Shot Through with Greatness: Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate

A scene from Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate

Reading the various comments on my Critic at Large’s colleague David Churchill’s evisceration of Michael Cimino’s 1980 epic western Heaven’s Gate proves one thing. Filmgoers are not indifferent to the film, either hating it with a passion or loving it equally intensely. My own view has always been somewhere in the middle, but having now seen the officially approved (by Cimino) 216-minute director’s cut of the movie, stunningly transferred to DVD on the Criterion label, I find my view has shifted somewhat from when I first saw the shortened version of the film more than 30 years ago. (The studio brass forced the director to cut it by more than an hour, destroying it entirely.) Then, I felt the movie was quite impressive but I was most disturbed by all the dramatic licenses it took with history (the lead characters from the movie, Ella Watson (Isabelle Huppert) and Jim Averill (Kris Kristofferson) were killed before the main events of Heaven’s Gate ever took place and didn’t even practice the professions the film had them doing). I had only been reviewing movies for a few years then and still perhaps had something of a naive belief in the ‘truth’ of films based on facts. (I know better now, of course.) But even then, for all my doubts and concerns, I could tell there was something more to the film than the infamous disaster it was supposed to be – and that was even before seeing the (then pre-restoration) full version (219 minutes) of the movie. (Unlike David Churchill, I’ve only ever seen the movie on video or DVD or TV because the one time it played in Toronto on the big screen after its initial disastrous opening, I was not able to go. My loss.) What I sensed and later came to believe and still do, is that Cimino’s epic, like Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (which came out a year earlier and had similar issues concerning length and hubris and controversy), was that it was not at all a great movie but a movie with greatness within it.

Lamb to the Slaughter: Beyond the Hills

Cosmina Stratan and Cristina Flutur in Beyond the Hills

The Romanian director Cristian Mungiu is best known for his international success 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, a tight, compelling study of a young woman and the friend who accompanies her on a mission to have an illegal abortion during the Ceausescu era. In America, the issue of abortion is all tied up with religion, but religion doesn’t play any role in Mungiu’s film: while the film presents the abortion itself as a difficult experience made all the more harrowing by the fact that the two friends are breaking the law, the law itself – which was put in place because Ceausescu wanted to expand his country’s population – is just one more impersonal, bureaucratic dictum limiting their freedom, even over control of their own bodies.

Mungiu’s new film, Beyond the Hills, is about a young girl, Alina (Cristina Flutur), who dies in the course of an “exorcism,” and it finds room to condemn, or at least look askance at, both the religious believers who have taken the girl in, only to destroy her, and the secular world that might have done better for her but could find no place for her. (The doctor who prescribes antipsychotic meds for Alina is sympathetic and intelligent – trying to describe her condition to the uncomprehending nuns at the convent where she lives, he says that she has an illness that “doesn’t kill you, but doesn’t let you live” – but has to turn her out of his hospital because he simply doesn’t have enough beds.)

Critic's Notes & Frames, Part IV

Despite the fractious relations within The Byrds in 1968, where co-founder David Crosby was given the hook, The Notorious Byrd Brothers still remains one of more beautifully poignant of their records. There is a faint sense of loss all over this album, but without the group ever once expressing regret for having borne such aching desire. From Carole King's "Goin' Back" to "Wasn't Born to Follow" (used in Easy Rider), The Notorious Byrd Brothers affectionately waves goodbye to hippie utopianism, but not without first claiming the romanticism they once embraced. You can hear the full weight of that romanticism, too, in the shimmering harmonies of "Get to You."

New Roots: LeE HARVeY OsMOND's The Folk Singer & Field Recording by Kevin Breit & the Upper York Mandolin Orchestra

LeE HARVeY OsMOND

Tom Wilson is one third of Canada’s best alt-country bands, Blackie & the Rodeo Kings. But when he’s not recording or performing with them, he hooks up with Josh Finlayson (Skydiggers) and Michael Timmins (Cowboy Junkies) called, with intentional humor, LeE HARVeY OsMOND. Established in 2009, they consider themselves creators of psychedelic folk, a definition that says everything and nothing about the music they write. (NPR has called their music “acid folk.”) Their latest release is called, The Folk Sinner (Latent).

An intentionally moody record, it's a blend of country-goth with good helping of Mississippi mud to sound “psychedelic.” This is particularly true for "Easy Living" with its steady beat and space-age guitar solo. Tom Wilson's vocals can either frighten or seduce. He has a remarkable capacity to keep you guessing on several tracks, especially "Honey Runnin." But the opening track, written by Gordon Lightfoot, sets the tone for the entire record. “Oh Linda” by Lightfoot is a straightforward cover version of the original: just Wilson and Double Bass accompaniment by Sean Dean. "Oh gal don't ya do me wrong or I'm gonna sing you a goodbye song." Lightfoot offers the threat; Wilson makes good on it.

Wilson offers a sad lament on "Break Your Body" that sounds like a James Brown ballad with its steady pulse on piano and his use of falsetto vocal. It's one of the strongest cuts on the record, nicely paced and nicely mixed. “Deep Water”, written by Josh Finlayson closes the album and it's an inspired choice featuring the second of two duets with Margo Timmins from Cowboy Junkies. It's subtle colours featuring steel guitar, makes it a less-menacing song, unlike the other tracks whose atmosphere is dark and heavy. But the weight of the music is often lifted on some of the up-tempo tracks such as “Devil's Load” which is a great blues number with vibes, no less. Considering that this is only the band’s second album, LeE HARVeY OsMOND is one group deserving wider recognition in spite of the fact that they aren’t a working band.

Missouri Waltz: Talley’s Folly

Matt Friedman, the narrator of Talley’s Folly, explains to the audience at the top of the show that what we’re about to witness between him and Sally Tally in the dilapidated, once-extravagant boathouse on her family’s property in Lebanon, Missouri will be a waltz, as he coaxes his year-long courtship of her (which he has conducted mostly from his home in St. Louis, by letter) to a proposal of marriage. And by the end of ninety-seven intermissionless minutes he does indeed get her to say yes, but the journey turns out to be considerably rockier than he’d anticipated. Lanford Wilson’s 1979 play, set in 1944, is the tale of two people with secrets that have wounded them so ferociously that Sally, and for many years Matt (until he met Sally, on vacation, at a Lebanon dance), have preferred to stave off any hope of romance rather than reveal them and risk further heartbreak. Matt is a European-Jewish émigré in his forties who works as an accountant; his secret concerns the tragic story of his family. Sally, a nurse who tends to the war casualties at the local hospital, is a left-wing intellectual in a family of conservative family-owning bigots (they think of Matt as “the Jew” and find his politics even more dangerous than FDR’s). She hold so tight to her secret that we don’t learn it until moments before the finale, when the play turns at last into the love waltz Matt promised us it would be.

American Dreams & British Nightmares: Jim O'Brien's The Dressmaker (1988)

Thanks to The Beatles, Liverpool has become something of a tourist haven, apparently second only to the Tower of London for sightseers in England. Ironically, the city's history is hardly a cause for celebration. For while Liverpool spawned The Beatles, The Beatles ultimately wished to break free of this seaport locale. Even so, one could always hear the character of Liverpool in their songs, the sense that as things could always get worse, they would find ways to make things better. That goal is also a characteristic germane to the city, a quality Alistair Cooke once described as "cheerful pessimism." The cause of that "cheerful pessimism," though, came directly from Liverpool's disparate economic and cultural life which begins in the 18th Century, when the slave trade from Africa became mixed with the cotton market from North America. When abolition became law in 1807, slaves were not allowed to land in England, but since cotton was sent to manufacturing cities like Manchester and Birmingham by railroad, other immigrants made their way to the jobs.

By 1820, the dockyards and the Cotton Exchange attracted close to 160,000 Irish immigrants from across the channel to make the kind of money they couldn't make in Ireland. But the Irish would also become the despised in Liverpool and were the victims of both unrest and hopelessness. During the Depression years, with the merger of the Cunard and White Stripe shipping lines, the luxury liner traffic was being rerouted to Southhampton. This decision changed the industrial base of Liverpool diminishing their economic status. The only way that they could retain their former status was by becoming the anchor of the country's naval operations. But that change inadvertently created an adverse effect when relentless German air raids lead to massive destruction. By 1941, thousands were killed and the city was reduced to rubble. After the war, it took years to relocate over ten thousand persons.

Liverpool in the Forties

During that period, Liverpool became part of a metropolitan area called Merseyside with a population of about a million and a quarter. When the U.S. entered the war, Americans were stationed there – and they were a source of great fascination for Liverpudlians. Given the hardship they'd endured under German bombs, the brash and stylish manner of Yankee soldiers represented something quite hopeful and exotic for locals to look up to and admire. "The people living within these confines saw the seaport as a threshold on the horizon," Beatles biographer Bob Spitz wrote. "Beyond it, an invisible world beckoned. Not a day passed when detachments of tall-masted ships weren't diligently on the move, bound for one of the globe's imagined corners." But during the mid-Forties, through all the devastation, the rationing, and the nightly rain of bombs and casualties, England's dreaming hadn't really grown beyond surviving on the obliterated streets in which they lived. So when the Americans came calling then, they were the objects of derision as much as envy. They were also a reminder of everything that Liverpool didn't have, even if they represented what Liverpudlians might truly want.

Neglected Gem #39: Emporte-Moi (Set Me Free) (1999)

Hanna Cohn (Karine Vanasse), the adolescent protagonist of Set Me Free (Emporte-moi) by the Québecois filmmaker Léa Pool, is tender and angry, needy and rebellious by turns. This marvelous film, set mostly in Montreal in the early sixties, begins with Hanna’s first period, and it’s about her attempts to figure herself out. It feels autobiographical – movies are crucial to Hanna’s efforts to define herself (she falls in love with Anna Karina as the prostitute Nana in Godard’s My Life to Live), and at the end, a beloved teacher (Nancy Huston, who worked on the screenplay with Pool and two other women) lets her borrow a Super 8 camera for the summer and she uses it to record her life. It seems we’re meant to see these impressionistic images as the genesis of the childhood portrait that would emerge, eventually, in the form of Set Me Free.

Hanna lives with her Jewish father (Miki Manojlovic), her Catholic mother (Pascale Bussières), and her older brother Paul (Alexandre Mérineau) in a cramped, ugly apartment that can only be accessed through the fire escape. They live on top of one another, and on the way in or out, they’re likely to run into the landlady, who makes unwelcome personal comments about them and demands the rent, which is forever late. Hanna’s mother works long days at a sewing machine in a small clothing factory, and when she finally gets home, her husband, who has trouble holding onto jobs, expects her to type his poems, which is how he defines himself. They’ve never married, and though Hanna declares her illegitimacy proudly in school, along with her official lack of a religious identity (since Catholicism is passed down through the father and Judaism through the mother) – she offers these as proof of free thinking and bohemianism in opposition to the conventional bourgeois culture – you get the sense that marriage is actually something David, her father, has held back from her mother, as a way of punishing her. He calls her terrible names and slaps her when he’s frustrated with how his writing is going (and it never seems to be going well). Both Hanna’s parents are very complicated: he’s a Holocaust survivor and dreadfully moody and demanding; she’s depressed and takes pills, either to put herself to sleep or, on occasion, in attempts at suicide. It’s a hardscrabble, difficult home, both for Hanna and for Paul (whom she’s close to). Officially it’s a Jewish home – David says the prayer before the Sabbath meal – but it doesn’t feel like one, because the mother’s presence imputes a distinctly French Catholic aura to it. And when the kids aren’t sufficiently quiet and serious during supper while their father listens to reports of the Middle East conflict on the radio, he launches his favorite complaint: that they’re a family of Mongols, Gentiles who don’t understand or respect their Jewish roots.

Three Neglected Gems (#36-37-38): Citizen Ruth (1996), Lila Says (2004) & Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (2005)

Laura Dern stars in Alexander Payne's Citizen Ruth (1996)

From Japan's Akira Kurosawa (Seven Samurai) to Italy's Marco Bellocchio (Good Morning, Night), the best filmmakers often function as commentators and observers of their country's foibles, politics and attitudes. Whether it be the razor sharp satire of Spanish director Luis Buñuel (The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie) or the timely and relevant dramas of French filmmaker Olivier Assayas (Cold Water, Summer Hours), those films educate, edify and illuminate the issues that roil and preoccupy a specific society, allowing uninformed viewers to glean a deeper understanding of what's going on below the sensationalist newspaper headlines and quickly tossed off news reports. Here are three films: two which revolve around the social politics, respectively, of the United States and France and another that gives a nod to a classic English novel while also examining the realities of Britain's celebrity culture.

Veronica Mars and the Promise of Life after TV

Kristen Bell, the once and future star of Veronica Mars

One topic that television fans never tire of – and I count myself among them – are favourite shows cancelled too soon. My own list is long, and grows with every passing year. A couple of years ago I wrote about five such shows, and I could add many more: Terriers, Awake, Party Down, Better off Ted, How to Make it in America, or the criminally underappreciated Knights of Prosperity. The reason why it’s fun to talk up the shows that never make it out of their second seasons (or even sometimes their first) is that they were cancelled at the top of their game. They had no time to stumble or even hint at their weak spots. Two standard-bearers of the brilliant-but-cancelled genre – Judd Apatow’s Freaks and Geeks and Joss Whedon’s Firefly – were barely given the chance get their bearings before their respective networks pulled their plugs.

But the thunderous success of Rob Thomas’ recent Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for a proposed Veronica Mars movie has shifted my thoughts to a darker, less congenial question: what about those beloved series that lived too long, the ones whose sublime early seasons begin to decay under the weight of their own continuity?

Don Draper for the Revolution: No (2012)

Gael Garcia Bernal stars in No

Gael Garcia Bernal has the physical equipment of a young romantic lead and the skill and emotional depth of a real actor. In the Chilean film No, Bernal plays René, an ad man who has returned home after some time in exile (to Mexico) and become a success designing TV commercials for a soft drink called Free. It’s 1988, the fifteenth year of the Pinochet dictatorship, and the government, looking to finally achieve international respectability, has agreed to a national election meant to certify Pinochet’s legitimacy as president. A “yes” vote will translate into another eight years in office for the General; those who want him gone can vote “no.” The eyes of the world will be on the election, but the government assumes it won’t have to rig the results; even if enough people had the courage to vote against Pinochet, it’s taken on faith that after fifteen years of official propaganda, anyone who isn’t terrified of change will be indifferent to the possibility. But just to show that everything is on the up and up, for twenty-seven days, fifteen minutes of TV programming will be set aside, late in the evening, for the opposition party to make its case. As one of Pinochet’s men explains, the government will also have fifteen minutes every night, as well as every other minute of broadcast time leading up to the election. René, whose boss is working on the government’s nightly fifteen minutes, volunteers his services to the opposition.

The Perils of a Double Life in the Spy Thrillers of Charles Cumming

Author Charles Cumming.

What do you think spies are: priests, saints and martyrs? They’re a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes pansies, sadists and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives. Do you think they sit like monks in London balancing the rights and wrongs?

– John le Carré, The Spy Who Came In from the Cold. 

The good spies are invariably introspective and thoughtful.

– Charles Cumming.

Lying and duplicity are essential traits if a spy is to practice his tradecraft of espionage. As a result, he could be like Alec Milius, the central character of the Scottish writer, Charles Cumming’s debut novel, A Spy by Nature (2001) and his later book, The Spanish Game (2006). Milius is a self-absorbed opportunist whose motivation, rather than being ideological, is financial gain and the “kick and the buzz” from the adrenalin that flows from being in the game. Similarly, the self-serving CIA agent, Miles Coolidge, in Typhoon (2008) disregards official CIA policy by organizing clandestine terrorist attacks in order to destabilize China on the eve of the Beijing Olympics. Yet one of the many virtues of reading a Cumming’s thriller is his multifaceted depiction of intelligent agents. Take, for example, Joe Lennox, the British agent operating under deep cover in Hong Kong in Typhoon. Despite his criticism of Bush and Blair for the fiasco in Iraq, Lennox is a patriot who believes in Queen and Country and the importance of safeguarding Western values. Thomas Kell, who has been sacked from SIS (MI6) because of a torture scandal in Kabul and the protagonist of Cumming’s most recent novel, A Foreign Country (St. Martin’s Press, 2012), is equally a complex figure. Like all of Cumming’s spies, Kell cannot conceive of an alternative to working in the secret world. Nonetheless, he is disturbed by his own passive complicity in the aggressive CIA interrogation of a terrorist suspect and his willingness to agree to the outsourcing of torture so that others could do the dirty work. When given another opportunity to interrogate a kidnapper who knows the whereabouts of an innocent man whose life is at stake, Kell redeems himself. He conducts an interview à la the real life former FBI officer, Ali Soufan, who managed to achieve astonishing intelligence results by “rapport building” and treating the terrorist suspect with respect rather than resorting to aggressive methods that Soufan considered were often counterproductive. Kell’s interrogation similarly achieves desirable results and demonstrates that agents can do their work without trashing the principles that some of them profess to believe in. He is simultaneously critical of leftists who demonstrate “their own unimpeachable moral conduct, at the expense of the very people who were striving to keep them safe in their beds.”

Working in the shadows where duplicity is a way of life does carry a high price, particularly for those who do not possess a moral compass. In Spy by Nature that focuses on industrial espionage, Alec Milius is given his first assignment at a British oil company to establish a personal relationship with two American CIA officers working undercover at a rival oil company and feed them disinformation about the Caspian Sea area. They in turn try to turn him into a double agent with the lure of a huge amount of money. Because of his greed, he recklessly overplays his hand by participating in a sting operation against the CIA. Disastrous results ensue not only because he earns the enmity of both agencies – he becomes the convenient scapegoat for SIS when British relations with the “Cousins” become strained – but he likely caused three civilian deaths, one of them is his former fiancé. He also has no qualms about risking the life of his only friend, Saul Ricken, by entrusting his secrets to him as a guarantee against CIA retaliation. 

The Revisionist: Redgrave Plays Eisenberg

Vanessa Redgrave and Jesse Eisenberg in The Revisionist (All photos by Sandra Coudert)

Jesse Eisenberg is one lucky bastard: he managed to get Vanessa Redgrave, arguably the greatest living actress – certainly she’s in the top three or four – to star opposite him in his own play. The Revisionist, which is being produced by Rattlestick Playwrights Theater at the Cherry Lane Theater in Greenwich Village, is a two-hander in which David, a young American writer who’s having trouble doing the revisions his publisher has requested on his second book, a sci-fi novel, visits Maria, his grandfather’s cousin and a Holocaust survivor, in Szczecin, Poland. She’s overjoyed to see him, eager to play host and show him around the city; he’s just hoping that some peace and quiet in a remote setting will propel him through his writer’s block. He’s the world’s worst house guest – not just a vegetarian (a fact he neglected to mention when he invited himself for a visit) but uninterested in food, so the dinner she’s prepared for him on his first night goes unappreciated. (He just wants to go to sleep.) He finds any kind of noise distracting; he’s caustic, impatient, judgmental and completely self-absorbed. And his treatment of her vodka-swigging taxi driver friend (and sometime lover) Zenon (Daniel Oreskes) – whom he finds washing her feet, a task Zenon apparently performed for the dead mother whose loss he still grieves – is condescending. Moreover, David is wound so tight that he keeps retreating to his room to pry open the window and sneak a few tokes from the stash of weed he managed to get through customs. Only when Maria alludes to her Holocaust experience – her entire family was murdered by the Nazis while her babysitter hid her until the end of the war – does David show any interest in her.

John Neumeier’s Nijinsky: As Brilliant and Mad as its Subject

Guillaume Côté in Nijinsky. (Photo by Erik Tomasson)

I am aware that saying I am over the moon mad for a ballet about a dancer who spent half his life in and out of insane asylums sounds, well, a little crazy. But go ahead, commit me. Because I am certifiably nuts about Nijinsky, choreographer John Neumeier’s two-act homage to the great Ballets Russes dancer who tragically lost his mind in 1919, at the age of 29, after only 10 years of blazing like a comet across the stage. This ballet is my amour fou.

I saw it twice earlier this month during its recent run at Toronto’s Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts as part of the National Ballet of Canada’s spring season and each time the ballet was a revelation to me. Neumeier captures the epic sweep of the singular dancer’s triumphs and tragedy and as such his ballet is a masterpiece. It held me mesmerized, start to finish. 

A Pleasant Shock to the Senses: Randy Newman's Born Again (1979)

In August 1979, Bob Dylan had just confounded his fans with Slow Train Coming, a full-blown announcement of his coming out as a born-again Christian. That same month, another Jewish performer would also be born again – only not as a Christian. Born Again was the title of a Randy Newman album which might have gone just as far as Dylan's had in alienating his most loyal fans except that it vanished before a whisper of debate could be stirred. Where Dylan has always been an omnipresent figure, an ever-changing undefinable force in the world, Newman is largely invisible to mass culture (except as the guy who writes music for Pixar movies). Dylan is also a performer who is the sum of the masks he wears, where a hidden history lurks behind each face, and behind every recorded album. Newman wears a collection of masks, too, but they are a different set of disguises than Dylan's. Newman's masks (like Woody Allen's) suggest more the harmless invisibility of the nebbish, but they act instead as a veil for the clever satirist. Newman has always been an outsider who with his trojan horse quietly slipped inside.

With a collection of tunes that might be defined as misanthropic 'comedy songs,' Newman took the popular song on Born Again to the edges of cruelty, as if to test the audience's ability to listen to them. Once again using the voice of the untrustworthy narrator, as he had in previous records like Sail Away (1972) and Good Old Boys (1974), Randy Newman (like Dylan) worked against the grain of mass audience approval. But (unlike Dylan), Newman really had no mass audience to reject him – except that a year earlier, he briefly found one with a notorious hit single called "Short People." Kicking off his otherwise lacklustre Little Criminals (1977) record, "Short People" is a harmless ditty, but it ended up epitomizing Newman's brand of satire and working against it. An obvious broadside attack on the absurdity of prejudice, few, in the end, read this catchy little number that way. Besides his small legion of fans, a whole new audience came to Newman because of "Short People" – and they made him briefly a household name for all the wrong reasons. (As with Frank Zappa's "Valley Girl," the audience responded as if it were a naughty novelty song.) But if his new listeners were enthralled with the narrow-minded protagonist of "Short People," a bigot who begins his ridiculous manifesto over a galloping piano ("Short People got no reason to live"), others were severely pissed off with what they heard. Who else but Newman could write a song about a guy expressing paranoia about tiny folks? The film Freaks did so unintentionally back in 1932, but that movie was hardly a satire; there was a weird sentimentality in the way the movie played on our sympathies for circus dwarfs and pinheads. "Short People" was at the other end of the spectrum. The character Newman created here was pathetic, much like the stalker in his "Suzanne," or the voyeur in "You Can Leave Your Hat On."

A Contemporary Classic: David Bowie's The Next Day

Not too many years ago David Bowie was the artist to watch. His dynamic musical career continually offered listeners something different at almost every turn. Not content to just release “yet another record,” Bowie always challenged his audience. We never knew what to expect from album to album, each as unique as the last. Every fan eagerly awaited his next move and then, after a world tour called Reality, he decided to call it quits in 2004. Afterwards, he made the occasional surprise appearance with the band Arcade Fire, or turned up at some fashion show. But the fans were still watching, just not necessarily expecting a new album any time soon.

All that changed on January 8^th, 2013, Bowie’s 66^th birthday with the surprise release of a new single called “Where Are We Now?” a moody ballad that walks us nostalgically through the streets of Berlin, circa 1977. To me it sounded like “Thursday’s Child” from the album, hours (1999). But with the release of the single and an album to follow, Bowie was clearly back in the music business once again. Foregoing any auto-tuning, Bowie’s vocal on “Where Are We Now?" is a little raw. He sounds older and I respect the fact that he’s not hiding behind the mask of Ziggy Stardust or the Thin White Duke. This is Bowie in 2013, after some health issues, quietly revealing him in the first of many songs written over the last couple of years.

Kansas Flatlands: Oz the Great and Powerful

James Franco stars in Sam Raimi's Oz the Great and Powerful, now in theaters

There is no good reason why a fresh movie spinoff of The Wizard of Oz shouldn’t be an eminently doable proposition. The new Disney film Oz the Great and Powerful – a “prequel” directed by Sam Raimi and starring James Franco as a two-bit carny magician who is whisked away to the magical land of Oz and, after proving himself through a series of heroic challenges, installs himself as the Wizard – has inspired a fair amount of anticipatory derision, and even some horrified shudders, as if it could only be an act of sacrilege, ever since it was announced. While the 1939 movie starring Judy Garland is rightly considered a classic, its status as a holy relic, like that of It’s a Wonderful Life and A Charlie Brown Christmas, has less to do with its inherent virtues than with the saintly reverence a lot of people seem inclined to feel towards anything they watched on TV ten times when they were kids. Years ago, this kind of living room repeat-viewing exposure was a rare phenomenon, but now that cable movie channels and home video have been a fixture of American life for so long that people who grew up on them are reaching maturity and getting jobs writing about movies, we’re seeing beloved-classic status automatically assigned to some real pieces of shit: movies from Top Gun, Caddyshack, Three Amigos, and even Sneakers. 

How would L. Frank Baum, the author of the original Oz books, feel about the idea that his masterwork was something more fragile and delicate than another potential franchise tent pole? He’d probably feel that he worked his hands to the bone to grow that tree and he didn’t need anyone getting in the way of it being properly sapped. Baum was an aspiring actor and playwright whose dreams of the stage had ruined him financially before he finally sat down and started writing children’s books. He wrote fourteen Oz books in all – the first great, long-running modern franchise of children’s fiction.  Baum charmed readers partly by using a theatrical ham’s instinct for showmanship as a substitute for the “mythic” qualities of European fairy tales. (Once Baum struck gold, he was quick to adapt his own work to the stage, and toured with a show that utilized film, slides, and live performers that promised a “travelogue” of Oz.) 

Judy Garland and Ray Bolger, off to see the Wizard in 1939

Pauline Kael wrote of the 1939 movie that Bert Lahr and Ray Bolger were so memorable as the Cowardly Lion and the Scarecrow because they understood “that the roles are vaudeville-comedy turns." The characters, and what the right kind of performers can bring to them, are at the core of Oz’s appeal, but every screen attempt to recapture that appeal – the 1978 movie of the Broadway musical The Wiz, Disney’s previous attempt to reboot the franchise with the 1985 Return to Oz, and the 2007 TV miniseries Tin Man – have gone big on concept at the expense of the characters. Much the same thing happens in Oz the Great and Powerful, but where some of the previous Oz films at least counted as honest failures by talented people committed to something they’d overthought, this movie doesn’t really have a concept so much as a marketing plan. It has a flat, defeated, half-hearted feeling that’s a little reminiscent of David Lynch’s Dune – another case of a gifted, idiosyncratic director “adapting” unusual material for a film that he has been made to understand isn’t really his project.

Critic's Notes & Frames, Part III

The Rolling Stones often had great B-sides on their singles ("Sad Day," "Long Long While," "Who's Driving Your Plane?"). "Child of the Moon," which backed "Jumpin' Jack Flash," is a particular favourite. It was their last bit of psychedelia before heading into the harder rock and country blues of Beggars Banquet. A contemporary band, Radon Daughters, have done the song justice by turning its acid tinged balladry into a tough piece of baroque pop.

Stompin' Tom Connors: An Appreciation

When Stompin' Tom Connors died last Wednesday at the age of 77, just about every Canadian could quote one of his songs. That reward alone was enough for Connors whose final statement, issued March 7, 2013, thanked the fans not just for his success but also for his identity. "I want all my fans, past, present, or future, to know that without you, there would have not been any Stompin' Tom." Ironically, in the first volume of his autobiography published in 1995, Connors states, "I didn't set out to create a special image. It was created for me, partially by the media. And, to be honest, I have sometimes enjoyed playing along."

Image aside, Connors had a unique ability to write songs about ordinary people and make them extraordinary. He wrote about miners, bus drivers, tobacco pickers and hockey Moms. He wrote about small town Canada as if he was born in the very city or town he sang about, ("Sudbury Saturday Night") or he could express in no uncertain terms the pain of picking tobacco ("Tillsonburg"), a job he actually held for a couple weeks when he was a teenager. For a musical map of Stompin Tom, click here.

Staging Dementia: MTC’s The Other Place

John Schiappa and Laurie Metcalf in The Other Place, at the Manhattan Theatre Club (Photo: Joan Marcus)

Putting us in the perspective of a character whose point of view is skewed in some way by radical physical or psychological distress poses a tricky challenge for playwrights and directors. (It’s the motivation for the first experiments in expressionism in the movies: the plot of the first expressionistic film, Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, turns out to be a paranoid fantasy concocted by an institutionalized madman.) Arthur Kopit tried it back in the seventies with Wings, which attempted to sketch the world as a woman who’s had a stroke experiences it, and both he and the actress, Constance Cummings, received rave notices – though the fact that the play is revived so seldom suggests that it wasn’t as successful as critics believed at the time. (I didn’t think Cummings was very good either.) Playwright Sharr White and actress Laurie Metcalf have received the same kind of praise for The Other Place, which closed two weeks ago at the Manhattan Theatre Club’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre. The play concerns Juliana, a woman in her early fifties with a rare kind of dementia that not only causes paranoid outbursts – the first occuring at a medical conference where Juliana, a research scientist for a pharmaceutical company, is (ironically) pitching a new neurological drug – but also provokes her into believing that her husband, Ian (Bill Pullman, in an extraordinarily sensitive performance), is cheating on her with a younger woman and planning to divorce her and, most dramatically, that their teenage daughter, who disappeared a decade ago, has contacted her.

American Composer: Frank Zappa's Understanding America

“It's all one album,” Frank Zappa once told journalist Jerry Hopkins in characterizing his work during an interview for Rolling Stone magazine in 1968. With only three releases to his credit, and long before he'd come to accumulate close to 100 records of satirical rock, orchestral, ballet, electronic and jazz scores, Zappa already fully grasped the “conceptual continuity” of his project/object. “I could take a razor blade and cut them apart and put it together again in a different order,” he said. “It still would make one piece of music you could listen to.” In 1993, a couple of years before he would die from prostate cancer, Zappa followed through on that suggestion. He took a razor blade to his back catalogue with the purpose of creating a caustic, but passionate musical portrait of the nation that produced him. Understanding America is a two-CD musical anthology unceremoniously put out last fall by Zappa Records through the distribution of Universal (who recently re-released, with huge sonic improvements, his large body of work). But given the little fanfare provided its arrival, you might as well call it The Mystery Disc. The CD comes with a stark 1975 black-and-white photo of the composer on the front cover, a didactic title, no track listing on the back cover, no accounting of the various musicians who play on it, no background notes on the songs (including which year they were recorded and what albums they first appeared on), and scant explanation concerning the context of the new album except for cryptic pronouncements that it's a record about “love, peace, justice and the American way.” (Its very design prompted a friend of mine who saw it to ask: “Is this a bootleg?”)

If the proposed audience for Understanding America is the Zappa fan, it might make sense to avoid redundancies by leaving out information that's already been absorbed into the DNA of the initiated. But what will the uninitiated make of this release? Some fans have already panned the album on websites and chat rooms complaining that it uses the old reverb-drenched digital mixes instead of the new cleaner and dryer ones (but what other mixes would he use since Zappa sequenced this release while he was still alive?). They're also arguing about the inclusions of some songs and the omissions of others (as if this were yet another 'greatest hits' package). How about the new listeners to Zappa's music? Since it's unlikely to get reviewed by contemporary pop critics, Understanding America not only doesn't stand a chance of being understood, it likely won't be realized either. And that would be a huge loss. Drawing from a vast and varied selection of Zappa's compositions, Understanding America is a musical jig-saw puzzle piecing together a political heritage embroidered with assassinations, deep racial divisions, religious zealotry, cultural elitism, and witch hunts. (The album traces chronologically – with a couple of detours – the dramatic changes in the political and social landscape from the era of Lyndon Johnson to the end of the first Bush presidency.) It also provides a unified field theory of Zappa's disparate selection of songs. Understanding America gives listeners a perceptively potent framework; one in which to examine the conflicting characteristics of American life, as well as providing a completely new contextual ground in which to experience Frank Zappa's music. One of the great ironies of Understanding America, however, is that the work included on it ended up embraced more by dissidents behind the original Iron Curtain (who even did prison time for embracing it) than by Americans deprived of his music by radio stations who censored it. Understanding America sets out to test the strengths of American democracy, too, by holding the country to the promises held in its founding documents by primarily shedding light on its failings. And because of Zappa's openness to such diverse musical genres, he draws from a huge storehouse of self-expression to do so.

Subterranean Mysteries: Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache Procedurals

Some feeling that had once between human and natural had twisted. Become grotesque. Had turned sour and corrosive until its container had eaten away. Until the human barely existed.

– Louise Penny, The Cruellest Month.

Louise Penny is a master at articulating and exploring corrosive emotions – jealously, bitterness, hatred and revenge – as well as joy and grief. The resolution of a murder by Chief Inspector of Homicide, Armand Gamache and his team, which she expertly accomplishes, is what garners to Penny legions of readers. What I find most compelling about her work is not discovering the identity of the murderer but how she explores the range of emotions in the character of the empathetic Gamache. She goes even further in examining the emotional dynamics between him, his team and his superiors, and the captivating denizens of the hamlet of Three Pines in the Quebec Eastern Townships. They feature in all of Penny’s eight novels except her most recent, The Beautiful Mystery (Minotaur, 2012).

In her debut novel, Still Life, Penny reveals a piece of information about Gamache that powerfully reverberates throughout the subsequent novels. He broke rank by investigating a senior officer in the Sûreté du Quebec who had ordered the murder of natives. The officer was convicted and he and his friends on the force are determined to destroy Gamache. Although Gamache has achieved an almost perfect record in solving homicides, he will never be promoted and has been excluded from the confidences of the top inner circle, something that Gamache fully understands given that actions have consequences. Nonetheless, he is a contented man, happily married and maintains a good relationship with his adult son and daughter. Penny hints in the first two novels that there may be agents de provocateurs in Gamache’s team who are working to undermine him. By the third novel, The Cruellest Month, I found the tension so gripping that I skipped ahead not to find out the identity of the killer but to those passages about how this subplot would play out. Then I was able to return my attention to murder investigation itself.

Being Woody Guthrie

Woody Guthrie gets a shoe shine, 1943 (Photo: Eric Schaal/Time & Life Pictures)

When I was a boy, I got a guitar. My Mom took me to Viola Music Centre and paid for lessons. They sold her a cheap acoustic sunburst that looked nice but had neck problems. No kid should ever have to learn on a guitar that would be better used in an archery competition. I think it was called a Capri. It may even still be in the basement of my Mom’s house, but it’s not good for much. I learned very little from the lessons. I wanted to play folk music, and they taught me “When the Caissons Go Rolling Along”. I wanted to sing Peter, Paul & Mary songs, and they taught me how to pick one-string melodies from a book that I don’t ever want to think about. I wanted to be Woody Guthrie, but I didn’t know it yet.

After hearing Peter, Paul & Mary’s version of “Blowin’ in the Wind” we tracked down the original. I well recall stopping at a music store in some small Bruce County town and when we walked in, the song playing was “To Ramona” and Dylan’s voice disturbed my Grandfather: “Ramona / Come closer / Shut softly your watery eyes…” When he got back to the car he teased and mocked that voice. Little did he know that the LP he’d helped me pick out was by the same singer. He’d hear a lot of that voice for the next few years. I didn’t want to be Bob Dylan, but it turned out he just wanted to be Woody Guthrie too. 

Getting Un-Surrounded: Glenn Frankel on The Searchers

Jeffrey Hunter and John Wayne, in a scene from John Ford's The Searchers

Among the autuerist critics who re-evaluated the reputations of American studio directors in the 1960s, and the new generation of filmmakers who created a renaissance in American moviemaking in the 1970s, no Hollywood film casts a more intimidating shadow than John Ford’s 1956 Western The Searchers. Legend has it that the movie was overlooked in its time, only to be rediscovered by a discerning group of artists and movie lovers as, in the words of J. Hoberman, one of the “few Hollywood movies so thematically rich and so historically resonant they may be considered part of American literature.” As Glenn Frankel acknowledges in his fine new book, The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend, the mythology around the film’s rediscovery is a little overblown. No, it wasn’t nominated for any Oscars, if that’s your idea of the true credit due a work of film art. But it wasn’t a flop; it did pretty well at the box office, and the reviews were mostly good. If there’s anything scandalous about the response to the movie when it was new, it’s only that critics and audience seemed to regard it “merely” as another John Ford-John Wayne Western, albeit a good one with an epic scope. The general consensus among those who came along to acclaim the film ten or fifteen years after its initial release is that it is so much more.

Ripper Street: A Fresh Take on Old Crimes

Jerome Flynn, Matthew Macfadyen and Adam Rothenberg star in Ripper Street

You can’t swing a remote control these days without hitting a period drama. From Downton Abbey, to Mad Men, to Copper, it seems that TV producers and TV audiences are interested in stories that happened ‘back then.’ The dividing line of these period offerings is whether the television produced mobilizes feelings of nostalgia and wants us to long for those times, or whether the stories are told precisely to disturb that warm and fuzzy feeling for the days of hats, cigars, and clear social structures. The new BBC/BBC America co-production, Ripper Street, falls firmly into this second category. The Victorian-era crime drama opens a door into a distinctly gruesome version of Conan Doyle’s London: a re-imagining which upsets and reconfigures our set notions of the past. It is easy to imagine Holmes and Watson moving about in hansom cabs, solving their own mysteries just five urban miles west of Ripper Street's Whitechapel district. Mind you, I was inadvertently well-prepared to imagine just that, having recently finished Anthony Horowitz’s novel The House of Silk, a faithful and gritty take on Conan Doyle’s characters and setting. Horowitz tells a dark story perfectly in sync with the spirit of Richard Warlow’s Ripper Street – both tell period stories geared towards an audience willing to glimpse just a little deeper in the depths of human depravity than previous generations.

It’s 1889, and London’s East End is still reeling from the effects of the grisly Jack the Ripper killings. Jack has gone silent, but the repercussions of those murders are still emerging: both for a traumatized population and for the policemen who failed to catch him. Such is the setting of Ripper Street. And it is gripping stuff.

Bad Things Happen: Arnaldur Indridason’s Black Skies

Nothing comes without consequences - Charles Ferguson's 2010 Inside Job.

In a 2008 interview with the CBC’s Michael Enright, the Swedish novelist, Henning Mankell, commented that the vast majority of lawbreakers are not evil but that they get caught up in evil circumstances. I thought about Mankell’s musing while reading the Icelandic novelist, Arnaldur Indridason’s most recent police procedural (published in English) Black Skies (Harvill Secker, 2012) since greed, fear of public disgrace and revenge for a terrible injustice committed years earlier provide the motivation for the murders committed. In Arnaldur’s (in Iceland everyone is known by his first name) oeuvre, he is primarily concerned about domestic and social issues, and how the harsh Icelandic climate can affect people. Bad things happen when people make ill-considered decisions. He does feature psychopaths but they are frequently murdered, sometimes decades later, as a result of their incessant abuse of others.

From Jar City (2004) to Hypothermia (2009), Arnaldur’s brooding but resourceful loner, Erlander, is the senior member of the police investigation team. Burdened with guilt because of an incident in which he lost contact with his younger brother in a storm, compounded by having abandoned his wife and two young children years later, he tries in Silence of the Grave to explain to his almost comatose drug-addled daughter who has tracked him down after over twenty years that “he had been battling against that blizzard for all his life and all the passage of time did was to intensify it.” Yet in his professional life, Erlander draws upon that pain to crack open cases that were perpetrated years earlier in Silence and The Draining Lake or relive his personal tragedy in Voices so that he can salvage his daughter’s life in the present. He is assisted by the capable Elinborg, who successfully juggles her career with managing a family, and by Sigurdur Oli, a graduate of criminology from an American university, even though he is hampered by a stiff-necked personality with rigid attitudes. When Outrage begins with the murder of a young man with a rape drug in his possession, Erlander is on leave to wrestle with personal demons and the case is assigned to Elinborg, who is particularly astute in investigating cases of sexual abuse. At the same time that she is working on that investigation, Sigurdur Oli is at the centre of two cases that are the focus in Black Skies.

A Puzzle of a Play: The Glass Menagerie at American Repertory Theater

Zachary Quinto, Cherry Jones, and Celia Keenan-Bolger in The Glass Menagerie (All photos by Michael J. Lutch)

The audience stood and cheered at the end of the performance I attended of The Glass Menagerie at Cambridge’s American Repertory Theater, and a few weeks later Ben Brantley in The New York Times made it sound like one for the ages. I wish I could echo that proclamation of greatness and the sentiments expressed in that ovation. This production of Tennessee Williams’ beloved play, directed by John Tiffany (represented on Broadway last season by Once, which began at A.R.T.), is performed with tremendous fervency by the four-person cast – Cherry Jones as Amanda, Zachary Quinto and Celia Keenan-Bolger as her children, Tom and Laura, and Brian J. Smith as the Gentleman Caller. Nico Muhly has supplied lovely incidental piano music, Natasha Katz’s lighting is gorgeous, and the non-realist set design by Bob Crowley (who also did the costumes) is lyrical and evocative. An abstracted pyramid of scaffolding stands in for the fire escape attached to the Wingfields’ Depression-era St. Louis apartment, and a reflecting pool with a quarter-moon dipped in it provides a downstage frame for the action. I have no idea what that pool is supposed to signify (Brantley’s explanation, that it’s “the abyss of being lost,” doesn’t make sense to me in terms of the text, and it isn’t even good English), but every now and then one or another of the characters wanders to the edge and sways toward it, as if in danger of tumbling in. That’s one example of the movement provided by Steven Hoggett, who collaborated with Tiffany on Once as well. I loved the strangeness of the movement in Once, but it was really choreography; here it intrudes on the play, and the actors are so obviously not dancers that it feels awkward, even occasionally embarrassing. I felt the same way about some of the staging, too, like the way Laura enters at the top of the play and exits at the end through the back of the living-room couch, and the miming of the meals. It’s OK, I guess, that Tiffany wants to do without silverware, but it’s absurd to imagine Tom would eat with his fingers or lick up the last traces of food on his plate. This is nonsense of a specifically A.R.T. brand. And it’s less forgivable that there’s so little on stage in the way of furniture and props that we don’t get to see the photograph of the absent Mr. Wingfield that Tom repeatedly draws our attention to, or that all we’re shown of Laura’s titular glass collection is a single figure.

Love Letter to Days Gone By: Dave Grohl's Sound City

Sound City is a very sentimental look at one of L.A.’s most successful recording studios. It was established in 1969 and became famous for recording some of the best known and biggest selling albums in rock. For Director Dave Grohl it was his connection to the human-side of the recording process, a point that he repeatedly makes throughout the movie. In 1991, his band Nirvana made the trip from Seattle to Van Nuys, California, to record their second album, Nevermind, over a period of 16 days. The result was a smash hit for the band and the studio, which had fallen on tough financial times. For Grohl, who learned that the studio was closing in 2011, it was the last straw. Somebody had to tell the story of the studio and the people behind it, before it was permanently closed. The result is Sound City, a slick, yet informative documentary that covers everything you need to know about the recording business from the technical to the creative.

Sound City, the studio, ranks with some of the most important and beloved recording facilities in music. Considering the history of music, studios often take on a status of importance that is as significant as the music it documents. When you think of Sun Studios for instance, you think of Elvis Presley or Carl Perkins. When you think of Abbey Road in London, you automatically think of The Beatles or Pink Floyd who recorded their best work there. So it is with Sound City whose wide-ranging facility was the home of the Nirvana’s Nevermind, and Fleetwood Mac’s self-titled recording in 1975 with Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks. In fact, Mick Fleetwood met Buckingham just after the release of Buckingham Nicks their acclaimed debut.

For a list of Sound City recordings, click here.