s bidding for the same animal. The brothers’ relationship is poisonously competitive, though rarely equal. Arthur is constantly needling Ted, throwing his financial success and his record of service in the Boer War – when Ted stayed home to support his family – in his face, and when Ted has had a few drinks he can’t resist the bait. The horse is an impractical purchase: it’s a hunter, not a work animal, so it’s of no use on the farm, as his wife Rose (Alyssa Bresnahan) is quick to point out. But true to a certain kind of coming-of-age narrative – National Velvet (1944) and The Black Stallion (1979) would be the key examples from American movies – the proud, noble animal exerts a magical pull on the boy, who names him Joey and tames him. Arthur wants the horse for himself, so he gets his brother drunk and bets him the mortgage money that he can’t train Joey to haul a wagon, knowing that if he loses he’ll have no choice but to sell the horse to Arthur. When Ted’s impatient efforts to train Joey aggravate the horse into kicking him, his impulse is to administer a savage beating, so an incensed Albert goes to work himself to try to win his father’s unlikely bet for him. And in an archetypal scene Joey surpasses everyone’s expectations and drags the wagon over the designated line. The resulting idyll of horse and boy is disturbed when war breaks out two years later, however. Ted sells Joey to the army behind his son’s back; only the guarantee of Lieutenant Nicholls (Stephen Plunkett), who admires the horse and has been making sketches of him, that he’ll take personal care of him calms Albert. But Nicholls falls in battle and his sketchbook is sent home to Albert. The boy, terrified about Joey’s fate and still furious at his father, lies about his age (he’s only sixteen at this point) and signs up so that he can search for his beloved horse. That’s the first act. Act two intercuts Joey’s and Albert’s adventures during the course of the war, with other characters – a German horseman named Müller (Peter Hermann), a traumatized little French girl (Madeleine Rose Yen) – replacing Albert as the human figure in most intimate contact with Joey.

Open Roads: Life is a Highway: Canadian Pop Music in the 90s, on CBC Television

Life is a Highway is the fourth chapter in the history of Canadian pop music, a CBC television documentary written by Nicholas Jennings. It's the story of Canada's rise on the international music scene in the 1990s, one of the most successful decades ever for Canadian pop. It follows Rise Up (the 80s), The Beat Goes On (the 70s) and Shakin’ All Over (the 60s).

With a steady pace and an editorial eye to celebrating Canadian music, Life is a Highway is a delight to watch. With comprehensive broad strokes it looks at the history of Canadian pop that successfully merges the regional and cultural influences that have shaped the sound of Canadian music in many ways. Canada covers a large geographic footprint, the larger part of North America in fact. It's a country whose regions has played havoc with politics from a federal perspective, but through music have helped defined them. This chapter in the television documentary tells a story of musical convergence where different musical styles from African rhythms to Celtic jigs begin to blend in with hip-hop and pop.

Oldies But Goldies: Toronto Heritage Dance Recycles Vintage Works Into Something New

Patricia Beatty

The heads in the audience, for the most part, were gray and nodding as around them swirled pre-show chatter touching on the weather, doctor’s appointments and 25th anniversary reunions. It was definitely an older crowd that gathered inside Toronto’s Winchester Street Theatre (80 Winchester Street) on Thursday night for an evening of dance, an art form notorious for its love affair with youth. Many in the house were ex-dancers whose own leaping days were far behind them. They had come not entirely for nostalgia’s sake, although the event gave reason enough for reminiscing: the program at hand promised an evening of revivals by local dance pioneers as well as the welcome return to the stage of some beloved local dancers, long retired. But more enticing (and worthy of a late night) was that this modern dance show, while celebrating the past, was actually something novel, marking as it did the debut of Toronto Heritage Dance, the new kid on the Canadian dance block with a backpack jammed with history.

The brainchild of veteran dance producer Nenagh Leigh in collaboration with Patricia Beatty, Toronto Heritage Dance aims to use work from the not-so-distant past (the oldest work on the current program is just 40) to jumpstart new creations for the 21st century. The idea, elaborated Leigh during a brief intermission chat, is to get audiences used to the idea of preservation as a means of fostering a re-invigorated dance future. Vintage is all the rage in fashion, film and home decor. So why not apply the trend to locally made dance? 

Out of Gas: Drive

Until Drive, his latest film, actor Ryan Gosling could always be counted on to deliver consistently good performances; often he was the best thing about a bad movie. He shone in The Believer (2001), as a Jewish-born neo-Nazi, and in Half Nelson (2006) as a drug addicted junior high school teacher. Even though the films were otherwise mediocre, those parts were juicy. Gosling was also the sole bright spot in this summer’s dismal, overrated romantic comedy/drama Crazy, Stupid, Love. – his first foray into comedy. Playing a Lothario who took on a hapless shlub (Steve Carrell), who has just been dumped by his wife, in a successful bid to turn him into a winner with the ladies, allowed Gosling to lighten up for a change and just have fun with his part. (The film’s second half flattened his role when his character was tamed by falling in love with a young woman.) And sometimes his fine acting matched the quality of the movie itself, such as in Lars and the Real Girl (2007), where he was utterly convincing as a man in love with a sex doll, and in this year’s Blue Valentine, where he registered strongly as a desperate man trying to deal with the painful reality of his busted marriage. So, with such good judgement in parts, if not in films, what is Gosling doing in an idiotic, empty-headed movie such as Drive? This one doesn’t offer him anything of value at all.

Death Knell: The End of the DVD Store

The end is nigh. The days of the DVD store are numbered and there is little any of us can do about it. The announcement this spring that the collapse of Blockbuster US was going to force the actually profitable Blockbuster Canada into bankruptcy with it signalled the end of an era. (Blockbuster Canada was a separate company, but associated enough that the debt holders in the US could force the Canadian version to sell off its wares and close.) Rogers is still up and running, but rumours are rampant that they want to get out of the DVD rental business.

Don't get me wrong, I know there is a somewhat healthy independent industry still thriving, but when you live in a middlebrow city like Markham (just north of Toronto), your options are pretty limited. In fact, Markham's last independent shop, the terrific DVD Mansion, moved to Woodbridge (20 kilometres to the west of Markham) 18 months ago. That leaves, for the entire city of Markham, one little, bitty Rogers store (and nobody knows how much longer that will stay open). Regardless of what you thought of Blockbuster, the stores were big and they had a lot of films. Okay, 90% of them were of the Hollywood big budget variety from the last 4 to 5 years, but there was still that 10%. My local Blockbuster had a pretty healthy foreign language film collection, and it wasn't afraid to bring in a copy of micro-budgeted films like the terrific The Eclipse (which I rented at Blockbuster and wrote about here). They also had a section dedicated to promoting Canadian films, a few dozen pictures from Hollywood's golden era, plus you could get the occasional Criterion edition of classic films. Rogers? Not so much. If you want to see Hollywood pictures (or the occasional B flick) or some TV series from last three to five years, then you were in luck. Anything else, forget it. 

How Much History? Paul Simon's “The Sound of Silence” at Ground Zero

Paul Simon at the 9/11 Memorial on Sunday

In the conclusion of his 1981 book Deep Blues, his musical and cultural exploration of the Mississippi Delta blues, the late music critic Robert Palmer wrote, "How much thought...can be hidden in a few short lines of poetry? How much history can be transmitted by pressure on a guitar string?" You could spend an inordinate amount of time contemplating the depth in those very fine lines. You might even say that Palmer spent his whole book in quest of that riddle. In the new paperback edition of Blues & Chaos (Scribner, 2011) – a collection of Palmer's essays first published in hardcover two years ago –  that sojourn is outlined in a much more literal manner, one suited to a fine music historian. The editor, Anthony DeCurtis, has thematically designed the book as a journey into the vast mystery of music itself, which includes blues, jazz, rock and world music. But he begins the book with Robert Palmer's 1975 Downbeat magazine essay, "What is American Music?" In it, Palmer claims that "American music is non-proprietary ... in that American composers (and performers) innovate and move on."

That spirit of being non-proprietary made me think of many American artists, but mostly of Woody Guthrie, who once said that he didn't write songs, but pulled them out of the air. When a performing artist can create a work by reaching into the air, rather than simply claiming ownership of it, he/she taps into the essence of exactly how much history will be transmitted from the moment they begin to perform. The artist who innovates discovers a work's meaning rather than imposing meaning on it. As an audience, we can then discover how much history is transmitted when the song begins to change the artist who created it. That's what struck me most when I heard Paul Simon begin his classic song, "The Sound of Silence," during the events at Ground Zero this past Sunday. 

Remarkable Polymath: The Cinema of Michael Winterbottom

Director Michael Winterbottom

It may be because he’s so prolific, putting out at least one film most years and sometimes more; or maybe because he has no discernable visual style (Bringing Up Baby’s director Howard Hawks didn't either); or simply because he rarely makes a film in the same genre twice in a row; but for whatever reason, British filmmaker Michael Winterbottom may be the most unheralded director around. He’s also one of the most interesting ones, too, which makes his below-the-radar state somewhat unjust.

Since he began making TV films in 1989 through to his recently completed film Trishna, an adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Ubervilles, but set in India, which will be released next year, Winterbottom has amassed 25 credits in just 22 years, most of those being feature films. He’s also tackled virtually every genre under the sun (except for horror) from domestic dramas (Family, 1994; Wonderland, 1999) to literary adaptations (Jude, 1996; A Cock and Bull Story, 2006), from westerns (The Claim, 2003) to science fiction movies (Code 46, 2006), film noir (I Want You,1998), to comedy/dramas (24 Hour Party People, 2002), even a unique love story interspersed with hardcore, genuine sex scenes and live concert scenes (9 Songs, 2004). That wide-ranging interest in disparate subject matter and characters might, in a minor filmmaker, result in a lot of diverse movies that didn’t necessarily succeed as art/entertainment. But except for a few duds (the overwrought psychological thriller Butterfly Kiss, 1995; his simplistic fact-based post 9/11 drama The Road to Guatanamo, 2006), most of his output stands out, particularly his very fine topical dramas which centre on war (Welcome to Sarajevo, 1997) and displaced peoples (In This World, 2003), and his more offbeat offerings (Code 46, 24 Hour Party People, 9 Songs). The other fact you need to know about his movies is that many of them don’t often play commercially in North America or in limited release at best. (I wouldn’t have seen some of his earliest films, such as I Want You and With or Without You, 1999, if they hadn't been featured at a now-defunct British film festival in Toronto which showcased Winterbottom’s movies as its centrepiece.) More likely they’ll pop up at various film festivals before heading straight to pay-TV and DVD.  The Killer Inside Me (which had a limited theatrical release in the U.S. but never played in Canada) was released on DVD last year and recently premiered on The Movie Network in Canada, as did A Summer in Genoa. Both premiered on TV at almost the same time as one of Winterbtottom's rarer commercial releases in Canada, The Trip. Remarkably, The Trip has hung on since it opened earlier this summer. The trio offers a chance for film-goers to gain a perspective on the director and his strengths and weaknesses as a filmmaker.

Musicals in Revival: Anything Goes & How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying

Except for Kiss Me, Kate, no Cole Porter show has been revived as often as Anything Goes, the 1934 shipboard musical he wrote with P.G. Wodehouse, Guy Bolton, Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse. Wodehouse and Bolton penned the original script, about a shipwreck; when the cruise ship the S.S. Morro Castle went down in a fire weeks before rehearsals were scheduled to start, marking the worst maritime disaster of the decade. Lindsay, who was also directing, and Crouse quickly refashioned the plot as a romantic farce about a young man who stows away on a ship to stop one of its passengers, the girl he loves, from marrying the man her mother has picked for her and through the device of a purloined passport ends up being mistaken for a celebrated gangster.

The book of the musical as it was finally produced is peerlessly silly, though every time it’s mounted afresh on Broadway someone is hired to tinker with it: the version that is currently intoxicating Manhattan audiences carries credits to Crouse’s son Timothy and Stephen Sondheim’s sometime collaborator John Weidman. Even the Porter score gets treated as a work in progress. All productions include “I Get a Kick Out of You,” “You’re the Top,” “Blow, Gabriel, Blow,” “All Through the Night” and the title tune, and since the sixties “It’s De-Lovely” from Red, Hot and Blue and “Friendship” from Du Barry Was a Lady are common bonuses. The 2011 edition adds “Easy to Love” (which Porter wrote for the film Born to Dance) and “Goodbye, Little Dream, Goodbye” (from an obscure British play called O Mistress Mine) while restoring the often excised “There’ll Always Be a Lady Fair,” “The Gypsy in Me” and “Buddie, Beware.”

Purists may whine, but it doesn’t seem to make much difference what tiny omissions and additions script doctors make to Anything Goes or how the Porter repertoire gets mined, as long as the shape of the original is retained and the mainstays of the score don’t go missing. After all, it’s not Fiddler on the Roof. The Porter songbook is rich in variety but the adjectives we might apply to one of his songs – effervescent, brittle, madcap, flamboyantly witty – would fit any of the others, and only Kiss Me, Kate (indisputably his finest score) is so intricately tied to a dramatic context that its songs can’t be slipped with impunity into other shows. That said, I think that the creative team behind the newest revival, headed by director-choreographer Kathleen Marshall and music supervisor-arranger Rob Fisher, has assembled the most pleasing combination of originals and interpolations yet. And it’s hard to imagine them being performed more delightfully.

Remembering 9/11

To commemorate the 10^th Anniversary of 9/11, tomorrow, starting at 8:46 a.m. EDT (the exact moment the first plane hit the first tower), we at Critics At Large will be running a series of posts throughout the day written by members of the site. Seven of us have each written an essay that looks at the cultural (including personal and public) ramifications that have come about as a result of this tragedy. So to our registered followers, whether directly to the site or via Facebook, please note you will be receiving seven notifications throughout the day that a new piece has gone up. We will be posting once an hour, with the last piece – Deirdre Kelly's devastating on-the-ground-in-New York-on-9/11 piece – going up at 2:46 p.m. EDT. Each essay is as unique and individualistic as the writers who crafted them. Please let us know what you think by adding your thoughts to our comment section.

-- The writers of criticsatlarge.ca

Overcoming the Irrational: Flying in the Post 9/11 World

Today, at 11:06am local time, I will board flight UA906 from San Francisco to Chicago. The planes hijacked on September 11, 2001, were also transcontinental flights, chosen by terrorists because they were loaded with jet fuel. I’m not generally a superstitious being, but as I get ready to board this flight I am a little anxious. Traumatic events tend to augment our irrational tendencies, on both a personal and societal level. After 9/11, many people were afraid to fly, although statisticians tried to convince us that we were safer than ever. Airport security was upped to inane levels, although would-be terrorists had likely developed more sophisticated techniques than hiding metal in their flip flops. Crises often catalyze change, and in many ways 9/11 has changed our world for the good, making us more compassionate, considerate, and careful. Still, it was too high a price to pay for the compassion, consideration, and care we should have been showing each other anyway. 9/11 has worked its way into our literature, film, television, and collective conscious. Throughout today, as we reflect on the impact of the events of a decade ago, let’s turn our temptation for paranoia into a catalyst for change. That’s what I’ll be reflecting on during my 4-hour flight this morning.

– Mari-Beth Slade is a marketer for an accounting firm in Halifax. She enjoys hearing new ideas and challenging assumptions. When not hard at work, she appreciates sharing food, wine and conversations with her family and friends.

2001: A Terrorized Odyssey

“The mystic chords of memory,” President Abraham Lincoln suggested during his first inaugural address in 1861, should be tempered by “the better angels of our nature.”

On an early autumn morning 150 years later, the mystic chords of memory became rooted in infamy that would change almost every political, social and cultural sphere on the planet. There’s no going back to the widespread innocence and ignorance that existed before the momentous events of 9/11, which many of us often replay in our minds.

I’d like to think my better angels will eventually diminish the feelings of fury about who wreaked so much misery and about an American government’s failure to be vigilant despite dire forewarnings. After a decade, the immediate fear has subsided but the rage continues and the wound never quite heals.

Here is an account of memories, reconstructed as faithfully as possible, from my sojourn at the Toronto International Film Festival when the worst demons of our nature came calling:

Trying to Comprehend the Incomprehensible: Artists and Musicians Coming to Terms with 9/11

9/11 Tribute - Photo by David Kidney

September 11, 2001, started out as a very ordinary day. Woke up to the radio, had my shower, cereal for breakfast, took the bus to work. It didn’t start to get weird until just before 9am. I received a phone call from one of the technicians in my office.

“A plane just crashed into the World Trade Center!”

I laughed. “Joe, New York City is a ‘no fly zone,’ planes don’t fly over the city!”

“Well it was on the radio.”

“You must’ve misunderstood … what was it, a Piper Cub?”

Twenty minutes later he called back. “Dave, another plane crashed into the World Trade Center!”

9/11: Popular Culture's Partial Truths

After 9/11, pundits weighed in on how the popular culture was going to treat this unique, horrific event and how it would change because of what happened in America on that fateful day. I remember comments about the immediate death of irony, pace Roger Rosenblatt in Time magazine, and musings about a supposed new seriousness in American culture. Well, neither has happened, as in many ways the U.S. has gone further along a superficial route with its TV reality shows still thriving and becoming even more idiotic and fatuous. Much of Hollywood’s output is increasingly given over to tedious remakes, unimaginative sequels and empty-headed comedies. You can also see that disintegration of thought in the political arena where complex issues are routinely debased with cheap sloganeering and carelessly used language such as Rick Perry’s recent labelling the act of U.S. Reserve Chair’s Ben Bernanke’s printing of U.S. money as ‘almost treasonous.’ In the case of depictions of 9/11, however, popular culture has taken a different route, not making light of the tragedy, but for various, sometimes complex reasons, refusing to look at it in a clear light and thus veering away from examining the reality of the terror attacks and what they actually meant.

Mirrors: 9/11 and the New Media

One night, about four years ago, I was sitting in front of my computer at work, just killing time and finishing some e-mails. As I was about to head home, a Chinese employee in her mid-thirties just happened by my office to chat. In no particular hurry to leave, I asked her to sit and soon we began talking about her short time in Canada as well as the journey that brought her here from Beijing. Our conversation quickly got around to world affairs and some of the historical events that touched, perhaps even changed our lives. After I rhymed off some of the key ones for me – from JFK's assassination to 9/11 – I suggested that for her the massacre of the students at Tiananmen Square in 1989 had to be a seminal event. Instead of nodding in full recognition of the terrible slaughter of that June, she looked at me with the puzzled expression of someone left out of the loop of a conversation.

Certainly I must be confusing this horror with some other place, some other country, some other time, her face told me. While I insisted on what I knew to be historical fact, she was adamant that Tiananmen Square never saw such a calamity. For her, not only had Tiananmen Square never happened, student leader Chai Ling never existed, nor did the iconic sight of the sole protester standing in front of the tank; an image that, for many, stood for both the resiliency of human defiance as well as its futility when it's up against enormous odds. In her mind, there never were such odds at stake. Her expression of denial proved wrong the hopeful young female student speaking to the BBC who, in the middle of the protests, told the reporter, "What can they do to us? We have our whole future ahead of us, and we've seen it." The student obviously didn't see a future where one of her own citizens had no knowledge, or even a recognition of the events that prompted her to see a better future, a time she saw ahead as a period of democratic freedom that China has yet to attain.

Paralysis: The Day the Words Ended

“What's that Bin guy's name?” I asked Ron Bowering, who'd just told me that two airplanes had deliberately crashed into New York's World Trade Center towers. And so it began. As I outlined last year in my analysis of the U2 song, “Beautiful Day,” everything began to change for me on that day. In the case of U2, the song's meaning was transformed, but in so many other ways my attitude and outlook also began to morph into something different.

Throughout the rest of that horrifying day, windows opened onto a whole other reality. For about an hour after I watched the first tower fall on a TV in a boardroom, I tried to work. In my day job, I write feature and sales copy about fine wines and spirits, so I tried, vainly, to go back to it. Finally, I knew I needed to get out, so I grabbed a work colleague and we walked down to the water's edge at the Toronto harbour. Everything was quiet as we talked and tried to make sense of things. A handful of images from our moment by the harbour persist today: hundreds of seagulls knew something had happened because they surrounded us, just walking rather than flying, as if they had received the no-fly order too; a bus circled aimlessly around in the background (we were in an unused parking lot where bus drivers were obviously given lessons); just before we returned to work, a single-engine plane approached the island airport. We both found that odd since we had heard that all North American airplanes had been grounded (clearly this pilot didn't get the memo). We went back to work and I sat at my keyboard to start again on our latest 'magalogue' about the wonderful world of wine. I opened the program, rested my fingers on keyboard and, nothing. I thought, “What the fuck does it matter that I'm telling people about wine when the world was ending?” I couldn't type, I couldn't think about anything else except what was happening in New York, and, later, Washington and Pennsylvania. And then it seemed to be getting worse. A friend called and said there was gunfire in the streets of New York. Another friend told me the Sears Tower in Chicago was down. It was like the end of days.

Seven Days in September

This wasn’t my war. It wasn’t even my city. And it wasn’t supposed to have been my assignment that day, or for the nearly 10 days that followed. But I was in New York on 9/11 -- definitely the wrong place at the wrong time -- and found I was swept up in the chaos and other forces beyond my control.

I had been there already for days, covering the fashion shows that had been unfolding inside the tents at Bryant Park as part of New York Fashion Week. That morning, as terrorists flew jet planes into the World Trade Center, I was just about to take my seat alongside a catwalk teeming with pregnant models showcasing a new line of maternity wear by American designer Liz Lange, a fashion runway first.

But I didn’t end up reporting on that.

Gentle On My Mind: Glen Campbell's Ghost on the Canvas

It's not very often when a musician decides to announce a final tour and a last recording. Usually it's a quiet retirement from performing accompanied by a final tour, as was the case with Vladimir Horowitz and Canadian jazz pianist Oliver Jones. There have also been "farewell tours" that never ended like the ones by Cher, David Bowie and The Who, to name just three.

For Glen Campbell, who revealed in June that he has Alzheimer's disease, a last album and a final tour take on new meaning. At a packed concert at the Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto on August 31st, portions of which you can see on youtube, Campbell didn't look like the debilitated artist one might expect. He was in great form performing some the biggest songs in pop music history, principally written by Jimmy Webb. "Galveston," "By the Time I Get to Phoenix" etc were included in the set with "Gentle on My Mind," "True Grit" and "Southern Nights." But rather than hide behind his illness, Campbell has simply called it the "Goodbye Tour" that takes him across the continent, the U.K. and back again until next February. I can only admire his tenacity and bravery in what are his final days. I don't know much about Alzheimer's but it is commonly known as a degenerative form of dementia or senility. Once the mind starts to fail the bodily functions follow and the only destination after that is death.

Neglected Gems #6: Stevie (2002)

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 (Another Earth, Ballast) acquired upon their subsequent release. In any case, here is the latest entry in a series of disparate movies you really ought to see.

Telling Us What He Thinks: Ry Cooder, Pull Up Some Dust and Sit Down (Nonesuch Records, 2011)

Ry Cooder has been described as a modern Ulysses, on an odyssey though the music of his native America, and then through the rest of the world. From his earliest recorded works as a session guitarist in the late '60s (playing on records by Paul Revere & the Raiders and Pat Boone), through a series of world music experiments (with Africa’s Ali Farka Toure, Hawaii’s Gabby Pahinui and Cuba’s Buena Vista Social Club), and a decade scoring films for directors Walter Hill and Wim Wenders, he has introduced slide guitar and blues mandolin to generations of listeners. In 2005, he returned to the marketplace as bandleader with Chavez Ravine, the beginning of his California Trilogy. This series continued with My Name is Buddy (2007) and I, Flathead (2008). Each release saw him expand his vision with bigger productions not just musically but in packaging. Chavez Ravine included a fat booklet with historic photos of the LA neighbourhood; Buddy came in a hardcover book with illustrations (by Vincent Valdez) and brief narrative pieces (written by Cooder) linking the songs; I, Flathead was packaged in a large format hardcover book with a novella telling the story of Kash Buk and the Klowns. The songs on all three albums were composed by Cooder. This, too, was a change of direction.

The Glory of Horse Racing: Secretariat (2010) and an afternoon at Woodbine Race Track

For me, there may be nothing more beautiful on this Earth than the sight of a thoroughbred race horse, with jockey aboard, charging down the homestretch pushing and pushing to beat the other thoroughbreds in a turf race. Even as a young boy, I paid attention to the great Triple Crown in the US (Kentucky Derby/ Preakness/ Belmont Stakes) and Canada's own version (The Queen's Plate/ The Prince of Wales Stakes/The Breeder's Cup). The fine-toned, rippling muscles of these gorgeous animals, whether just standing in a paddock or galloping down the track have always caught my eye. I'm fortunate to remember watching Secretariat live on TV, one of the greatest horses ever, when he managed to win the Triple Crown in 1973

It was quite exciting when he won because it had not been done since Citation in 1948. And it has only been done twice since, Seattle Slew (1977) and Affirmed (1978). Over the years, I've cheered on a variety of horses, some which managed to get the first two, but always failed at the longer and harder-to-achieve, Belmont Stakes. My favourite in recent years was Smarty Jones, a great horse considered “smallish” by thoroughbred standards, but who still managed to easily win the first two legs before being pipped at the wire by Birdstone at Belmont. I didn't even necessarily know I was doing this, but I've also discovered that I've always gone out of my way to watch horse racing films. Carroll Ballard's The Black Stallion (1979), Simon Wincer's Phar Lap (1983), Gary Ross's Seabiscuit (2003), Joe Johnston's Hidalgo (2003) and, of course, Randall Wallace's Secretariat (2010) which has just recently come to DVD. Some of these were great, such as Ballard's lyrical masterpiece; some are rousing entertainments (Hidalgo); some of them are sentimental crap (Seabiscuit – really unfortunate since it is based on an absolutely brilliant book written by Laura Hillenbrand); and some are old-fashioned, in the most gloriously positive sense (Secretariat). (A nod must be extended to my Critics at Large colleague Steve Vineberg for this description that he shared with Kevin Courrier; I couldn't agree more).

Unlikely Duo: Allen & Malick

For a variety of reasons, I didn't get to many movies this past summer. It would also appear that I wasn't alone. (According to CBC News, box office attendance was at its lowest since 1997.) So I didn't feel like I missed much. But there were a couple of movies over the past few months that did cause some lively discussions and unresolved arguments. Students in my classes and people attending various lectures all wanted to talk about Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris and Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life. Given the dramatically different sensibilities of both of these directors, the talk reflected much of that divide.

In the case of Midnight in Paris, a romantic comedy fantasy about a screenwriter and novelist (Owen Wilson) visiting Paris with his fiancée (Rachel McAdams), the story is about how a contemporary writer's nostalgia for an earlier artistic culture allows him to wish-fulfill himself back into that time. In this case, it's the twenties with Gertrude Stein, Man Ray, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Cole Porter, Picasso and Ernest Hemingway. Midnight in Paris is a completely enjoyable and charming picture where the pleasures exist within the conception of the story rather than in what Allen does with the inhabitants in it. The characters mostly reflect the screenwriter's impressions of them rather than becoming fully fleshed out versions of Hemingway and Stein. Still Midnight in Paris has deservedly become a huge global hit, one of the director's most successful films, and it continues to sell out at rep houses showing it in second run. What I enjoyed most about Midnight in Paris though was the way Woody Allen finally confronts his need to hide in the past. It was a significant step coming from a man who stopped being a strong contemporary comic voice a long time ago.

Comedies of Manners: The Admirable Crichton & Heartbreak House at the Shaw Festival

Steven Sutcliffe and  Nicole Underbay

James Barrie’s comedy of manners The Admirable Crichton has spawned so many movies that it’s in the collective imagination even if people no longer recognize its title. Gloria Swanson starred in a Cecil B. DeMille silent version called Male and Female in 1919; there was a breezy, vaudeville-style musical adaptation called We’re Not Dressing in 1934 with Bing Crosby, Carole Lombard, Ethel Merman and Burns & Allen; and a faithful English film, released in North America as Paradise Lagoon, came out in 1957. Lina Wertmüller’s Marxist variation, Swept Away by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August, received undeserved acclaim in 1975. Yet, serviceable as it is, the play itself is rarely revived. The Shaw Festival is mounting it this season, for the first time in thirty-five years.

The premise is ingenious. An English lord with liberal ideas – he has a habit, wearying to his family and embarrassing to his domestic staff, of inviting the servants to tea – winds up shipwrecked on a desert island with his daughters, an indolent young member of the leisure class who is paying court to one of them, and a pair of servants, including his indispensable valet Crichton. Because only Crichton possesses the practical skills to keep them alive and thriving, he becomes the ruler of the island community and his employer, the Earl of Loam, is demoted to the position of servant – until they’re rescued and returned to England. Loam learns through experience what Crichton has been protesting all along: that class boundaries can’t be traversed, even though the make-up of the upper class may shift according to Darwinian dictates. (Except for Paradise Lagoon, the film versions don’t stick to Barrie’s high-comedy ending. We’re Not Dressing adopts romantic-comedy mode – Lombard is the snobby heiress who has to be brought down to earth by Crosby’s unpretentious sailor – and Swept Away, which is rather nasty, takes great pleasure in putting down the rich bitch, Mariangela Melato, by showing that she can’t resist the sad-eyed macho prole played by Giancarlo Giannini. Male and Female veers away from comedy of manners early on straight into melodrama.)

Room to Improve: Soulpepper's Production of Arthur Miller's The Price

Eighteen months ago, I had the privilege to direct The Price by Arthur Miller for the Village Players. For me, the cast and the crew, it was an invigorating experience.So it was exciting for all of us to learn that a Soulpepper production was going to be staged in 2011. The Price opened September 2nd to a packed house of friends, colleagues, students and theatre critics. So my review is probably best understood coming as a former director rather than as a critic removed from the work.

Arthur Miller’s play first debuted in 1968. It’s the story of Victor Franz (Michael Hanrahan), an aging police officer, who has to sell the furniture and worldly belongings of his dead father because the building in which they are stored, is being torn down. So he calls up the aging Gregory Solomon (David Fox), a dealer, to come and assess the value or the price of the goods. His brother Walter (Stuart Hughes), who he has not spoken to (or seen in 16 years), shows up as an equal partner in the imbursement of the estate. Esther (Jane Spidell), Victor’s wife, is also a participant looking to support her husband through this transaction, but as Solomon states upon his arrival, “with used furniture you cannot get emotional.” This prediction comes true over the course of the play.

Covered Up: Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah"

Steven Page at Jack Layton's state funeral

While listening to Steven Page sing Leonard Cohen's now iconic "Hallelujah," during the largely moving televised funeral last weekend for NDP leader Jack Layton, I began to recognize just how much this song has lost its meaning and much of its sting. Sung now with a solemn reverence, as Bob Dylan's "I Shall Be Released" often is, "Hallelujah" is about as misunderstood as Randy Newman's "Sail Away." Written in 1984, Cohen conceived the song as one that combined invective with elegiac and religious meditation. "You're not on the stand when you're praying," he told me in an interview months before the song was released. "You can't come with any excuses. You don't have a deep belief in your opinion any longer, or your own construction of how things are. That's why you pray because you haven't got a prayer." You don't hear in these famous cover versions by Jeff Buckley, Rufus Wainwright, kd lang, or in Steven Page's recent rendition, any of that sense of doubt, the struggle between the profane and sacred, or even the naked fear of the singer being aware that despite being armed with prayer the world still remains the same.

Trio: The Debt, Submarine and a final comment on The Tree of Life

Despite being the locus of so much American media coverage, Israel doesn’t figure very prominently in U.S. TV and cinema. Since those productions are expected to travel abroad and make money, likely their creators, for the most part, would rather avoid dealing with the subject for fear of losing sales in anti-Israel markets or risk alienating European audiences, who don’t much like the Jewish state. If they didn’t think like that, at least one James Bond movie would have had a Tel Aviv setting. In fact, except for the regular character of ex-Mossad agent Ziva David on TV’s NCIS, and the odd Israeli reference in Alias or a few scenes in Charlie Wilson’s War – which was nonetheless careful not to identify Jerusalem as actually being part of Israel, much less its capital – the country is rarely even mentioned at all. Thus, it’s most surprising that Miramax decided to remake the 2007 Israeli film Ha-Hov (The Debt), which revolves around three Mossad agents sent to capture a key Nazi in 1965, and what happens afterwards.. But The Debt, despite its potentially juicy plot, is a rather lacklustre affair that never feels as authentic as it wants to be.

Renewal: The Fall Fashion Magazines

For most, the idea of beginning a new year involves waiting for the dropping of the ball in Times Square, flowing champagne, and finally a round of "Auld Lang Syne". Mine, however, arrives when that familiar fall coolness bookends the still warm days after a long hot summer. September, particularly the wrapping up of the Labour Day weekend, is my time to reflect on the past, hope for the future, and become overwhelmed with excitement about my fresh start.

Perhaps this all comes from attending school for too long, but this is my new year. Refreshed from summer with a new game plan, I am ready to reveal my reinvented self to the world. Among the other more introspective emotions and activities, this is usually accompanied with a fall wardrobe to match. Our style, our presentation of ourselves, is a great form of self expression. The right ensemble – carried with our natural confidence – can capture attention, demand respect, and leave lasting impressions. It has the potential to be that finishing touch that sells us.

Talking ‘bout an Evolution: When a Movie Twosome Grows Ever More Tiresome

I thought that One Day would, at the very least, provide some eye candy with footage of Edinburgh, Paris and London. The film certainly flits between those gorgeous European cities while tracking its two protagonists as they continually relocate over the course of 23 years. The conceit is that Emma (Anne Hathaway) and Dexter (Jim Sturgess), just after their 1988 university graduation in Scotland, have an unconsummated sexual encounter on July 15. According to British legend, the weather on that particular date will last for 40 more days. This annual holiday is dedicated to St. Swithin, a Saxon monk who died in 862.

You might ask what a 9th-century celibate priest would have known about romance but the characters never do. For another two decades, Emma and Dexter remain best friends separated by miles and life choices who continue dancing around the fact that they’re obviously soul mates. It’s a 108-minute cinematic tease. Exhaustion sets in. July 15, intended as some kind of mystical touchstone in their existence together and apart, keeps popping up on inter-titles that are ever more meaningless. St. Swithin, be damned. The weather is totally ignored.

Pads and Claws: The Cat Vanishes

In Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye (1973), detective Philip Marlowe (Elliott Gould) loses his cat when he tries to feed him food he doesn't care for (worse, he tries to fool the pet by pretending it's his favourite). The cat's disappearance becomes a test of loyalty that opens up the theme of the picture. In Argentinian director Carlos Sorin's sly and deceptive The Cat Vanishes, when the pet feline Donatello flees, it becomes a test of sanity for both the characters and us. The Cat Vanishes is being compared to Hitchcock's thrillers, but the resemblance is superficial at best. Unlike Hitchcock, Sorin submerges the familiar techniques of suspense while presenting instead a chamber piece that's embroidered with chills. The story is as devious as the missing Donatello.

The Cat Vanishes opens humorously with a lengthy exposition scene that resembles a similar one that concluded Psycho. A number of psychologists are gathered to discuss Luis (Luis Luque), a history professor who has been institutionalized after having a major breakdown. This esteemed scholar had thought a colleague had stolen his life work with the aid of his wife Beatriz (Beatriz Spelzini), so his violent outburst against both of them lands him in the mental hospital. But the doctors also believe that his breakdown was temporary. Given his solid reputation, they arrive at the conclusion that maybe he should be released into the care of Beatriz. At first, Beatriz tries to make Luis comfortable and calm, but when Donatello freaks out at his arrival and soon disappears, Beatriz begins to wonder if all is well with her hubby after all. She even wonders if his appearance and the cat's departure are linked.

The Royal Shakespeare Company, At Home and Abroad: Macbeth, As You Like It & The Winter's Tale

Aislín McGuckin & Jonathan Slinger in Macbeth.

The Royal Shakespeare Company's production of Macbeth at Stratford-on-Avon this season, staged by artistic director Michael Boyd, has something to do with the cult of Edward the Confessor and something to do with the desecration of Catholic churches during the Reformation, but you have to read the essays in the program to understand the connections, and even then they're not terribly clear. A directorial concept that you need liner notes for can't possibly work – especially in the English theater, where you have to lay out three or four pounds for a playbill. Years ago I saw a production of The Cherry Orchard at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts that filled the stage with constructivist cardboard cut-outs: I was baffled until I consulted the director's note at intermission and found that he thought the play was about the Russian Revolution and he was convinced that its tone was hopeful. This explanation didn't remove my bafflement, merely redirected it. You can do a lot with a classic text, but if your ideas don't sync up with what's on the page then perhaps you'd be better off calling it something else. And you'd be better off going all the way and changing the text. (Punchdrunk's popular haunted-house reimagining of Macbeth, an environmental piece which combines scenes from the play with images out of Hitchcock and leaves out the dialogue entirely, is appropriately titled Sleep No More.) The director's note in the Cherry Orchard program didn't mesh with the lines about the drowning of Ranevskaya's little boy or the loss of her estate, and in Boyd's Macbeth there's a large enough gap between the text and the visual links to these two historical periods for the whole production to fall into it. I'm sure hardly anyone in the audience has any idea why Ross (Scott Handy) reappears in the second act in a white priest's robe with an enormous cross around his neck or why there's a broken stained-glass window above the stage and a pile of rubble upstage.

Good-bye Gadhafi: The Fourth Estate Says Farewell

Frizz-head himself

“We’re coming for you, frizz-head!”

This derogatory threat frequently aimed at Colonel Moammar Gadhafi by the ragtag revolutionaries now conquering Tripoli is not exactly among the famous battle cries of history, such as “No guts, no glory!” or Shakespeare’s “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.” The sarcastic name-calling reminds me of a (roughly translated) quote from Augusto Cesar Sandino, who fought the U.S. Marines occupying Nicaragua from 1927 to 1933: “Come, you clod of morphine addicts...I will make you eat the dust of my wild mountains!” Back then, morphine was routinely included in military first-aid kits to treat painful injuries. But our soldiers must have been using the opiate just to get high and really who can blame them, given the snakes, scorpions and swelter of Central America?

The clod of Libyan loyalists sticking with their leader after four decades of authoritarian rule have been eating the dust of the rebels’ wild deserts. And news coverage of the conflict is mesmerizing for a longtime war-correspondent wannabe like me. The most must-see-TV moments: the 36 journalists from all over the world held hostage in the Rixos, a five-star hotel that became their five-day prison.