In for a Pound: Showtime's Penny Dreadful

Josh Hartnett, Harry Treadaway, Eva Green and Timothy Dalton in Penny Dreadful (Photo by Jonathan Hession)

Named for the Victorian-era pulp novels that captured the attention of young British men with their vivid tales of true crime and gothic horror, Showtime's new series Penny Dreadful premieres tonight. The show is a co-production of Showtime with Britain's Sky Atlantic and will begin airing for UK audiences on May 20th. The period horror series boasts strong production values, a talented cast of actors, and some genuine literary ambition. And also, it need not be said, vampires. Lots and lots of vampires.

With three seasons of FX's American Horror Story under our belt and the second season of its poorer Netflix cousin Hemlock Grove premiering in a month,  I wouldn't have thought that the television landscape needed another self-described "psychosexual" horror series. And honestly for this sometimes weak-stomached viewer, two horror series have sometimes been two too many, with the current shows erring too much and too often on the side of exploitation for me to enjoy them regularly. To its credit, Penny Dreadful – for all its gothic pedigree and explicitness regarding blood and sex – has succeeded in telling a story which is both creepy and entertaining. Sensationalist without being lurid, literary without being self-conscious, Penny Dreadful is a blast.

Migration and Movement: Esmeralda Enrique's De Idas y Vueltas

Esmeralda Enrique in De Idas y Vueltas, at Toronto's Fleck Dance Theatre (Photo: Hamid Karimi)

The powerful, absolutely top-notch, program of hand-clapping, foot-stomping, throaty flamenco which Toronto’s Esmeralda Enrique presented late last month at the Fleck Dance Theatre inside Harbourfront Centre, explored the idea of human migration, and how when people move, ebbing and flowing like the oceans carrying them from their homelands to a new land of (it is hoped) opportunity, things are lost and things are gained. As a theme for a dance show, essentially an examination of how people move, it fit like the proverbial shoe.

Flamenco is a dance/music hybrid, born in Spain but indelibly stamped with a wide array of influences visited upon it by a whole of host of immigrants past, among them marauding and native sons and daughters returning from the Americas armed with the cadences and rhythms of Cuba, Mexico and other Conquistador countries where Spanish people have traditionally immigrated to and emigrated from over the centuries. Some of these journeys far from home have spawned a genre known as cantes de ida y vuelta, nostalgic immigrant songs given a flamenco accent. Enrique, a Spanish immigrant herself who founded her own company in 1982 shortly after moving to Canada, took a handful of these songs to create an original program of dance, song and live music called De Idas y Vueltas in recognition of its source material. A recipient of two Dora Mavor Moore Awards in addition to the inaugural Young Centre for the Performing Arts Dance Award issued in 2012, Enrique has a proven track record of producing arresting flamenco-inspired programs. But De Idas y Vueltas has to count as among her best. The three-performance run was sold-out, a rarity for a dance show of any scale in Toronto. The lure was Enrique’s reputation as a consummate professional who seeks to preserve the traditions of her cherished flamenco while at the same time offering something new.

All the Living and the Dead: The Amazing Spider-Man 2

Andrew Garfield in The Amazing Spider-Man 2

Early into The Amazing Spider-Man 2, we’re treated to an action sequence in which the eponymous superhero chases down a madman (a barely-recognizable Paul Giamatti) driving a stolen truck containing vials of plutonium. It's a thrilling scene that spins airborne acrobatics and comic punches into pure cinematic gold. You can tell Andrew Garfield’s having the time of his life in the red and blue suit as he cartwheels down the canyons of Manhattan, and his All-American kid quality is infectious. I knew as soon as I saw this sequence that I was in for a treat. But I wasn’t ready for just how affecting the movie would be. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 continues to burrow deeper into its characters and their feelings than its parent trilogy, and while its narrative gets a bit messy at points, it's only a function of that same honest emotional mess.

Saturday Night Comatose: Liza Johnson's Hateship, Loveship

Kristen Wiig and Guy Pearce in Hateship, Loveship

Hateship, Loveship, a low-budget drama directed by Liza Johnson and adapted by the novelist and screenwriter Mark Poirier from an Alice Munro story, opens with the dead-faced Johanna (Kirsten Wiig) dully looking at the old woman she’s been caring for and finally picking up a phone to tell someone that the woman is dead. It’s like the opening of a horror story about an affectless psychopath; has Johanna murdered her own charge? Is this just the latest in a string of victims who made the mistake of getting on her nerves by not dying on her timetable? It turns out that Johanna is a good woman, though her behavior often calls to mind the question that Nora Dunn asked of the hooker played by Jennifer Jason Leigh in Miami Blues: “Is she really Princess Not-so-bright?”

Johanna finds a new job working for Mr. MacCauley (Nick Nolte), who lives in a big house in a small town with his granddaughter Sabitha (Hallee Steinfeld, the Mattie Ross of the Coen brothers’ True Grit), whose mother was killed in an accident. Sabitha’s father, Mr. MacCauley’s son-in-law Ken (Guy Pearce), is a drug-addicted wastrel living in Chicago. It would be almost be a stretch to say that Johanna and the handsome, directionless Ken barely know each other. But after Sabitha and her mean-girl friend Edith (Sami Gayle) prankishly forge a love note from Ken to Johanna, and Johanna responds to it, the teenage girls set up an email account in Ken’s name and start catfishing her on a regular basis. Before long, Johanna gathers up her savings and heads for Chicago, having also paid to have a load of antique furniture belonging to Mr. MacCauley shipped ahead. When she walks in on the ailing, drugged-out Ken, expecting to start a new life with him in the space that hasn’t gotten a good cleaning since his wife died, he’s fit to be tied, I don’t mind telling you!

Back to Basics: Neil Young's A Letter Home

Neil Young. (Photo courtesy of The Canadian Press)

There's a certain irony to the news that Neil Young considers his newest release to be "low-tech." After all, he's been complaining for years that the Mp3 is an inferior audio technology for music, even though all of his music is available in that format. He's even developed an audio system, and player (Pono), that uses FLAC audio files, larger in size and presumably in audio quality. That said, his new album, A Letter Home (Third Man Records), was recorded in a refurbished 1947 Voice-O-Graph, quite literally the size of a phone booth. Jack White, who co-produced this album, purchased one for his label storefront in Nashville. In this small space, Young has recorded 11 songs that he considers chestnuts of the folk and country music catalogue. A good friend of mine sent me a pre-release copy on CD no less, although the album has been released on LP. A limited edition package containing CD and LP formats plus a DVD is scheduled for release on May 27.

The album itself has a rawness that resembles the original Edison recordings of the 19th Century rather than anything from 1947. But the spirit of the music and Young's performance is all that matters, and he's really done more here than simply cover the most familiar songs in contemporary music with an antiquated technology. Most other artists might treat this as a novelty, but this is Neil Young, an artist who likes to surprise us. So he's done something comparable to what we heard a few years ago on his album, Le Noise (Reprise, 2010), where he featured new, personal songs enhanced by Daniel Lanois’s interesting soundscapes. Since A Letter Home looks to the technology of the past, the sound is deliberately dreadful. The fidelity is tinny, razor sharp to the ear with little bottom end. It's in mono, which is fine, but the production values are lean. If it wasn't for the performance value, which is strong, this could be considered Young's worst sounding album ever.

Neglected Gem # 54: Timecrimes (Los cronocrímenes) (2007)

I have a soft spot for time travel films. In the question of time – how it works, what it means, and whether or not we can master it – there is potential for great storytelling, because it taps into the most fundamental questions we can ask. Make no wonder that time is represented so broadly in film, from the nested intricacy of Primer, the numbing repetition of Groundhog Day, to the haunting exploration of La Jetée, and the visceral desperate action of The Terminator or Looper. The subject of time transcends genre, allowing stories of all stripes to emerge, and while they often don’t tell us much about time itself – except, perhaps, not to meddle with it – they do reveal plenty about the artist asking the question. And what we learn about Nacho Vigalondo, the writer and director behind 2007’s Spanish-language Los cronocrímenes (or Timecrimes in English), is that his view of time is very fatalistic indeed.

Of Mice and Men: Depression Dream

James Franco and Chris O'Dowd in Of Mice and Men (Photo: Richard Phibbs)

Depression plays are a distinctive genre in American theatre, and Of Mice and Men, which John Steinbeck fashioned from his 1937 novel, is perhaps the finest example written by anyone other than Clifford Odets. (Odets was the undisputed master of the form, and Awake and Sing!, produced two years earlier than Of Mice and Men, was his masterpiece.) Steinbeck’s book is practically a play – it’s mostly dialogue and it has a clear dramatic arc – so the transposition was a natural one. The play opened on Broadway while the novel was still on the bestseller lists. The original production starred Wallace Ford as George and Broderick Crawford as the physically strong but mentally challenged Lennie, whom George has known since childhood and has always cared for and protected. There was a marvelous film version in 1940, directed by Lewis Milestone, with Burgess Meredith and Lon Chaney Jr. and an Aaron Copland score that I’d call the greatest music ever written for a movie. It was remade in 1992 with Gary Sinise and John Malkovich, and there have been a couple of TV adaptations, including a memorable version in 1968, directed by Ted Kotcheff, with George Segal and Nicol Williamson. But perhaps because it’s shown up so often on the screen, it’s rarely revived on stage, so Anna D. Shapiro’s beautiful new Broadway production is an occasion. (The last New York mounting was in 1987.)

From Memoir to Film: The Railway Man

Any director who attempts to adapt a memoir into a feature film is confronted with a myriad of challenges. The text will inevitably be telescoped but what to eliminate and what to emphasize, especially given that with the memoir genre, the author’s decision to conceal is as important as what he reveals? Should the film maintain the memoir’s structure of a chronological overview or revert to flashbacks? What about the choice of casting: should the filmmakers be looking for actors with cinematic appeal or attempt to search out individuals who closely resemble in appearance, age and mannerisms the characters in the memoir? And perhaps most important: with the choices above already made, can the film be true to the spirit of the memoir?

The foregoing issues are especially acute because Eric Lomax’s memoir, The Railway Man (1995 reissued by Vintage in 2014) is so uneven. In the early chapters, he chronicles his love for the railway in childhood and how it turned into a youthful passion for engineering and radios that later led him to the Royal Signals Corp of the British army during the war in Singapore. What follows, the treatment of POWs, is the best part. As a 22 year-old when he was captured after the British surrender of Singapore, Lomax, along with tens of thousands of POWs in1943, was forced to build the notorious “Death Railway,” as it became known, a 258-mile stretch of train track from Burma to Thailand. The rail line provided the passage way for military transport from Thailand to Burma, and the route of a possible Japanese invasion of India. Treated as slaves, the prisoners worked in the torpid heat on a subsistence diet where diseases such as dysentery and cholera were rife. Whenever a POW flagged, he would be beaten. Over 12, 000 Allied POWs died as a direct result of the project. (It should be noted that over twenty-five percent of the American and British Empire POWs died in Japanese captivity while only one percent of the same POWs died in Nazi camps.)

How To Say Goodbye: Coming-of-Age in Friday Night Lights

For those who haven't watched Friday Night Lights, this piece contains some spoilers. Ed.

Episodes 5 and 6 of season four of Friday Night Lights, which aired in 2010, may be the best two hours of television I’ve ever seen. They’re certainly the most poignant, and I couldn’t keep them out of my head for weeks after I watched them. Almost everyone I know loves Friday Night Lights, Peter Berg’s imaginative expansion of the H.G. Bissinger non-fiction volume about high school football in a small Texas town, yet it stayed under the radar and never made it into the running for the big awards. A narrow but steady audience kept it on the air for five seasons, though every year its fans were on tenterhooks, waiting to see whether it would get renewed for another season. When it returned for its second go-round, in 2007, the writers seemed to be caving in to network pressure to make it more conventional by threading in overblown plot lines. But the level of the acting, the series’ most striking element, never fell, and by the third season the melodrama had vanished and the writing was more delicately observant than ever.

The first three seasons of Friday Night Lights focused on the fortunes of the Dillon High School football team, the Panthers, led by Coach Eric Taylor (Kyle Chandler), and on the lives of the players and of their parents and significant others, citizens of a town where the Friday night games are the most important event of the week and where Monday-morning quarterbacking is not just a tradition but a civic duty. (Eric inevitably has to sweep up the For Sale signs that jokers, probably in their cups, scatter on his lawn during the night after the Panthers lose a game.) In these episodes the Taylors are a thoroughgoing Dillon H.S. family: Eric’s wife Tami (Connie Britton) begins as a guidance counselor and then (in season three) becomes principal, and their daughter Julie (Aimee Teagarden) dates retiring, deeply sensitive Matt Saracen (Zach Gilford), whom Eric molds into an accomplished quarterback when the gifted, charismatic Jason Street (Scott Porter) is paralyzed in a football accident in the show’s opening hour. Jason loses his girl friend Lyla Garrity (Minka Kelly) – the daughter of Eric’s best friend, car salesman and Panther booster Buddy Garrity (Brad Leland) – to his pal Tim Riggins (Taylor Kitsch), a talented player whose ascension to adulthood has been hampered by alcoholic indolence, an ease at getting his way through sexual charm, a dearth of good male role models at home, and a deep-seated conviction that he’s essentially worthless. The other major teenage character is Tim’s ex-girl friend Tyra Collette (Adrianne Palicki), a plain-spoken good ol’ girl whose tough act conceals a terror that she’s not good enough to make it into college and the wide world beyond Dillon. In season two she has a relationship with Matt’s nerdy, generous best friend Landry Clarke (Jesse Plemons) and forges an unlikely friendship with Julie; the fact that both are A students suggests Tyra’s secret longing to be taken seriously. In the plausibly incestuous social landscape of the community, Buddy and his receptionist, Tyra’s mother Angela (Dana Wheeler-Nicholson), have an affair that breaks up his marriage, while Tyra’s older sister Mindy (Stacey Oristano) winds up married to Tim’s brother Billy (Derek Phillips), who has been his unofficial and semi-competent guardian since their ne’er-do-well father deserted them.

Movie Love: Ty Burr’s Gods Like Us, David Thomson’s Moments That Made The Movies and Sophie Cossette’s Sinemania!

I may not be particularly enamoured of the movies much of late – their overall quality is abysmal and they just don’t seem to have the cultural cachet they used to have – but I can still appreciate the enthusiasm of those that are still enthralled by the art form and, more so, enjoy the different approaches they take to expressing their love of cinema. Three recent books all find a way into the movies that is both atypical and idiosyncratic. They’re entertaining and informative in equal measure, fine tributes to the movie love that so many people still possess and a timely reminder of why I fell for the movies in the first place.

The Song is Over: The Television Media and the Enabling of Rob Ford

Is it possible that the nightmare of Rob Ford's rule over Toronto is finally over? It would be reassuring to discover that the release of the latest video of our inebriated Mayor smoking crack cocaine and an audio tape of him spewing more invective about gays and women would spell the end of him. But Ford has been a cat with more than nine lives. His political survival in the face of mounting corruption, bad behaviour and substance abuse has been nothing short of miraculous – or has it been? Watching the television coverage of the latest scandal, that continues to taint the political process and one's belief in good governance, what began to emerge was something as disturbing as Rob Ford's actions. If crack cocaine and alcohol have been our Mayor's drug of choice, the television media has made Rob Ford their own prize narcotic.

Coverage from CP24 to CBC Newsworld, so far, reveals a sickening prurience about our mayor's disgusting actions. You don't see reporters talking about the ramifications of Ford's remarks and what they actually say about women, gays and minorities. By watching the news, you would think that Ford's only real problem has been his inability to stay sober rather than the things he says when stoned. Last night, on CBC's The National, a reporter even told us before playing the recent tape recording that the language we were about to hear might be offensive. (As if naughty language is at issue here like in grade school.) Speaking as one who doesn't believe in the 'dirty word' concept, how does saying 'fuck' become more offensive than the Mayor endorsing sexual assault when he says he wants to "jam" mayoralty candidate Karen Stintz? Why are we so worried about four-letter words instead of what he is actually expressing? By avoiding the content of what Rob Ford believes, the news media just turns Ford into their bad boy who essentially keeps fucking up.

Making the Invisible Visible – A Man Called Destruction: The Life and Music of Alex Chilton

Alex Chilton. I have to say, I never gave him much thought. A quick perusal of my record collection showed that I didn’t even have one song on which he sang including his first big hit, “The Letter,” by Memphis’s Box Tops. Not even on one of those “all American Hit Parade collections.” So why would I buy a book about him? That’s right, I bought the book, it wasn’t one of those galley proofs sent out by a publisher to recruit reviewers. I selected this from the wall of books at my local shop. Got myself a tall Pike while I was at it. But after the coffee was gone I settled down to read Holly George-Warren’s fascinating biography of a musician I didn’t know, A Man Called Destruction: The Life and Music of Alex Chilton.

Over 350 pages later I know quite a bit about what happened during Chilton’s career, I even bought a Big Star album, and an anthology of Chilton’s later work, and Big Star collaborator Chris Bell’s solo CD, and a download of The Box Tops greatest hits. That’s a lifetime of music, and I’ve only scratched the surface. I watched the recent bio, Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me. I’m even considering reading Rob Jovanovic’s book Big Star: the Story of Rock’s Forgotten Band. Just because there’s something eminently intriguing about a rock star who never really got there. The music that Chilton made haunts me. It ranges from the blue-eyed soul of the Box Tops to the power-pop of Big Star, through years of punk, and just about every genre in between.

Counterfeit Action – The Raid 2: Berandal

 Iko Uwais (left) returns as Rama, in The Raid 2: Berandal

The Raid: Redemption came as a surprise to action cinema fans when it surfaced in 2012, combining a rarely-seen Indonesian martial arts style with a ballsy, hyperviolent tone. The film didn’t bother much with plot, filling most of its runtime with intense and brilliantly-shot fight sequences, and it made a name for itself as an example of action purity; if you were going to make a movie filled with nothing but action, then your action had better be as jaw-dropping as The Raid’s. The entire film took place in one apartment block and focused on a rookie SWAT cop (Iko Uwais) who had to ascend each floor of the building, fighting through waves of baddies, until he could find and confront the head honcho. Other films – notably the overlooked Dredd (2012) – have used this video game-inspired formula, but few to such visceral effect. Curiously, The Raid 2: Berandal mostly abandons this simplistic structure in favour of a “reluctant undercover cop” narrative, which proves to be ill-suited to the style established by the first film.

Funny Men: Act One & Beyond Therapy

Tony Shalhoub and Santino Fontana in Act One, at Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont Theater (Photo: Joan Marcus)

The three plays I consider the funniest in the American canon came out within four years of one another: The Front Page by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur (1926), Chicago by Maurine Watkins (1928), and Once in a Lifetime by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart (1930). All three are hard-boiled comedies, a genre that has, unhappily, all but disappeared, though you’d think that the huge success of the movie musical version of Chicago, which restores more of the original text of the play than the stage musical did, might have had the effect of bringing it back into the culture. (The last great cinematic example of the genre before Chicago was probably Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H, in 1970.) Hard-boiled comedies are tough, spirited and satirical. They view the world as essentially a lousy place, certainly a corrupt one, though if you’re clear-eyed and quick-witted and skillful at what you do, you can manage to succeed in it. The hard-boiled comic hero, often the representative of an exclusive group – like the Chicago reporters in The Front Page – is a wised-up pro with a sense of irony and a nose for bullshit, and though his (or her) behavior may not be saintly nor his motives pure, the fact that he’s neither pretentious nor hypocritical places us firmly on his side. The real target in a hard-boiled comedy tends to be institutional or cultural, anyway: politics (The Front Page) or the justice system (The Front Page, Chicago) or the American hunger for celebrity (Chicago).

Once in a Lifetime, my favorite American comedy, is about Hollywood during the chaotic, panicked transition from silents to sound, and its protagonists are a trio of vaudevillians who – since the talkies are killing what’s left of vaudeville – trek out to the coast to start a school of “elocution and voice culture” to take advantage of the general chaos and lack of direction at one of the big studios. (The play provided the obvious inspiration for Betty Comden and Adolph Green when they penned the best hard-boiled movie musical before Chicago, Singin’ in the Rain.) The script for Once in a Lifetime was a collaboration between a twenty-six-year-old novice named Moss Hart, who came up with the idea for it, and the most successful comic playwright of the era, George S. Kaufman; it began a collaboration that spanned a decade and included seven more plays, two of which, You Can’t Take It with You and The Man Who Came to Dinner, were turned into famous movies and are revived often. The only reason that Once in a Lifetime isn’t is that, as befits its subject matter, it’s extremely extravagant, with a massive cast and six sets, including a starry L.A. club and a Hollywood soundstage. The 1932 movie version preserves most of the original script and it’s quite enjoyable, though with a couple of exceptions it doesn’t have the cast the material deserves. The Broadway production is legendary, and the trials and tribulations that led to its ultimate triumph forms the last section of Hart’s 1959 memoir, Act One, which, dramatized by James Lapine, is currently occupying Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater. (Lapine is also the show’s director.)

Dublin Fog: The Crime Noir Novels of Benjamin Black

Novelist John Banville, aka Benjamin Black, author of the Quirke detective novels ( Photograph: Cyril Byrne)

I suspect that most readers of the mystery genre anticipate that whatever heinous crimes are committed that they will be solved by clever, intuitive police work and that the perpetrators will be brought to justice. That kind of reassurance cannot be found in the novels of Benjamin Black, aka the Irish Booker Prize winner, John Banville. In the six Quirke Dublin mysteries that Black has written – Christine Falls (2006), The Silver Swan (2008), Elegy For April (2010), A Death in Summer (2011) Vengeance (2012) and Holy Orders (2013, Henry Holt and Company) – the scales of justice are frequently tipped to deny justice to murder victims because of official incompetence, the protection of perpetrators by powerful interests who are bent on “hiding the damage,” or suicide to avoid the courts. Then what is the attraction for reading these novels? Well, if the reader can accept the fact that the identity of the perpetrator is secondary to other considerations, it turns out that there are many reasons.

A Fashion Revolution: An Interview with Stella McCartney

Stella McCartney (PA Photos)

Stella McCartney is today as much a household name as her famous father, Beatle Paul. As the director of her eponymous Stella McCartney label, a global fashion brand whose annual profits are estimated to be around $7-million, the 42-year old fashion designer has attracted her own international following since starting her own business in 2001. Her fans – and they include A-listers like Gwyneth Paltrow and Kate Moss to everyday consumers who shop her stand-alone boutiques and websites – love her because no matter what it is she does, from women’s and children’s clothing to eco-friendly sunglasses and athletica for Adidas, McCartney comes across as straight-forward and honest, a woman designer proudly designing for other women, their real shapes and lives. Like her father and her late mother, the vegetarian activist and photographer Linda (nee Eastman), McCartney is also a keen environmentalist who has managed to create a 21st century luxury fashion brand without using leather or fur in any of her designs. 

She is not disposable fashion. She is fashion with a cause, winning three British Fashion Awards, an OBE and the honour of designing her nation’s Team GB Olympics uniforms in 2012. Besides edgy, sexy, uncomplicated design, what gives McCartney an edge is her commitment to sustainable fashion which, as she describes it on her site,www.stellamccartney.com, is a trend as important as recycling: “It’s really the job of fashion designers now to turn things on their head in a different way, and not just try to turn a dress on its head every season. Try and ask questions about how you make that dress, where you make that dress, what materials you’re using. I think that’s far more interesting, actually.” When not helping to lead a fashion revolution, McCartney is a busy mother of four young children and wife to Alasdhair Willis, the recently appointed creative director of British brand Hunter. She is also the devoted daughter of you-know-who, actively supporting Sir Paul in her fashion, like wearing a t-shirt of her own making emblazoned with the words, About Fucking Time, at Sir Paul’s induction ceremony into the Rock and Roll Hall of fame in 1999. They remain close. When Sir Paul married Nancy Shevell in 2012, the bride wore a dress custom-made by her new daughter-in-law. Father and daughter have worked together only once, for the making of a ballet. McCartney describes what that was like, and more, in the following interview.

Getting Real: Hot Docs 2014

In its early years, if the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival in Toronto had been something of an industry event that gave filmmakers a chance to find a wider audience for their work, over two decades later, it's safe to say the audience is now there and continuing to grow. That growth has led to having their own movie house (The Bloor), which presents documentaries all year round. The Festival each year also showcases various themes such as Docs at Dusk, which shows free films every evening at 8pm with live music following, Hot Docs Talk, a seminar where this year social science experts and film-makers discuss the impact of agenda-focused documentaries, and this year, provide a welcome tribute to veteran documentary director Barbara Kopple (Harlan County U.S.A., American Dream) whose early films certainly helped popularize smart and engaging work on important social themes. Since technology changes as rapidly as the weather, it has also allowed for documentaries to be made on the cheap – often digitally –which have helped create wider definitions of what constitutes a documentary film. Part of the new shifts in technology even include the expanding use of social media, which not only makes possible the expansion of the audience (through Skype), but the technological shifts can also provide subject matter for any number of films including this year's opening night film, The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz, which examines the tragic life of the freedom of information activist who helped develop Reddit and RSS and was ultimately hounded by the U.S. government on outdated computer fraud laws.

Keeping It Real: David Gordon Green's Joe

Nicolas Cage (right) and Tye Sheridan in Joe, directed by David Gordon Green

For a guy who’s given a lot of pleasure to the world and who is in a risky, unstable profession where only John Cazale and possibly Maria Falconetti can claim to have achieved a perfect batting average, Nicolas Cage sure does take a lot of shit. When Cage was still in his twenties and sufficiently unguarded to talk about his artistic ambitions in a way that sounded nakedly arrogant, entertainment writers scored off him by calling him an ingrate who didn’t know how lucky he was to have been a part of an Oscar-winning crowd-pleaser like Moonstruck. When, after winning the Academy Award for Leaving Las Vegas, Cage recanted his expressed reservations about the mainstream and threw himself into the action-blockbuster marketplace with The Rock (in which he was very funny) and Con Air (in which he was less so), the wheel turned and it became fashionable to denounce the actor as a whore, and a hammy, eye-popping whore at that. Seriously, didn’t the world learn its lesson during that awful period when even the Bressonian purists at People magazine took to making fun of Michael Caine for his work ethic?

Cage, like Caine, clearly likes to work, and there are always too few worthwhile projects around. Just as clearly, the man has made some bad choices: say what you like about the very notion of a Ghost Rider movie, two of them are a lot. But compare Cage’s overall track record, and the jeering press he gets, to those of some other stars who the media treats reverentially, and you can see that not all bad decisions are regarded equally. Meryl Streep is supposed to be very intelligent, and after almost four decades of working in the theater and movies, she ought to have picked up on a few of the warning signs about which kind of plays transfer successfully to the multiplex and which ones don’t. Shouldn’t she have guessed how the film version of a stagebound scream-a-thon like August, Osage County was likely to turn out?

Deluge Delusions: Darren Aronofsky's Noah

Russell Crowe in Darren Aronofsky's Noah

If you want a spiritual understanding of the story of Noah and the Ark, I wouldn't recommend Darren Aronofsky's Noah any time soon – or any time at all, really. The mythical tale of the Deluge from Genesis communicates many truths, ultimately God's power over sin and saving of creation. Aronofsky grasps this basic idea, but then muddies it with New Age extra-biblical concepts, half-baked aesthetic choices, and excruciating melodramatic acting. Hollywood's track record with adapting the Bible isn't great, and Noah's not going to do much to change that. It's a missed opportunity that will leave many scratching their heads, believers and non-believers alike.

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.