Thrilla from Wasilla: The High Stakes of Game Change

Ed Harris and Julianne Moore as John McCain and Sarah Palin in HBO's Game Change

Greetings from Cloudcuckooland! Here in the not-so-United States of America, many Republican legislatures are proposing draconian laws to insert medically unnecessary transvaginal probes into the private parts of women seeking abortions (Texas and Virginia), or force female employees to tell their bosses if they’re using birth control for controlling births rather than for health concerns (Arizona), or change the legal definition of women who have been raped from “victims” to “accusers” (Georgia), or allow the murder of doctors who provide abortions (South Dakota).

By contrast, claiming to have foreign policy experience because you can see Russia from your house seems rather tame. That is actually only a satirical line in the dead-ringer Tina Fey impersonation on Saturday Night Live. It’s a slight exaggeration of a genuine attempt by Governor Sarah Palin to bolster her credentials as a vice-presidential nominee: She merely said that Russia can be spotted from somewhere in Alaska. The distinction is among many revelations in Game Change, an HBO drama based on the bestselling book by seasoned journalists John Heilemann and Mark Halperin about the 2008 elections. Viewers may be familiar with the chronology but the picture still unfolds like edge-of-your-seat entertainment.

History at a Dance: The National Dance Company Of Ireland

The cast of National Dance Company of Ireland’s Rhythm of the Dance

It might not be as grand a pageant as Riverdance or as flashily sexy as that show’s Michael Flatley-led spinoff, Lord of the Dance, to name two of the most popular Irish step dance shows still touring the world since their inception in mid-1990s. Yet, while smaller and more intimate in scale, Rhythm of the Dance, now in its 11th year, is equally fast and furious where Celtic hard-shoe dancing is concerned.

Choreographed by Doireann Carney, a Riverdance alumna, Rhythm of the Dance has just as many taps per second as the bigger cousin shows, if not more. Former headliner Aisling Holly was said to have 40 taps a second compared to the 28 taps a second that got Flatley into the Guinness Book of World Records in 1989 as the fastest dancer alive. Why does this matter? Because to love Irish dancing is to love the rat-a-tat of it – dancing that sounds like machine gun fire as triggered by flying feet.

Undefeated: Sometimes a Simple Story is Good Enough

A scene from the Academy Award winning documentary Undefeated

It’s no surprise that Daniel Lindsay’s and T.J. Martin’s Undefeated won the Best Documentary Feature award at this year’s Oscars. This highly inspirational tale of a white volunteer coach guiding an all-black football team to their best season in history can’t help but strike a pleasing, receptive chord in today’s polarized United States, including among the voters who chose it for the Oscar. But while the movie isn’t startlingly original or groundbreaking, it’s a gripping and even, dare I say, heart-warming film that proves once again that truth can often outdo fiction when it comes to edge-of-your seat storytelling.

Take The Last Train: The Monkees' Davy Jones – R.I.P.

Davy Jones, Micky Dolenz & Mike Nesmith: The Monkees in 1969

Davy Jones is dead! I can hardly believe it. The littlest Monkee. Broadway’s Artful Dodger from Oliver! In fact, the weekend before I heard the news about Davy, I had watched a DVD of his performance on The Ed Sullivan Show. I was watching for The Beatles of course, but there was Davy, so young and innocent. February 9, 1964 it was, and only a year or so later, he was a Monkee. Davy confessed that after seeing the reaction of the girls to the Fab Four that night, he decided on the road his career would take. Rock star! Well … sort of!

August 25th, 1969. Whew! Over forty years ago! A really hot day. In the nineties. Humidex way up there! A few friends from high school and I had spent all day at the Canadian National Exhibition, or “the EX” as it's still affectionately known. We went every year, sort of an end of summer ritual to prepare ourselves for going back to school. I thought my brother Al was with me, but when we talked about it last month he said, "No!" I know Barb was there. We snuggled and necked a bit on the train home.

The big 4-0: Lent for the modern mind

Whether or not you subscribe to the original doctrine of Lent, the ancient rite has benefits we can all appreciate. So please temporarily suspend any disbelief you have in God, god, Jesus, and other biblical prophets (no different than you would do if watching a film or reading a novel). Whether or not these figures are fictional, there is something we can learn from their stories. True learning takes effort, which could explain why the ritual of Lent hasn’t been taken up by society at large. We’ve gotten lazy, and since we no longer put in the work, we no longer reap the rewards.

One can usually count on Hallmark and Hollywood to pervert seasonal subtleties into commercial projects. But neither has embraced Lent’s profit potential, perhaps because this period is viewed as dismal rather than festive. If you walk down Hallmark’s aisles you won’t find many cards wishing you Happy Lent. It’s difficult to find portrayals of Lent in popular cinema. Once you weed out the overtly religious films, you’re left with 40 Days and 40 Nights (the abrasive Josh Hartnett movie about a man who eschews sex for Lent) and Chocolat (the lovely Juliette Binoche film about a woman who refuses to renounce chocolate, Lent be damned). Oddly enough, Binoche’s character seems to understand Lent more than Hartnett’s. The purpose of Lent is not to deny oneself just because, but to renew. As one church sign quite rightly put it, Lent is “forty days of renewal.”

Talking Out of Turn #28: Oliver Stone (1986)

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, the host of On the Arts at CJRT-FM

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.

film director and screenwriter Oliver Stone

One chapter, titled The Ghosts of Vietnam, features interviews with a variety of authors (Robert Stone, Brian Fawcett) and filmmakers (Louis Malle, Robert Altman) who dealt in their work with various aspects of the legacy of the Vietnam War and how it was felt in the Eighties. The American obsession with Latin and South America during the Reagan years seemed to be an ill-advised attempt to exorcise the ghosts of the earlier conflict. One filmmaker who has continually dealt with the legacy of Vietnam and the Sixties in general is Oliver Stone. Although Stone began a profitable career as a screenwriter (Midnight Express, Scarface, The Year of the Dragon) when we met he had just written and directed a low-budget drama called Salvador, with James Woods as print correspondent Richard Boyle. In fact, by the time Salvador finally found release, Stone had already completed his Vietnam War drama Platoon which dealt with his own personal experiences in the Vietnam War.

Mark Rylance: Everyman in Extremis

Mark Rylance in Measure for Measure, at the Globe Theatre in 2004.

A friend who saw Christopher Walken play William Hurt’s roommate in the original Broadway production of David Rabe’s Hurlyburly in the mid-eighties once told me that Walken was so utterly relaxed that he scarcely seemed to be acting at all. My friend described a moment when Walken, in the middle of listening to a conversation, looked down at his watch, conveyed that he was late for a meeting, and disappeared, his rhythm so natural and free of even the subtlest dramatic rigging that it looked as if he’d improvised it – decided at that moment, on that evening, to leave the stage. I’ve seen Walken on stage twice, and I can imagine what my friend was talking about. Both times he was playing Chekhov, whose brand of naturalism demands that performers throw off theatrical self-consciousness and bury themselves in their characters. When he played Astrov in Uncle Vanya at American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the late Nineties, he executed one of the two most sublime drunk scenes I’ve ever seen live (the other was by Alan Bates in another Russian work, Turgenev’s Fortune’s Fool, on Broadway, the last play he appeared in before he died), and its special quality of improbably sustained distraction, the feeling of not just balancing on eggshells but pirouetting on them, was the result of an almost Zen intensity of relaxation.

Actors call this kind of spontaneity, which derives from a thorough and acute awareness of the dramatic situation and the energies of the other actors on the stage and a focus so complete that it seals out any other world – even in the presence of a live audience – acting in the moment. Mark Rylance possesses that ability in a greater degree than any other actor I’ve ever seen, even including Walken. Rylance is a Midwesterner but he’s spent so much of his career (which spans more than three decades) in London that audiences can be forgiven for thinking he’s a Brit: he was the artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre for ten years, where he famously played Hamlet and Angelo in Measure for Measure, and his last Broadway role, as the alcoholic trailer dweller Rooster Byron in Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem, is an English play that originated in London's Royal Court Theatre. His technique transcends national distinctions. It’s steeped in the kind of physical fluency that the British are far more deft at than Americans, yet when you see him in a comedy he seems to be continuing the legacy of the great silent movie clowns. Not so much Chaplin (who, of course, hailed from the English music hall) as Keaton, and even more the lesser-known but brilliant Harry Langdon – seen at his best in Tramp, Tramp, Tramp and the two comedies he did for Frank Capra, The Strong Man and Long Pants – whose persona was the most debased and battered of them. In Matthew Warchus’s 2008 Broadway revival of Boeing-Boeing (also a transplant from the West End, with only Rylance repeating his performance), Rylance suggested some loopy hybrid of Langdon and a maddened Alec Guinness from his Ealing Studios days (I’m thinking especially of Guinness’s performance in The Man in the White Suit), an Everyman in extremis whose panic and determination have pitched him right on the edge of hysteria.

Newgrass Bluegrass: Punch Brothers' Who's Feeling Young Now?

Who’s Feeling Young Now? (Nonesuch 2012) is the third album by the rising bluegrass band called Punch Brothers. It’s a valiant record full of stories of hard fought battles between the sexes and the insecurities of being a parent. It’s also an album of cloistered conceits and an expression of an uncertain future all under the peculiar sound of instruments best suited to mountain music and country-dances. The Punch Brothers formed in 2006 after a series of meetings that involved large quantities of wine and food and complaining about failed relationships. Led by Chris Thile (mandolin, lead vocals) and Gabe Witcher (fiddle), Punch Brothers is essentially a rock band with acoustic instruments. The group, which also features Noam Pikelny (banjo), Chris Eldridge (guitar) and Paul Kowert, (double bass), perform their own music with scarcely a traditional bluegrass song in site. It is for this reason that Punch Brothers deserves attention rather than dismissal. The result is contemporary songs performed with a bluegrass aesthetic.

Failure to Launch: Unsuccessful TV Pilots – L.A. Confidential and The Time Tunnel

Over the past month, hundreds of actors and actresses have descended upon Hollywood for what is called pilot season. Each year, all the studios commission and shoot dozens of pilots for potential TV series. Most of them never see the light of day since there's only a few shows that make it to air, and most of them get cancelled before too long too (Terra Nova, The Event and soon I really fear, Awake). Sometimes, a pilot seems like a no-brainer. Based on a hit movie, a project gets the green light hoping that lightening will strike twice. Sometimes, someone has the idea of resurrecting (or 'rebooting,” in the current parlance) an old TV series, dusting it off and hoping nostalgia for it might catch the attention of those who make the decisions about what will and what will not make it to air. For every M*A*S*H or Battlestar Galatica, there is an L.A. Confidential and The Time Tunnel.

For the Sheer Pleasure of the Text: Criterion's DVD Release of Vanya on 42nd Street

Louis Malle with the cast of Vanya.

One way of describing Louis Malle's extraordinary Vanya on 42nd Street (1994), which Criterion has just released on regular and Blu-ray DVD in a sparkling newly remastered print, is to say that it depicts theater director Andre Gregory's workshop of Anton Chekhov's Uncle Vanya. But it is neither a documentary nor is it filmed theater. It's not even in the traditional sense of the word a movie. Vanya on 42nd Street is more like an inspired laboratory where a number of actors plus their director delve into the play by peeling away all of its acclaim, its reputation and various interpretations, plus its legendary hold on modern theater, in order to get to the very root of its tragic realism, to reveal what it is that makes this seminal work last. As if he were setting out to rediscover an old forgotten language, Andre Gregory takes his cast through Vanya for the sheer pleasure of the text; to find out just what this text reveals to the actors about the characters they inhabit. "What Chekhov is about fundamentally is the nature of the quality of [the] passing [of] your life, of what it feels like to be here as we travel across the ocean of life," is how Gregory explains the making of Vanya in the DVD's documentary Like Life. If so, he started with the right play where its tone and substance, the very essence of contemplation, illuminates its plot.

It’s Mourning in America: NBC’s Awake

Jason Isaacs stars in Awake, on NBC.

Tonight, NBC will air the second episode of Awake, its new fantasy-crime drama from writer/creator Kyle Killen. Awake tells the story of Michael Britten (Jason Isaacs), a police detective finally returning to work after surviving the tragic car accident which claimed the life of Rex, his teenage son (Dylan Minnette). Or was it his wife, Hannah (Laura Allen) who died that night? Actually, it was neither. Or, perhaps more precisely, both. As we quickly discover, Britten has been living in two realities since night of the accident: he goes to bed at night with his wife sleeping beside him, and wakes up the next morning in bed alone, with his son sleeping down the hall. The series follows Britten as he slips back and forth between these two universes, one in which his son is mourning the loss of his mother and another in which his wife is mourning the loss of their son. It is an ambitious and challenging premise, and it was masterfully executed, in writing, acting, and direction – and if the pilot is any indication, it promises to be one of the most ambitious and creative new dramas of the television season.

Unadorned & Unaccompanied: Stephen Fearing's No Dress Rehearsal

Colin Linden, Stephen Fearing, and Tom Wilson, AKA Blackie & the Rodeo Kings

A few months ago I attended the Hamilton Music Awards. Blackie & the Rodeo Kings were headlining. I've seen BARK a few times before, and they're always an entertaining night out, filled with great music and a few laughs. The laughs generally come from wondering how early Tom Wilson will start swearing. This night he was pretty much under control, prowling around the right hand side of the stage like a wolf, with his low-slung Gibson guitar. That’s the one with all the autographs on it – Ralph Stanley, John Fogerty and Johnny Cash among them. It's interesting to note that of all the guitars on stage, this is the one that comes on and leaves with its owner. No stage stand for this baby. Colin Linden is on the left of the stage (stage right to you theatre people) wearing his ever-present fedora, and clearly enjoying himself. He bounces up and down as if on a pogo stick, contrasting Tom's horizontal movements across the stage. In the middle is Stephen Fearing, who basically stays put. The three Kings are backed by John Dymond on bass and this evening Tom Hambridge on drums. I have to put in a special word for Tom (award-winning producer of Buddy Guy), who did a tremendous job filling in for the usual drummer Gary Craig. From "Water or Gasoline" through "Stoned" and "49 Tons," with a brief look back to Willie's "White Line" and a generous sampling of the new (and critically acclaimed) Kings and Queens, they simply rocked the place. They’ll be featuring the Kings and Queens album later in March with a very special concert at Massey Hall (which I’ll tell you all about later). But right now I’d like to focus on the guy in the middle: the quiet one who ‘stays put.’

Imagining the Unimaginable: The Map that Changed the World by Simon Winchester

As I fall in sync with a group of rush hour commuters, walking along in our daily parade, I give little thought or consequence to the land beneath our feet. A patch of dirt here, an errant pebble there. Only when we hear of some distant earthquake, or put a porous shoe through an unexpected rain puddle, does the average urban pedestrian remark on the earth we trod upon – if, in a modern landscape of asphalt and concrete, any such earth remains on the surface at all. Even in the greenest rural pastures, rarely do we have cause to wonder: over what does this seemingly solid ground lie? And even when this question does arise, our satellite images, modern geological equipment and the apparent omnipotence of Google can render an answer in mere moments.

Of course, this wasn’t always so.

Simon Winchester’s The Map that Changed the World (HarperCollins, 2001) takes us back to the English countryside of the late 18th century, to a man who asked these questions without any such resources to satisfy his curiosity. William Smith, a young surveyor with a passion for history and scientific enquiry, took it upon himself to map the strata of rock beneath England on a scale never before conceived, and – according to Winchester – thus secured his place among the founders of geology.

Venus in Fur: Role Playing

Hugh Dancy and Nina Arianda stars in Venus in Fur

Everyone who teaches in a theatre department knows David Ives’s one-act plays, ingenious small-scale amusements that are ideal for undergraduate directors. (They’re collected under the title All in the Timing.) He’s also the go-to playwright for the Encores! series when alterations to the books of various musicals are asked for, and he adapted Mark Twain’s Is He Dead? when it finally received a New York production five years ago. But his two-hander Venus in Fur is the first original full-length comedy I’ve seen of his, and it’s very accomplished. It’s also enjoying considerable success in New York: it played two sold-out runs off Broadway before its current Broadway iteration at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater. In all three the spectacularly funny Nina Arianda has starred as an aggressive young actress who talks a playwright (Hugh Dancy, replacing Wes Bentley) into letting her audition for him at the end of a long, wearying, fruitless day.

Articulate Conversation: Duets by Reg Schwager

Duets (Jazz for Rant, 2011) is the latest from guitarist, Reg Schwager whose been carving a musical niche for himself since the early 80s. I’ve seen Schwager play on a number of occasions through the years in Toronto and his technique and musical vocabulary is second to none. It’s for this reason alone that Duets is the best showcase for his remarkable sound and articulation. It is a thoughtful and introspective album of standards and original compositions, with four of Canada’s finest bass players: Pat Collins, Neil Swainson, Don Thompson and Dave Young.

A lot of cross-pollination has taken place between the performers. Thompson and Swainson have played and recorded with George Shearing. Young has played with Oscar Peterson and Pat Collins is a teacher, bandleader and accompanist to musicians and singers, such as Maureen Kennedy, in Toronto. Schwager has also earned the experience of playing with everybody on the scene in Canada by forging a career of constant one-nighters. His commitment has paid off: Duets captures a musician at the top of his game.

The Science Of Dancing: Wayne McGregor’s Entity

Entity, choreographed by Wayne McGregor (Photo: Ravi Deepres)

Talk about a ‘Eureka!’ moment: A dance performance that is also a science experiment, the focus of study being the body in motion. Audiences, put your thinking caps on.

Entity is the name of the brain puzzle of a dance in question, and it is an entirely new choreographed creature, owing its genesis to the mind as much as the body.

Choreographed in 2008 by Wayne McGregor (choreographer-in-residence at the Royal Ballet in England, and represented by his 10-member strong Random Dance troop, the resident company of Sadler’s Wells in London), the hour-long piece concludes its month-long Canadian tour in Toronto tonight at Harbourfront Centre: Run to get a ticket.

Toronto’s production of War Horse: Much Spectacle But Not Much Heart

Alex Furber and 'Joey' in Toronto's production of War Horse (Photo by Brinkhoff/Mögenburg)

Toronto is a theatre town that's used to hoopla, but the first Canadian production of War Horse to hit the city has pulled out all the stops. Opening night, reportedly attended by Canada’s Governor General, was glitzy and glamourous and certainly the cavernous 2000-seat Princess of Wales Theatre was a perfect venue for this larger-than-life production. And though much of it was impressive and even occasionally awe-inspiring, I’m not sure that the spectacle didn’t overwhelm the human core of the play.

The Monroe Mystique: Michelle Williams in My Week with Marilyn

Michelle Williams as Marilyn Monroe

As Meryl Streep went up to collect her golden statue at last Sunday’s Academy Awards, I was one of those she referred to from the stage going, “Oh no, not her again.” The Iron Lady is the insufferably noble Mrs. Miniver returned to us with Greer Garson’s patriotic stoicism repackaged as a modern feminist polemic. Who would have ever guessed that Margaret Thatcher’s life and policies would be seriously perceived as a brave revolt against the male establishment? But that’s how this picture skirts any controversial dramatic take on Thatcher. Just like Patton, four decades ago, The Iron Lady is shrewdly designed with box office consideration to give us a Thatcher that both liberals and conservatives can find acceptable without ever fully delving into the depths of what made her such a divisive figure. As for Streep’s celebrated role as Thatcher, it is so skillfully mannered (with every defiant nuance carefully in place) that her performance becomes as self-righteous as the story. If the rousing sentimentality of Greer Garson’s stiff-upper lip can help countries win wars, I guess Meryl Streep’s grand dame theatrics can win awards.

But Margaret Thatcher at least provides a definitive personality for an actress to play. Imagine the challenge for Michelle Williams who was far more deserving of an award for playing the elusive Marilyn Monroe in My Week with Marilyn. Since Monroe’s sexuality, in screen siren terms, was both passive and polymorphous, no one has ever been able to quite capture her appeal on the screen until now. In her review of Norman Mailer’s 1973 book Marilyn, Pauline Kael accurately described the Monroe mystique this way:

“She would bat her Bambi eyelashes, lick her messy suggestive open mouth, wiggle that pert and tempting bottom, and use her hushed voice to caress us with dizzying innuendos. Her extravagantly ripe body bulging and spilling out of her clothes, she threw herself at us with the off-color innocence of a baby whore. She wasn’t the girl men dreamed of or wanted to know but the girl they wanted to go to bed with.”

Neglected Gem #10: Pretty Village, Pretty Flame (1996)

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 The Lord of the Rings’s Peter Jackson’s mock 1995 documentary Forgotten Silver didn’t become the cult hit it should have been. In any case, here is the latest entry in a series of disparate movies you really ought to see.

The long-running, bloody Bosnian conflict is the backdrop for this forceful anti-war drama, which opens and closes with newsreel footage of politicians dedicating monuments to friendship among Yugoslavia 's various factions. In each case, the dignitary cutting the ribbon cuts himself instead. That gives an idea of the tone of this cleverly named film, which largely takes place in an abandoned tunnel in which a group of Serbs are besieged by Muslim soldiers. But the movie opens in a hospital ward where the tunnel survivors try to keep their old hatreds alive. It also flashes backward to the pre-war relationship between a Serb named Milan (Dragan Bjelogric) and a Muslim named Halil (Nikola Pejakovic) who later become bitter enemies. With some scenes worthy of Vonnegut at his most hallucinatory, Pretty Village, Pretty Flame, ably guided by director Srdjan Dragojevic, barrels its way forward, forcing the audience to pay attention. The film, which won the best film award at the Stockholm fest and was Yugoslavia 's foreign-language Oscar entry, is somewhat clichéd and a little more pro-Serb than necessary, but it packs a genuine punch.

– Shlomo Schwartzberg is a film critic, teacher and arts journalist based in Toronto. He teaches regular courses at Ryerson University 's LIFE Institute, where he just finished teaching a course on the work of Steven Spielberg. He is currently teaching a course there on the films of Sidney Lumet, which began on Friday, Feb. 10, 2012.

Runs in the Family: Soulpepper's production of Long Day's Journey Into Night

Gregory Prest, Nancy Palk, Joseph Ziegler & Evan Buliung. Photo: Michael Cooper

Until last week, I had neither seen nor read Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night. In fact, going in I knew only four things about it: It is very autobiographical. O'Neill is the basis for the consumptive character, Edmond. He wrote it in 1942 and then expressly forbid it to be published until 25 years after his death (a wish that was, thankfully, broken by his wife – it was first published and performed in 1956, only three years after his death). And it is considered one of the greatest plays ever written in the English language. After seeing Toronto-based Soulpepper Theatre Company's production (onstage February 23rd to March 31st), I understand why.

In 1912, an Irish-American family spend the day together hurling accusations and recriminations at each other as the matriarch, Mary Tyrone (Nancy Palk), slowly spirals back into a morphine-influenced psychosis. The patriarch, James Tyrone (Joseph Ziegler), is a miserly, alcoholic, formerly popular stage actor who regrets the fact he reached for and managed to grab the brass ring of success, a brass ring that became a false god. The eldest son, Jamie (Evan Buliung), follows his father onto the stage where he too achieves a measure of success on Broadway. His self-loathing, which he steeps in a steady supply of booze and whores, comes from the knowledge that whatever success he had was from riding his father's coat tails. The youngest son, Edmund (Gregory Prest), tries and fails to escape it all. He has the soul of a poet and travelled the world in an attempt to find meaning in his existence. For his efforts, he manages to contract tuberculosis and has returned to his parent's home, cap in hand, looking for help to regain his health.

A Dangerous Method: Analysis as Comedy

Keira Knightley & Michael Fassbender star in A Dangerous Method

In the late 1960s and the 1970s, psychoanalysis, long a staple of thrillers and drawing-room melodramas, found its way into stage and screen comedy. Not only did we gain admittance into the characters’ conversations with their analysts (the therapy session was almost a staple of Paul Mazursky’s early movies) but the protagonists of movies like Woody Allen’s Annie Hall and plays like John Guare’s Bosoms and Neglect spoke naturally in the intricate, unshackled language of the analysand, casting their own chaotic lives and messy relationships in Freudian terms. These movies and plays, which simultaneously satirized analysis as self-involved navel gazing and took it seriously, were intended for literate, sophisticated audiences for whom therapy was as much a part of living in experimental times as leftist politics and smoking pot. David Cronenberg’s marvelous A Dangerous Method, which Christopher Hampton adapted from his play The Talking Cure (based on John Kerr’s book The Most Dangerous Method), is the ultimate analysand comedy. It would have to be, since the characters are Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and Jung’s most infamous patient (and lover) Sabina Spielrein. It’s an ingenious idea: what better subject is there for comedy than the early days of psychology, when the pioneers made up the rules as they went along and violated them at the same time?

A Whole Wide World Within the Grooves

By the time I was four, I had developed a promiscuous interest in music. Without understanding the meaning of the first songs I discovered, such as Frankie Laine's romantic confession "Moonlight Gambler," or Marty Robbins' fateful ballad "The Hanging Tree," I was drawn by the unusual texture of the sound in those tunes. Laine, a hyperbolic performer, used a number of strange effects in his song. A high-pitched whistle, drenched in reverb, opened the track. To my young ears that whistle seemed to be signalling forlornly to some distant train arriving into a lonely, abandoned station. It was soon followed by another voice making click-clop noises, as if a majestic horse were coming over the hill to intercept that oncoming train. And all of this was taking place before Frankie Laine opened his mouth to sing. It was clear that I was responding to more than just a song – but instead to a whole other world of sound reverberating around me, creating a spot in my imagination, and inviting me to share in the music's distinctive peculiarities. But these were my parents' and my relatives' records. I didn't really discover rock 'n' roll until my mother's cousin, Jimmy Mahon, came to live with us in 1959.

A Seamless Tapestry: The Chieftans' Voice of Ages

It's hard to believe that 50 years ago, The Chieftains released their first album. Their tenacious passion to bring ancient Irish folk music to a wider audience was especially brave considering the approaching debut then of a new band from Liverpool, a group that was about to change the sound of the planet. I'm happy to report that Voice of Ages (Hear Music, 2012), The Chieftains new record, is about to do the same in the 21st Century. Produced by T-Bone Burnett, Voice of Ages is a glorious record that captures the unassuming and unpretentious sounds of a band still able to cut through the noise of pop and offer up a genuine, original, non-synthetic sound.

Voice of Ages also features collaborations of the finest order. Unlike the high-strung, record exec match-ups these days, such as Duets II with Tony Bennett, this record brings together musicians whose Celtic sensibility is matched by their respect for the band and its history. Imelda May, the bright new pop singer from Dublin, opens the set with a straight-ahead version of “Carolina Rua,” a traditional Irish folk song. Her buoyant performance of a tune she probably learned at an early age, sets the tone. Right from the start we know this is going to be a serious recording and not simply a frivolous commercial release.

Ferocious and Precocious: Patrick deWitt’s The Sisters Brothers

Author Patrick deWitt.

Since I’ve begun writing for Critics at Large it’s become apparent that negative reviews garner a lot more attention than positive ones. Since I love attention, I had my mind made up to dislike this novel. I thought it was a sure thing. Superficially, Patrick deWitt’s The Sisters Brothers (Ecco, 2011) is a violent, empty western, dominated by male characters and curtly short chapters. But ultimately, it’s an insightful novel filled with the themes that drive each one of us – family, money, sex and the pursuit of happiness. There are some parts where I cackled garishly; others where I clutched the book to my chest with an understanding sigh.

Having a brother myself, one of the things I most understood was the tacit communication between the Sisters brothers. Throughout the narrative, Eli and Charlie simply have to look at each other to have a conversation. For professional hit men who often find themselves in complicated situations, this is a real asset. Because they are family, the relationship between Eli and Charlie is complex and deWitt does a superb job of depicting this relationship. Particularly in the opening chapters, the characterization of the Sisters brothers is magnificent. We’re naturally drawn to Eli, who narrates the story and attempts to villainize Charlie. However, since deWitt paints Charlie as so full of the logic that Eli seems to lack, it’s impossible to wholeheartedly accept Eli’s portrayal of Charlie as bad guy. Within a few short pages, the reader is shown insights into both Eli’s and Charlie’s individual personalities as well as the way they interact. Eli himself says it best early on as he ponders “the difficulties of family, how crazy and crooked the stories of a bloodline can be.”

The Future of the Printed Book?

Over Christmas, one thing I put on my list was a Kobo e-book reader. My decision was purely pragmatic. As a lifelong reader, I will always prefer the traditional book. Nothing can replace the feel of an old or new one in your hands. One of my favourite sounds, too, is the slight cracking of the spine as you open a brand new book. Two of my favourite smells are the inky smell of new books and the slightly musty one you get with older ones. So, my love affair with this tradition will continue regardless if I finally get an e-book reader (Santa wasn't kind this past Christmas).

So, why do I want one? Certain books in the world I just want to read and let them go. Most thrillers, even the good ones, are generally pretty disposable, so though I still like to read some of the better ones (such as The Assassini by the late Thomas Gifford which I wrote about here), I don't necessarily want to have them gathering dust on my bookshelf or stuffed in a box somewhere. On e-book, once I've read it, if I have no intention of reading it again, I could simply delete it. Novels like Arthur Phillips' The Tragedy of Arthur (2011) are a different kettle of fish. Phillips’ book was a wonderful piece of literary fiction with fantastic characters and a compelling plot. It is the type of novel I would happily return to again and I'm glad I have it as a real book. And besides, it's a real first edition. (How can book collecting even be possible if only e-books exist?)

The Inspiring and Frustrating Harry Belafonte

When The Beatles played The Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964, they were awarded 13 minutes of air time. A month later, one man would be granted nearly double it. At the time, Harry Belafonte was an even bigger star in North America than The Beatles. He brought calypso music to the fore. His gentle, melodic voice soothed the airwaves whether singing about “Scarlet Ribbons” or complaining about the long hours loading bananas (“Day-O”). He appeared in movies, and on television. He headlined in Las Vegas. And yet, somewhere near the middle of his elegant new memoir, he makes the following claim:

“I wasn’t an artist who’d become an activist. I was an activist who’d become an artist. Ever since my mother had drummed it into me, I’d felt the need to fight injustice wherever I saw it, in whatever way I could. Somehow my mother had made me feel it was my job, my obligation. ‘And don’t ever give in,’ I can hear her say still. ‘Don’t let them get you. You fight boy. You fight.’ So I’d spoken up, and done some marching, and then found my power in songs of protest, and sorrow, and hope.”

Facing the Hard Truths: Erik Larson’s In the Garden of Beasts

From the vantage point of the present day, it seems odd that anyone, other than hardcore racists and anti-Semites, could ever find anything positive to say about Nazi Germany. But back in the 1930s, many people in the West, for various reasons, only sometimes having to do with negative feelings about Jews, did indeed feel receptive to the rise of fascism. For many, it was a movement which they excused as a force that was instilling German confidence, making for a vibrant society and, not incidentally, in a world mired in a great depression, seeming to embody a prosperous economic model that was worthy of emulation, Those views were certainly held by William E. Dodd, the newly appointed – and neophyte – U.S. Ambassador to Germany. It is his slow, horrifying realization that all was not rosy in that seemingly idyllic country that forms the basis of Erik Larson’s powerfully gripping book In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin (Crown Publishing, 2011).

Soured Lives: Merrily We Roll Along

Betsy Wolfe, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Colin Donnell, Celia Keenan-Bolger & Adam Grupper in Merrily We Roll Along.

The Stephen Sondheim musical Merrily We Roll Along, which was revived over the last two weekends at New York’s City Center by Encores!, flopped on Broadway in 1981, closing in two weeks after receiving punishing reviews. In the intervening decades Sondheim aficionados have struggled to reclaim it as a lost treasure wrecked in the original production by disastrous production decisions. (It ended the partnership of Sondheim and director Harold Prince, who had staged all of his seventies musicals: Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Pacific Overtures and Sweeney Todd.) The source material is a play of the same name that George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart wrote together in 1934, their second of their half-dozen collaborations and a distinct comedown after their classic hard-boiled comedy Once in a Lifetime. The subject is the ruined friendship of three once-inseparable comrades, a playwright, a painter and a novelist, and the gimmick is that the action runs backwards, beginning when all three are middle-aged and miserable and winding up with a glimpse of who they were when they started out. It’s a terrible play in which almost every one of nine scenes ends with a melodramatic punch, and the reverse flow of the narrative – the idea that drew Sondheim and book writer George Furth to the material nearly half a century later – is intractable. The characters are so dislikable that by the time we discover what bright-eyed idealists they were in their youth we’ve already written them off.

In the musical the protagonists have become Frank Shepard, a composer, Charlie Kringas, his playwright-lyricist collaborator, and Mary Flynn, a novelist turned theatre critic. Their story, looked at chronologically, centers on Frank’s quickness to trade his integrity for the promise of fame and fortune. First he persuades Charlie to put the political musical they’ve put the best part of themselves into on the back burner and write a commercial musical comedy for producer Joe Josephson and his actress wife Gussie Carnegie. Then he coaxes him to help him turn it into a movie. Finally he abandons songwriting altogether to put his name to superficial Hollywood pictures. Meanwhile his personal life is a shambles. His wife Beth, at one time the third member of a satirical revue trio with Frank and Charlie (which Sondheim and Furth may have based on The Revuers, made up of Betty Comden, Adolph Green and Judy Holliday before they all landed on Broadway in the 1940s), divorces him when he begins an affair with Gussie and she gets custody of their little boy. He ends up marrying Gussie but by the time he’s joined the Hollywood elite their relationship is dead, and so is her career. By this time Frank and Charlie no longer speak to each other because of the public trouncing Charlie gave him on a talk show, satirizing his slavish devotion to financial success and his indifference to the creative process that brought them together in the first place. And Mary, at one time a bestselling fiction writer, has become a helpless drunk embittered by a long unrequited passion for Frank that everyone seems to know about but him.

Comic Book Men: AMC’s Kinder, Gentler Reality Show

Kevin Smith (centre) and the rest of the Comic Book Men

AMC has come a long way since the premiere of Mad Men in 2007. Firmly establishing itself as a destination for original programming, the channel has had its ups (Breaking Bad) and downs (Hell on Wheels). But last Sunday, it stepped decisively into television’s 21st century with Comic Book Men, its first unscripted series. Yes, AMC now has a reality show.

For all the television that I regularly watch, I have to admit that reality shows rarely make the cut. I’ll watch (and enjoy) the odd episode of Amazing Race, but most of the unscripted shows currently on the air are often just too plain loud for me. The shows are too often populated by poorly drawn, unrealistic characters whose problems are usually the result of their own narcissistic reality distortions – quite simply not people I want to welcome into my home, at least not voluntarily. Nevertheless, the best of those shows can often be genuinely entertaining, and, like good film documentaries, can provide insight into people, worlds, and situations beyond the average viewer’s everyday experience. With Comic Book Men, AMC opens the door to the slightly mysterious kingdom of the comic book store. And now that it’s here, it feel almost like an inevitably. The world of comic book and sci-fi nerds is much more fashionable now than it ever has been. After all, the boys of The Big Bang Theory have been making comedic fodder of it for five successful seasons.

The Author's Voice: Chimes of Freedom – The Songs of Bob Dylan Honoring 50 Years of Amnesty International

–

Film critic André Bazin

The French film critic André Bazin once offered that the reason we get so few great movies from great books is that film directors are intimidated by the author's voice. He speculated that the film adapter, who obviously loves the work of fiction, feels in danger of falling short of the book's greatness. Therefore, Bazin thought, it was much easier for filmmakers to make great movies out of ordinary books, bad books, or even pulp fiction. It's an interesting theory. He's right, for example, that there are few great films made out of classic writers such as Dostoyevsky (remember William Shatner in Richard Brooks' woebegotten The Brothers Karamazov?), Virginia Woolf (let's just give a huge pass to Michael Cunningham's nod to Woolf in The Hours), or Tolstoy (War and Peace with Rod Steiger, anyone?). But Jim Thompson (The Grifters), Cornell Woolrich (Rear Window) and Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep, The Long Goodbye) have provided some pretty terrific pictures. Coppola's The Godfather may be the best example of a great film coming out of a mostly lousy book. The only exception to Bazin's rule perhaps is Charles Dickens, celebrating his 200th birthday this year somewhere in the great beyond, who has had more good movies made from his books than any other great writer. But that's likely due to Dickens writing in a popular dramatic style; that is, constructing his stories in a manner that anticipated the model for film narrative which D.W. Griffith would build upon in his first silent pictures. (Outside of Dickens, Henry James and James Joyce might be two other exceptions.)

In considering André Bazin's general observation, I wondered if the same held true for singer/songwriters and the endless number of tribute albums we see these days. The foundation of the American songbook, the infamous Tin Pan Alley, was built solely by songwriters who composed simply so that others could interpret their songs. But this all changed in the Sixties when The Beatles (who wrote and sang their own material) turned Tin Pan Alley into a premature graveyard for the tunesmith. Just consider that you can probably count on the fingers of both hands the number of memorable Beatle cover songs. Which is to say that these four lads from Liverpool were so successful in putting their own distinct voices on their tracks that no one else could claim those songs as their own. Bob Dylan, on the other hand, is in a whole other league. Besides being one of the best modern songwriters, as well as the most prolific, and one who has put a very distinct voice on his own material, he also wrote his songs for others to sing. And sing them they did. From Joan Baez, to the 1910 Fruitgum Company, to William Shatner, to The Byrds, they've all tackled Dylan - good and bad. But in performing his songs, each artist has had to deal with Bob Dylan's canny and incomparable voice, to claim it, reject it, or risk failure in trying to do both.

The new omnibus 4-CD set Chimes of Freedom: The Songs of Bob Dylan, a vast selection of Dylan songs that features 73 cover tracks by over 80 artists, has its fair share of both successes and failures. But its sheer range of both material (from The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan to Time Out of Mind) and genre artists makes it a fascinating listen. Chimes of Freedom, which includes indie rockers (Silversun Pickups), young pop hit makers (Miley Cyrus, Adele, Kesha), reggae favourites (Ziggy Marley), punk bands (Bad Religion, Rise Against), rappers (K'naan) and veterans (Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, Pete Townshend and Steve Earle), also celebrates 50 years of Amnesty International which, given their sometimes paradoxical political agendas, makes them an interesting bedfellow for Dylan who walked away from leading charges to the barricades. Be that as it may, no other songwriter could provide a more nuanced selection of social and political material than Bob Dylan. After all, he basically took the topical folk song, which traditionally served the social cause by denying the singer a subjective role in singing it, and turned that tradition inside out. For Dylan, the topical song was purely subjective, where he performed it from his own perspective and not with a socialist realist objectivity. But he also wrote love songs, surreal adventures, blues and gospel, which opens up the territory for such a variety of performers that populate Chimes Of Freedom.

A Delicate Gem: Monsieur Lazhar

Mohamed Fellag stars in Monsieur Lazhar

Though Quebec is one of Canada’s more multicultural and diverse provinces, largely because of Montreal's population mix, its cinema has usually failed to reflect that reality. That’s partly because Canada’s cultural policies too neatly divide Canadian film funding into French and English increments: French for Quebec and English for the rest of the country. Thus Montreal Anglophones wanting to make movies in Quebec are usually out of luck, and Francophones wanting to shoot movies in Ontario, which has some sizable French-language enclaves, are equally so. And since that’s the case, Quebec’s French filmmakers are much more likely to make films about their own communities with less attention paid to the other cultures they bump up against. That was the source of some controversy when Anglophone filmmaker Jacob Tierney (The Trotsky) complained – in a French language newspaper interview – that Quebec cinema wasn’t reflecting the multicultural realities of the day. (He did, unfortunately, feel the need to distance himself from the late Mordecai Richler who famously and accurately commented that Quebec nationalists who spoke of Quebec for Quebeckers did not envision people named O’Reilly, Ginsberg and Wong among them. While French filmmakers weren’t being racist so much as myopic, the salient point and end result is identical.) The other reason that a cultural omission exists in Quebec cinema is likely because majorities tend not to try to understand or feature the concerns of minorities. That however is beginning to change. Denis Villeneuve’s excellent Incendies dealt with an Arab family trying to make a new life in Quebec. And Philippe Falardeau’s very fine new movie Monsieur Lazhar is filtered through the prism of a refugee interacting with, and trying to make his way through, a dominant French Canadian landscape.

Elementary: BBC's Sherlock – Season Two

Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman as Holmes and Watson

One of the great joys of writing for this website is discovering hidden treasures that you can share with the reader. Sometimes you can also warn folks, too, about the dreck that litters the popular culture landscape. But for me the biggest pleasure I get is when one of my colleagues unearths something, writes about it and turns me on to it. That is exactly what Mark Clamen did nearly two years ago when he reviewed the first season of the new BBC TV version of Sherlock Holmes, called simply Sherlock. Up until Mark reviewed it I didn't know it existed. And until that moment I'd also never heard of Benedict Cumberbatch (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; National Theatre’s Frankenstein) who was cast as Sherlock Holmes.

Because of his review (he'd seen it in advance of its Canadian premiere), I was able to keep my eye out for it when the first season was finally broadcast on the Canadian cable channel, Showcase (it played on PBS in several markets, but not on my Buffalo-based PBS station for some reason). I won't rehash Mark's review, but suffice it to say that adapters – Mark Gatiss (who also plays Mycroft Holmes on the show) and Steven Moffat (creator of another fascinating but finally unsuccessful updating with his version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, called Jekyll) – have brilliantly updated to our current era these stories based on Arthur Conan Doyle's. Some of the updating is inspired with twisty variations to the original stories. Some of the updating is incredibly simple, but very effective. For example, Dr. John Watson (a really good Martin Freeman) is a veteran of a war in Afghanistan, just as the Dr. Watson was in Doyle's original stories. Some things never change.

A Short Excursion into the Novel: The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde

When I first read The Eyre Affair (Hodder & Stoughton, 2001) a decade ago, its whimsical world enthralled, yet also perplexed me. Certain that many of its quips and literary references had flown clear over my young head, I felt inspired to go brush up on classic English literature. For The Eyre Affair is a book lover’s book, as Jasper Fforde weaves the familiar with the outlandish to create a novel that pays tribute to the cultural legacy of stories, while crafting a tale that’s remarkably original and unexpectedly smart.

Fforde's first novel, The Eyre Affair shows us mid-80s England through the looking glass, as described by police detective Thursday Next. In Thursday’s world, literature remains the pop culture medium of choice, the Crimean war rages on, and dodos make excellent pets. When an unusual book theft turns out to have links to Thursday’s past, she’s called in to help investigate. What follows is action-adventure that ranges from gripping thriller to Monty Pythonesque lunacy, climaxing with a voyage into Charlotte Brontë’s opus itself.

Two Hearts: Contrary Views on Valentine's Day

Note to Readers: Since today is Valentine's Day, which always brings out strong feelings in just about everyone, we thought we'd address this romantic celebration from two completely different views. What is perhaps uncharacteristic about the following two posts, from Laura Warner and Mari-Beth Slade, is that the single woman still embraces the sentiments of Valentine's Day while the married one could just as easily give it a pass. As always, we leave the reader to choose for themselves. Enjoy.

Why We Go to the Theatre: Rosemary Harris and David Hyde Pierce

Jim Dale, Carla Gugino, and Rosemary Harris in The Road to Mecca

In the Broadway revival of Athol Fugard’s The Road to Mecca by the Roundabout Theatre Company, the luminous Rosemary Harris plays Miss Helen, an aging Afrikaner widow in a small South African village (in an arid section of the country known as Karoo) in the mid-1970s who reaches out to a younger friend, Elsa Barlow (Carla Gugino), a Capetown schoolteacher, at a time of personal crisis. Miss Helen is an artist whose fanciful sculptures of animals and other creatures fill her yard and have unsettled her conventional neighbors for years. She and Elsa became friends when the younger woman, passing through the Karoo, stopped to admire the art – and Miss Helen, used to a mixture of disdain, mockery and dismissal from the other villagers, warmed to her enthusiasm. Elsa, too, is a renegade: she keeps getting in trouble with the school board because she encourages her students, who are black, to speak and write about equality. She loves Miss Helen because she sees her as that rarity, a truly free spirit, and that freedom is manifested in what she calls her Mecca, that yard full of wild creations that the close, churchgoing village of New Bethesda finds creepy, even shocking. But Miss Helen hasn’t been able to make any art for some time, and she fears that her inner vision – the images that appear to her, guiding her hand – may have stopped for good, leaving her in darkness. The desperate tone of her last letter has drawn Elsa to her cottage for a visit. She arrives just at the point at which the local minister, Marius Byleveld (Jim Dale), has almost persuaded Miss Helen to give up her solitary house and go into a home.

A Spy in the Cinematic House of Peril: Nobody is Safe

Denzel Washington and Ryan Reynolds hit the road in Safe House

If you’re looking for a current movie about clandestine government operatives who betray their brethren, go see Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. If you’re looking for a current movie about clandestine government operatives who betray their brethren starring Denzel Washington, Safe House is your best bet at the moment – though not necessarily one that will stick with you beyond that juncture. The former thriller, adapted from a 1974 John le Carre novel, keeps its bloodshed to a minimum and adheres to the great British tradition of allowing tension to build under an otherwise laconic surface. The latter film revels in splatter, ramping up dastardly deeds with typical Hollywood adrenaline.

Washington employs his usual charisma and clever thespian chops as Tobin Frost, a CIA agent gone rogue for the past decade. The question is whether or not he’s really a sociopath, like the corrupt cop the actor essayed in Training Day (2001). When his Safe House antihero gets a chip containing a hush-hush file, he injects the damn thing under his skin to escape detection before beginning a 115-minute chase scene. There are actually numerous chase scenes, but the unrelenting action becomes a big blur. Frost is targeted by a seemingly never-ending supply of generic mercenaries so downright evil that the story almost veers into horror-flick territory, in which a monstrous entity continually rises from the dead. There’s one chief bad guy in particular (Fares Fares, a name so nice he uses it twice) who I thought had at least a dozen bullets pumped into him, yet the thug manages to pop up unscathed in the final denouement.