Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit – A Hero at Long Last

Directed by Kenneth Branagh, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit is the fifth movie built around spy novelist Tom Clancy’s hero, the first with a plot invented entirely for the movies, and the first I enjoyed from start to finish. It’s never occurred to me to pick up one of Clancy’s books, because the movies culled from them are suffused with the kind of unremittingly gray techno-dreariness that makes my eyes glaze over. Sean Connery redeemed the first Clancy picture, The Hunt for Red October (1990), with a glittering performance as a Soviet sub commander who hatches a complicated scheme to defect; as the hero, a Soviet analyst turned CIA operative, Alec Baldwin made so little impression that when I sat down to write this review I found I couldn’t remember who first played Jack Ryan on screen. In Patriot Games (1992) and Clear and Present Danger (1994), the role went to Harrison Ford, deep in his ulcerated, acting-is-misery period. (The movies that precede Patriot Games in Ford’s filmography are Presumed Innocent and Regarding Henry and the one that comes between his two Clancys is The Fugitive – a veritable dirge of performances.) Clear and Present Danger was easier viewing than Patriot Games, but the week I saw it I happened to be reading Ross Thomas’s 1984 thriller Missionary Stew, which covers some of the same territory, and as a piece of entertainment the Thomas novel is superior in every conceivable way. Then there was 2002’s The Sum of All Fears, a bloated (two hours four minutes) pretend commentary on post-9/11 America in which the director, Phil Alden Robinson, threw symbolic weight behind the images of destruction and potential destruction as well as slowing down the action to make sure we understood how important it was. The role of Ryan had now passed to Ben Affleck, who seemed absurdly lightweight both as an action hero – this was a decade before he earned the right to play one in his own terrific Argo – and as a Soviet expert.

Road Maps Home: Rosanne Cash's The River & The Thread

Five years ago, Rosanne Cash released an album called The List (Blue Note). It was a collection of songs that her father, Johnny Cash, considered standards in the Americana songbook. It was and remains an important musical connection to her past. With the release of The River & The Thread, (Blue Note) Cash has extended the reach of her father’s favourite songs by writing her own “list” and the results are nothing short of superb.

The River & The Thread weaves its way through the American south like the Mississippi river. To me, it’s a collection of short stories set to music with the insightful assistance of Cash’s husband and musical partner, John Levanthal. The pair has written and produced a beautiful, unadorned album that is more than just a traveller’s diary. It’s a geographic and spiritual road map. The record opens with the philosophical “A Feather’s not a Bird,” a slightly ambiguous song about the importance of change and being open to it. She sings, “a feather’s not a bird, the rain is not the sea, but the river runs through me.” Perhaps she’s taking on the role of a spiritual conduit of American history? The record, or journey, continues as Cash tells the story of a woman who continues to work the land in spite of impending floods every year ("The Sunken Lands").

Movin' On: Rosanne Cash Live at the Burlington Performing Arts Centre

Photo by Clay Patrick McBride

“For my entire life I have been trying to give voice to the rhythms and words that underscore, propel, and inform me. Because my peripheral vision is more acute than my direct powers of observation, and my love of an A-minor chord is more charged and refined than my understanding of my own psyche, I have often attempted to explain my experiences to myself through songs: by writing them, singing them, listening to them, deconstructing them, and letting them fill me like food and water. I have charted my life through not only the songs I’ve composed, but the songs I’ve discovered, the songs that have been given to me, the songs that are part of my legacy and ancestry. Through them I’ve often found meaning and relief, while at other times I’ve failed to recognize or understand a rhythm or a theme until it became urgent or ingrained and I finally came across a song that captured that experience…My life has been circumscribed by music…”

Rosanne Cash said all that in the introduction to her brilliant 2011 memoir Composed. And last Saturday night at the Burlington Performing Arts Centre, she and her band took a sold out audience on a journey through music that no one will soon forget. The Performing Arts Centre in Burlington is a gem. Medium-sized it maintains an intimacy and warmth that makes it a first choice as a venue for acoustic music such as Rosanne plays. There is a carpark directly next door offering free parking after 6pm and all day on weekends. This is a bonus if you’re used to theatres in Toronto, or other big cities. And the icy cold didn’t affect us either since the car park is connected by a bridge to the theatre. Genius.

The Higher Depths: The Criterion Collection Blu-ray Release of Aki Kaurismaki's La Vie de Boheme

When the Finnish writer-director Aki Kaurismaki first appeared on the world film scene in the late 1980s, he risked being typecast as a sort of Nordic-European doppelgänger to Jim Jarmusch, who shared Kaurismaki’s dry wit, his fixation on slightly outdated lowlife-bohemian milieus, and devotion to visual and narrative spareness. Like Jarmusch, Kaurismaki has sometimes rushed into production with only one joke in mind – as in his rock-band road movie Leningrad Cowboys Go America, which boasted a cameo by Jarmusch himself – and one audience member in mind, himself. La Vie de Boheme, which has just been released on DVD and Blu-ray by the Criterion Collection, was Kaurismaki’s most full-bodied and accessibly funny picture to date when it was first released in 1992. (He’s since topped himself, with The Man Without A Past, his 2002 comedy about an amnesiac who reinvents himself as a promotor of “rhythm music,” i.e., jumpy, stripped-down rock and roll.) In some ways, this, too, is a one-joke movie, but the director loves the joke, and the people who embody it, so much that it takes on the quality of a world view.

Fare-Thee-Well Pete Seeger: A Folksinger Who Really Cared

One summer at Camp Kinderland in the late 1950s my eight-year-old sister approached Pete Seeger, who often performed at this Upstate New York enclave that promoted politically progressive ideas and folk music . She mentioned that I – then about 15 – had met him on a recent boat cruise around Manhattan. He supposedly remembered. I have no recollection of such a cruise but will gladly keep that encounter in my mind’s treasure trove of those who went before. Seeger’s death this week at age 94 makes me think of a tune we used to belt out at Kinderland: “Passing through/passing through/ Sometimes happy/ sometimes blue/ glad that I ran into you/ Tell the people that you saw me passing through...” (Listen to "Passing Through" here.)

As adolescents, my friends and I went to every possible Seeger concert in New York City. It was the equivalent of today’s youngsters never missing, say, a Justin Timberlake show. But instead of singing about personal romance, our hero generally addressed the more universal “love between my brothers and my sisters/ all over this land ...” That snatch of lyrics comes from “If I Had a Hammer,” a leftie anthem Seeger co-wrote in 1949 that was made famous more than a decade later by Peter, Paul and Mary. Although he experienced blacklisting and censorship during the McCarthy Era, Seeger always maintained Americans had the right to express any views, however unpopular – or far ahead of their time – they might be. He was a Communist with a capital C before disillusionment about the Soviet Union transformed him into a lower-case communist. His celebrated unionization, justice, tolerance and peace, while fighting against dangerous signs of fascism. His weapons: a banjo and not-so-fabulous vocals driven to greatness by sheer passion. CBS didn’t allow broadcast of Seeger’s Vietnam protest song, “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy,” when he appeared on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour in 1967. After an outcry, he reprised it on the program the following year but the network excised the last verse. No matter how much the government or corporations tried to marginalize him, Seeger somehow went on to inspire generations of activists and just plain music lovers.

Luigi’s Legacy: Reflecting On 30 Years of Second Place

A year ago this month, someone at Nintendo must have snorted awake at their desk, shaken off their New Year’s hangover and said, “Hey! Luigi has been around for 30 years now. Should we do something about that?” The result was a branding of 2013 as “The Year of Luigi," a hastily-manufactured tribute to a character which Nintendo seems to think nobody cares about. All the marketing focused on Luigi stealing the spotlight from his older brother Mario by adding Luigi-flavoured content to pre-existing games, and releasing sequels to first-party titles in which Luigi plays a supporting role. The attitude seemed to be one of playful mischievousness, hinting that while we want to give Luigi his due, don’t worry – the hero you all know and love will be back in 2014. Well, I’m going to give the downtrodden underdog the benefit of the doubt, and explore why he might just be more interesting and memorable than his extremely famous Bro.

Hamlet of Hamlets

Rory Kinnear as Hamlet

Nicholas Hytner’s production of Hamlet at the National Theatre, which was transmitted in HD in 2010 and recently had an encore screening, is set in a distinctly modern police state where the omnipresence of security is such a familiar sight in the court of Denmark that the characters have stopped noticing them. Polonius (David Calder) and Ophelia (Ruth Negga) talk freely in front of one guard, though the topic of their conversation is her romantic relationship with Hamlet (Rory Kinnear), and when Polonius confronts her about it, he produces a file containing photos of them together. Spying is a natural impulse to Polonius, who sends Reynaldo (Victor Power) off to France to check on his son Laertes (Alex Lanipekun) and later gives his daughter a walkie-talkie concealed in a Bible so that he and King Claudius (Patrick Malahide) can hear how Hamlet reacts when she returns his love gifts. The way Calder plays the old counselor, he has a passion for spying. He’s proud of himself for his ability to tender this service to his king – though when he tells his son, “This above all: to thine own self be true,” he pauses, unsettled, and you wonder if, just for a moment, he contemplates the possibility that he’s violated his own principles (at least since Claudius took over the throne). After Hamlet kills him by accident in his mother’s bedroom and Claudius can’t get him to stop clowning long enough to tell him where he stowed the body, one of the king’s men opens an attaché case full of torture instruments, and Hamlet, who has been handcuffed, acquiesces. Instead of being a fop (as he’s usually played), Osric (Nick Sampson) is the same military man who had a hand in Hamlet’s deportation to England – where he was supposed to be executed on the English king’s orders – and when he invites Hamlet to take part in the duel with Laertes, it’s obvious to us that he’s in on the conspiracy.

"Yes We're Soldiers": BBC's Bluestone 42 and FOX's Enlisted

War is never funny. But, on-screen at least, life in the army is another story. The culture, bureaucracy, and general absurdity of life in uniform has been mined for comedy and satire for centuries, and for good reason. Military service in times of war and especially during eras of conscription has become an (often involuntary) rite of passage for men. And as Catch-22 and M*A*S*H (both the novels and the films) demonstrate, the most fertile ground for comedy often comes from putting men into the army that simply shouldn't be there. But WWII, Korea, and Vietnam are long past, and our collective memory of the draft has faded considerably in the last few decades. Even as the US, Canada, and NATO forces are in their second decade of continual war in Afghanistan, military service remains the choice of the relatively few men and women who take that professional route – as the choice of a few, it is difficult to mine for experience that can be shared with larger television audiences. In short, the time of Sgt. Bilko, F Troop, and McHale's Navy are over. War hasn't gone away, but the politics of warfare – especially since 2001 – have grown far more contested. In short, to apply a too-on-the-nose metaphor, the army sitcom has become a minefield.

All which of makes the fact that there are currently two army-centred comedies on television all the more notable. And they are set in our present era. (Stories set during a contemporary war have long been the purview of propaganda mills – see the short-term industry of WWII-era Hollywood films.) Of the two series, one will begin its second season in April and another is just beginning – the first is British and the other is American. It is perhaps not surprising that the BBC 3 series, Bluestone 42, is the raunchier, more biting, and as a result more consistently hilarious series, but Enlisted, which premiered on FOX two weeks ago, while still taking its first steps, already has charm to spare and has demonstrated a lot of potential.

A Zionist Love Letter: The Prime Ministers: The Pioneers

The recent death of Ariel Sharon, Israel’s Prime Minister from 2001-2006, was a timely reminder of the unique situation of the men and women who have held that country’s highest office.While leaders of all lands bear a heavy responsibility for their country’s safety, it’s only in Israel that the threat is existential. Should Israel lose a war, she would cease to exist, something that is not a factor anywhere else. Richard Trank’s documentary The Prime Ministers: The Pioneers, based on Yehuda Avner’s book The Prime Ministers, testifies to that fact as well as illuminating two of Israel’s PMs, Levi Eshkol and Golda Meir, whom Avner served in various capacities. It’s a sometimes schmaltzy, overwrought film but also an emotional and thoughtful testament to one’s man’s love of country and those who led it. (It’s the first of two parts, with the second film, The Prime Ministers: Soldiers and Peacemakers, detailing Avner’s stints under Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres set for release in the spring.)

Heartbreakers: Our Children and The Past

 Tahar Rahim & Émilie Dequenne in Our Children

The devastating Belgian picture Our Children begins with its heroine, Murielle (Émilie Dequenne), in a post-traumatic condition and then shows us how she got there. (The much better French title is À perdre la raison, or To Lose Your Mind.) At the beginning of the story Murielle marries her Moroccan boy friend, Mounir (Tahar Rahim), and moves in with his unofficial adoptive father, André (Niels Arestrup), a successful doctor who has also invited Mounir into his practice. André is married to Mounir’s older sister, but it’s a paper marriage – a marriage of convenience so that she can get Belgian citizenship – and André’s professional and financial support of Mounir is his way of offering another member of the family a better life in Europe. (In the course of the movie he engineers a second paper marriage between Mounir’s younger brother and Murielle’s sister.) It’s generous of him, but of course there are strings attached. As the couple begins to have children, the communal space they share with André feels more and more constrained, especially since Mounir is always conscious of wanting to please this man who is his mentor and who owns the house they’re living in. But when Murielle suggests they might be happier living in Morocco – the only bond her locked-in world allows her is with Mounir’s warm, solicitous mother (Baya Belal), whom she gets to see too rarely – André explodes at Mounir, accusing him of ingratitude, and Mounir backs down immediately. Meanwhile two children have become too much for Murielle to handle, and when the family expands to five and then six she finds her only outlet in visits to a therapist. Her husband isn’t kind or patient with her; he behaves with an entitled masculinity and has little tolerance for her when she can’t keep the children controlled and out of his hair. You don’t wonder when she grasps her mother-in-law in a desperate embrace before they put her on a plane back to Morocco – she sorely needs the comfort that only another woman can provide. (Her sister isn’t especially giving.)

Bittersweet Symphony: The Beatles U.S. Albums Box Set

This past Tuesday, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of The Beatles' invasion of America in February 1964, Capitol Records released The U.S. Albums, a 13-CD Beatles collection that spans from 1964’s Meet The Beatles! to 1970’s Hey Jude. While many fans back in 2009 already shelled out a fair chunk of cash for the official U.K. remastered stereo CDs and the subsequent box set of the mono versions, The U.S. Albums can seem like a redundant cash grab. But these albums actually differed considerably from the band’s U.K. versions, including having different track lists, song mixes, album titles, and even cover art. For those of us who grew up in North America during the Sixties, these were the albums we knew, and the history we were familiar with. The albums presented here are also in both mono and stereo, with the exception of the embarrassingly fawning 2-LP documentary, The Beatles’ Story, and Hey Jude, a collection of mostly unreleased singles, which are in stereo only.

But there are a number of issues that bring a sour taste to this spirit of celebration. To begin with, Capitol had already released two box sets (The Capitol Albums, Vol. 1 & 2) containing their first eight American albums a decade ago. So why didn't they just put out Volume 3 to fill out the rest? For those of us who bought those sets, we now have to repurchase them to get the remaining discs. On top of that, do we really need The Beatles' Story added instead of, say, The Beatles Live at the Hollywood Bowl, which was only made available on LP? Hey Jude is also not a Capitol album, but an Apple product devised by then manager Allen Klein in 1969 after he'd negotiated a new contract for the band and wanted to massage the deal. The only reason it's being included here is because of the inclusion of tracks like "Paperback Writer," "Hey Jude" and "Lady Madonna." So why not then include in the box set Rarities (which is a Capitol release and collects the magical "There's a Place" and "Misery" that were missing on The Early Beatles, as well as "The Inner Light" (the B-side of "Lady Madonna"), and the rare promotional single "Penny Lane" that featured the French horn coda at the end)? But what is worse: Capitol has decided in this new box to largely ignore the original American mixes and use the 2009 ones instead. Even if the 2009 versions sound better, and they do, we are just re-purchasing what we already bought a few years ago. Whatever you think of the altered sound of the North American albums (with their added reverb, duophonic simulated stereo, and remixed songs), you're supposed to be paying tribute to one culture's way of hearing and remembering the past. As always, when it comes to The Beatles' catalogue, Capitol Records finds new and imaginative ways to botch things up. And they've done it right from the beginning just before the group landed in New York to change the world almost half a century ago. 

The Coen Odyssey: Joel and Ethan Coen's Inside Llewyn Davis

Oscar Isaac as Llewyn Davis

In his memoir, Chronicles, Bob Dylan wrote that “a folk song has over a thousand faces and you must meet them all if you want to play this stuff.” What he meant was that you had to let the songs sing you rather than the other way around. When Dylan would perform a traditional tune about the slave market, like "No More Auction Block," he wanted to sing it from inside the experience of the black man being sold into bondage. "With a certain kind of blues music, you can sit down and play it," he said in 1966. "[But] you may have to lean forward a little." Becoming a character in a song like "No More Auction Block" requires a fair bit of leaning, and maybe sometimes even donning a few nifty disguises, but that's how Bob Dylan transformed American topical music into a fervid national drama that the listener had a stake in.

In the opening scene of the latest Coen brothers' film, Inside Llewyn Davis, as the titular folk singer (Oscar Isaac) plays the traditional death ballad "Hang Me, Oh Hang Me" with earnest dedication, what's clear is that Llewyn Davis has yet to meet even one of those thousand faces. He sits on a faintly lit stage in a Greenwich Village club with confident assurance and sings that he doesn't mind being hanged, but dreads the finality of the grave. Yet for all his fidelity to this dramatic dirge, Llewyn never truly gets possessed enough by its power to bring the Gaslight Cafe audience into that endless sleep with him. Over the course of the picture, however, we quickly grasp that Joel and Ethan Coen are most certainly fascinated by what's at stake in the song. With Inside Llewyn Davis, they take Llewyn on an elliptical and evocative sojourn through the American heartland of the early Sixties, in the dead of winter, and touch the despair and futility that's right at the heart of the song. In doing so, they've fashioned a funny, occasionally touching, and remarkably haunting ballad of their own. It's by far their best picture.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle: Nintendo & The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds

Fierce and bitter wars were fought in the playgrounds of the 1990s. They were secretive conflicts, pitting friend against friend in brutal opposition, even as the teachers looked on in disinterest. I’m not talking about marbles or King of the Hill or whatever – I’m talking about the Console Wars, and any child of my generation will remember them, and count their scars.

When many of us were young, we couldn’t afford to buy video game systems ourselves. This meant relying on Mom and Dad (or sometimes Santa) to deliver these incredible imagination machines to our living rooms – but they came bundled with a decision of deadly import. Multiple consoles (and iPads and phones and laptops and any number of electronic ephemera) might be common today, but in those halcyon days it was always, “Which one do you want – a Nintendo, or a Sega?” You would agonize over the decision, weighing Super Mario against Sonic the Hedgehog, and when you finally chose and got your console it was your sworn and noble duty to justify and defend your choice as fervently as your grade-school psyche would allow. You would brook no pretenders to the throne: you picked the Sega Genesis, and it didn’t matter that Nintendo’s Zelda and Metroid and Kirby looked so fantastically fun – they were garbage games when compared to the ones you could play. These arguments were the ground zero of the Console Wars, which are still raging today – just visit any internet forum which pits the Xbox One against the Playstation 4 to witness true modern warfare.

Celebration: Twelfth Night on Broadway

Stephen Fry and Mark Rylance in Twelfth Night 

Twelfth Night was first performed in Queen Elizabeth’s court, and Shakespeare wrote it for the end of the twelve days of Christmas. Tim Carroll’s all-male production, which originated at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, conveys the celebratory mood. Carroll and his actors imported it to Broadway for the holiday season, in repertory with Richard III, showcasing Mark Rylance’s performances as Richard and as Olivia. (The title cards for the two shows borrow the Renaissance spellings: Twelfe Night, or What You Will and The Tragedie of King Richard the Third.) I saw Richard III in November but I didn’t write about it because I’d already reviewed both Kevin Spacey’s Richard at the Old Vic and the brilliant production by Propeller Theatre, and I found the Globe version – also with a completely male cast that overlaps with that of Twelfth Night – uninteresting. Even Rylance’s depiction of Shakespeare’s busy, self-amused villain-king felt recycled, a compendium of tricks he’d pulled from his voluminous sleeves on other occasions. But Twelfth Night is something else again – a splendiferous entertainment in which Rylance’s hilarious, love-addled Countess Olivia is just one member of a grand ensemble.

You get into the spirit as soon as you walk into the house. The actors are still getting into costume, so those audience members who have purchased tickets to sit on the stage above the playing area become part of the general bustle as ushers escort them to their places. Once strove for a companionable cross-over between actors and audience, inviting viewers to hang out in the pub at the top of the show, and Diane Paulus’s revival of Hair encouraged dancing on the stage after the curtain call, but both these efforts felt forced. At Twelfth Night the immediacy of the actors from the start doesn’t pretend that we have some relationship with them, but it does get us excited about the treats in store.

Legacy of a Literary Recluse: Salinger, The Movie

J.D. Salinger

“I'm sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody,” Jerome David Salinger wrote in Franny and Zooey. “I'm sick of myself and everybody else that wants to make some kind of a splash.” That statement certainly seems emblematic of his struggle with the overwhelming success that followed publication of The Catcher in the Rye in mid-July 1951. Less than two years later, J. D. Salinger fled the instant celebrity status imposed on him in Manhattan for rural Cornish, New Hampshire. But, over the decades, fervent fans would stake out his remote hilltop home in hopes of meeting the increasingly iconic wordsmith.

One such determined admirer is Michael Clarkson, who drove 450 miles from Ontario to Cornish in 1978 and again in 1979. He’s a talking head in Salinger, directed by Shane Salerno, also the coauthor with David Shields of a similarly titled 698-page biography. After its Toronto International Film Festival premiere last year and a subsequent theatrical release, the fascinating but frustrating documentary will be broadcast Tuesday night (January 21) on the PBS American Masters series.

Seeing in the Dark: Distinctive Voices in Nordic Noir

Readers of Phantom likely concluded that Jo Nesbo decided to end the high octane series with its brilliant but flawed detective, Harry Hole, given its grim ending. After all, the author revealed that “Harry will not have eternal life, that he will not rise from the dead.” But with the publication of Police (Random House, 2013), the tenth Harry Hole novel, Nesbo seems to have changed his mind - or has he? At the outset, the maverick Hole is not present unless he is that closely-guarded patient in a coma. To follow what transpires in this densely-plotted and disturbing thriller, the reader must read the previous novel first: the plots, characters and themes that coursed through that book are present in Police. For almost half of this intricately-plotted story, without Harry’s leadership, an elite and covert group of specialists are secretly working to put the pieces together and catch a serial killer who lures a police detective on the anniversary to the scene of the very crime the officer investigated but failed to solve. There, the unsuspecting officer is gruesomely dispatched in a manner similar to that of the victim of the unsolved crime. Removing Harry from the action may be a risk but it allows Nesbo to furnish incisive character studies of the ensemble players who have always languished in his shadow – secondary figures like Beate Lonn, the brilliant head of forensics, who has the uncanny ability to never forget a face, and Stale Aune, the mild-mannered psychologist who misses the adrenaline rush of helping hunt down Harry’s monstrous criminals.

Goin' South: Blackie & the Rodeo Kings' SOUTH

Goin’ South is something we northerners think about all the time. Sure, we head up north to the cottage in the summertime. We like to sit on the dock, dangle our feet in the cool water, maybe drop a line in or do a little canoeing but when the snow comes it’s all about south. Musicians in Canada have been thinking about the south forever. South is where you need to make it. South is where all the influences come from. Even if we’re influenced by Neil Young or Joni Mitchell we had to watch them travel to California before we paid them much attention. The Band had four Canadians and it was the lone southerner who had the biggest impact on their sound. I mention The Band because they are the group people point to as the precursor to Blackie & the Rodeo Kings whose new CD came out this week. It’s called SOUTH and you can hear echoes of The Band in the title track. The ragged but spot on harmonies, the organ, the solid bass and lots of guitar. However don’t think that B&RK is just a copy of Levon’s old group!

Time Killer: HBO's True Detective

Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson in True Detective.

Knowledgeable TV watchers inked True Detective in as the first cultural event of the year as soon as news of it began to filter out last spring. In an industry where it’s unusual for even ambitious series to have just a few people at the helm insuring unity of personal vision and style, the series was conceived by the novelist Nic Pizzolatto, who also wrote all eight episodes, all of which were directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga. (Fukunaga previously made the fine 2011 feature adaptation of Jane Eyre.) The main characters, a mismatched pair of police detectives working a homicide case in Louisiana in the mid-80s, are played by a couple of movie stars: Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson.

Even now that the barriers that used to separate movie and TV careers have eroded, it’s unusual to see a couple of big names as successful and adventurous as these two agreeing to headline a weekly TV show, and McConaughey and Harrelson won’t be sweating out the wait to see if the series gets renewed; like Ryan Murphy’s conceptually audacious (albeit deranged) American Horror Story, this is an anthology series, designed to tell one story over the course of a season, then return to tell a different one, with a different set of characters, in the same basic genre. This ought to be a good way to attract talented people who are reluctant to tie themselves to a regular TV schedule (although Murphy has made a fetish of bringing back certain actors, from season to season, in different roles); it’s also a smart way to get past what’s always been the great creative trap of American series TV, which has demanded that creators keep drawing their stories out past the point of dramatic tension and common sense for as long as it remains profitable to keep their shows on the air, instead of thinking in terms of stories with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Everything about True Detective sounds great in theory. And to a degree that I don’t remember seeing on American TV before, that’s just what it is: a show that’s absolutely bursting with pride at how great it is in theory.

When Ordinary People Come to Terms with the Extraordinary: Revisiting David Lynch's The Straight Story (1999)

Richard Farnsworth in The Straight Story

As I watched Alexander Payne's new film, Nebraska, in which Bruce Dern plays Woody, a craggy old man banking his final hopes on some junk mail scam that promises him a million dollars if he hoofs it to Billings, Montana to collect it, the picture's plainness left me with a bad case of sensory deprivation. I bailed some thirty minutes in. The smallness of the characters and Payne's need to italicize every irony didn't leave me quite as steamed as his Martian take on family life did in his last movie, The Descendants, but (despite the fine performance here by Dern), the journey undertaken in Nebraska sets up an inevitable ending before we even arrive there. So, following Woody's example, I sought fortune elsewhere and fled the theatre. And I began thinking back to another, somewhat similar road movie that has continued to cast its elliptical spell over me like some fairy tale recovered again years later in my grandparent's treasure chest. David Lynch's The Straight Story (1999) is a straight-forward account of one man's journey to seek closure towards the end of his life, but it's by no means simple. This lovely, poignant tale of a stubborn coot who wishes to mend his fractured relationship with his brother – and the world – before he dies examines what happens when ordinary people come to terms with the extraordinary.

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Sensualist: Kill Your Darlings

Dane DeHaan & Daniel Radcliffe in Kill Your Darlings

In Kill Your Darlings, John Krokidas’ feature film debut, Daniel Radcliffe plays the young Allen Ginsberg, whose friendship with the charismatic daredevil Lucien Carr (Dane DeHaan) during his first year at Columbia University represents his artistic and sexual coming-of-age. Krokidas, who also co-wrote the screenplay with first-timer Austin Bunn, has taken the true story of Lucien Carr’s role in the formation of the New York City Beat Generation – he was a sort of ringleader and muse for Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs – and his grisly murder of his gay stalker David Kammerer, and refracted it all through Ginsberg’s perspective. Krokidas doesn’t have the directorial chops to make this movie work. It meanders and drifts, coming in and out of focus, and its glazed druggy-jazzy set pieces are pandering and heavy-handed. (The structural problems also come from the script.) And visually, it’s a poky little production, awkwardly pasted together – you don’t have to be a technical expert to see it. The difference between Kill Your Darlings and a run-of-the-mill bad movie from a freshman director is that Krokidas has really interesting ideas; he just doesn’t know how to execute them yet. But Daniel Radcliffe does: his performance, which is crystal clear in every scene, gets to the emotional core of what Krokidas as a writer-director can’t express. He keeps you watching.

A Note on Acting Categories

I'm continually surprised during award season to observe which actors land in the categories of leading actor and actress and which are consigned to the ranks of supporting players. In the era of the big Hollywood studios – the Academy Awards were first handed out in the late 1920s – the dividing lines were easily drawn: if your name appeared above the title of a movie (either in the credits or on billboards) you were eligible for a Best Actor or Actress nomination and if it fell below you weren’t. Since most A-list pictures were vehicles for established stars, there wasn’t much room for argument. The only actors who tended to be ignored were children, who only occasionally garnered nominations and then only in supporting categories, however large their actual roles. (The Academy usually covered their contributions with specially constructed pint-sized statuettes.)

Intelligence and Helix: New Science Fiction TV for 2014

A scene from Helix, now airing on the SyFy Channel

For the television audience, January sometimes brings some belated Christmas presents. TV's mid-season is no longer the place where networks dump the shows not quite good enough for September, and cable networks never really much cared about the old schedules anyway. This past week, two new science fiction dramas premiered: Intelligence (CBS/CTV) and Helix (Syfy). Both shows boast some familiar faces in front of and behind the camera, but whereas the former feels uninspired and derivative, the latter shows some real promise in its early episodes.

The Light Fantastic – The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug & The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

The middle part of Peter Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy, The Desolation of Smaug, is terrifically enjoyable, and its two hours and forty minutes move with alacrity. It’s the ideal Christmas entertainment, though it’s now fashionable to deride Jackson, who was – justifiably – everybody’s hero between 2001 and 2003, when he turned out the three Lord of the Rings pictures. The general feeling seems to be that he returned to Tolkien with his tail between his legs because his two intervening movies, King Kong and The Lovely Bones, were disasters and it was the only thing he could do – as if nearly-three-hour fantasy adventures with enormous casts were so easy to pull off that they no longer merited any respect. And then it turns out that The Hobbit movies are piddling achievements because they’re not in the same class as The Lord of the Rings.

Well, backlashes don’t make sense except as expressions of envy, but I feel duty bound to correct the record. The Lovely Bones was indeed a disaster: Jackson didn’t have the sensibility or the style for Alice Sebold’s delicate novel, which is the damnedest coming-of-age story I’ve ever read (the heroine, who narrates it, has been murdered by a predatory neighbor). Jackson compensated by overproducing it in a kind of storybook lushness probably meant to mimic Maxfield Parrish or maybe the 1940s output of the English filmmaking team Powell and Pressburger. And it was all wrong – the way Spielberg’s The Color Purple was all wrong. Talented directors sometimes fall flat on their faces. But King Kong was another story. Yes, it went on for hours, but there were splendid things in it right alongside the scenes that fumbled, and if you stuck around for the last section, in New York, which focused on the love story between the ape and Naomi Watts, your patience was rewarded. A former student of mine theorized cannily that it was way too long because Jackson loved the material so much he couldn’t bear to let it go – a charge that might be made about his Lord of the Rings movies, too, if it weren’t for the fact that there was nothing in them you’d want to cut (and that includes the roughly half an hour of additional footage he restored to each for the director’s-cut DVDs). You can call King Kong a folly, but it’s hardly fair to call it a waste.

When Magic Isn't Magical: Lev Grossman’s The Magicians

Lev Grossman's The Magicians was described to me as “a grown-up Harry Potter,” and while that makes for glib description in retrospect, that’s pretty much what it is: a team of teenagers attend a magical college called Brakebills, with plenty of colourful characters and adolescent debauchery to populate it. It’s an easy sell. Here's what was missing from the Harry Potter universe: copious sex and drinking.

The Magicians is in reality an odd duck, a novel which confused me not through plot intricacy, difficult language, or even authorial incompetence, but through a mismatch between my expectations and reality – namely, the expectation that had been bred in me that The Magicians was going to stand up to scrutiny against Harry Potter. Oddly fitting, too, considering that the protagonist, a young Brooklyn wizard named Quentin Coldwater, struggles with this very dichotomy in what becomes the novel’s major theme. Quentin is unwittingly enrolled in a secret school of magic, which fulfills his every escapist fantasy. He comes to learn, however, that fantasies aren’t necessarily much better than reality. In its handling of these so-called “mature themes” – what it calls “the horror of really getting what you think you want” – The Magicians is canny, providing more than a few moments of hungover cynicism that struck rather too close to home. But though I’m inclined to say that its angsty insight trumps Harry Potter’s storybook naiveté, The Magicians’ fundamental storytelling is where the comparison falls flat.

Gutter Balls: Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street

Leonardo DiCaprio as Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street.

Martin Scorsese’s three-hour, head-crushing The Wolf of Wall Street stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Jordan Belfort, a stockbroker who loses his job with a big Wall Street firm after the 1987 crash and re-invents himself as a dealer in penny stocks, making a fortune (and soon setting up his own firm) by pitching shares of virtually worthless businesses to strangers on the phone. There is a real Jordan Belfort; the screenplay, by Terence Winter, takes it title and many of its characters and events from Belfort’s autobiography, which describes his rapid rise in the 1990s, his party-hearty lifestyle, and his eventual arrest for stock fraud. At the end of the movie, he has remade himself, yet again, as a motivational speaker. It’s easy to imagine a worse outcome for a guy like this, but when DiCaprio is standing in front of a roomful of shmucks, half-heartedly inviting them to show them what they’ve got and handing around a pen to use as a prop, he has the same dead-eyed, cast-out-of-Eden look as Ray Liotta’s Henry Hill at the end of GoodFelllas.

Malfunction: Spike Jonze’s Her

Joaquin Phoenix and Scarlett Johansson (on table) in Her

He’s only directed four features in all since his 1999 debut with the startling and brilliant Being John Malkovich. But nothing in Spike Jonze’s oeuvre, which also includes the clever and witty Adaptation (2002) and the moving Where the Wild Things Are (2009), prepared me for his latest film, Her (2013), a failure on pretty much every level but also a science fiction movie singularly lacking in originality, thought or vision. Considering it’s Jonze's solo debut as a screenwriter, he may want to consider letting others write his movies for him. He certainly displays no facility for crafting screenplays on his own that entice and reward the viewer.

Set in the near future, Her revolves around one Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Pheonix), an introverted man still reeling from the breakup of his marriage to his childhood sweetheart Catherine (Rooney Mara). He spends his days in a job that involves writing love letters for people who lack the facility or time to do so but he is lonely himself, resorting to Internet porn to get through his nights. But one day, he’s told about a new invention, a particularly intelligent Operating System (OS) that is all the rage. He buys one and soon the OS (voiced by Scarlett Johansson, Don Jon), who has chosen her own name, Samantha, becomes a permanent fixture in his life, first as a friend and then as something much more, a girlfriend with whom he falls deeply in love. It’s not the worst idea for a movie but it’s also not the revelatory concept Jonze and many critics – the film has (inexplicably) received its share of awards, including being picked best movie of 2013 by the National Board of Review – seem to think it is.

Past as Prologue: Patty Griffin's Silver Bell and American Kid

Patty Griffin on NPR

Last year Patty Griffin released two albums that could be considered long, lost companions reunited. Even though the releases span 13 years, they offer insight into Griffin’s maturity as a singer and songwriter.

In the brief liner notes to Silver Bell, Griffin writes about this previously unreleased record as "the last of many things". But to my ear it’s as much a “beginning” as an "ending" because Silver Bell is a fine album of transition, from Griffin’s edgy rock sound to her current recording, American Kid [New West] that is refined and inspired from her past. To me, Silver Bell is the gateway to American Kid.

A Hopeless Mess: The Commons of Pensacola

Blythe Danner and Sarah Jessica Parker in The Commons of Pensacola (Photo by Joan Marcus)

The actress Amanda Peet has an earthbound vivacity and an unpredictable way of attacking a line; I loved watching her on Aaron Sorkin’s TV series Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip and as Mark Ruffalo’s wife in a terrific little movie called What Doesn’t Kill You that went straight to DVD (when the company that produced it went bankrupt on the verge of its intended release). But her playwriting debut, The Commons of Pensacola, which the Manhattan Theatre Club is producing off-Broadway at MTC Stage I at City Center, is a hopeless mess. It’s set in a retirement condo in Pensacola, Florida, where Judith (Blythe Danner), the wife of a Bernie Madoff-like Jewish financier who victimized Holocaust survivors, now lives on the restricted income allowed her. It’s Thanksgiving, and she’s visited by her daughter Becca (Sarah Jessica Parker), an actress on her uppers who arrives with a younger boyfriend (Michael Stahl-David), self-described as a guerilla journalist. On their heels come sixteen-year-old Lizzy (Zoe Levin), Judith’s granddaughter, and finally Lizzy’s mother, Ali (Ali Marsh), who hasn’t spoken to Judith for a year but flies down when a fall lands her, unconscious, in the hospital.

It’s a good assumption that the subject of a play with this plot premise is the fallout from a front-page scam for the family of the sociopath who engineered it, but Becca’s financial desperation – when her agent calls, it isn’t to offer her work but to find out if she’s available New Year’s Eve to babysit her daughter – is unrelated to what her father did, and so is her boyfriend Gabe’s having sex with Lizzy while Becca is at the hospital with her mother. The narrative feels as though Peet thought it up, episode by episode, on a caffeine jag. There are individual scenes that don’t make sense on their face. Left alone with Judith hours after meeting her for the first time, Gabe pitches the idea of a documentary series he and Becca have conceived that would allow her to talk about her husband’s crime and show some sympathy for the people he bankrupted. When she finds the idea repugnant, he makes it clear that he doesn’t believe she could possibly have been ignorant of what her husband was up to. It’s a fact about notoriety, like any other kind of celebrity, that complete strangers feel emboldened to proclaim their point of view, but is it likely that a man meeting his girlfriend’s mother for the first time, a guest in her home, would insult her?

What I Did Last Year!: 2013 Concerts in Review

Stephen Fearing performed at The Pearl Company in Hamilton on April 19, 2013.

Do you remember the assignment you had back in school? Write an essay called ‘How I Spent My Summer Vacation’? I’m sure you wrote several such essays. Well, at the end of a year I like to look back over the past 12 months and just see what happened. Where did I go, what did I see, how many CDs and books did I buy? A complete list would take up more space than I have today, but I thought it might be interesting to look back at the concerts I attended.

The Damned Hurt: Albert Maltz’s The Journey Of Simon Mckeever

While writing about Henry Fonda a few years ago, I learned about a movie project he desired to make late in his life, but never did – an adaptation of a novel called The Journey of Simon McKeever, written by Albert Maltz and published in 1949. I’d never heard of the book. But I got a copy, and read it. It haunted me for days, and I've wanted ever since to tell people about it.

Simon McKeever is seventy-three and lives meagerly in a Sacramento nursing home; his wife and child, both killed in an explosion, are long dead. Born in Ireland and raised in America, he has labored all his life, and now suffers from crippling arthritis. Yet he resolves to hitchhike, by himself, 400 miles of highway to find the doctor someone says will cure him. Simon is a sober, sensible man who accepts pain and even death, but not uselessness; he’s also a man of great complexity and sensitivity who is plagued by Kafkaesque nightmares in which he finds himself to be “a cockroach after all; not a man, a bug.” But above all, Simon is profoundly, rebelliously alive.

Anyone who has read about the McCarthy-era blacklist knows Albert Maltz’s name, even if they can’t quite remember his work. Born in Brooklyn in 1908, he was one of the Hollywood Ten – a group of screenwriters who, called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities during its 1947 investigation of Communist influence in the movies, refused to answer questions, and were subsequently banned from the industry and jailed for contempt. Prior to the HUAC hearing, Maltz had been a playwright in the WPA-era Theater Union; an award-winning short story writer and respected novelist; and a screenwriter who, answering Hollywood’s siren call à la his compatriot Clifford Odets, chalked up some decent credits: This Gun for Hire (1942), Pride of the Marines (1945), Cloak and Dagger (1946), The Naked City (1948).

Hair Club: David O. Russell’s American Hustle

Amy Adams and Christian Bale in American Hustle

The very title of David O. Russell’s American Hustle (from a script credited to the director and Eric Warren Singer) announces a level of ambition that’s been missing from Russell’s movies since his out-of-control 2004 satire I Heart Huckabees. Loosely inspired by the Abscam investigations of the late 1970s, in which FBI agents worked with con men (including a bogus Arab sheik) to ensnare crooked Congressmen by offering them bribes, the new movie has some of the broad canvass and satirical edge of Russell’s masterpiece, the 1999 Iraq War movie Three Kings. But American Hustle’s driving force – what makes it one of the most entertaining movies of the swaggering awards-bait season – mostly come down to Russell’s skill with the actors and his enjoyment of putting them together and watching them cook, which is what made his comeback pictures The Fighter and Silver Linings Playbook stand out. (It was also the best thing about I Heart Huckabees.)

Most of the principal players appeared in one of Russell’s two previous movies, and the performances have the confidence and experimental looseness of actors letting themselves go under the watchful eye of someone they’ve come to trust. Usually, that would be the set-up to describe how some actor has plumbed his inner depths and gone deeper into himself than he’d ever gone before, but Christian Bale – who starved himself for both The Machinist and Rescue Dawn and practiced his glower in Christopher Nolan’s Batman films, before winning an Oscar for his role as a junkie in The Fighter – has been needing to lighten up for a while, and Russell has gently managed to lead him out of the strobe-lit Method torture chamber inside his head and goad him into having fun onscreen again.

Folkie Flashback: The Music Scene On Screen And Off

Washington Square Park, New York City, 1960s

Mired in controversy worthy of a folk song that laments bruised feelings, raw memories and hard travelin’, Inside Llewyn Davis is intended to capture the spirit of the times 53 years ago in Greenwich Village. The titular protagonist (Oscar Isaac) is based on the late musician Dave Van Ronk and performs his signature songs.The screenplay is loosely adapted from his posthumous 2005 memoir, The Mayor of MacDougal Street, by co-directors Joel and Ethan Coen. Although I have yet to catch up with the movie myself, I keep hearing that the character comes across as a talented but misanthropic loser.

Van Ronk’s first wife, Teri Thal, denounced the film in a recent Village Voice story. “I didn't expect it to be almost unrecognizable as the folk-music world of the early 1960s,” she wrote. “Llewyn Davis a not-very smart, somewhat selfish, confused young man for whom music is a way to make a living. It's not a calling, as it was for David and for some others.”

Terri Thal and Dave Van Ronk

Thal concludes: “The inept Llewyn Davis arranged some of those songs? Sang them as well as Oscar Isaacs does? I don't believe it. That schmuck couldn't make that music.”

Ouch!

Inside Llewyn Davis attempts to chronicle the days just before a guy newly-arrived from Minnesota changed the entire equation after cleverly tapping into the zeitgeist. Something was happening and you did know what it was, didn’t you, Mr. Dylan? Later, his lyrics for “Tangled Up in Blue” perfectly captured the Village life he found in early 1961: “There was music in the cafes at night and revolution in the air...”

Critics as Readers: The Best Critics at Large Pieces of 2013

This is the time of year when critics love to make lists of their favourite things from the year that's just passed. Even though Ten Best Lists often draw attention to work that might otherwise have been overlooked and undervalued, they still tend to categorize the work rather than bring out the qualities that made it so special. So Amanda Shubert and Kevin Courrier have decided to create a Ten Best List that focuses on reviews by some of the writers at Critics at Large this past year. These are pieces that we feel brought out the love of engagement a critic can have with their subject, and in writing about them we sought to express our own love of engaging with the work our colleagues produce.

But since there are more than ten writers working at Critics at Large, we couldn't use everyone. That is not a reflection on the work of those who are missing. (Additionally, although founding editor David Churchill left us a couple of good pieces before his tragic and untimely death last April, we decided not to include him in our list because the site had already honoured him with an omnibus of our favourite pieces.) We simply wanted to focus on certain reviews that excited us, and to describe how they made us feel. These pieces are in no way listed in any particular order of preference, and are to be enjoyed with the same zeal as the critics themselves felt in writing them.