Off the Shelf: Nine Queens, 3-Iron and Omagh

Given that it's a holiday weekend, our readers just might find more time to catch up on some movie watching. Rather than recommend some new titles, ones that will already be in demand at your better DVD stores, here are some perhaps less-in-demand foreign-language gems to cozy up to:

Nine Queens is a polished and vastly entertaining caper film that puts the sting back into the con. Argentinian director Fabian Bielinsky, in his award-winning feature debut, smoothly amuses the audience with a deftly elaborate shell game. He provides a divertingly sharp character study that cleverly examines the question of honour among thieves.

Juan (Gaston Pauls) is a small-time crook who gets caught conning a convenience store clerk. Marcos (Ricardo Darin), a big-time swindler, steps in to "arrest" him – with the hope of recruiting him for a bigger job. Soon Marcos's sister, Valeria (Leticia Bredice), contacts him from a luxury hotel where Juan and Marcos team up for a ruse to obtain a counterfeit collection of some extremely rare stamps known as the Nine Queens. Since they have a buyer already in mind, their plan seems airtight – until other scam artists and derailed strategies send their promising racket into comic episodes of misadventure.

Contains Almost No Robots or Explosions: The Internet is a Playground by David Thorne

When I was little, I often wished for a book with an infinite number of pages. It would simply carry on the story as I read it, it would never get boring, and it would provide my life with magic and amusement wherever I went. Of course at that age I didn’t realize that never-ending stories would be problematic, or that the web was about to be invented. These days people carry hundreds of volumes in their pockets, and hold in their phones a vast network of reading material that expands by the day. Whether the new forms of interactivity this lends to the once-humble book is for good or ill is a matter of debate, yet digital pages simply have more options than their static print counterparts.

Which is what makes The Internet is a Playground (Tarcher/Penguin, 2011) a rather ironic title to find in print. The volume amasses the emails, articles, and other written musings of David Thorne, an Australian satirist and design director. His blog, 27b/6, hosts most of these online exchanges, many of which have gone viral. The more notorious of these involve lost cats, pie charts, and Thorne’s attempt to repay monetary debt with a drawing of a spider.

Venus Rising: A Conversation with Kristin Scott Thomas (1995)

When Kristin Scott Thomas strides into a room, she holds her head proudly as if sniffing a rarefied air that only her lungs find pleasing. She is a regal beauty, turning the heads of all the men seated at the bar as she approaches my table, suggesting a darker, more exotic Grace Kelly. But do not call her 'aristocratic.' Mention that word and she winces as if lemon juice had just violated her taste buds. Thomas is an actor whose beauty is often accentuated by undercurrents which charge dramatically to the surface. She imbues British etiquette with teeth that hunger for something more than just shallow pleasantries.

Educated at London's Central School of Speech and Drama, Thomas made her film debut in Under the Cherry Moon (1986) as an heiress who humanizes Prince's preening gigolo. She didn't, however, really step into the spotlight until she portrayed the cynical Fiona in the Oscar-nominated hit Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994). Before she would become renown in The English Patient (1996), Gosford Park (2001), I've Loved You For So Long (2008), and more recently, Sarah's Key (2010), Thomas appeared in Angels and Insects (1995). In the picture, she played Matty Crompton, the impoverished relative of an aristocratic Victorian family. As a budding feminist, Matty attempts to define what independence means to her. It's a quality you could say that Kristin Scott Thomas, as an actor, has embodied all along.

A University’s Odd Universe: Where Damsels Go To Dance

Carrie MacLemore, Annaleigh Tipton, Megalyn Echikunwoke and Greta Gerwi star in Damsels in Distress

Mix 1930s screwball comedy with 1950s kitsch, while providing a wink and a nod to a smattering of contemporary concerns. What do you get? Damsels in Distress, the first film from writer-director Whit Stillman in 13 years. Back then, he was a young indie darling thanks to his award-winning Metropolitan (1990) and The Last Days of Disco (1998), with a less acclaimed Barcelona (1994) tossed in for good measure. Now middle-aged, his interests remain rooted in the discreet charm of the “urban haute bourgeoisie,” as a Disco denizen refers to her fading social milieu. This fascination may be the perfect fit for a filmmaker whose mother was a genuine debutante and whose godfather was the man who coined the term WASP to describe White Anglo-Saxon Protestants.

There are at least two black students in evidence, including Rose (Megalyn Echikunwoke), at Seven Oaks University, a fictitious New England school that is the focus of Damsels. But she’s British, so perhaps that releases her from the burden of U.S. ethnic divisions. The emphasis is on class – seemingly upper – instead of race, but Stillman certainly offers no examination of the American Dream like that found in, say, The Great Gatsby. Literary classics aside, money isn’t really mentioned in the screenplay, except when the self-exiled lead protagonist Violet (Greta Gerwig) briefly checks into a Motel 4 as a less expensive alternative to the low-grade Motel 6. Fluffy fun until the story begins to run out of steam, the Stillman picture both ridicules and celebrates its clueless, anachronistic characters.

Dusty Sings Newman: "I've Been Wrong Before"

Music critic Rob Hoerburger, in his illuminating liner notes for The Dusty Springfield Anthology (1997), described the husky-voiced artist's impact on popular music in this way: "Dionne Warwick was more polished and Diana Ross sexier and Martha Reeves tougher and Aretha, well, Aretha. But Dusty Springfield, the beehived Brit, was always the smartest, the most literate, the wisest." In a career that spanned more than 35 years, she was also one of the finest white soul singers to emerge in the Sixties. Springfield covered, in the most significant and delicate ways, the gamut of soul, yet she also extended herself to perform lushly orchestrated pop and disco. Dusty Springfield not only could mine the emotions buried within a song, she would sometimes find emotions that weren't even planted there. Like Jackie DeShannon, Springfield's roots actually began in folk music. The trio she began with her brother, called The Springfields, made an early success of "Silver Threads and Golden Needles" in 1962. But Dusty left the band early in 1963 to pursue a solo career. It wasn't long before she quickly climbed the charts with the exquisite "I Only Want to Be With You" in 1964, quickly followed by the majestic "Wishin' and Hopin'."

When she was recording her album, Everything's Coming Up Dusty (retitled You Don't Have to Say You Love Me in the U.S. after the title song became a huge hit) in 1966, which was sumptuously seeped in R&B, Springfield made a decision to include tracks by the great pop practitioners Burt Bacharach ("Long After Tonight is Over"), Goffin/King ("I Can't Hear You," "Oh No! Not My Baby"), and a new song by a West Coast songwriter named Randy Newman. (We were still a few years away from hearing the sly and subversive satirist of "Sail Away" and "Rednecks.") Since the mid-Sixties, Newman had been a songwriter-for-hire at Metric Music (the West Coast equivalent of the Brill Building in New York) churning out conventional pop tunes for just about anyone who'd sing them. But the Newman song Dusty Springfield chose to perform, "I've Been Wrong Before," turned out to be arguably his strongest, most memorable of those numbers.

Working Alone: Kenny Werner’s Me, Myself & I

American musician Kenny Werner is one of those slightly unsung piano players whose work as a sideman often goes unnoticed (even though he’s recorded with John Scofield, Dave Holland and led his own trio for many years). On his new album, Me, Myself & I (Justin Time, 2012), which is set for release April 10th, Werner is left to his own devices on a solo piano recording that is full of great humour, spontaneity and grace. It was recorded in Montreal last June during the festival at a small club called the Upstairs Jazz Bar and Grill.

The album contains seven compositions featuring a mix of the old and new. It opens with a mysterious study of Monk’s “Round Midnight” as Werner extends the track with a heady progression of melodic ideas. It’s an introspective version of the tune, where the rhythm and the musical idiosyncrasies of its composer sets up the listener for the entire album. Werner shows remarkable touch here, offering a distinctly sensitive rendition of the song.

On Being British: David Lean and Noel Coward

No filmmaker in the history of English cinema has ever devoted himself to the subject of being British as David Lean did. It was his great theme. He explored it in one way in his Dickens adaptations (Great Expectations and Oliver Twist) and in the comedy Hobson’s Choice, where the two main characters, a willful slob and his fierce, unyielding daughter, are as quintessentially English types as the figures who populate Dickens’s novels. His most celebrated and perhaps most indelible creation, Captain Nicholson in The Bridge on the River Kwai – played by his favorite actor, Alec Guinness – was a satirical portrait of the sensibility that upheld the crumbling British Empire, clinging religiously to tradition and regulations and choosing polish and follow-through over common sense. Lean’s final picture (and one of his finest), based on E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India, directly addressed the issues of empire and examined the qualities of the colonial English by pitting them against the Indians and demonstrating the futility of their attempts to emulate their masters.

It seems fitting, therefore, that Lean’s first four movies were all collaborations with Noël Coward, the jack of all show-biz hyphenates (playwright-screenwriter, producer-director, actor-singer, composer-lyricist), who perfected a dramatic language built on English understatement, English middle-class and working-class English cliché, and that celebrated English repression of emotion that is in fact sentimental at its core. Coward is otherwise (and best) known for his high comedies, two of which, Private Lives and Design for Living, are masterworks of the genre, perfect specimens of how a prodigiously gifted playwright can subsume tragic depths in brittle, inconsequential-seeming farce. (The first is a portrait of the marriage of two people who are both profoundly in love with each other and profoundly unsuited to living with each other – or, most likely, in the world. The second is about a trio of true social revolutionaries, and it’s still shocking.) But many of his plays were depictions of bourgeois English life that reveled in presenting unexceptional characters caught in soap-opera situations, and it’s the paradox of his career that he was able to shift so easily back and forth between these two sorts of plays. And every now and then he paused to write an operetta.

In the Key of Studs Terkel: Craig Taylor's Londoners

Big Ben from Trafalgar Square - Photo by David Churchill

Over the years, I have been fortunate to visit cities considered some of the most exciting in the world: New York, Paris, Rome, Bombay and London. Like many before me, I fell in love with each one of them for their own unique reasons. Heck, Paris so inspired me during my one and only (so far) visit that it became the setting, and partial inspiration, for my first novel, The Empire of Death. But it is without question London that has its siren call still singing in my ears. I've only been there twice, but upon my return home each time I've longed to go back so I could continue to explore this great and historic city. Sure, two trips barely scratches the surface of this locale, but for whatever reason (perhaps because England is half my heritage – Irish being the other) it is a city I feel instantly comfortable and at home in, even if they don't seem to know they drive on the wrong side of the road.

Little Driver pub - East London - Photo by David Churchill

When I travel, the first thing I always do is toss my suitcases into my hotel room and go for a stroll around the neighbourhood. The last time I was in London in 2009, I stayed at a lovely little hotel in the east end near the Bow Street Tube station called City Stay (its appeal, beyond good rates, is that they had a kitchen you can cook your own meals in as long as you bring in your own food – it saved me a bundle). Across the road is a terrific working class pub, called Little Driver, which instantly became my local after a long day exploring. (I did an edit on The Empire of Death there while enjoying their perfect-temperature drafts of Guinness. Isn't that what pubs and coffee shops are for, drinking and writing?)

Craig Taylor - Author of Londoners

This is a very long way to introduce a wonderful oral history of London compiled by Craig Taylor, called Londoners: The Days and Nights of London Now – As Told By Those Who Love It, Hate It, Live It, Left It, and Long For It (Ecco/Harper Collins – 2012), to give it its full title. The book is inspired by the work of the great American oral historian Studs Terkel (Working, The Good War, Hard Times, and many others). Taylor, an ex-pat Canadian living in London (ironically, he's lived there for several years before he felt comfortable to call himself a Londoner – he didn't think he'd earned it), like me became enthralled with the city, but unlike me he made the decision to make it his new home. As he walked around the city, he began to pick up conversations with the people all around him. He realized there were so many stories, so many voices, that he had to compile the voices in order to, as he says, give us a “snapshot of how London is now.” It sure took him a great deal of time. The project took five years: he burned through 300 AA batteries, and the transcripts took up almost a million words. With the help of his hard-working editor, Matt Weiland, he winnowed the hundreds of interviews down to 90 voices. I cannot imagine how difficult it must have been to roll this much data into a coherent and compelling text, but regardless of how he did it, he has succeeded admirably.

Don't Trust the B---- in Apartment 23 and Bent: Comedy is Alive and Well in the Midseason

Krysten Ritter and James Van Der Beek in Don't Trust the B---- in Apartment 23

With the television season running year-round these days, the midseason is no longer the networks’ dumping ground for shows not strong enough to make the cut in the fall. Today I’m looking at two new, but very different comedies which more than prove the point that great television doesn’t always begin in September. (Let’s not forget that Parks and Recreation and even All in the Family were midseason replacements when they were first launched!) ABC’s Don't Trust the B---- in Apartment 23 will premiere on April 11, and NBC’s Bent is already more than halfway through its short, six-episode freshman season.

Of Culture, High and Low – Footnote and Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness

Lior Ashkenazi and Shlomo Bar Aba in Footnote

It may seem like an unusual subject for a movie, but it’s apt that Joseph Cedar’s Israeli film Footnote – a provocative story of a father and son who are both scholars – deals with the specifics of academia and the vagaries of scholarship, since Israel is one country that values higher education, so much so that it punches above its weight when it comes to winning Nobel Prizes and the like. Footnote is also one of the more welcome Israeli features since it offers up a nuanced view of a country that is the sum of more than the divisive politics and tensions that seem to solely define it in most mainstream media coverage of the region.

Footnote, which swept Israel's top film awards (The Ophirs), garnered an Oscar nomination for best Foreign-language film, and won Best Screenplay at Cannes, also marks a maturation of Cedar’s talents. It is his most compelling, original and best-made movie yet, albeit one that falls short of the finest recent Israeli cinema. An Orthodox Jew, a rarity among the mostly secular filmmakers in Israel, Cedar began his career delving into the religious underpinnings of Israeli society. His debut movie Time of Favor (2000) was a slick but interesting thriller about a religious Jewish plot to blow up The Temple Mount, one of Islam’s holiest shrines, and the charismatic rabbi (Assi Dayan) whose sermons inadvertently inspired some of his more diligent students to interpret his words as a literal call to arms. Campfire (2004), based on Cedar’s time living in a religious settlement, was a choppy but fascinating look at the unique Jews who populate such places, seen through the eyes of a widow and her two young daughters who join a West Bank settlement. Beaufort (2007) was a powerful though admittedly familiar tale of an Israel Defense Forces unit about to vacate the high ground of a hard-won battle to capture a Crusader castle, a symbol of Israel’s ultimately futile invasion of Lebanon. Footnote (2011) goes further afield; it’s a drama that, though it deals with Talmudic discourse, is neither concerned with religion nor conflict, except through the passive aggressive one playing out between father and son.

Our Waking Dreams: Movies in the Digital World (Hugo, The Artist, & The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo)

While watching the Academy Awards this year, I was struck by an ongoing motif that seemed to run throughout the evening. Often it was impacted in the periodic jokes of host Billy Crystal, but I could also detect it in the asides by various presenters. There was a constant reference to the early origins of cinema being made just when technology has dramatically transformed the art form – and continues to do so at warp speed. Not only could a viewer detect some concern over whether the technology would come to diminish the quality of the dramatic material, the nominated movies seemed to embody the very argument that was at the heart of the show.

When I was growing up the only way you could watch movies was when they opened in theatres. Movies on television were limited then and they were often burdened by commercials. The limited window of opportunity that theatres offered you to see the picture was partly what built your enthusiasm and anticipation in going to the movies. If the picture was really good, you feared that once it abandoned the movie house you might never get to experience it again. (Part of what got me interested in collecting movie soundtracks was so I could listen to the dramatic score and evoke my favourite scenes from the film.) It was also true that when you saw something really bad, you got worried it might disappear from your city before you had a chance to try it again to test your first reaction to it. 

Taking Wing: The Seagull at the National Ballet of Canada

Sonia Rodriguez and Guillaume Côté in The Seagull. Photo by Bruce Zinger.

Think of The Seagull and the fowl metaphors immediately take flight. So let’s just give into them in describing a ballet that soars as a result of choreography that wings through time and dancers who so completely inhabit their characters they end up nesting inside the imagination, hatching ideas, feelings, and all sorts of artistic pleasure: A rare and beautiful bird.

Although I have not seen a fraction of the more than 200 ballets that the American-born choreographer John Neumeier has created since becoming director of the Hamburg Ballet in 1973,  I think this full-evening, two-act work has to count as among his best works.

Fighting Ageing Every Step of the Way: Ben Babchishin's Short Videos on Music and Ageing

Bill Bourne, in a scene from For the Record Featuring… Bill Bourne.

I first came across the filmmaker Ben Babchishin on the Internet. It’s complicated. Master folk muscian Bill Bourne was playing in town at The Pearl Company and I had agreed to go to see him. That day my wife was out of town, so when I got home from work I took her car to run a couple errands. I drove up to the used CD shop in town to pick up something I had ordered, and as I turned left I was t-boned by a teenaged girl who was late for work. “Don’t call the police,” she begged. It was her second accident in a month. As I looked at my wife’s car, the rear passenger door bent neatly in half, I was glad not to be hurt, but wondered how I would ever explain this. The car and I limped home; I spent 2 hours on the phone with insurance companies, and thought … I’m not going out tonight. Then I decided that music might be healing, and took my car to The Pearl Company. My ride there was tentative, every intersection a challenge … but by the end to the night, Bourne and his band had cheered me up. My wife’s car was still a mess when I got home.

I was taken by Bourne, bought his Bluesland CD, and found it enjoyable. I was searching for the name of his guitar player on the Internet when I discovered a DVD called For the Record Featuring … Bill Bourne. I contacted the site, and quickly had a reply from Ben Babchishin, the filmmaker. He offered to send me a copy. He asked me about other music I liked. He told me about another film he’d made for Bravo TV, Mae Moore & Lester Quitzau: In Their Own Backyard. When I told him that I knew about Quitzau and Moore he said he would send that film too. He told me about some of the roadblocks he encountered too. When he suggested to the producers at Bravo he wanted to do a documentary on Valdy, they had replied, “Unhunh … who’s Valdy?”

Animal Crackers: Hijinks

The cast of Animal Crackers with Mark Bedard (centre). Photo: Jenny Graham.

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival production of Animal Crackers is scrappy but entertaining, and it’s fun to be reminded not only of the early days of the Marx Brothers but also of the freewheeling (and almost free-form) flapdoodle musical comedies of the 1920s. Animal Crackers opened on Broadway in 1928, before the Depression altered the style of the musical, seeding in elements of satire, urban sophistication and bittersweet elegance. It was written by two of the most skillful purveyors of loony-bin wisecrackery, George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind, and no doubt it was rewritten many times in rehearsal to accommodate the Marxes’ improvisations. Marx aficionados know thick swatches of the dialogue by heart – most of it made it into the 1930 movie version, where it’s played at a dizzying speed that offsets the early-talkie staginess. (The Marxes’ film debut, The Cocoanuts, also began as a Broadway show.) What gets sacrificed in the Paramount version are the secondary romantic couple – no great loss – and most of the Bert Kalmar-Harry Ruby songs. The OSF production, which was directed by Allison Narver, not only restores them but tosses in a few others, like “Three Little Words” (one of the best known of their songs, and the title of the M-G-M musical bio with Fred Astaire and Red Skelton as the two tunesmiths) and “The Blues My Naughty Sweetie Gives to Me.”

A Cabaret of Emotion: Ndidi Onukwulu's Escape

The Vancouver songstress Ndidi Onukwulu (pronounced In-DEE-dee On-noo-KWOO-loo) integrates jazz, rhythm and blues, world, folk, and bluegrass – to name a few genres – into a sound that is silky and soulful, whimsical and relevant. You just have to picture a young Billie Holiday crossed with Cat Power. Escape (Emarcy/Universal Music) is her third album following up on the successful No I Never (Festival Distribution, 2008) and Contradictor (Outside Music, 2008). Recorded and released in France in 2011, Escape arrived on our shores last winter and offers listeners a continuation of Onukwulu’s natural niche for song. But this time with a more polished, mature, and even French togetherness.

Dirk Gently and the Fundamental Interconnectedness of All British TV

Stephen Mangan and Darren Boyd star in Dirk Gently, on BBC Four

Adapting beloved literary characters to television is a risky business. Often, though, it is a risk well worth taking, as in Steven Moffat’s sublime variation on the classic Conan Doyle characters and stories in Sherlock, which recently aired its second season. This year, the BBC tries its hand at another generation’s literary hero: Douglas Adams’ Dirk Gently. The TV version of Dirk Gently first saw the light of day as a 60-minute test pilot that aired in December 2010. Commissioned for a three-part series a few months later, the first new episode premiered on BBC Four on March 5 and its third and last episode aired just this past Monday. With Gently, the result is less explosive than with Sherlock, but then again, the show is working with a smaller palette (smaller budget, and a half hour less screen time per episode – a Gently episode is 60 minutes, while Sherlock episodes run 90) and a much more restricted canon. On the other hand, Moffat was hardly the first to adapt the great detective, and Dirk Gently hasn’t (yet!) been immortalized as a puppet on Sesame Street. Adams’ fans have reason to be apprehensive, and when it comes to this new series, it is really a matter of balancing expectations.

Less of an adaptation of the wickedly funny novels than a new work inspired by the tone, themes, and characters of the two Dirk Gently novels – Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (1987) and The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988), Douglas Adams’ follow-up to his immensely popular The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy novels – the new series follows the adventures of Dirk Gently (Stephen Mangan), part hapless private detective and part conman, and his put-upon sidekick, Richard MacDuff (Darren Boyd). The show’s creator, Howard Overman, clearly has no ambition to literally translate the novels to the small screen, and the series genuinely succeeds in capturing the spirit, if few of the details, of Adams’ stories.

Neglected Gem #11: Almost Peaceful (Un monde presque paisible) (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 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.

Taking place immediately following World War II, Michel Deville’s Almost Peaceful is a loving, moving portrait of Jewish survivours of the Holocaust attempting to pick up the shattered pieces of their lives in Paris. Unlike better known Holocaust films (Schindler's List‚ The Pianist), which concentrate on survivors' actual, horrific experiences during the war, Almost Peaceful, based on a book by Robert Bober, is a low-key drama that never engages in graphic imagery.

Set in a tailor shop which has just been reclaimed by its owners, the film follows the business' proprietors, Albert (Simon Abkarian) and Lea (Zabou Brietman), and their employees as they rebuild their existences. One pines for family members who will never return; another finds solace in the arms of prostitutes. Others engage in their own affairs of the heart. Beautifully shot and rendered, the evocative Almost Peaceful is firmly placed in the humane tradition of French directors like François Truffaut (The 400 Blows) and Louis Malle (Au revoir les enfants), but with a heart and spirit all its own.

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

Eight is Enough for Now: Philip Kerr's Prague Fatale

Never thought I'd say this. Never thought I'd have to say this. Philip Kerr needs to take another extended break from Bernie Gunther, his series of detective novels set during the rise and fall of the Nazis in Germany. Gunther is a private detective. He's a former cop who left the force (forced out?) because he became sickened by what the Nazis were doing to his city, Berlin, his country, Germany, and its people, especially the Jews. The eighth novel in the series, Prague Fatale (Putnam, 2012), was published late last fall in the UK, and will be published on April 17th in Canada (I read the UK edition which I got from overseas). It is, I'm sad to say, the only failure in this series of books.

Infatuated with the Past: Carolina Chocolate Drops' Leaving Eden

The new Carolina Chocolate Drops CD Leaving Eden (Nonesuch, 2012) is an album that seeks to acknowledge the American past with its eclectic mix of jig, blues and ballads, where the historical roots even go far back to the 1870s. Sepia images not only grace the cover and liner notes, the instrumentation is banjo, jugs, fiddles and bones used for percussion. I’m not entirely certain of the band’s intentions regarding their image, but as far as the music is concerned, producer Buddy Miller has captured the soul of a band infatuated with the past and not afraid to show it.

American roots music has much to celebrate in the 21st Century as a new generation of musicians seeks out a tradition that is old and as un-hip as one could imagine. For the Carolina Chocolate Drops, who bill themselves as progenitors of Negro Jug Music, the whole notion of being fashionable takes on an image completely removed from the mainstream. In many ways, this North Carolina trio goes beyond categorization. Rhiannon Giddens (vocals / banjo / fiddle), Dom Flemons (vocals / percussion / banjo) and Hubby Jenkins (guitar / banjo) came together in 2005 while trading instruments and playing a particular brand of music associated with the Piedmont region of North and South Carolina. The Piedmont region covers an area from New Jersey to Georgia, east of the Blue Ridge Mountains of Appalachia. It was in these foothills that Piedmont blues, a mix of ragtime, folk songs and African American spirituals, was born. By the 1920s, guitarists such as Blind Blake developed a sound that was eventually captured on record, thanks to the work of Alan Lomax, the historian who travelled the world with his reel-to-reel tape recorder. His recordings made for the Library of Congress are essential to understanding the history of American roots music.

Demise of the Real B Movie: 21 Jump Street

Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum star in 21 Jump Street

If David Fincher's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo reminded me why I wanted to become a film critic in the first place, Phil Lord and Chris Miller's 21 Jump Street reminded me why I quit. A few weeks back, grindhouse genius Roger Corman said, approximately, that Hollywood had destroyed the low budget, independently made crappy, but fun, B and C movies when they started making them themselves and then lavishing extravagant budgets on them. 21 Jump Street is a case in point. The picture cost $42 million to make, plus marketing costs, and I came out of it wondering what they had spent the money on. It sure hadn't been on production values, because the film looks okay, but it's nothing special. It wasn't for the script which borrows a bit from Beverly Hills Cop and 48 Hrs., puts some ironic makeup on it (it's like putting lipstick on a pig, but never mind) and pretends it's hip and with it. It wasn't in the action sequences which, again, while competent, were also nothing special. And it sure wasn't because the leads were making $20 million each. Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill, again, are okay (and Tatum actually might have some light comedy chops), but it's ... it's just so drab. Is this the best we can do with all that money? Really?

Memphis: A Musical for Its Time

The hit Broadway musical Memphis, which recently aired on PBS with its original cast intact, has an irresistible swing. Joe DiPietro’s book presents a simplified version of how rhythm and blues crossed over to attract white audiences in Memphis in the 1950s, with characters standing in for demographic groups and points of view. But you feel as you do at certain movies that dramatize key moments in the chronicle of popular music like American Hot Wax or Cadillac Records: the show gets it right emotionally even if you don’t buy it as history, and you get caught up in the visceral excitement of the subject matter. It does a hundred things wrong and still delivers an awfully good time.

Chad Kimball plays Huey Calhoun, a white ne’er-do-well who ventures into a black club in his home town in 1951 to hear up close the glorious music he’s been sneaking illicit listens to since he was a boy. There he discovers Felicia (Montego Glover), who looks like a black baby doll with bright button eyes and marcelled jet hair but sings gospel and R&B in an exuberant bourbon-and-molasses voice. Huey can’t hold down a job as a department-store stock boy (he gets distracted and breaks the merchandise) but when he convinces his boss to let him try out in the music department he causes a small-time sensation playing “race records.” The ones he sells to turned-on white customers are his own, of course; the store doesn’t carry music that isn’t white – and his employer is too scandalized to keep him on. But he talks his way into a DJ spot on a local radio station with a combination of sheer bravado and unarguable results: listeners who haven’t heard anything like the kind of music he spins keep calling in to request more. Eventually he gets the station manager (Michael McGrath), a pragmatist with a terrible sidewall haircut, to let Felicia perform one of her songs live on the air, and her brother Delray (J. Bernard Calloway), who owns the club where Huey first saw her, starts producing her records. But Delray has trouble warming up to Huey. When he and Felicia start a romance, Delray foresees trouble, and he’s right. Though they have to sneak around, mostly after dark, they aren’t careful enough, and the first act ends with redneck thugs beating both of them up in the street. (They aim the worst blows, administered with a baseball bat, at Felicia.) The second act finds Huey as the host of an American Bandstand-style local TV show that gets away with showcasing African American singers and dancers, and Felicia setting her sights on a crossover career in New York City, where she and Huey can live safer lives.

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.