Songs We Continue to Sing: Rob Ford and the Culture of Corruption

The night Rob Ford was elected Mayor of Toronto, almost four years ago, he had just won a bitterly fought battle to lead the city, and he did it by marshalling and manipulating a populist rage towards city government. Ford had warned us of a "gravy train" of bureaucratic waste depriving us of our hard-earned taxed dollars. While he positioned himself as city saviour, he also began targeting those he described as 'liberal elites,' a pampered, educated and entitled bunch, whom he saw as the true enemy of the hard-working individual. If Margaret Thatcher had once casually dismissed the notion that society actually existed, Ford went a step further. He talked about the city of Toronto only in terms of the taxpayer rather than in terms of its citizens. Since we all pay taxes – even when we're homeless and buy a cup of coffee – taxpayer was merely a code word for property owner. To Ford, Toronto wasn't a diverse and multiculturally vibrant urban community, made up of those who are privileged and those who aren't; it was instead a dysfunctional corporation he was about to restore to efficiency. His message to the city, where he alone could determine those he'd serve and those he wouldn't, was communicated with obscene clarity on the day of his coronation. CBC Television broadcaster and former NHL coach Don Cherry had arrived in his flamingo pink suit to drape the chain of office around Ford's neck. It was Cherry who helped set the new tone for the city in his opening remarks. "Well, actually I'm wearing pinko for all the pinkos out there that ride bicycles and everything," Cherry began with cheers from the crowd in the upper rotunda while city counsellors sat in shock. "I say he's going to be the greatest mayor this city has ever, ever seen, as far as I'm concerned – and put that in your pipe, you left-wing kooks." One thing certain in those tone-setting remarks: contempt was now public policy.

Another Heiress: Victoria Stewart's Rich Girl

Amelia Broome, Sasha Castroverde, Joe Short, and Celeste Oliva in Rich Girl. (Photo by Mark S. Howard)

Victoria Stewart’s Rich Girl, which is receiving its Boston premiere at Lyric Stage, is a contemporary version of The Heiress, Ruth and Augustus Goetz’s superb 1947 dramatization of the Henry James novella Washington Square. Standing in for James’s heroine, Catherine Sloper, a retiring, socially awkward young woman who falls for a fortune hunter, is Claudine (Sasha Castroverde), the titular rich girl who is swept off her feet by an actor and theatre director named Henry (Joe Short). Catherine’s brilliant, icy father, who sizes up her suitor – and whose wisdom about the match is inseparable from what she correctly assesses to be a contempt for her – has become Eve (Amelia Broome), who runs a foundation that employs Claudine and hosts a popular show about finance.

FX's Fargo: Their Own Private Minnesota

Allison Tolman and Shawn Doyle in Fargo, now airing on FX

It's not a sequel. It's not a spinoff or a remake. Maybe it's more like a reboot? Right now I'm thinking of Fargo, FX's new limited-run television series, as falling into the "inspired by" category. My favourite theory is that its story is a riff on the same "true story" which playfully (and apocryphally) inspired Joel and Ethan Coen's feature. It shares a universe, an aesthetic of darkly comic, casual violence, and perhaps an area code with the Coen brothers classic 1996 film of the same name, but there is little other explicit overlap. (However, careful fans might observe a mysterious briefcase the show's opening scene.) Still, television viewers tuning in will be reminded of the film by the big skies, the unforgettable North Minnesotan dialect and exaggeratedly rounded vowels ("aw geez", "you betcha!"), and the signature pacing and tone. There are significant risks in toying with a beloved and critically acclaimed movie on the small screen, but so far, with nary a wood chipper in sight, FX's Fargo has already begun to stand on its own snow-booted feet.

Notes on the Method: Michelle Williams as Marilyn Monroe

Michelle Williams as Marilyn Monroe.

Is there anything trickier for an actor than playing a show-business legend? Jimmy Cagney in Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) and Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl (1968) didn’t have to worry about getting down George M. Cohan and Fanny Brice because so few moviegoers would have been able to compare them to the personalities they were depicting – Cohan had made only one obscure film, and by the time Funny Girl came out Brice’s handful of screen appearances were long forgotten. They were stage performers (Brice also had a radio fan base); an established movie star like Cagney or a newly minted movie star like Streisand easily trumped a ghost from an earlier Broadway era. But Judy Davis in Life with Judy Garland: Me and My Shadows and Geoffrey Rush in The Life and Death of Peter Sellers – both made for television – were playing movie stars of mythic status, so they had to find a way to replicate their eccentric physical presences while simultaneously inhabiting them from the inside, and miraculously both did. Davis, giving perhaps her greatest performance, burrowed so deep into Garland’s persona that when she lip-synched that famous contralto, with its spring-air freshness and warmth in the thirties and forties and its increasingly desperate tremolo in the fifties and sixties, the results were spooky. Rush approximated Sellers’s madly gifted clowning and made up the rest, since whereas the whole world got to see Garland’s neuroses – in A Star Is Born and on her TV show (and you can hear it on the Judy Garland at Carnegie Hall album) – Sellers’s complicated psychology was always completely separate from the characters he played in the movies.

Neglected Gem #53: Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist (2008)

Kat Dennings and Michael Cera star in Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist (2008)

I recently finished teaching a class on iconic cinema and iconic actors, such as Casablanca, Gone with the Wind, Greta Garbo, Charlie Chaplin and John Wayne, among many others. One of my lectures, the last of eight, was devoted to youth culture, examining the iconic nature of everything from A Hard Day’s Night (1964) to The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), to the films starring Saturday Night Live alumni – National Lampoon’s Animal House (1978), The Blues Brothers (1980) and Ghostbusters (1984) – and, of course, the popular films of John Hughes – Sixteen Candles (1984), The Breakfast Club (1985). The sleeper of the bunch however is the little known Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist (2008), a teen romantic comedy that is more authentic then Hughes’s contrived output (Sixteen Candles is a complete mess, actually). With its smart use of indie songs on the soundtrack, from the talented likes of Vampire Weekend and The National, and deft use of underground New York City locations, it’s a movie which packs an emotional, moving punch, albeit in a sweet, understated way.

The Unwatchable Watchable: Errol Morris' The Unknown Known

Errol Morris (and his subject) in The Unknown Known

Film director Errol Morris once worked as a private investigator and his best part is his investigative-journalist side – the muckraking detective. While planning a documentary about a forensic psychiatrist who became notorious for his “expert witness” testimony in capital punishment cases, he happened to come across a death row conviction that didn't smell right and made a film (The Thin Blue Line) that ended up getting an innocent man released from prison. But Morris’ reputation as one of the greatest living filmmakers, and very likely the greatest living specialist in documentary feature filmmaking, isn't based mainly on 25-year-old headlines generated by his breakthrough movie. It’s based on his being a “stylist” – on his artistic pretensions and the easily recognizable visual and aural tics that make up his style.

Morris has been known to reject the term “documentary” in favor of “nonfiction film,” because he feels that having his movies called documentaries lumps them in with films shown in classrooms and on public television. Frederick Wiseman may well be the most important documentary filmmaker of the past fifty years, but if you happened to walk past a TV set while High School or Basic Training was showing, you could take a glance for a few random seconds and mistake them for a clip from any old TV news show. Morris’ movies look and sound like Errol Morris movies. How impressed you are by the fact that, more and more, they all look and sound like the same Errol Morris movie may depend on whether you use the word “auteur” in casual conversation.

Taking Nothing For Granted: The Holmes Brothers' Brotherhood

The Holmes Brothers have just released their 11th album and these veteran musicians keep getting better with age. For the record, there are only two Holmes brothers, Sherman and Wendall. They grew up in a musical house in Christchurch, Virginia, nurtured by their parents who were schoolteachers. The boys took an interest in music beyond the Sunday morning Baptist hymns and spirituals by tuning to blues artists such as Jimmy Reed and B.B. King. Those influences took a creative hold of Sherman and Wendall who make a beautiful sound deeply rooted, but not confined to, gospel music.

Ebony Sails: Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag (Freedom Cry DLC)

Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag (Freedom Cry DLC)

Downloadable content (DLC) has been an inherent function of the video game industry for over a decade now, and it’s become both a blessing and a curse: it allows us to dive back into the virtual worlds we love and live in them for that much longer, but this comes at the risk of being nickel-and-dimed to death. Some unscrupulous video game developers have been known to split a full product apart and sell you the smaller pieces after the initial release, as though they were designed as "additional" content. The scrupulous ones, on the other hand, invent all-new content which enhances and builds upon the original experience, but instances of this kind of craft are rare in the industry. The Freedom Cry DLC for Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag would have no place in the narrative of its mother game (simply because there just isn’t enough room), and so it sets out to justify its existence through a strong standalone story and engaging new mechanics. Black Flag was the story of Edward Kenway, legendary pirate, and this plays almost like a fan fiction set in that world – it’s a rich enough realm that it feels natural to visit it again through a different character's eyes.

Mr. Vaudeville: Remembering Mickey Rooney

When Mickey Rooney died on April 6 at the age of ninety-three, he’d been in show business for a surely unprecedented ninety-one years. (He was shooting not one but two movies at the time of his death, including the third in the A Night at the Museum series.) His parents were vaudevillians who introduced him into their act when he was seventeen months old; he started making film shorts in 1926, first as Mickey McBan and then as Mickey McGuire. He was all of fourteen when he played Clark Gable’s character as a boy in Manhattan Melodrama, the earliest of his many movies at M-G-M that film buffs are likely to have seen. (It’s a famous picture, though not because of its cast; it acquired instant notoriety when John Dillinger was shot down as he emerged from a Chicago movie house playing it.) A number of film personalities in the early days of the talkies began in vaudeville (Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor, Fanny Brice, The Marx Brothers), but Rooney retained a special connection to it because the musicals he and Judy Garland made in the late thirties and early forties – Babes in Arms, Strike Up the Band, Babes on Broadway and to a lesser extent Girl Crazy, which was the best of them – were imbued with the vaudevillian spirit. They were about brave, persistent adolescents who want to put on shows and usually have to fight authoritarian adults with sticks up their asses who try to get in their way. In Babes in Arms, the flagship musical in the series, which was adapted from a hit Broadway show by Rodgers and Hart, Rooney and Garland and their cohorts are also the children of vaudevillians who are on the road, fighting the Depression in order to put bread on the table, and the success of their kids’ musical revue keeps the do-gooding locals from farming them out to orphanages. The message of all four of these movies was the same: talent will out. And though Rooney also starred in the fantastically popular homespun Andy Hardy series (twice opposite Garland), it was in these musicals that he truly made his mark.

When the Political is Personal: Borgen

Sidse Babett Knudsen and Pilou Asbaek in TV's Borgen

Note: Spoiler alerts.

“Nearly all men can withstand adversity, 

but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.”

- Abraham Lincoln

This aphorism appears at the beginning of the final program in the superb Danish television blockbuster Borgen, which is the brainchild of Adam Price who both produced and was a major writer of the consistently intelligent scripts over three ten-program seasons. (The title refers to the Christiansborg Palace, where the Danish Parliament, Prime Minister's office and Supreme Court reside.) Every episode begins with an epigraph that ranges from Machiavelli to Churchill; a casual viewer might not realize how astute it is until he or she watches it twice, which I highly recommend. Along with The Killing and The Bridge, Borgen has been an overwhelming popular and critical success in the UK, and the trio of shows are beginning to make inroads in North America, primarily through libraries, independent video stores and specialized American channels. Since television viewers on this side of the pond seem to be put off by reading subtitles (although the actors all speak excellent English when speaking to any foreigner), the two police procedurals have been remade for North American audiences with at best mixed, and in my opinion inferior, results. Apparently, HBO is considering a remake of Borgen, but I am not certain how American audiences will respond to a series that deals with coalition politics involving eight political parties, a process likely alien to many of these viewers.

Harmony in Motion: Contemporary Dance in Toronto

Aleatoric Duet No. 2 from he/she

Three different programs of contemporary dance by three different companies took place within days of each other in Toronto at the end of March: Dichterliebe, a revival of a 2012 suite of 16 dances set to 16 sung sections of Robert Schumann’s same titled song cycle (the lyrics are by the late-Romantic German poet Heinrich Heine) which Coleman Lemieux & Co. presented at their Citadel theatre and studio complex in Regent Park; he/she, an evening of new and revised work by Peggy Baker Dance Projects at the Betty Oliphant Theatre, and Around, a new 60-minute work by Dancemakers artistic director Michael Trent which the company, this year celebrating its 40th anniversary, performed as an ensemble at its Distillery District-located Centre for Creation.

Art vs. Propaganda: Bethlehem and Omar

Tsahi Halevi and Shadi Mar’i in Bethlehem

It’s always been highly illuminating to compare Israeli and Palestinian films about their intractable conflict. While I’ve never seen an Israeli film – from Cup Final (1991) to The Bubble (2006), The Syrian Bride (2004) to The Band's Visit (2007) – that has failed to humanize the Palestinians, Israel’s Arab neighbours or its own Arab citizens (and I’ve seen many Israeli films, as a film critic and chief programmer for the Toronto Jewish Film Festival), the Palestinian record is much spottier in that regard. Rashid Masharawi’s Palestinian film Ticket to Jerusalem (2002), a documentary-fictional hybrid, presented a fair, even sympathetic view of young Israeli soldiers, as did Michel Khleifi’s acclaimed Wedding in Galilee (1987), at least until its 360-degree turn into a strident vilification of the same. (It’s as if someone told the filmmaker that he was being too kind to his Israeli characters and needed to adjust the picture.) But otherwise, the norm is more along the lines of Hany Abu-Assad’s Palestinian film Paradise Now (2005), about a pair of would-be suicide bombers setting out to wreak havoc in Tel Aviv. At best, Abu-Assad could only bring himself to condemn suicide bombings as counterproductive and harmful to the Palestinian cause and not as the moral failings or criminal acts they actually are, and he showed not the slightest interest in the possible Israeli victims of the film’s planned terror attack. (The most notable exception to this traditionally myopic view of Israel is Ziad Doueiri’s The Attack (2012) wherein an Arab-Israeli surgeon discovers that his wife committed a suicide bombing and must come to terms with the truely heinous actions of his spouse. Startlingly, Doueiri, a Lebanese filmmaker, spent almost a year living in Israel in order to better understand his country’s “enemy”.) Abu-Assad’s latest film, the 2013 Oscar-nominated Omar, about a young man coerced into becoming an informant for Israel’s security services, is likewise spun out of that one note. Fortunately, we also have Yuval Adler’s similarly-themed Israeli cinematic counterpart Bethlehem (2013) as a provocative point of comparison. It’s a superior film in every way: nuanced, complex and empathic to both sides of the political and human equation in a way Omar doesn’t even attempt to be.

Neglected Gem #52: BBC's Gormenghast (2000)

Jonathan Rhys Meyers in BBC's Gormenghast

2001 was a good year for epic film adaptations of classic fantasy literature. It was the year that the first installment in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy premiered, but it was also the year that the BBC series Gormenghast first aired in the U.S. (It had played in the U.K. the year before.) Directed by Andy Wilson and adapted by Malcom McKay, Gormenghast is based on novelist Mervyn Peake’s trilogy – a “fantasy of manners" – set in an isolated earldom called Gormeghast. (Peake envisioned a longer series of books but died before he could get past the third, Titus Alone. The TV version sticks to the events of the first two, the 1946 Titus Groan and the 1950 Gormenghast, which was very sensible.)

The story begins with the birth of the seventy-seventh Earl of Groan, Titus. (Ian Richardson plays his father, a melancholy bibliophile whose spirits and sanity do not survive the destruction of his library.) All the inhabitants of Castle Gormenghast seem to be mad, yet most of them have style, and Gormenghast is an entertainment for those able to set aside 21st-century attitudes towards democracy and royalty, or at least bend them a little, for the sake of a wallow in pure style. Although the cast is packed with comic monsters, the villain is the lowly born boy who would tear it all down and incite revolution: Steerpike, “a diabolically clever little monster” played by that specialist in louche dandies, Jonathan Rhys Meyers.

Return to Frantic City: A Conversation with Teenage Head and Geoff Pevere's Gods of the Hammer

Teenage Head in 2008: (from left) Frankie Venom, Jack Pedler, Steve Mahon, Gord Lewis (Photo by Stephanie Bell)

The last time I saw Teenage Head, Frankie Venom was swinging from the pipes over the stage, and Gordie Lewis’s guitar sound was circumnavigating my eardrums. Now here we are in the pristine white event space of the Art Gallery of Hamilton, sitting in civilized rows around a raised platform (call it a stage) on which sat four current (or ex) members of the band along with pop critic Geoff Pevere, the author of the new book on the band, Gods of the Hammer, and Hamilton Spectator columnist Graham Rockingham waiting for A Conversation With…Teenage Head. “A Conversation”! Who would've thought? 

Look around. The crowd is here, black leather jackets have given way to wool overcoats, and Converse All Stars have been replaced with loafers. The ladies look good, high heels, black stockings, short skirts, very sophisticated. Wait, there’s a guy in denim, wearing a baseball cap, he’s carrying an armload of old Teenage Head paraphernalia. Oh good, we’re not completely civilized. Someone in front of us accidentally kicks over her glass of dry white wine. Oh good, the floor’s sticky. Sure in the old days it would’ve been a bottle of beer, or even a tableful of draft, that was dumped, and for sure we wouldn’t have wiped it up carefully with polyester napkins, and paper serviettes, we would've simply waited for it to evaporate. The event is part of Hamilton’s GritLit Festival. Now ten years old it celebrates the work of Canadian writers (in general), and Hamilton writers particularly. Peter Robinson (creator of Inspector Alan Banks) was here Thursday, Emma Donoghue (Room and Frog Music) stopped by Friday, and Michael Winter, Catherine Bush and a host of others have participated through the weekend. Tonight though, it’s Geoff Pevere and everybody’s favourite punk band Teenage Head.

Cold Conflict – Captain America: The Winter Soldier

Chris Evans and Samuel L. Jackson in Captain America: The Winter Soldier

The pantheon of superhero films from the last decade that have dominated and defined global box offices often feel bloated with a sense of self-importance, despite their ludicrous premises (see: Man of Steel, The Dark Knight Rises, etc). Captain America: The Winter Soldier is as modest as its protagonist, Steve Rogers, at least as far as such a thing is possible in a blockbuster superhero action feature, and this makes for a refreshingly sober, unaffected entry into the ever-growing Marvel film canon.

As a Canadian and an X-Men fan, I’ve seldom been compelled by Captain America’s character. He’s one of the less “super” superheroes and feels irrelevant to today’s pop culture zeitgeist. This is of course addressed with the fish-out-of-water humour from The Avengers, which depicts Cap’s difficulty integrating into modern society after having been frozen in stasis since World War II. The Winter Soldier takes place two years after the events of that film, and drops this “Can Cap Adapt?” arc in favour of a more relevant and topical story. Cap no longer labours to fit in; he’s now concerned with aligning his 1940s sensibilities with a world of modern conflict, in which the moral boundaries are far less clear, and this existential grappling makes him suddenly much more interesting.

A Threepenny Opera Con Brio

Photo by Kevin Thomas Garcia

Productions of The Threepenny Opera usually stumble over the paradox that though it’s a great play, technically it’s not a very good one. The script by Bertolt Brecht is massively overwritten, with long passages of dialogue that no translation from the German (I’ve encountered several) has succeeded in rendering without awkwardness. The comic scenes may have been partly improvised in rehearsal when the show was first mounted in Berlin in 1928, or else Brecht may have built them around the vaudevillian talents of his cast; now the exchanges between the gangster Macheath (Mack the Knife) and his gang, Mackie and his pal, Chief of Police Tiger Brown, Brown and Jonathan Peachum, the ruthless boss of all of London’s beggars, and Peachum and his equally devious wife just sit on the page, challenging actors to figure out how to make them funny. Yet the play, a raucous social satire that updates John Gay’s eighteenth-century satirical burlesque The Beggar’s Opera, is vibrant, theatrical to the gills, and every time the action pauses for one of Brecht and Kurt Weill’s songs, you know you’re watching and listening to one of the signal achievements in modern theatre. Weill’s music is thrilling: glittering and acid, robust and plaintive, simultaneously redolent of the music hall, the salon and the jazz club.

The Other Hugh Bonneville: Twenty Twelve and W1A

Hugh Bonneville stars as Ian Fletcher in Twenty Twelve and W1A, on the BBC.

As Downton Abbey fans worldwide eagerly await the popular ITV period drama's fifth season, it is a good time to point viewers to W1A, a new BBC comedy series whose brief first season will conclude this Wednesday April 9. W1A stars Downton Abbey's Hugh Bonneville as Ian Fletcher, the new-minted Head of Values for the BBC. Bonneville is returning to a character made famous (at least for British audiences) on BBC's Twenty Twelve, where Ian Fletcher was Head of Deliverance for the London 2012 Olympic Games. Both series not also demonstrate Hugh Bonneville's talent in a contemporary setting – far removed from his gracious, and sometimes other-worldly turn as Lord Grantham in Downton Abbey – but also put Bonneville's quiet but immense charm and comic ability on display.

Time, Power and Song: Time After Time, The Seduction of Joe Tynan and Hair

It's still difficult, if not impossible, to comprehend that we lost our dear colleague and Critics at Large co-founder David Churchill a year ago today. For David was not only my best friend, he was also my counsel. If I tried to recall the number of times this past year I wanted to pick up the phone to get his advice on a piece, request an idea for one, or hear him come up with a brainchild for a series to run, I would quickly lose count. Never mind that every day I went to edit and post a piece, I would look at our homepage and be reminded that he was here and not here. 

I've been wanting to keep his presence on Critics at Large continuous despite mortality making that task next to impossible. Fortunately, his wife, Rose, lent me a box of his writing – both published and unpublished – that allowed me to at least try the impossible. And it was quite a trip dipping into the volume of his work and going all the way back to his film reviews from his university days. Perhaps the bonus was finding in the box the notebook he kept in the mid-Eighties. In it, I discovered handwritten comments he had compiled at a number of screenings we went to together. Sometimes he even had very precise notes to counter my own opinions on pictures we would ultimately disagree on when we finally reviewed them on the radio at CJRT-FM's On the Arts. Reading them today quickly stoked those moments on air when I heard those views for the first time. Reading his quickly scribbled assertions had an alchemical way of bringing his voice back into the present. 

Today I want to reach back to his university reviews where I found it bracing (and not terribly surprising) to discover that David's conversational voice was indeed as recognizable as it became years later on Critics at Large. Last week, Rose commented to me that David was all there right from the beginning. She was saying that he didn't grow into his voice. Judging by the pieces below, I would have to agree. To prove the point, I've decided to include film reviews first published in 1979 from the newspaper, one of the University of Toronto's journals at that time. David's temperament and wit are easily recognizable to anyone who knew him. Since I also want to treat these pieces as if they were copy he just e-mailed me this morning, they are presented as edited from their original source.

Kevin Courrier,
Editor-in-Chief.

The Latest Great Expectations

Ralph Fiennes as Abel Magwitch in Mike Newell's Great Expectations

It would never have occurred to me to cast Ralph Fiennes as Charles Dickens, but he’s superb in The Invisible Woman,which he also directed. And you can scarcely recognize him in the opening scenes of the latest version of Great Expectations (2012) where he plays the convict Abel Magwitch, who alters the life of the protagonist, Pip, bankrolling his ascension to the life of a London gentleman in payment for the boy’s kindness to him during his attempted escape. Fiennes’s performance is small-scale – as readers of the novel know, Magwitch drops out of the story early on, not to return until the final act – but he’s as good as Finlay Currie in the classic David Lean film from 1946 or Robert De Niro in the underappreciated Alfonso Cuarón remake from 1998, which updates the story to contemporary Florida and Manhattan. David Nicholls, the screenwriter (he wrote When Did You Last See Your Father?,which I liked, and One Day, which I didn’t), and Mike Newell (Four Weddings and a Funeral, Donnie Brasco), the director, focus the first part of the movie on the mistreatment of Pip (Toby Irvine) at the hands of most of the adults in his life.

Last of the Great Gadflies: Remembering Lorenzo Semple Jr.

Screenwriter Lorenzo Semple Jr. (1923-2014)

There are two kinds of legendary screenwriters: the folks on Olympus, who (like Robert Towne) pen masterpieces on subjects that are important to them, with every word in perfectly in place, and the gadflies, who live on the money they get for bringing some wit and craftsmanship to commercial assignments and eat out on their collection of great stories. (There is considerable overlap between the two camps.) Citizen Kane was written by a gadfly, Herman J. Mankiewicz; part of Towne’s legend is how much time he’s spent away from his own dream projects to parachute into film sets and work as a script doctor, sometimes on such projects as The Godfather and Bonnie & Clyde, more often on a vast wasteland of junk. Towne once tried to work out his feelings about his career as a much-sought-after, richly paid writer-for-hire, but he needed to assign the protagonist a profession that would reflect what he himself felt about the work but that seemed to him more glamorous, and maybe less morally reprehensible, than trying to tone up the screenplays of Orca and 8 Million Ways to Die. This is how he came to write and direct the 1988 Tequila Sunrise, a movie whose hero is a drug dealer.

Lorenzo Semple, Jr., who died last week at the age of 91, may have been one of the last of the great gadflies. A nephew of Philip Barry, Semple wrote plays and short magazine fiction when he was young, but he found his niche in his forties, when the producer William Dozier hired him to “create” the Batman TV series. Semple had previously worked with Dozier on a series spin-off of Charlie Chan called Number One Son, which was set to go into production when ABC decided it didn’t want a show with an Asian-American hero; according to Semple, the Batman job was Dozier’s way of making it up to him. Semple wrote the first four episodes and the screenplay for the 1966 Batman movie, and stayed on as “Executive Story Editor” throughout its three seasons on the air. He devised and and maintained the poker-faced, Pop Art campiness of the show—the mock-stolid Batman of Adam West pitted against the hamminess of the guest villains, the fight scenes punched up with written sound effects flashing on the screen. All of which is to say that he played an enormous role in making self-aware pop irony mainstream—a accomplishment that it’s easy to have mixed feelings about today, though it must have been fun and refreshing at the time.

The Art of Contemplation: The Seagull at The Huntington

The cast of the Huntington Theatre Company's production of The Seagull, in Boston, MA. (Photo: T. Charles Erickson)

Of his four dramatic masterpieces, Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull is the most autobiographical. It’s a transparent wrestling match in which he works through his personal issues: the tortured experience that is writing, the frustrations of practicing rural medicine, the tragic conflict between artistic purity and celebrity vanity. The Huntington Theatre Company’s current production, starring Kate Burton and her son, Morgan Ritchie, illustrates how the play is itself a contemplation of life. And its singular feature--its unique conceptual vision--is to highlight how this rumination takes place in a meditative milieu. The tragicomic melodrama – the interpersonal conflicts the characters experience – occurs within a sublime pastoral atmosphere, one that gives the audience its own taste of the good life. That the characters can’t access that beauty, though, only reaffirms our inability to live it fully.

A Flawed Theory: Particle Fever

The CERN Large Hadron Collider, in Mark Levinson's documentary Particle Fever

The challenge of Particle Fever is to distil a hugely complex subject into something we can grasp and appreciate: the hunt for the elusive Higgs boson particle, and through it a deeper understanding of the fundamental laws of the universe. It rises to the challenge, presenting a deeply momentous scientific undertaking with passionate clarity. But I’m not sure it will convert those who are not already scientifically-inclined. For those of us who retain the thirst for knowledge we cultivated as children, however, it’s an exciting ride. The film focuses on the theoretical and experimental physicists who gather at Europe’s CERN from all corners of the globe in 2008, before the switch was first flipped on the Large Hadron Collider – a singular moment in the history of science, where literally everything we thought we knew about the universe and how it worked was up in the air. These scientists were buzzing with excitement at the prospect of gathering some truly unprecedented data, using the largest and most complex tool ever designed by human hands. As one physicist remarks, it’s “history happening right before our eyes.”

The Cocoanuts: Marx Brothers Redux at OSF

Harpo (Brent Hinkley), Chico (John Tufts) and Groucho (Mark Bedard) in The Cocoanuts (Photo: Jenny Graham)

When The Marx Brothers came to Hollywood in the late twenties, their first two movie projects were adaptations of hit musical comedies they’d starred in on Broadway, The Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival had a big success with Animal Crackers two years ago, so this season they've included The Cocoanuts in their schedule, and it’s driving audiences into a state of sublime lunacy. I had a good time at Animal Crackers, though it was a bit of a mess. (Friends report that as the run went on it grew crazier and more unhinged.) But you’d have to be a curmudgeon to register a complaint about The Cocoanuts, which Mark Bedard has adapted from the 1925 script by George S. Kaufman and (uncredited in the OSF program) Morrie Ryskind, with songs by Irving Berlin.

Bildungsroman: The Criterion Collection Blu-ray DVD Release of Blue is the Warmest Color

When Steven Spielberg awarded the Palme d’Or to Blue is the Warmest Color – released on DVD this year by the Criterion Collection – last May, he remarked that the jury had taken the exceptional measure of bestowing it not upon one artist but three: Adèle Exarchopoulos, Léa Seydoux, and Abdellatif Kechiche. Directed and written by Kechiche, who adapted it from Julie Maroh’s graphic novel of the same title (with the help of his regular collaborator Ghalia Lacroix), Blue is a coming-of-age story of startling intimacy. At its core is a love affair between two women, Adèle (Exarchopoulos), a high school girl whose deep appetite for sensual experience is flared by a momentary chance meeting with a blue-haired stranger on a city street, and Emma (Seydoux), the punkish art student who captures Adèle’s curiosity and then her passion. This picture is as entirely a collaboration as Richard Linklater’s Before movies, which he co-created with his stars Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, or as My Dinner with André and Vanya on 42nd Street were between Wallace Shawn, André Gregory and Louis Malle, but Blue is the Warmest Color is yet more electrically and originally sensual and more philosophically capacious. It reminded me of at least a dozen pictures I love, but it’s not quite like anything I’ve seen before: it’s a groundbreaking erotic drama.

Cabaret: The Crooked Frame in “The Attack on Modern Art in Germany 1937”

Alan Cumming in the 1998 production of Cabaret.

Indulge me in serving up what might appear as an improbable conceit: that the current New York production of Sam Mendes’s Cabaret, that (as I write) is in previews on Broadway, could have been included in the Degenerate Art Exhibition of avant-garde paintings and sculptures on display uptown at the Neue Galerie. The Mendes production is a revival of his own 1998 reinterpretation of the 1966 Harold Prince Broadway blockbuster and the 1972 celebrated Bob Fosse film, all of which are loosely based on Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories and his experiences in Berlin during the early 1930s when he befriended a cabaret singer who became the inspiration for Sally Bowles. If Prince and, to a greater extent, Fosse’s glossy sheen and honky-tonk gaiety were inspired by the garishly-coloured and provocative subject matter depicted in the paintings of George Grosz, Otto Dix, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Max Beckmann, Mendes offers a grungier, economically desperate and grimmer look. Both the characters and the set – the Kit Kat Klub alternates with a dowdy rooming house without any evidence of conspicuous wealth – communicate a sense of impending danger, false hope, resignation and the threat of radical change that will forever alter their lives and designate the cabaret as degenerate just like the modernist artworks that provided some of the cinematographic cornucopia in the Fosse film.

Doubles: The Face of Love & Enemy

Ed Harris and Annette Bening in  The Face of Love

As a woman who can’t get over the death of her husband in The Face of Love, Annette Bening does her best acting in years. Bening still has the old-Hollywood glamour that made her such a luscious camera subject in Bugsy and The Grifters nearly two and a half decades ago, but the pussycat brittleness has been replaced by elegance: as Nikki, who “stages” empty L.A. houses for resale, she has the aura of a southern California countess. Nikki’s husband Garrett died in a drowning accident during their thirtieth-anniversary vacation in Mexico, and even now, five years later, she hasn’t moved past her grief. The only friend she seems to have retained is her neighbor Roger (Robin Williams), who has also lost his spouse, and her response to the on-again, off-again relationship her daughter Summer (Jess Weixler), who lives up in Seattle, has with her boy friend is to urge her to cut it off rather than set herself up for more pain. Then one day Nikki sees a man who’s a dead ringer for Garrett, and she’s hypnotized. His name is Tom, and he’s a painter. (Ed Harris plays both Tom and, in flashbacks, Garrett.) When she finds out that he teaches studio art classes at a local college she tries to enroll in one, but it’s already halfway through the semester, so she persuades him to give her private lessons at home. Though it quickly becomes clear that she’s not really interested in learning how to paint, by that time he’s begun to fall for her and they become lovers.

Dry Wells: Believe and Crisis

Johnny Sequoyah and Delroy Lindo in Believe, on NBC

The new NBC TV series Believe is about a magic little girl, Bo (Johnny Sequoyah), who has psychic and telekinetic powers. She is sought after by powerful men—chiefly, Kyle MacLachlan—who would use her for sinister purposes, and there ends any resemblance this show has to Brian De Palma’s The Fury. Delroy Lindo has the Carrie Snodgress role of the villain’s former associate who helped raise Bo and tutored her in harnessing her powers but now works to keep her safe, so that she can be used only as a power for good. He breaks a sullen convict named Tate (Jake McLaughlin) out of a cell on Death Row so that he can become Bo’s new protector and traveling companion, the previous holder of that position having been run off the road and murdered by a female assassin (Sienna Guillory) in Kyle MacLachlan’s employ. Tate is a natural choice for the job, because he’s actually Bo’s biological father, though he doesn’t know it, and for some reason, Lindo doesn’t see any possible advantage in telling him. Instead, he’s just along for the ride, spending most of his screen time acting grumpy about having this kid joined to him at the hip. On other occasions, he stands on the sidelines open-mouthed at Bo’s displays of her superpowers, such as when she summons a cheesy-looking CGI swarm of doves to overpower Sienna Guillory.

Refinement: Norma Winstone's Dance Without Answers

Vocalist Norma Winstone (Photo by Petra Kemper)

There are some artists that defy explanation and description. Vocalist Norma Winstone is one of them. Considered by many as the “singer’s singer” the British chanteuse will probably never enter the mainstream and, considering her history, most likely prefers to seek out her own artistic path. But with the release of her new album, Dance Without Answers (ECM), she may well enter the mainstream on her terms, rather than make the compromises many singers; many female singers have to make to be successful. Namely repertoire. Winstone has often avoided the pitfalls of category by writing her own words and music and by being highly selective regarding standards in the jazz idiom.

L’Air de Panache: Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel

In The Grand Budapest Hotel, Wes Anderson tries his hand at something new: he jumps into comedy with both feet, and I think it suits him much better than the drab navel-gazing he’s known for. In his Critics at Large review of Moonrise Kingdom (2012), Shlomo Schwartzberg pointed out (quite rightly) how the rigidly-constructed artificiality of Wes Anderson’s films works against them – nothing feels true or honest or real, and in the case of Kingdom it doesn’t even really succeed at being original.  The result of his tonal shift in The Grand Budapest Hotel is a madcap, zany, hilarious film that plays on Anderson’s limited strengths. The plot is a madcap crime caper that bounces along at a brisk pace. The central story, about the titular hotel’s refined, roguish, sweet-scented concierge M. Gustave (Ralph Fiennes) being framed for the murder of an elderly patron, is nestled Russian doll-style in a series of layered flashbacks that tell a broader and more touching story than the trailers might suggest, without ever becoming convoluted or confusing. Anderson draws generously from his now-impressive stable of regular collaborators; actors such as Willem Dafoe (as a comically lugubrious hitman) or F. Murray Abraham (as one of the story's multiple narrators) and they chew through their almost cameo-sized roles with abandon.

Showboating: The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window

Ron Menzel and Sofia Jean Gomez in The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window (Photo by Jenny Graham)

The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, receiving a rare revival at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, was the last play written by Lorraine Hansberry (A Raisin in the Sun); she died, at thirty-five, during its Broadway run in 1964. Set among Greenwich Village bohemians, it’s a bald, generalized and often preposterous attack on corruption and compromise. Sidney, the hero (played by Ron Menzel), a hard-drinking dilettante in search of a venue for his undefined artistic and communal aspirations, buys a local newspaper (his last property, a jazz and folk club, went belly-up) and opts to put its clout behind a politician, Wally O’Hara (Danforth Comins). But by the time O’Hara wins the election, the political machine he opposed has bought him. Sidney’s wife Iris (Sofia Jean Gomez), a would-be actress, lands a gig in a TV commercial for a hair product that doesn’t work. When their playwright neighbor, David Ragin (Benjamin Pelteson), opens his first show to enthusiastic notices, Sidney, panicked because Iris has left him, begs David to write a role for her in his next play; he even tries to bribe him with the promise of a rave review in his paper. Their friend Alton Scales (Armando McClain) wants to marry Iris’s sister Gloria (Vivia Font), until he discovers that she’s a high-class hooker.

Veronica Mars: You Can Go Home Again

Kristen Bell in Veronica Mars, now in theatres (Photo: Robert Voet/Warner Bros. Entertainment)

Last Friday, the much-anticipated Veronica Mars film appeared in movie theatres, Video on Demand, and for direct download on iTunes and Amazon. Last March, when series creator Rob Thomas' famous Kickstarter campaign was in full swing, I expressed some mixed feelings about the project: both because the strength of the TV series was always so dependent on the television format, and because its third (and final) season had demonstrated some real signs of decline. Still, whatever reservations I may have had, I eagerly marked March 14, 2014 on my calendar, and, with my expectations not-so-firmly in check, couldn't help counting the days until the film's release. The verdict? As neo-noir filmmaking goes, this isn't The Usual Suspects; despite the ten-year high school reunion plot element, it isn't even Grosse Pointe Blank. What it is is Veronica Mars, simpliciter. And for this long-time fan, that turned out to be more than enough.  

Beauty and Barbarism: Hayao Miyazaki's The Wind Rises

The Wind Rises

With The Wind Rises, Japanese director Hayao Miyazaki has achieved a feat befitting a master: he has crafted his final film into an elegiac farewell that at once communicates what it means to be an artist, while also being an artistic triumph itself. When I urge friends to see it, they deride the notion that a “cartoon” could be good. Pity. This animated movie is a feast for the eyes, ears, and heart, with narrative magic married to tonal complexities to form a sublime milieu. It's not a perfect movie, though, and its romantic idealism tries to find redeeming grace among irredeemable evils. It simultaneously breaks your heart and renews your belief in the transcendence of the human spirit.

Monumentally Dull: George Clooney's The Monuments Men

George Clooney and Matt Damon in The Monuments Men

It’s an unusual criticism to make of a movie that it doesn’t aim low enough. But that’s the problem with The Monuments Men, George Clooney’s new movie about a team sent by FDR to Europe in the final years of the Second World War to root out the art the Nazis stole from the countries they conquered and protect any more of the cornerstones of western civilization from being damaged. Using as source material the non-fiction book by Robert Edsel, The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History, Clooney and his co-writer/co-producer Grant Heslov – his collaborator on Good Night and Good Luck and The Ides of March – have set about to make a wartime adventure in the square style of big-studio entertainments of the fifties and early sixties, but they’ve done it without an ounce of cheeky wit or romance. Clooney has made the movie with a sort of middle-brow integrity, but what it really needs is showmanship – an instinct for melodrama, which he lacks entirely. He and Heslov start with a sensational story and a tantalizing cast – the seven “monuments men” are played by Matt Damon, John Goodman, Bill Murray, Bob Balaban, Downton Abbey’s Hugh Bonneville, The Artist’s Jean Dujardin and Clooney himself as Frank Stokes, the head of the mission – and then strip the movie of just about everything that might have made it fun to watch.

To Get to The Other Side: The Bridge

Kim Bodnia and Saga Noren star in the Swedish-Danish series The Bridge

The TV series The Bridge, a Swedish-Danish co-production that first aired in 2011, begins with the discovery of what appears to be the dead body of a Swedish politician. He has been cut in two; the corpse is lying at the exact spot on the Oresund Bridge that marks the point where the borders of Copenhagen and Malmo meet. Sofia (Saga Noren), a Swedish homicide detective, and Martin (Kim Bodnia), a Danish detective, both arrive at the scene, and it’s only after Sofia has brashly claimed the case for herself, with Martin’s happy consent, that it’s found that the “body” is actually two halves of two different dead women. Sofia and Martin end up working together on the case, which expands as it becomes clear that a serial killer with a larger agenda is at work.

Masterclass Concert: Robben Ford at Mohawk College, March 7

Guitarist Robben Ford

Robben Ford has played guitar with some of the greats. Joni Mitchell, George Harrison, and Miles Davis! Those names are legendary, but Robben Ford? Not so much. He is an extremely tasty guitarist with a long career behind him, and judging by his brand new CD he should have a long career ahead of him. But last Friday he came into Hamilton to offer a guitar masterclass to the students of Mohawk College, and he stuck around to play a concert at Mohawk’s McIntyre Theatre.

The show started at 8pm but the doors opened an hour earlier while ushers walked up and down selling raffle tickets as a fun-raiser for the music programme. The prizes? Autographed posters from last year’s guest guitarist Jimmie Vaughan and a signed Robben Ford Epiphone guitar. This is an annual event which has also featured Larry Carlton. The lights soon dimmed and after a few notices the opening act came on stage. Bump City is a student band, under the direction of Darcy Hepner, which plays the music of Tower of Power. Don’t Google them, you’ll find another Bump City entirely, also a tribute to Tower of Power band but made up of much older musicians. This group appeared to have an average age of 20, and each member was filled with the energy and enthusiasm you might expect. Their half hour set showcased three different vocalists, and a horn section that was together, and had all the moves down just so. Special props to their guitarist (Braden Varcoe) who made a guest appearance during Mr. Ford’s set. But more about that later. I’ve never been much of a Tower of Power fan, but Bump City acquitted themselves beautifully and kept their promise (from their Twitter site) to “make you shake your squib cakes all night long.”

All This Useless Knowledge: Jeff Vandermeer’s Annihilation

The work of H.P. Lovecraft is one of popular fiction’s favourite aesthetics-du-jour. We’re still apparently enamoured with zombies, dystopias, and teenagers murdering one another, and whenever we need a cut-and-paste horror setting, Lovecraft is the first well we draw from. His lurid and eloquent prose certainly invites (and deserves) imitation, but few works have managed to bottle his particular brand of dreadful, elegant, creeping horror. With Annihilation, Jeff Vandermeer comes closer than anyone I’ve ever read.

A mysterious place known only as Area X has been isolated from humanity for decades. The government sends out expeditions to explore it and record their discoveries. Some expeditions came back dazed, unsure of what they’d seen. Some came back and contracted terminal cancer. Some came back and committed mass suicide. Some never came back at all. Annihilation follows the twelfth group, which is composed of four women – a psychologist, a surveyor, an anthropologist, and a biologist (our narrator). The characters are named by specialization and never physically described, their expertise and attitudes being the only salient information the author provides. The setting is likewise left ambiguous: Area X, and whatever lives there, might be a product of nuclear warfare, or government experimentation, or alien invasion, or any other recognizable science fiction trope. 

Musical Vaudeville: Encores! Production of Little Me

Rachel York and Christian Borle in Little Me (Photo by Joan Marcus)

Encores! at New York’s City Center opened its three-musical season at the beginning of last month with a spirited, uproarious revival of the 1962 Little Me, directed by John Rando, whose work for the series has included some of my personal favorites (On the Town, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Irving Berlin’s Face the Music). The source material for Little Me is a book by Patrick Dennis (author of Auntie Mame) that takes the form of a fictional memoir by a scandalous dame named Belle Poitrine – poitrine is French for chest – who came of age in the early decades of the twentieth century. It’s pretty much an overlong one-joke comedy, the joke being the obvious discrepancy between the innocent version of events Belle is offering and the truth that glares at you between the lines. I got tired of the novel and of Belle after about a hundred pages and put it down. But the book of the musical, by Neil Simon, though it’s overstuffed – act one is ninety minutes long – is consistently funny. Simon divided the character of Belle between an aging millionairess (impersonated in Rando’s production by the feisty Judy Kaye) and her indomitable younger self (Rachel York, belting happily and effortlessly carrying off an ingénue role she ought to be about a decade and a half too old for). Belle goes to jail for murder, resurfaces as a stage personality on the basis of her notoriety – note that Little Me predated Chicago by thirteen years – entertains the troops in the Great War and stars in silent movies, among other adventures.

Feathers In their Caps: Svetlana Lunkina and Evan McKie in Swan Lake

Evan McKie & Svetlana Lunkina (with the National Ballet of Canada) in Swan Lake. (Photo: Aleksandar Antonijevic)

The highly anticipated debuts of principal guest artists Svetlana Lunkina and Evan McKie in James Kudelka's version of Swan Lake readily explains why Toronto's Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts was packed to the rafters last Saturday night (March 8). McKie who self identifies as a dancer-actor is the Toronto-born principal dancer with Germany's Stuttgart Ballet who is internationally celebrated for his ability to dramatize a role, and make it matter. Last month, the 30-year-old McKie headlined the Paris Opera Ballet, a first for a Canadian ballet dancer. In April, he will be a featured performer with the New York City Ballet where doubtless his long lyrical lines, his buoyant jumps and aristocratic mien will get audiences there as excited as they have been this past week for his homecoming in Toronto. Russian trained, McKie has also performed with the Bolshoi, making him a choice partner for Lunkina, a star ballerina of the Bolshoi who made headlines last year when she announced she was quitting Russia for Canada following a series of malevolent threats made against her and her family at a time when the Bolshoi was rocked with violence, an acid attack on its artistic director, Lunkina's former partner Sergei Filin, being one. McKie's undisputed talent as a gifted dramatic dancer notwithstanding, she was the one everyone had come to watch. The house was filled with ex ballet dancers and au courant balletomanes, all eager to see the controversial Russian ballerina show her stuff. She did not disappoint.