Sleepy Hollow: Who Knew An Apocalypse Could Be So Fun?

Nicole Beharie and Tom Mison star in Fox's Sleepy Hollow

On Monday night, Sleepy Hollow will return from the brief hiatus it took after it aired its fifth episode. With the shadow of Halloween still briefly upon us, this seems as good a time as any to explain why perhaps you should already have been watching Fox's new supernatural thriller. Sleepy Hollow's delightful unpretentious recipe of fantasy, horror, over-the-top melodrama, alternate history and police procedural stands out among the new dramas this fall season. And the light touch the show brings to its subject matter is a welcome respite from our post-Homeland universe of unending, and ever-ramping up, intensity (see: CBS's Hostages) – reminding television viewers that sometimes TV can actually be fun.

The series is ostensibly – but not really – a "modern-day re-telling" of Washington Irving's classic short story "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." Using the name of the 'hero' of "Sleepy Hollow", and some of the setting and the one single memorable detail from Irving's "Rip Van Winkle", Sleepy Hollow takes off from there with gleeful abandon – throwing in some unambiguously apocalyptic overtones just for good measure. Imagine if Grimm and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter had a illegitimate child, and you may have a taste of what Sleepy Hollow often feels like.

One look at the show's pedigree, and none of this would come as any surprise. The résumés of Sleepy Hollow's co-creators, Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, reads like a "best of" list of television at its most entertaining, unselfconscious, and downright giddy. Kurtzman and Orci first worked together back in the 1990s on Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess, and even on Jack of All Trades, Bruce Campbell's delightfully irreverent turn as a turn-of-the-19th-century American spy. But the two hit their zenith with Fringe, the Fox series they co-created with J.J. Abrams (before the two joined him on his big-screen Star Trek adventure), and oversaw for 5 remarkable seasons. In many ways, Sleepy Hollow has more in common with those unapologetically B-television Sam Raimi/Rob Tapert shows of the 90s than Fringe – and it is all the better for it.

Graham Nash: Wild Tales, A Rock and Roll Life

The photographs on the front and back of Wild Tales: A Rock and Roll Life, Graham Nash’s autobiography, were taken by Nash himself, in mirrors. The front cover shows him circa 1972; the back is more current. In between the two photos is another self-portrait, in words. The story begins with him leaving the place of his birth, walking away from his wife, his band (The Hollies), and his bank account and discovering a new world of music with David Crosby and Stephen Stills, new love (Joni Mitchell) and a new bank account in the USA. The text which tells his story is bracketed by two sentences. He begins “It always comes down to the music,” and concludes, some 345 pages later, “it all comes down to the music.” And that is pretty much Graham Nash’s philosophy.

Detente: The Iran Job and Zaytoun

Kevin Sheppard and members of A.S. Shiraz in The Iran Job (2012)

Till Schauder's 2012 picture The Iran Job garnered the award for best documentary entry at this past weekend's Arlington International Film Festival in Massachusetts, and when you watch it you can see why. Schauder gains a rare and privileged look at Iranian life and culture through the most unlikely of perspectives: an American basketball player contracted to play one season for a new team in the country's Super League. The player would be Kevin Sheppard, a gregarious point-guard from St. Croix with an outsized personality and infectious reserve of energy. Having failed to make the NBA out of college, Sheppard followed the route of other athletes in the same position and played professionally in various points abroad. Then, in the fall of 2008, comes an offer from Iran, which (as the movie reminds us with a clip of George W. Bush's “Axis of Evil” speech) is just one of America's most strident opponents on the geopolitical landscape. But, unfazed by the two nations' frozen relationship, Kevin's soon on a plane from the Virgin Islands. The filmmakers follow him to his new digs in the city of Shiraz, where he's to play for the hometown heroes, A.S. Shiraz. And not just play for, but lead to success: he's been brought in (and paid double his Iranian teammates) to take the team out of the cellar where it sits and into the playoffs—something no new team in the league's ever done.

He's got his work cut out for him: his Iranian teammates got no game. They stink up the court so badly during the first scrimmage that a dumbfounded Kevin judges it the worst basketball he's ever participated in. He resolves to turn the team around, but that entails more than improving the Iranians' dribbling and shooting. It means changing their mindset from one that slavishly follows their coach's commands and nothing more, to the open-minded kind that allows for the quick-thinking, free-flowing, improvised play required of exciting basketball. So it is that this narrow narrative focus aptly contains the broader cultural conflict between Western secularization and Iranian theocratic Islam. For the movie's real story is off the court, where Sheppard navigates his way through the unfamiliar terrain of his host country.

The Wild Side: Lou Reed vs Frank Zappa

Lou Reed and Frank Zappa (illustration by Chris Grayson) 

It's curious how we recall certain moments only when death intervenes and creates a rent in our day. The sad passing of Lou Reed this past Sunday, at the age of 71, took me immediately to a typical party I attended as a teenager on a Saturday night back in the early Seventies. There's no significant reason to remember this party and I hadn't even thought about it since the night it happened. But that's what death does. It brings dormant moments back to life. On that evening, it was the first time I became aware of Lou Reed and his band, The Velvet Underground. Their debut album, The Velvet Underground & Nico, just happened to be playing on the turntable and I remember most the nursery rhyme beauty of the opening track, "Sunday Morning," the slashing guitar that droned under the driving beat of "I'm Waiting for the Man," and the pulsating intensity of "Heroin," where John Cale's shrieking violin seemed to create an electric blanket to surround Reed's determined voice and speaking for his heightened nervous system; the sensations brought on by milk-blood flowing in the veins (all of which made Steppenwolf's popular song "The Pusher" seem even sillier and more self-conscious by comparison). I also loved the Celtic melody that underscored "Venus in Furs" while the flattened out timbre of Nico's voice on "All Tomorrow's Parties" made me momentarily forget the party I was attending.

Music, Music, Music: The Most Happy Fella, Merrily We Roll Along and Baritones Unbound

Marnie Parris & Bill Nolte in The Most Happy Fella

Six years passed between Frank Loesser’s hugely successful Guys and Dolls and his next Broadway show, The Most Happy Fella, and the two projects couldn’t have been more different. Guys and Dolls was an effort to find a musical-comedy equivalent for the quirky idiom of Damon Runyon’s stories, where gamblers and gangsters are interchangeable (and basically benign), wear fedoras and pin-stripe suits, and speak without contractions. Loesser’s score is lyrical, but it’s comprised mostly of comic numbers – solos (“Adelaide’s Lament”) duets (“Sue Me,” “Marry the Man Today”) the title song, call-and-response numbers  (“Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Boat” and the two Hot Box showgirl tunes), even a counterpoint trio (“Fugue for Tinhorns”). The Most Happy Fella has a lush romantic score, and there’s so much of it that the original cast recording was released in two versions, a single LP of highlights and a complete three-LP set, in the style of opera recordings. Technically the show is an operetta, since it does contain dialogue sections (which were also written by Loesser). And though it may not be up to Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess or Kurt Weill’s Street Scene, the two Broadway musicals that are not only extensive enough but also complex enough musically to qualify as operas, it’s extremely ambitious – and surpassingly beautiful. (In fact, the New York City Opera used to keep it in their repertory.) Loesser based it on a 1924 play by Sidney Howard called They Knew What They Wanted – a hit despite that unwieldy title – that starred Richard Bennett and the legendary stage actress Pauline Lord and was filmed three times over the next decade and a half.

You Say You Wanna Revolution?

It's not too hard to take apart comedian Russell Brand's idea of an egalitarian revolution, which he happily endorsed this week on BBC Newsnight with Jeremy Paxman. There are no ideas there; only vague cereal box pronouncements that would make Karl Marx blush. Since Brand had already guest-edited The New Statesman on that very subject of revolution, he was brought on to the show to explain himself. Besides saying that voting only "legitimizes a corrupt system," Brand's dissent was all sound-bite with nothing at stake. But why Brand received so much play on social media isn't so negligible. As Elizabeth Renzetti pointed out in a column in The Globe and Mail yesterday, the political system has so broken faith with its constituents that it has allowed the bromide of a Russell Brand to take hold. "[W]hen the political system looks increasingly absurd – and you need only look to the kindergarten-style scrapping in Canada’s Senate or the tumbleweeds that recently rolled past the monuments in Washington – the absurdists look rational," she writes. "In his interview, Mr. Brand pointed to the fact that the British government is suing the European Union to remove a cap on bankers’ bonuses on the fifth anniversary of the financial crisis – if that isn’t head-spinning farce, what is?" What Brand spoke to is the void left when, as Renzetti puts it, "the web of trust and civic engagement meant to bind a society is fraying." When only 19 per cent of Americans trust their government compared to 75 per cent fifty years ago, Brand comes across as prophetic.   

Forty-five years ago, though, the thought of revolution was something of a fact rather than a whimsical idea. In the early days of 1968, everywhere you looked, real ideals were being put to the test. The Soviet Union had brought a totalitarian chill to the Prague Spring after they invaded Czechoslovakia. The assassination of Martin Luther King in April was followed two months later by the shooting death of Democratic presidential candidate Robert Kennedy. Student upheavals in Paris against the Gaulist government were matched by riots in the United States over the escalation of the Vietnam War. During their various world tours, John Lennon had wanted The Beatles to have more freedom to comment on the political tumult surrounding the group, but Brian Epstein, fearing public reaction, steered Lennon against it. But with Epstein dead by 1968, Lennon knew that there was now no one around to stop him. He immediately went to work on completing a song he first started composing in India. "Revolution" was written in response to the various left-wing organizations that were vying for The Beatles' support for violent revolution. But instead of throwing his hat into the ring, he composed a stern riposte against violence that would create a huge backlash against the group from certain anti-war activists who had counted on The Beatles for support.

What’s Left Untasted: The Criterion Collection's DVD release of Mike Leigh's Life is Sweet

Jane Horrocks and Claire Skinner in Life is Sweet

The irrepressible couple at the center of Mike Leigh’s Life is Sweet (1990) – released on Blu-ray and regular DVD this year by the Criterion Collection in an impeccably restored digital print – are Wendy (Alison Steadman) and Andy (Jim Broadbent), working class parents whose good-natured pleasure in daily life is laced with melancholy. Faithful to family life, they have no illusions about the compromises they’ve had to accept to raise their twin daughters, Nicola (Jane Horrocks) and Natalie (Claire Skinner), who at twenty-two are a solid four years older than their parents were when they were born. Humor and hope keep them tethered. Andy is susceptible to grand schemes for the future, as in the rusted junkyard lunch wagon he buys for a marked-up fee with the fantasy of striking out in his own business; Wendy accepts his foibles with her infectious laugh, a programmed response to life’s little absurdities. But their best qualities blinker them, too. Wendy, with all her girlishness and her resolute positivity, doesn’t know what to do with Natalie’s ambiguous sexuality – she wears men’s clothes and works as a plumber – or Nicola’s bulimic, depressive stupors which, in spite of living under her family’s roof, haven’t improved. And Andy often can’t see what’s right in front of him: it’s the price he pays for clinging to impossible aspirations. Food is the film’s theme and its central metaphor: life may be sweet, but so much of it goes untasted.

A Future Nostalgia: The Crucible of Paul McCartney

At the age of 71, Paul McCartney continues to build his legacy, never content to coast on the sizeable reputation he built as part of one of popular music's most significant groups. But as he goes forward, with a new album – called New – which John Corcelli will be reviewing in Critics at Large in a couple of weeks, it's curious how much McCartney draws from his past in order to move forward with a more contemporary sound. He performs as a man who knows full well that he can't out-jump his own shadow so by embracing it he casts his reflection forward. Yet just as he dabbles in keeping current, there is still a relentless quest in his music to get back, to seek a place of refuge while continually defining his musical future. (The latest album has four producers on it to help him do so.) Once was a way to get back homeward, he once sang confidently in 1969 on "Golden Slumbers." But for Paul McCartney, all his life, getting back homeward became an illusive task. As his career scaled musical heights not imagined, McCartney always looked to the past for some point of reference, or maybe for some profound meaning to make sense of how far he'd come as an artist. Who could blame him? With The Beatles, he not only was living out a dream, but the dream took on a life that made him feel larger than he truly was. His songs once had a power that they couldn't attain now that he was on his own. Writing in The Beatles was about more than just honing his craft. It fulfilled McCartney's ambitions and gave full shape to his creative impulses; it completed him. With the band gone after 1970, looking back could have seemed futile. But without a burning sense of the past, McCartney couldn't see a future in front of him.

Indifference: Randy Moore's Escape From Tomorrow

After Randy Moore’s Escape from Tomorrow played at the Sundance Film Festival, it received a ton of adulatory press, most of it focused on the audacity of Moore’s stunt: he shot his film, about a man coming unglued during a family vacation to Disney World, at Disney World and Disneyland, using small cameras and digital recorders to surreptitiously shoot inside the parks without permission. Given how touchy Disney is about threats to its image, most of the people who raved about the movie in Colorado last January seem to have assumed that it would never get any kind of general release. (The idea that their readers would be unlikely to ever check out the movie for themselves must have made them feel free to really let fly in their praise of its outrageousness and richness.) One online writer, Erik Davis, reported that “many are calling [it] the ultimate guerrilla film.’” Maybe so, but it’s also one of the ultimate examples of a movie that’s more fun to fantasize about than it is to sit through.

Concentric Circles in Sara Paretsky’s V.I. Warshawski novels

“No other female crime writer has so powerfully and effectively combined a well-crafted detective story with the novel of social realism and protest.”

– P. D. James, Talking about Crime Fiction

Anyone primarily interested in a whodunit crime novel may not find it in the writer Sara Paretsky. In her long-standing series that made its debut in 1982 with Indemnity Only introducing the female protagonist V. I. Warshawski, dead bodies do appear regularly but the identity of the perpetrator is rarely the novels’ most compelling feature. When a murder does occur early, for example in Body Work (2010) and the accused is an Iraqi veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress after the rest of his unit was killed in a firefight, Warshawski is also hired by the young man’s parents to prove his innocence. The tough, sharp-tongued but compassionate private sleuth is frequently engaged by clients to investigate a person’s disappearance.  

The impression from reading these novels is that the resolution of the mystery constitutes the most inner circle, one that is surrounded by a series of other circles including Warshawski’s personal life and her commitment to address social injustices. Finally, and, most interestingly, is the historical circle in which she connects the present to the past, which is found in a number of Paretsky’s later novels, especially her most recent, Critical Mass (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2013). The historical arc, which provides greater depth and resonance, should not surprise since she has a PhD in history from the University of Chicago.

David Bowie Is X 3

Pop icon David Bowie is the subject of the David Bowie is exhibit currently at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. Three of our critics, Deirdre Kelly, John Corcelli and Kevin Courrier, attended the show and each of them contribute their thoughts to this review.

It was the summer of my 15th year and my mother, to get me out of the house, and perhaps also to make me realize there was a wonderful world waiting for me outside it, sent me to London, England, where she had some friends who would put me up for a few hot weeks. I already knew the British capital to be the crux of all things cool. I was a Beatles fan, and, well, pretty much a fan of everything else with an English accent. But The Beatles were long over by 1975, and I was on to the next big thing which, to my constantly changing teenage self, meant glitter rock in the form of Marc Bolan of T. Rex, David Essex, Elton John (before he became respectable), Queen and – of course – David Bowie. Bowie was the pin-up in my bedroom, and I choose the word deliberately because he was, at the beginning of his career, not a boy, not a girl, but a deliciously subversive blend of both.

How to Be a King: The BBC Series The Hollow Crown

The magnificent BBC series The Hollow Crown, which PBS’s Great Performances ran over four weeks, is an epic undertaking: productions of all four of the histories that constitute what scholars call Shakespeare’s Henriad, shepherded by major English directors. The Henriad begins with Richard II, in which King Richard’s cousin Bolingbroke, exiled for half a dozen years, returns with an army when Richard confiscates his lands after Bolingbroke’s father’s death and pillages his estate to fund a war against Ireland. Bolingbroke claims that all he wants is what is rightfully his, his father’s legacy, but his army overruns the kingdom and his cause gathers allies who were formerly Richard’s friends, and Richard knows that the only logical consequence of a successful insurrection against his throne is the loss of the crown to his rival. Bolingbroke becomes King Henry IV, the title character of Shakespeare’s two-part sequel. But Henry IV is about the end of the king’s life and reign, and its protagonist is his heir, Prince Hal. At the end of Part I Hal comes of age on the battlefield; at the end of Part II he leaves behind the wastrel’s life among the London taverns and whorehouses to succeed his father on the throne of England. In the final play of the tetralogy, Henry V, his kingship is tested, once again in battle, as he leads his country against France, emerging in triumph and with the hand of the French princess, Katherine.

Greek Tragedy - Canadian Style: Soulpepper's Farther West

Soulpepper's production of Farther West (photo by Cylla von Tiedemann)

John Murrell has a long-established and fully justified reputation as a playwright who creates good roles for women and places them in well constructed works based on historical Canadian subjects. So it makes perfect sense that he would create a play about Canadian prostitutes in the 19th century. Farther West, first produced in 1982 (directed by Robin Phillips and starring Martha Henry) and now running at Soulpepper’s Young Centre for the Performing Arts until Nov. 9, won Murrell a second Chalmers Award, the first coming for 1977’s Waiting for the Parade. It is the story of May Buchanan, a prostitute who worked her way from small-town Ontario westward across Canada in the 1870s and ’80s. She started at 14, on the advice of her father, who had just found her having sex with a much older neighbour: “You can’t carry on like that here, girl. You better move on. Better start moving, farther west.”

Director Diana Leblanc’s production is striking, starting even before the opening: a naked couple is entwined on-stage as the audience takes its seats. No question, nudity is powerful, and the tableau leads convincingly and appropriately into the play proper. Astrid Janson’s set, though simple – a painted scrim backdrop, a sloped platform – is made striking by Graeme Thomson’s lighting, and it should be noted that a river, or rather a creek, runs through it. Janson’s costumes are grittily realistic, nicely matching the tone of the first act, at least. The scenes in Vancouver switch to a sort of nasty melodrama that takes us into a somewhat over-the-top ending.

Mastery of the Art: Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity

Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity

Alfonso Cuarón has made only seven full-length movies in twenty-two years, and his latest, Gravity, is the first he’s released since Children of Men in 2006. Gravity justifies the long wait. It’s exquisite and terrifying, a journey through space at 0G, or zero gravity, that Cuarón, the production designer Andy Nicholson, the editor Mark Sanger (co-editing with Cuarón himself) and his favorite collaborator, the cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, have made simultaneously abstract and grippingly real. (This is one of those rare films that demands to be seen in 3D.) Visually it’s as breathtaking as Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, but without that movie’s self-consciousness or ersatz philosophizing. The film I thought of more often while I was watching was Brian De Palma’s unjustly maligned Mission to Mars from 2000.

Seven Minutes in Heaven: Love, Trauma, and Choices

Reymond Amsalem and Eldad Prives in Seven Minutes in Heaven

Directed by Omri Givon in his first (and still only) feature, Seven Minutes in Heaven (Sheva dakot be gan eden, Israel, 2008) is a deceptively simple drama that melds dramatic realism with metaphysical and psychological drama to tell a powerful story of love and survival. We meet Galia (Reymond Amsalem, The Attack) at the hospital bed of her boyfriend Oren, roughly a year after the suicide bus bombing that left him in a coma and her badly burned. Galia’s memories of that morning, and the days leading up to it, are fragmentary and intermittent, and it is only after Oren finally dies that she begins to deal with her own pain. A new chapter of her life begins with the mysterious arrival of a necklace in the mail – one she at first barely recognizes as her own, and only later realizes she’d lost at the scene of the attack. With this small object as a touchstone, Galia is challenged to re-assemble and re-examine her recent past, and begin to live again in the present.

During her search for the paramedic who pulled her from the bus and ultimately saved her, she discovers that she was clinically dead for seven minutes before reviving (presumably the inspiration for the film’s title). Along the way, she meets another emergency volunteer who relates to her a mystical belief: when a soul is taken before its time, it is given the choice to return to earth, but only after being given glimpses of the life it will lead. Without giving too much away, those seven minutes are the metaphysical axis on which the narrative revolves.

Based on an original script by Givon, Seven Minutes in Heaven has the scope and slow, deliberate pacing of an ambitious short story. The film’s power comes from its tight focus on Galia’s point of view – Amsalem appears in every scene –  and its choice to tell a personal, rather than political, story. That narrative restraint pays off: Seven Minutes in Heaven tells a narrow story, but hardly a small one by any measure.

Neglected Gem #47: Gun Shy (2000)

Sandra Bullock & Liam Neeson

From the time Sandra Bullock started getting prominent movie roles in the early 1990s, she’s always had the sexy, shiny-faced glow of a  star, and she’s so easy to like, and so emotionally open, that it’s been fun watching her learn to act. Bullock, who’s currently showing just how much she’s learned in Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity, has had something of a stealth career, quietly mixing a steady stream of successful commercial comedies with Oscar-bait projects like Crash and The Blind Side, while avoiding the kind of missteps that badly dented the careers of some other actresses who were once touted by the media as being much smarter, such as Geena Davis’ decision to forsake her own romantic-comedy gifts to become Renny Harlin’s action-blockbuster muse. Bullock also makes her own luck. She started to branch out into producing into the late ‘90s, taking charge of George Lopez’s highly lucrative TV sitcom and several of her own movie hits. She also produced one terrific commercial dud – Gun Shy, a crime comedy released to near-universal indifference early in 2000, which marks the writing-directing debut of Eric Blakeney.

Blakeney, who hasn’t made another movie (or, for that matter, worked on another TV show) since, wrote several classic episodes of the better TV crime dramas of the ‘80s, including Wiseguy, Crime Story, and The Equalizer. His script for Gun Shy carries some of the ideas in those shows to another level, and the movie looks like TV, especially compared to the kind of scuzzball flash and jumbled time frames that Quentin Tarantino and his imitators had made the fashionable style for crime movies in the late ‘90s. The hero, Charlie (Liam Neeson), is an undercover federal agent (like the hero of Wiseguy). When we meet him, he hasn’t recovered from his last assignment, which ended with a blown cover, the murder of his partner, and a bloody shootout that kicks off when Charlie is tied up and laid out on “a silver serving tray” with his face pressed against “mushy watermelon.” (The opening flashback to this traumatic massacre is as flamboyant as Blakeney’s filmmaking gets, and it’s so choppily edited as to raise suspicions that the footage was salvaged from a longer sequence that was meant to play out in full, but that Blakeney couldn’t get to work.)

Cycle of Sin: Christian Themes in The Godfather

In a 2011 article for The New York Times, novelist Marilynne Robinson states that, “The Bible is the model for and subject of more art and thought than those of us who live within its influence, consciously or unconsciously, will ever know.” This thesis, which she subsequently demonstrates through a brilliant reading of The Sound and the Fury (not to mention in her own sublime fiction), comes from the literary critic Northrop Frye. He used his titanic studies The Great Code and Words With Power to illustrate how the Bible creates the “mythological universe” of Western literature–the creative playground of every artist’s consciousness and imagination. Any work of letters references, depends upon, and derives power from, the Bible. To write is to trade in the primal myths, language, archetypes, and metaphors that originate in the biblical narrative. Thus, every novel, poem, and play mediates that narrative’s meaning whether the author intends it or not – even when he intends the opposite. ‘Biblical meaning’ doesn’t equal ‘Christian doctrine’ though, but rather the instinctive way we thematize life.

The same principle applies to film – a cousin of literature, after all. And Francis Ford Coppola's twin masterpiece The Godfather and The Godfather, Part II makes for a paradigmatic example of how a movie can bear a Christian (in this case, Catholic) dimension without its doctrinal agenda (let's all agree that the third movie was a misbegotten fiasco). Coppola doesn't tell the story of the Corleone family through a Catholic lens, but the Corleones and their interlocutors are steeped in a tapestry of tradition, ritual, and code that grants them the mystique so evocative of Catholicism's archaic aura. Indeed, Coppola pulls the films' major visual and narrative motifs directly from the meaning-making worldview of its Italian American Catholic characters. And it's this worldview that imbues the story with such tragic weight.

Redux: The Mirvish Production's Les Misérables

There are several interesting story lines to Mirvish Productions’ revival of the grand musical Les Misérables, which opened last week at Toronto’s Princess of Wales Theatre. First there is the fact that it has been rethought and reconfigured from its previous incarnations, in Toronto and elsewhere, by directors Laurence Connor and James Powell, and designer Matt Kinley. Then there is the return to Toronto of the leading man, Ramin Karimloo, raised in Peterborough and Richmond Hill, who went to England to pursue a career in musical theatre, and who eventually starred in London’s West End with the title role in Phantom of the Opera. And of course there is the musical’s story itself, inspired by Victor Hugo’s epic novel, a tale encompassing love, revenge, revolution, social justice, politics, poverty, crime and punishment, all delivered by an enormous – and in this case enormously talented – cast of characters. The redesign, said to be inspired by Hugo’s own illustrations for the novel, is wonderful. In the magic-box set, a variety of “locations” – homes, street scenes, an inn, a cathedral and assorted city buildings, as well as the famous barricade and the eerie sewers of Paris – are established with intricate precision, all supplemented and loaned detail by large-scale back projections.

Politico: Robert Schenkkan's All the Way

With the U.S. government in shutdown and voting rights in peril in a number of red states, it’s hard not to feel nostalgic about All The Way, Robert Schenkkan’s chronicle of the year between Jack Kennedy’s assassination and the 1964 re-election of LBJ, which just wrapped up a sold-out run at American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, MA. (The title is, of course, derived from his campaign slogan, “All the way with LBJ.”) The political landscape covered by the play’s three hours is thorny: as the curtain falls, many of the architects of the Civil Rights movement feel betrayed by the president, who has overseen the passage of the Civil Rights Act but has had to excise the section on voting rights, and who failed to support the seating of the Mississippi Freedom Democrats with full voting privileges at the Democratic Convention. J. Edgar Hoover (Michael McKean) has ramped up his campaign to discredit Martin Luther King (Brandon J. Dirden), who has just won the Nobel Peace Prize, ferrying tapes of his motel-room adulteries to his wife Coretta (Crystal A. Dickinson). And LBJ has turned his back on his aide, Walter Jenkins (Christopher Liam Moore), after Jenkins was arrested, drunk, for solicitation in the men’s room of the Washington YMCA during the celebratory aftermath of the election. The play is about the political costs of social gains, about the balancing act of power, careerism and social change, and its subject is the last great old-style political animal to occupy the White House. But I don’t imagine there was anyone sitting in the house at Wednesday’s matinee who wouldn't opt for the world of Schenkkan’s play, where social progress is held dear, over the one we walked back into at the end of the afternoon.

Its built-in appeal to a contemporary liberal audience doesn’t make All the Way a good play, however – and that includes the rabble-rousing scene where David Dennis of CORE (Eric Lenox Abrams) yells up and down the aisles, demanding to know if the treatment of blacks in Mississippi can be called fair and just. At the matinee, audience members yelled back in support, though the show had, in my estimation, hit a low point: a playwright and director – Bill Rauch – who rev up a crowd so they can feel virtuous for being on the right side of a half-century-old political issue are merely indulging in a theatrical form of ass-kissing.

Critic's Notes & Frames, Vol. VI

Late last year, I included a few samplings from my Facebook page, which I've been treating as an ongoing dialogue with friends about social and cultural matters. (Some have described it as a salon.) Here is even more of the same. As before, it includes borrowings of songs and photos that others have posted and that I've commented on:

Despite looking like wax figures from the Revolutionary War wing of Madame Tussaud's Museum, Paul Revere and the Raiders were a pretty solid Top 40 pop band. Besides their famous anti-drug hit "Kicks," which lived up to its title, "Just Like Me" (in its sound) created the template for the early Elvis Costello & the Attractions, and "Hungry" (in spite of its collection of clichés) was sung by Mark Lindsay with a lustful abandon. "Good Thing" has that even more of that bounding optimism, and a try-it-on spirit that made many a hit in 1965-1966 despite riots, wars and assassinations.

My Sweet Ford.

Rubbing Our Faces In It: Claire Denis’s Bastards

Chiara Mastroianni and Vincent Lindon in Bastards

She’s only made eleven features in her 25 year film career, but French filmmaker Claire Denis’s output has been stellar, with nearly half a dozen masterpieces (J'ai pas sommeil / I Can't Sleep (1994), Nénette et Boni / Nenette and Boni (1996), Vendredi soir / Friday Night (2002), L'intrus / The Intruder (2004); 35 rhums / 35 Shots of Rum (2008)) to her credit and very few duds. Thus, it pains me to point out how unpleasant and offensive Bastards (Les Salauds), her latest movie, actually is. It’s a revenge thriller that’s almost as simply drawn as Charles Bronson’s two-dimensional Death Wish (1974) and in terms of pandering to the basest prejudices of its audience, it, incredibly, is reminiscent of the torture porn aspects of vile films like the Saw and Hostel series. We’re talking about Claire Denis, still one of France’s finest talents and, prior, to this movie, a demonstrated class act. What was she thinking?

The film, which anchors a Claire Denis retrospective in Toronto, opens with a man contemplating suicide on a rainy night in Paris. Next shot is of a naked young woman, blood flowing down her legs, walking, stunned, along the mean city streets. The following morning, Sandra (Julie Bataille), the suicide’s widow, weeps over his body. She blames a powerful French business mogul, Edouard Laporte (Michel Subor, one of Denis’ cast of regular actors who pop up throughout the film), for her husband’s death – he had warned the police about Laporte’s danger to his safety, as well as bankrupting him because of shady business dealings - and then reaches out to her seafaring brother Marco (Vincent Lindon) – he’s a captain on a Russian trawler – who hastens home to Paris to help his distraught sibling. How the young woman figures into the whole picture and what happens after forms the basis of Bastards, which begins promisingly before, unfortunately wallowing in the worst of human nature.

Shiver Me Timbers: A Contemporary Pirate Saga - Paul Greengrass's Captain Phillips

When not commanding cargo ships on the salty high seas, Richard Phillips normally leads a rather ordinary, salt-of-the-earth life with his family at their 1840 farmhouse in Underhill, Vermont. He snowboards each winter and cruises nearby Lake Champlain in a powerboat during the warmer months. Now 58, Phillips also reads a lot. He’s a history buff who enjoys, among other subjects, books about pirates. That means buccaneers wielding swords in olden times, not the modern-day Somali teenagers with AK-47s who held him captive for five days in April 2009 until his rescue by the Navy’s fabled SEAL Team Six.

Captain Phillips is a new film about that ordeal by Paul Greengrass, the British director probably best known for action flicks like The Bourne Supremacy (2004) and The Bourne Ultimatum (2007). A better comparison with the current release might be his Bloody Sunday (2002), about “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland, or United 93 (2006), a chronicle of what may have taken place aboard the hijacked plane that crashed in Pennsylvania on 9/11. The scrawny kids who try to hijack the unarmed Maersk Alabama, the freighter Phillips is navigating on the Indian Ocean, come from a typically impoverished coastal town in lawless Somalia, where vicious warlords order them to commit such crimes. Like most of their peers, they chew an amphetamine-like leaf called Khat. Pumped up for the job by this narcotic, the pirates race in small, swift skiffs toward the slower-moving ship that carries tons of food aid intended for several African countries.

Face Value: Ron Howard's Rush

Chris Hemsworth and Daniel Bruhl in Ron Howard's Rush

Like many people who have spent their entire adult lives, and then some, working in Hollywood, Ron Howard has a frame of reference shaped far more by movies than real life experience or history. As a child actor, Howard made a career out of gazing, in awe and worshipful confusion, at those who had mastered adult life, and as a successful, middle-aged movie director, that’s still his specialty. This can be a problem when he insists on making movies about people who have one foot in common, everyday experience, set in a world that is meant to be our own. I don’t remember ever having had a worse time at the movies than Backdraft (1991), his battling-firefighter-brothers movie, with a story thread about political corruption and a rip-off of Hannibal Lecter thrown in for good measure; the movie had a lot of problems to choose from, but the one at its core was its embarrassing, confident assumption that everyone still feels about firemen the way they did when they were eight years old. (If it had been released ten years later, in the wake of 9/11, it might have been acclaimed for its Zola-like realism.)

Howard’s new movie, Rush, is about Formula One race car drivers. It’s his most entertaining movie since the one about astronauts, Apollo 13, which may have something to do with the fact that its heroes are people for whom making those in civilian life feel as if they’re eight years old is part of their job description. It’s lighter, faster, and trashier than the solemnly engaging Apollo 13, maybe because it’s possible to make an argument that astronauts have a job that’s worth doing. Rush was written by Peter Morgan, the docudrama specialist who previously collaborated with Howard on the movie version of his play Frost/Nixon – a project that was in some ways a perfect fit for Howard, since it called for a director capable of gazing, with some degree of awe and worshipful confusion, on David Frost. Rush is set in the 1970s and deals with the rivalry between two top-dog drivers, the glamorously sexy, low-born thrill seeker James Hunt (Chris Hemsworth) and the methodical, self-possessed gearhead and German control freak Niki Lauda (Daniel Bruhl). The script includes deep thoughts about the nature of competition, and how one man needs his opposite number to drive him to be the best, but the movie is really about stardom, and about wondering whether one means of achieving it has more integrity, and ultimately means more, than another. It’s also about ‘70s hair.

Coming of Age: The Spectacular Now and The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Miles Teller and Shailene Woodley in The Spectacular Now

American filmmakers seem to have lost the knack of making romantic comedies, but every year brings some good new coming-of-age pictures. The Spectacular Now, which opened late in the summer, has a casual, intimate style that derives from the director James Ponsoldt’s interplay with his actors as well as from the dialogue that the screenwriters, Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber (adapting a novel by Tim Tharp), give them to work with. Ponsoldt’s leading man is the phenomenally talented Miles Teller; he the haunted teenager in Rabbit Hole who was inadvertently responsible for running down Nicole Kidman’s little boy, and he also played the grinning best pal in Footloose who learns how to dance in that musical’s most exuberant scene. In The Spectacular Now he’s Sutter, a high school kid who’s stalled in every conceivable way as he approaches graduation. He’s skating through his classes and dangerously close to failing math; he hasn’t completed his college applications. He drinks too much; he carries a whiskey flask around with him and sometimes shows up under the influence for his after-school job, in a men’s store. His girl friend, Cassidy (Brie Larson), breaks up with him and immediately starts dating the best catch in the senior class, a football player named Marcus (Dayo Okeniyi) and also the president of the student council. The title of the movie refers to Sutter’s lame claim to a philosophy – living in the present rather than worrying about the future. It doesn’t seem to be serving him especially well: Cassidy leaves him because she thinks he’s cheating on her, but really she’s ready to move on to someone who suits her seriousness about her own future.

Elmore Leonard: An Appreciation

We are pleased to welcome a new critic, Howard Shrier, to our group.

When Elmore Leonard died in August, shortly after suffering a stroke at age 87, tributes flowed fast and furious in newspapers, on blogs and other media. Some were from writers you would expect to love Leonard (Robert Crais, Michael Connelly); others came from those on whom he would seem to have had little or no influence (Jackie Collins).

I suppose I fall somewhere in between. My crime novels, save for one, have been first-person private eye stories. With the exception of his classic Western, Hombre, Leonard never wrote in the first person. Nor did he ever feature a private eye as a protagonist. My first loves and most direct influences were Ross Macdonald and Raymond Chandler, and, later on, Robert B. Parker, Crais and Dennis Lehane, all of whom featured first-person private eyes who mixed humour and action in a blend I found satisfying and inspiring.

Sign of Life: Nina Raine's Tribes

Erica Spyres and James Caverly in Tribes

In the middle of the second act of Tribes, the drama by the English playwright Nina Raine that is being given its Boston premiere by the SpeakEasy Stage Company, Billy (James Caverly) probes the woman he’s living with, Sylvia (Erica Spyres), to clarify what’s going wrong between them. Billy is deaf; Sylvia – his first serious girl friend – grew up with deaf parents but has only recently begun to lose her hearing. Billy grew up in a hearing family and never learned to sign; his mother Beth (Adrianne Krstansky) taught him how to speak and as a child he showed no interest in interacting with other deaf people because he absorbed his parents’ point of view that if he spoke and read lips and wore hearing aids then he could conquer what they saw in others as a handicap. But his relationship with Sylvia has drawn him into the deaf world, and she’s taught him how to sign. However, now he feels that she’s growing away from him, and he’s right. She insists that her feeling of loss as she goes deaf is different from anything he could possibly have experienced, since he’s never been able to hear:

I feel I’m losing my personality. . . can’t even be ironic any more . . . I feel stupid . . . when I lose something in the house I have to put my hearing aids in to look for it . . . I have these dreams . . . when I’m talking on the phone again. And I can hear perfectly. It’s all so clear . . . I don’t know who I am any more . . .

At the end of the scene she speaks and signs (“vehemently,” according to the stage directions), “Not everything in my life can be deaf.” This must be the most unorthodox break-up scene I’ve ever encountered in the theatre.

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Delivers a Mighty Wallop

Clark Gregg as Agent Phil Coulson on Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

This piece contains spoilers for The Avengers (2012) and Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

Despite Joss Whedon’s near-legendary status among his legions of fans, his television shows have long felt like underdog projects. While this fact has probably contributed to the good will he continues to inspire, it has also meant that has shows have had contested and limited lifespans. (Firefly famously never finished its short first season, and Dollhouse fought for practically every episode it aired during its two seasons on Fox.) With last summer’s blockbuster showing for the Whedon written and directed Marvel’s The Avengers, that all changed: the beloved cult icon became Hollywood’s golden boy. (It is tempting to compare this transformation to the comparable moment when Evil Dead’s Sam Raimi became Spider-Man’s Sam Raimi, but that is a story for another time.) For better or for worse, 1.5 billion in worldwide box office is always going to bring more schlep into the room than the adoration of the ComicCon community.

Co-created by Joss Whedon, Jed Whedon, and Maurissa Tancharoen, ABC’s Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is set in the aftermath of The Avengers, specifically its closing, climactic “Battle of New York”. Because of the publicity – and extensive property damage – of that failed alien invasion, S.H.I.E.L.D. is entering a new era of increased activity and public scrutiny. Times are a-changing and Agent Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg, reprising his film role) is putting together a new (non-super) team to reflect that new normal: a hand-picked but not quite combat ready team, with more snark and smarts than field skills.

When I first heard of the series, it was thrilling to imagine Joss returning to television, even in co-creator/exec producer mode. (His Avengers success seemed to make any new television venture extremely unlikely.) But with the burden of that film franchise behind the project, it was also just as easy to imagine the show collapsing under its own weight (or its title), Whedons or no Whedons. Frankly, as the high profile spin-off of the third most profitable movie of all time, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. didn’t have to be good to be popular. But right off the bat, this show promises to be more than a tie-in product for the multibillion-dollar franchise: it looks and sounds like a Whedon series.

No Humans Need Apply: Nicole Holofcener's Enough Said

James Gandolfini & Julia Louis-Dreyfus in Enough Said

If I believed that the characters in Nicole Holofcener’s comedies – Lovely and Amazing, Please Give, Friends with Money and the new Enough Said – could exist in the real world, then most of them, and especially her heroines, would be high on the list of people I’d cross the street to avoid. They’re glib and whiny, and they exude an unpleasant chill. When Eva (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), the masseuse who’s at the center of Enough Said, gushes over the Santa Monica house where her new client, Marianne (Catherine Keener), lives, her face freezes in a phony smile. Yet we’re not supposed to think that Eva is hiding her true feelings in order to secure Marianne’s business; we’re supposed to think she’s sincere. And later when she tries to get her college-bound daughter Ellen (Tracey Fairaway) to cuddle with her – it’s her way of making amends for hurting Ellen’s feelings – the offer feels similarly unconvincing, as if she were putting on a show for Ellen’s benefit. Eva comes across like those women in high comedies who don’t actually touch each other’s cheeks when they kiss, but that’s not the way we’re meant to read her. I don’t think that either the actress or the writer-director has any idea how unappealing she is.

Emotion in Motion: ProArteDanza at Fleck Dance Theatre

Anisa Tejpar, Erin Poole and Tyler Gledhill performing Shifting Silence, for ProArteDanza (Photo: Geneviève Caron)

Funky, fast and fierce, ProArteDanza opens with a bang at Toronto’s Fleck Dance Theatre at Harbourfront Centre, affirming its status as one of the most exciting small dance ensembles in the country with a new showcase of original work and hard-core dancing that will have you panting for more.

Three eye-grabbing pieces dominate the approximately 90-minute program, which opened to an enthusiastic crowd on Wednesday night and continues through Saturday. Each is by a choreographer with an association with ProArteDanza (literally, for the art of dance) which was founded in Toronto in 2004 as a vehicle for new creation: Shifting Silence, by company artistic associate Robert Glumbek, is a reprise (and Canadian premiere) of a work the Polish-born dancer and choreographer originally created for Ballett Nationaltheater Mannheim in Germany in 2012. Beethoven’s 9th-3rd Movement is a world premiere created jointly by Glumbek and artistic director Roberto Campanella, while Fractals: a pattern of chaos, the third and final piece, is by guest artist Guillaume Côté, the celebrated National Ballet principal dancer recently appointed to that company’s newly created position of Choreographic Associate in recognition of his burgeoning talent as a choreographer.

Live Wires: Showtime's Masters of Sex

Michael Sheen as Dr. William Masters and Lizzy Caplan as Virginia Johnson in Showtime’s Masters of Sex

Michael Sheen doesn’t have the world-beaters’ charisma or the easy, sexy charm that people associate with movie stars. He’s certainly a skillful actor, though, and he’s had the luck to be cast in a string of projects, written by Peter Morgan – Stephen Frears’ The Deal and The Queen, in both of which he portrayed Tony Blair, and as David Frost in Ron Howard’s Frost/Nixon. In both films, Sheen played strivers, men whose sheer ambition helped them overcome their limitations and essential mediocrity. These were important men roles that didn’t call for star magnetism, but instead for an actor’s ability to illuminate what might elevate a man who wouldn’t stand out in a crowd to the top of his field. Sheen has another role like that in Showtime’s Masters of Sex, which is the best new TV series of the fall season, by a pretty generous margin.

Tick, Tick … BOOM! at Toronto’s Studio Theatre

Parris Greaves, Laura Mae Nason, and Ken Chamberland in Tick, Tick ... BOOM! (Photo by Vincent Perri)

First things first. The production of Tick, Tick … BOOM! currently playing at the Studio Theatre of the Toronto Centre for the Arts is excellent: fast-paced, funny, energetic, well-staged, well-performed and well-sung. It’s a terrific way to spend an evening.

In broad outline, the story of Tick, Tick … BOOM! is kind of old hat: Young artist suffers for his art, agonizes over his future and his talent – is it all worthwhile? – and then, despite all the obstacles, has a great success. What gives this small musical its special frisson, however, is that it’s pretty much autobiographical, and that the show’s creator, Jonathan Larson, is better known as the originator of Rent, the sensational, multi-award-winning rock musical (loosely based on Puccini’s La Bohème) that ran on Broadway for more than a decade, toured all over the world, and spawned a pretty good movie musical.

A Story with Many Stripes: In Conversation with Publisher Prosper Assouline

Publishers Prosper and Martine Assouline (Photo by Jordan Doner)

At a time when electronic versions of books can be downloaded for free, luxury book publisher Prosper Assouline stays the course by continuing to put out titles on a range of subjects which cost top dollar. “My books are expensive,” he says unapologetically. “People, we have discovered, will pay dearly for a book if it is of top quality and beautiful to look at.” While some of his more exclusive books can cost upwards of thousands of dollars each, one of his latest, a history of Canada’s Hudson’s Bay Company is a comparative bargain at $65. But while the price might be lower than the $7,000 being charged for Gaia, the Special Edition coffee table book Assouline published in collaboration with Cirque du Soleil’s Guy Laliberté, Hudson’s Bay Company is teeming with text and more than 200 images, making the book, with a forward by Canadian-born Vanity Fair editor in-chief Graydon Carter, feel rich indeed. Art, fashion, the performing arts and architecture tend to make up the bulk of the books the Paris-raised, New York-based Assouline has published since launching Assouline, his boutique company with wife Martine in their native France in 1995. But there’s always room for the eccentric and the extravagant, which the story of the Hudson’s Bay Company epitomizes in being a history of the fur trade and the formation of a Canadian identity. An ebullient man who started as an art director in magazines when he was 16, Assouline spoke with Deirdre Kelly at The Bay’s Queen St. W. flagship store in Toronto at an intimate lunch commemorating the launch of the book, recognizable for the iconic Hudson’s Bay multistripe Point Blanket on the cover. Here is some of their conversation: 

Faraway Places: The Jungle Book & The Blue Dragon

Mary Zimmerman's The Jungle Book

The new stage adaptation of Disney’s The Jungle Book – presumably bound for Broadway sometime in the future – has been launched at Boston’s Huntington Theatre, which has had a successful relationship with its high-profile director, Mary Zimmerman. (She directed Candide there two years ago as well as two previous productions.) Boston is lucky: the show is spirited, musically exuberant and gorgeous to look at, and children should adore it. As Disney’s 1967 animated feature did, Zimmerman’s adaptation takes considerable liberties with Rudyard Kipling’s stories, which were first published in 1893-94, but the narrative is essentially the same: a pack of wolves adopts a white baby and raises him to become a hybrid – part “man cub,” part jungle creature. Kipling focuses on the boy Mowgli’s coming of age, which prompts a crisis of identity – the wolves don’t want him any longer and he receives a cool reception when he returns to the village where he was born. Zimmerman’s book moves Mowgli back to civilization but deals only superficially with the subject of his mixed heritage. What it borrows from Kipling are the boy’s adventures in the jungle – climaxing in his encounter with the three-legged tiger, Shere Khan (Larry Yando), who has been stalking him since he was a baby – and his friendship with his protector, Bagheera the panther (Usman Ally) and the easygoing Baloo the bear (Kevin Carolan).

Obsessive-Compulsive: Don Jon

Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Scarlett Johansson in Don Jon

In Don Jon, writer, director and star Joseph Gordon-Levitt gives us a comedy about sex as tightly compartmentalized as the life of its main character. Jon is a New Jersey bartender who takes a different girl home from the club every Saturday night and shows up for Catholic mass with his parents the next morning – the center that holds it all together is the hard-core porn he watches addictively on his computer. There’s something disarming about a movie this willing to be lighthearted about sexual compulsion, but Don Jon is not exactly Portnoy’s Complaint. Gordon-Levitt only shows us the clean surfaces of Jon’s obsessions – we don’t get a peak at the tension or the fear underneath, or even a taste of the pleasure principle that drives them.

I always thought that pornography appealed to people for similar reasons; it indulges the mechanics of sex, its kinks and fetishes and its carnal veneer, but it doesn’t get curious about what gets people into bed together in the first place. There’s nothing particularly subversive about two people fucking. On screen, as in life, eroticism is in the drama of emotional risk. Don Jon opens with a promising romantic comedy mis-en-scène when Jon, disillusioned by one-night stands, tracks down Barbara (Scarlett Johansson), a woman whose refusal to go home with him after an evening of dance floor foreplay makes him think she can supply the depth he’s been missing. Their incompatible sexual fantasies – his based on pornography (which she abhors) and hers on weepy romantic pictures (which he disdains) – is the smartest and funniest idea in the film, but Gordon-Levitt doesn’t follow through on its romantic possibilities; instead he sells out Barbara by turning her into an exploitative prude. When Don Jon turns out to be a small-scale redemption story about a guy who learns to stop jerking off and fall in love – and to give up his porn junkie lifestyle – you realize the movie’s not taking any chances. It gives in to erotic phobias instead of dramatizing them.