Attack of the Cyber Mann: Blackhat

Chris Hemsworth and Wei Tang in Blackhat.

Michael Mann’s new action thriller Blackhat is set in the up-to-the-minute world of  international cybercrime, with a hero (Chris Hemsworth) who’s a computer hacker pitted against an apolitical cyber-terrorist who engineers cataclysms, such as a near-meltdown at a nuclear power planet, in order to cash in on them. The term “blackhat” refers to this villain (played by the Dutch actor Yorick van Wageningen), but the character doesn’t have the stature to justify his being the film’s title character; he’s nameless and, for most of the movie, faceless. (We only get a good look at him as the movie is heading into its violent climactic set piece, so we’ll know which of the people on screen the hero is going to try to kill last.) Maybe his speeches about not knowing where, or even who, he is are meant to make his character seem computer-age, but he just comes across as seedy and dazed. Probably Mann just thought the title sounded cool. 

Mood Disorder: Two Days, One Night

Two Days, One Night—the latest offering from the Dardenne brothers of Belgium—feels about as long as that, despite clocking in at a little over ninety minutes. The filmmakers have made realism their trademark approach, seeking to give voice to contemporary society's flotsam and shed light on their plight. In this attempt, they mean to channel the neo-realism of De Sica and his fellow Italians. His Umberto D. follows one elderly man as he loses both his Rome apartment and his pride, forced to beg on the streets for rent money. The Dardennes's film also tells a basic story, that of one Sandra (Marion Cotillard), a French wife and mother of two who's being forced from her job at a small company. But De Sica suffuses his film with a tone and technique that flushes out fellow feeling for the titular character. He was a humanist: Umberto Ferrari's character is fully formed and dignity affirmed in our eyes, even as he's debased in the eyes of others. The Dardennes brothers miss this streak. Two Days, One Night lacks a compelling central character, which leaves its simple narrative and conflict moribund.

Neglected Gems #69-70: The Rocketeer (1991) & The Last Starfighter (1984)

Billy Campbell and Alan Arkin in The Rocketeer (1991)

The cinematic “excesses” of the 1980s and early 1990s, so venemously derided by critics today, manifest mostly in the films we still remember – your Rambos, your Conans, your Top Guns – but these big, loud, attention-grabbing blockbusters naturally came with their fair share of imitators, some of which did the job of perfecting escapist entertainment much better than their more lucrative counterparts. Swept aside by petulant studio executives and disregarded by audiences and critics as cheap knock-offs of worthier films, these are stories that Tolkien might have described as “lesser sons of greater houses” – lighthearted adventure films whose excitement, intelligence, and genuine charm have been all but forgotten in the wake of their longer-lasting, more successful kin.

Notes on the Method: Jane Fonda, 1969-1971, Part 2

Jane Fonda as Bree Daniel, in Klute (1971).

In the 1971 Klute, Jane Fonda plays Bree Daniel, a high-class Manhattan hooker who – reluctantly – asks for the protection of a cop named John Klute when she’s stalked by a creep (Charles Cioffi) who turns out to be a killer. Donald Sutherland gives a fine, understated performance as Klute, and the chemistry between him and Fonda (they were an off-screen couple for a few years and made one other picture together, 1973’s Steelyard Blues) is partly what makes the film so memorable, especially once the protagonist and the title character become involved. Klute is far from a romantic comedy, but it has a romantic-comedy set-up: the tensions between the hero and heroine, who come from different worlds – Klute is a small-town Pennsylvania police officer who meets Bree during an investigation into the murder of a friend – and rub each other the wrong way, turn out to be erotic ones. Sutherland’s nerdy looks – the gawky frame, the mongoose neck, the outsize ears – are used here to emphasize his character’s square-shooter persona, the very thing that Bree mocks and tries to undermine, at first reflexively and then as a form of resistance against the danger of losing emotional control. (During this early phase of his career, Sutherland generally played hipsters, most famously “Hawkeye” Pierce in Altman’s M*A*S*H; the fact that his goony appearance didn’t stand in his way is an indication of the way the Vietnam-era made movie stars of actors who would never have landed leading-man roles in any previous period, like Woody Allen and Elliott Gould.)

Living Outside the Norms of Time: Remembering Frank Ogden ('Dr. Tomorrow')

He went by many names. Some proclaimed him the "Marco Polo of Cyberspace." Others, "Dr. Tomorrow" from his internationally syndicated newspaper column that appeared throughout North America. Whatever name you gave him, it was generally agreed that Frank Ogden, who died at the age of 92 a few days before the New Year arrived in 2012, was one of Canada's rare creatures – an iconoclast who lived outside the norms of his time. He was not only an elected fellow of the Explorer's Club; he was also the first Canadian member of the World Future Club. From studying voodoo in Haiti, to turning himself into a "cyborg" by having surgically implanted, intra-ocular bionic lenses to improve his eyesight, Ogden was never chained by conventions. In a country not noted for celebrating its prodigies, Ogden created a niche that left both scientists and scholars comparing him to such unconventionally brilliant thinkers as Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller.

Storytime: The Missing and Babylon

Frances O'Connor and James Nesbitt in The Missing.

He does not have Daniel Craig’s suave charisma or Clive Owen’s intellectual charm or Gerard Butler’s (woefully overexposed) sexy swagger. James Nesbitt, ostensibly also a child of the United Kingdom but born to Protestant parents in disaffected Northern Ireland, has brought his own unique brand of intensity to the acting profession for decades. His recent triumph was as a father whose young son is abducted in The Missing, a taut eight-episode BBC series that was co-produced by and broadcast on the Starz pay-cable channel late last year.

I first saw Nesbitt, who turned 50 less than two weeks ago, as an Irish protest organizer trying desperately to keep things peaceful in Bloody Sunday. That award-winning 2002 television film, directed by Paul Greengrass (soon famous for The Bourne Supremacy), depicts a terrible chapter in world history. The British Army killed 13 unarmed demonstrators staging a cilvil rights march in Derry on January 30, 1972. Think Selma with white faces and a brogue. In The Missing, he inhabits the role of Tony Hughes, a Brit on a 2006 vacation in rural France with his wife Emily (the excellent Frances O’Connor, who portrayed an equally conflicted mom in 2001‘s A.I. Artificial Intelligence) and son Oliver (Oliver Hunt). The boy, age six, disappears and the story follows an agonizing search for clues by his distraught parents. They must contend with a duplicitous local police force and various suspicious civilians, including a wealthy developer (Ken Stott) and a convicted but remorseful pedophile (Titus De Voogdt).

Satire & L'affaire Charlie Hebdo (4 of 4): It’s (Still) Hard Being Loved by Jerks

Charlie Hebdo’s then editor Stéphane "Charb" Charbonnier (1967-2015), in 2012. (Photo by Fred Dufour)

“I prefer to die standing up rather than living on my knees.” – Stéphane Charbonnier (Charb), editor of Charlie Hebdo and one of the victims of the January 2015 terrorist attacks targeting him and his staff.

You cannot look at It’s Hard Being Loved by Jerks (C'est dur d'être aimé par des cons, in French), the fine 2008 documentary that Daniel Leconte made about Charlie Hebdo and the lawsuit launched against it about ten years ago by various French and non-French Muslim groups, in quite the same light as when it first came out. Yet the issues and questions raised by this very perceptive film, revolving around the definition of racism versus legitimate satire, the rights of French citizens to not be offended stacked up against the values of the Republic where free speech, however offensive, is sacrosanct, and the intent behind the Charlie Hebdo cartoons, still apply today. Only now they’re overlaid with the blood of the victims of the shootings in the magazine offices, killed by those who not only opposed their freedom of speech and image but who felt they had the moral right, even a religious obligation, to silence it.

Satire & L'affaire Charlie Hebdo (3 of 4): The Lessons of Philip Kaufman's Quills

In the opening scene of Philip Kaufman's prickly erotic drama Quills (2000), based on Doug Wright's clever and prescient play, we bear witness to a muscular brute partly dressed in leather who both gropes and caresses a young woman in what appears to be a sadomasochistic tryst. As we're drawn in further and become aroused by the deeper and darker dynamics of their grappling, we soon discover that we've actually become enraptured by the sight of Mademoiselle Renard, a libidinous aristocrat, who is about to meet her demise at the hands of a sadistic executioner during the Reign of Terror following the French Revolution. Just as she is about to be decapitated, we meet the incarcerated Marquis de Sade (Geoffrey Rush) who is in the process of documenting her tale. In one swift stroke, Phil Kaufman implicates us in our deeper fascination with sex and violence. With that audacious opening, the director, who is no stranger to eroticism and politics (The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Henry and June), brings us in more intimate touch with our hidden and forbidden desires. He uses the outrageous exploits – and the brutally frank writings – of the Marquis to raise more probing questions about the role of art, the matters of sex and the dubious tool of censorship. And it's no accident that the story is set a short time after the Reign of Terror because what's up for grabs in Quills is the romantic belief in the basic goodness of man.

Satire & L'affaire Charlie Hebdo (2 of 4): Revisiting The Interview after Charlie Hebdo

A scene from Death of a President (2006)

In 1971, in a novel that was first published during Richard Nixon’s first term as President and has since been reissued as part of the Library of America series, Philip Roth killed off  “Trick E. Dixon,” described the American people joyously celebrating their President’s untimely demise, and signed off with a chapter in which Tricky, in the afterlife, vigorously campaigns for the leadership of Hell. (“Now, Satan has indicated on several occasions during this campaign that I have been misrepresenting his role in the Job case.”) Six years later, Robert Coover used Nixon, called “Richard Nixon” this time, as a major character in his novel The Public Burning, which was set during the McCarthy era. This time, Nixon made it out alive, but he was subjected to speculation regarding his lusting after Ethel Rosenberg, and in the finale, was sodomized by Uncle Sam. A year or so later, a Saturday Night Live sketch depicted Nixon as a vampire who had to be executed with a stake through his heart to spare the country from being subjected to his self-exculpating memoirs. In the play Secret Honor, which Robert Altman filmed in 1984, a drunken, grotesquely self-pitying Nixon spends an evening recounting the crime against basic decency and human dignity that was his political career, promising to blow his brains out when he gets to the end.

Satire & L'affaire Charlie Hebdo (1 of 4): The Challenge of Endorsing “Je suis Charlie”

“…caricature distorts the original, it can be unfair, and it uses humor to reveal the shortcomings of, and occasionally to humiliate, its subject.”

                                                                 –Victor Navasky, The Art of Controversy

When I heard so many people expressing the slogan, "Je suis Charlie," I wondered what they were actually supporting. If the millions in North America and Europe, that include those who marched in Paris and other French cities (the largest since the 1944 liberation of France from German occupation), were merely expressing their sympathy for the murdered journalists at the offices of Charlie Hebdo, police officers, and Jews at a kosher supermarket by Islamist fanatics, their endorsement of free speech as a basic principle, or their repudiation of censorship-by-terrorism, I fully support these sentiments. During these marches, “republican values,” appeals to “fraternity,” and “solidarity” in the cause of freedom were often heard. A similar sentiment of solidarity could have been expressed for the 132 schoolchildren slaughtered in Pakistan in December and the countless numbers murdered, raped and turned into sex slaves by the savage Boko Haram in northern Nigeria. The inclusion of murdered Muslims in these gestures would have sent a strong message to the Muslim world that their lives count just as much as non-Muslims. Muslims suffer the largest number of victims from Al Qaeda and ISIS terror, yet we expect Muslims to condemn acts of violence against Westerners as they did when a delegation of 20 imams visited the Charlie Hebdo offices the day after the shootings, to brand the gunmen as “criminals, barbarians, satans” and, crucially, “not Muslims,” Writing in The Guardian, Jonathan Freedland argues that the demand of Muslims to condemn acts of terror committed by jihadist cultists as “odious [because] it tacitly assumes that Muslims support such horror unless they explicitly say otherwise. The very demand serves to drive a wedge between Muslims and their fellow citizens.” 

Selma: History Left on the Page

David Oyelowo (centre) as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in Selma

The director of Selma, Ava DuVernay, moves the historical figures around like action figures set against the famous landscape of Martin Luther King’s 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery to protest the denial of voting rights to African Americans. I can’t remember the last time a historical drama presented such potent narrative material so ineptly. As a filmmaker DuVernay lacks every important skill: she has no idea how to choose the most effective or interesting camera angle, no editing rhythm, no notion of how to shape a sequence, and neither she nor the screenwriter, Paul Webb, has a clue how to dramatize a scene. The actors stand or sit around and make speeches; even in the private interactions of King (David Oyelowo) and his wife Coretta (Carmen Ejogo) – the one where she visits him in a Selma jail cell after Malcolm X (Nigel Thatch) has come to see her with an offer of assistance and King refuses to consider it, or the one where she confronts him in their home about his infidelities – they seem to be presenting position papers, with careful deliberation and pauses you could drive a train through to underscore their points. We might as well be watching the story unfold in a pastiche made for the History Channel – though I doubt you could find anything as dull as Selma on the History Channel. And in the set piece sequences built around the march, like the protesters’ several efforts to make it across Pettus Bridge while the armored cops under the command of Sheriff Jim Clark (Stan Houston) stand with truncheons on the other side, the somber music enshrining the historical significance of what we’re seeing has to do the filmmakers’ work for them.

There’s no doubt that these scenes, and a few others – notably the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, which killed four little girls (two of whom we see walking down the stairs moments before the explosion) – are powerful. You can’t watch Clark’s cops beating black citizens in the streets and then chasing one family into a diner and mowing down its youngest member (Jimmy Lee Jackson, played by Keith Stanfield), or the clubbing and tear-gassing of the protesters when they first attempt to stage the march, without feeling horror and anguish. But those emotions derive naturally from the events, not from the way the filmmakers have put them on the screen.

On Sacrifice, Slaughter, and War: Mahmoud Dowlatabadi’s Thirst

Author Mahmoud Dowlatabadi (Photo by Chris Higgins/NYTimes)

When a person who is smitten by words is given a pen, he will not stop writing even if threatened by a blade.  – from Thirst, by Mahmoud Dowlatabadi.

The world is inundated with bad news.  For the most part, we specialize (professionally or personally) in one or two conflicts (perhaps in addition to what is trending on Twitter). More than that and we become overloaded. The Syrian Revolution and its evolution with ISIS, recent events in France and its contexts of both racism and secularism, not to mention the Ukraine, Kurdish movements, the Columbia FARC treaty, Tibet, Boko Haram, and Hindu nationalism… we only, albeit to our shame, have attention for so much. As conflicts move into the past, we retain a few impressions about what happened, but our engagement in the conflict (and its aftermath) becomes more distanced, and we become less invested. The more such conflicts appear firmly in the past, the less likely it is that we will know anything about them at all. How many people can simply call up an interesting or relevant fact about the Crimean War (1853-1856) or the Thirty-Years War (1618-1648)? A more recent example of a conflict that has quickly passed of concern for many (particularly in North America) is the 1980-1988 war between Iran and Iraq. This is the setting of Mahmoud Dowlatabadi’s most recent book, Thirst (Melville House, 2014). At minimum it will make the reader stumble over the indifference with which we dismiss any of the wars in our world. 

What's Up, Doc?: Paul Thomas Anderson's adaptation of Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice

Like E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime (1975), Thomas Pynchon's 2009 detective pastiche Inherent Vice is a hip and hefty comic riff (only with a melancholic bedrock) that builds on pop connections and associations already alive in the reader's mind. In Ragtime, a parable of American lore in which the author performed masterful tricks with the history we thought we knew, Doctorow captured the spirit of America in the era at the turn of the twentieth century and World War One. But rather than write a realistic account of the period, Doctorow created a crazy quilt, and a flip-book chronicle that was, in many ways, already a movie before it became one. Inherent Vice is equally opulent, but given that it invokes America in the early Seventies when the heady counter-culture of the Sixties is decimated by assassinations, drugs, and the election of Richard Nixon as President, it is perfumed in regret and loss. There's also a sense of dread implored, too, as the story opens in Los Angeles on the eve of the Manson trials (where Charles Manson, a diabolical psychopathic drifter, who looked like a hippie, had colonized the same California girls Brian Wilson once wrote lovingly about a few years earlier and together Manson and those women committed mass murder). Inherent Vice is about the door starting to close on the communal utopia the Sixties promised.

Comedic Realism Redux: Togetherness and Man Seeking Woman

Jay Baruchel stars in Man Seeking Woman, a new comedy which premiered on FXX this week.

Cable television gave viewers two new comedy series this week: HBO's Togetherness (which debuted January 11) and FXX's Man Seeking Woman (which debuted on January 14). Individually, either would be worth your attention – each brings a fresh new voice and vision to TV, along with some familiar and welcome on-screen talent – but the serendipity of both shows arriving in the same week is notable in itself, especially if you watched them back-to-back as I did last night.

Both new comedies delve powerfully into the stuff of everyday passion and pain, our shared desires for intimacy and love, and the excruciating arcs that our stories of love and loss can take. Togetherness adopts a sincerely realistic tone, while Man Seeking Woman is impressionistic, unabashedly surreal and absurdist. The former is telling a long, slow-burning character-based story, driven by the everyday insecurity and tender anguish of aging and regret; the latter is a more episodic, almost cartoonish exploration of the neurotic inner, and outer, life of a new-single 20-something man struggling to make sense of himself as he searches for new love. From a formal standpoint, the two shows could not be more different, yet both not only demonstrate the rich potential of televisual story-telling, they also reflect a deeply human take on interhuman relations in our time.

Lost in Music: Mozart in the Jungle

Gael Garcia Berna in Amazon's Mozart in the Jungle.

In most American popular culture, the stereotype of the arrogant, pompous classical-music conductor and his stuffed-shirt audience hasn’t changed much since the Marx Brothers’ day. In the Amazon Prime series Mozart in the Jungle, Gael Garcia Bernal gets the chance to embody the contemporary, highly promotable image of the celebrity conductor in the age of Gustavo Dudamel as a young, swivel-hipped sex symbol with an ingenuous manner and the mane of a lion. Garcia Bernal plays Rodrigo De Souza, who, in a blaze of fund-raising hype, is brought in to take charge of the New York Philharmonic. (He’s greeted with a garish nightmare of a promotional campaign built around the slogan “Hear the Hair!”)

Art and Life: National Gallery and 20,000 Days on Earth

A scene from Frederick Wiseman's National Gallery (2014)

When it comes to documentary filmmaking, there is no one quite like Frederick Wiseman. For nearly fifty years, since Titicut Follies (1967), his controversial exposé of the terrible conditions at a Massachusetts correctional institution, he has been making an average of one doc a year on any number of varied subjects, documentaries like no others currently being made. Wiseman eschews all narration, never puts himself into the film (unlike a certain self-aggrandizing documentarian I could mention), and simply chooses extensive footage that doesn’t editorialize so much as depict – whether the subject is high school life (High School, 1968). Law enforcement (Law and Order, 1969) or various artistic institutions (La danse, 2009). (He is not the first documentary filmmaker to work like that but I’d argue he’s the most consistent, purest one ever to do so.) Wiseman's most recent film, National Gallery (2014), is par for the course – a fascinating and riveting inside look at Britain’s prestigious National Gallery in London, a movie which will make you look at your favourite art gallery in a whole new light.

The Fearsome Female Protagonist Program: Marvel’s Agent Carter

Hayley Atwell stars as Peggy Carter in Marvels: Agent Carter on ABC.

When Marvel pushes an agenda, it pushes hard. The Marvel Cinematic Universe can be called many things, but lazy generally isn’t one of them. And there’s quite a lot to prove with ABC's Agent Carter, their first miniseries, being both a continuation of an established Captain America storyline and a testing ground for the miniseries format (Marvel has plans for five more Netflix-based mini-shows, whose existence will largely depend on the success of this first effort).  Agent Carter is also a melting pot of proven talent, bringing in Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, writers of both Captain America movies, and Joe Russo, who co-directed the excellent CA: The Winter Soldier, for the first two episodes. It’s hard to imagine such a strange, mutant project earning many accolades out of the gate, especially when it’s based on a character with so little audience recognition power outside of the comics-and-cosplay community – but if the MCU has taught us anything, it’s that Marvel will leverage all its power to see it succeed.

Well, if the pop culture press is to be believed, the show has done just that. Comparisons to The Rocketeer and – be still my heart – Indiana Jones are not misplaced. This “lesser-known” heroine everyone is suddenly taking notice of is Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell), agent of the Strategic Scientific Reserve (“SSR”), who has to keep up appearances at her mundane office job while secretly helping Howard Stark (Dominic Cooper) keep the operatives of a shadowy organization called “Leviathan” at bay (and away from his dangerous technology, or as he calls his more deadly inventions, his “bad babies”). She also has to dodge the annoyances of a male-dominated 1940s workplace, all while mourning the loss of her lover, Steve Rogers, whose “death” from the first Captain America film is replayed at the beginning of Agent Carter’s premiere. Stark offers Carter the help of his persnickety butler, Edwin Jarvis (James D’Arcy), whose prim adherence to the rigid structures of genteel living grate on Peggy’s dynamic superspy sensibilities. Taken together, these elements make Agent Carter a funny, exciting adventure serial that revels in its period details, a striking retro world guided by an exceptionally strong lead.

Notes on the Method: Jane Fonda, 1969-1971, Part I

Michael Sarrazin and Jane Fonda in They Shoot Horses, Dont They? (1969)

Jane Fonda entered movies in 1960 as a sex kitten with a killer instinct for comedy; in some of her early pictures, like Walk on the Wild Side and The Chapman Report (both from 1962), she played cleverly against her wide-eyed-innocent quality and her shimmering-starlet glamorousness. Her first husband, the French filmmaker Roger Vadim, used her wittily, especially in his soft-core sci-fi fantasy burlesque Barbarella (1968), where she was cast as a kind of female Candide – or Alice in a porno Wonderland. No one could have expected the cards she was holding close to her chest: that she had the gifts of a major Stanislavskian movie star. In 1969 she played Gloria in Sydney Pollack’s film of the 1935 Horace McCoy novella They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, set at a dance marathon on the Santa Monica Pier, and the next time out, two years later, in Alan J. Pakula’s Klute, she was Bree Daniel, a high-class Manhattan call girl who, freaked by a stalker, looks to a transplanted Pennsylvania cop named John Klute (Donald Sutherland) for rescue. These performances conferred a distinction on Fonda (she won the Academy Award for the second) that have never deserted her, though in only a handful of subsequent pictures (Julia, The China Syndrome, The Morning After) has she scored roles that gave her comparable acting opportunities. In that tiny corner of time where the late sixties and early seventies overlapped, she was the best actress in America.

The Age of Coming: The Criterion Blu-ray release of Alfonso Cuarón's Y tu mamá también (And Your Mama Too)

No one has ever fused the indissoluble relationship between sex and death in a coming of age story quite like the wildly gifted Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón does in his 2001 Y tu mamá también (And Your Mama Too). Recently re-released on DVD in a sparkling new Blu-ray print by the Criterion Collection, Y tu mamá también boldly plumbs the depths of adolescent eroticism, where sexual surrender brings one in touch with the primal terrors of loss and separation, with a refreshing and shocking candidness. It immediately calls up Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris, which examined with equal frankness the turmoil of sex and death from the vantage point of middle age. After charming audiences with the sophisticated fairy tale A Little Princess (1995), and the sumptuously expressionistic Great Expectations (1997), Cuarón returned to his Mexican homeland to make a sexually rowdy and wildly funny road movie, where two teenage boys, who are best friends in Mexico City, hit the road with the runaway wife of one of their cousins while their girlfriends are away in Italy. Armed with a juvenile code of conduct that is quickly undermined and rendered inadequate by the older woman they journey with, Cuarón unveils with buoyantly sportive humour the unacknowledged homoerotic bonds of male companionship – while also confronting the desperate need one has for sexual satisfaction when mortality looms large in the future. Y tu mamá también, which won the Best Screenplay Award at the 2001 Venice Film Festival, has virtually nothing in common with the more conventional coming of age stories like Rob Reiner's Stand By Me (1986), which sentimentalizes death by using it to reinforce the dubious virtues of staying young, or the Harlequin romanticism of the early Seventies hit, Summer of '42, where sex becomes a tender awakening that makes one forget the finality of death. The more welcoming sensibility that informs Y tu mamá también is alive and anarchic, much like sex itself, and suggests a delinquent version of Truffaut's Jules and Jim (1962) coupled with the rough house friskiness of Bertrand Blier's Going Places (1974).

Styles and Stylists: Mike Leigh’s Turner, Tim Burton’s Keane

Timothy Spall as J.M.W. Turner in Mike Leigh's Mr. Turner.

The English writer-director Mike Leigh is a caricaturist by bent whose famous collaborative process with his actors (which begins with improvisation) allows them to inhabit those caricatures – to make them experiential. He’s the closest any filmmaker has come to approximating Dickens, though his complex tone and the peculiar loving gruffness of his humor are distinctly contemporary. I love most of his movies, but when he applies his approach to nineteenth-century British subjects what he comes up with is truly wondrous. His 1999 Topsy-Turvy, about Gilbert and Sullivan and the first production of The Mikado, is simultaneously a dazzlingly detailed chronicle of theatrical creation (I think it’s the finest backstage movie ever made) and a profound study of the Victorian temperament comparable only, perhaps, to David Lynch’s The Elephant Man and Dennis Potter and Gavin Millar’s brilliant (and almost unknown) Dreamchild. In his new movie, Mr. Turner – which looks at the most celebrated and productive period in the life of the great (and remarkably prolific) painter J.M.W. Turner, who died in 1851 – Leigh uses his own pebbled, off-side style for an impressionistic effect that matches it up with Turner’s style, which anticipated impressionism and, in his late canvases, took on an abstract quality that (as Leigh’s movie shows) alienated audiences that had embraced his work for years. In Mr. Turner, an idiosyncratic master filmmaker reaches out to an artist from an earlier epoch and finds common ground. That’s what happened when Robert Altman took on Van Gogh in 1990 in Vincent and Theo. In both cases the eye of a gifted contemporary director fixes on the radical element that makes these painters’ work seem so startlingly modern. With Altman’s Van Gogh and Leigh’s Turner, you feel that their experiments were so ahead of their time that we’re still racing to catch up with them.

Passions Pursued: M.P. Fedunkiw's A Degree of Futility

(Full disclosure: I am acquainted with Marianne Fedunkiw slightly as she is the President of the Toronto Arts and Letters Club, of which I am a member.) 

Write what you know has been a guiding principle in M.P. (Marianne) Fedunkiw impressive fictional debut, A Degree of Futility (FriesenPress, 2014), a novel about three friends, Lily, the narrator, Greg and Simon, who have difficulty either in completing a PhD or finding full-time work in their chosen field. This topic has received considerable attention in the press, on the CBC’s, The Current and TVO’s, The Agenda. But to my knowledge, A Degree is the first to explore these issues in a fictional format. 

Fedunkiw obtained her PhD in 2000 in medical history and has taught courses at three Toronto-area universities for more than fifteen years. Like so many other PhD graduates, she has been an underemployed sessional instructor, going from contract to contract, with little chance of entering the tenure stream inside the academy. Both in the novel and in public statements, Fedunkiw has stated the importance of having a plan B if a tenured position does not materialize, and she has taken her own advice. It helped that Fedunkiw had a journalism degree that enabled her to work at The Globe and Mail among other publications, and she was also a member of the team that started The Discovery Channel in Canada during the 1990s. She has international research experience and runs MF Strategic Communications, a consulting firm that specializes in communications for the university, research and medical sectors. Moreover, she has written plays and is now working on another novel.

Critic's Notes & Frames Vol. XI: Je Suis Charlie

On Wednesday morning, the French satirical paper Charlie Hebdo was attacked by three masked gunmen who stormed the building and killed ten of its staff and two police officers. The gunmen are currently identified as Muslim extremists. The attack came shortly after the paper tweeted a satirical drawing of ISIS leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi. Irreverent and stridently non-conformist in tone, the publication has always been anti-religious while taking on the extreme right, Islam, Judaism and Catholicism. Its sensibility was clearly defined by its former editor, Stéphane Charbonnier, as "left-wing pluralism." In September 2012, the newspaper had published a series of satirical cartoons of Muhammed, some of which feature nude caricatures of him, in response to the anti-Islamic film, Innocence of Muslims, which led to attacks on U.S. embassies and increased security in France. Before yesterday's attack, the magazine had also been the victim of an earlier terrorist attack – a firebombing in 2011.

Curiously, I'd already been planning an edition of Critic's Notes scheduled for today, but after the horrible events yesterday in Paris, I've decided to forgo that one in favour of this new post. In solidarity with those who perished for exercising their freedom of speech, I've decided to let others have their voice in response to those events and to sit back and listen to those voices. In the spirit of Charlie's pluralism, I've also included contrary ones, as well, to keep to the spirit of equal opportunity democracy. Wherever possible, I tried to create links to the original articles (unless they were quotes from social media). For the first time, the picture of the pen that has always lead off this column takes on an added significance.

Knight of Light: Gordon Willis in Retrospective

A scene from Woody Allen's Manhattan (1979), shot by Gordon Willis.

Near the opening of his 1977 film Annie Hall, Woody Allen (playing Alvy, a version of himself) anticipates a rendezvous with the title character in front of a movie house. She’s running late, however, and during the interlude two wise guys accost him, recognizing his face from television comedian appearances. Unnerved beyond even his usual neuroticism, he practically runs to Annie when she pulls up in a cab at last. “I’m standing here with the cast of The Godfather!” he blurts out as they duck inside. This must rank as one of the great meta-references in cinema. For Diane Keaton, who plays Annie, of course was in the cast of The Godfather, in the role of Kay. You can’t get a better entrance. But it’s actually a double joke, for Annie Hall shares not only a great actor with those movies, but a great cinematographer as well: Gordon Willis. Willis died last year, and he stands prominently among the film luminaries we remember in looking back at 2014. So important was his impact on the art form, in fact, that the Brattle Theatre here in Boston offered a seven-film tribute to him late last summer. And while good doesn’t describe all of those pictures, Willis’ style is so distinctive that worth seeing does.

Critics Still At Large: Five Years On

During the late fall of 2009, when Shlomo Schwartzberg, the late David Churchill and myself sat down in Made in China, a restaurant in downtown Toronto, to create Critics at Large, we had no idea whether we would last five months, let alone five years. But here we are five years later and with more writers than we started with. At that time, we created the site with a chip on our shoulder. Two of us had been seasoned journalists, who were quickly finding ourselves out of season, and being left with nowhere to work. So there was a defiance in not going down quietly. Critics at Large was to be our weapon. But we were also venturing into the world of social media which many believed to be the harbinger of the death of print. So we made the decision to lower our swords, and see ourselves more as part of a pioneering effort, where we hoped we could bring the values we learned from the traditions of the analogue world and apply them to the digital one. The only thing to be decided was whether we had anything interesting to say. Time took care of that.

While I wouldn't be so bold as to say that we accomplished the goal of standing out from the pack, I think the question of what that meant was on everybody's mind who came on board. We all read each other and we knew that the bar could be raised (or dropped) in a heartbeat. Yet when I look back through our archive, I see a strong body of work that's versatile, filled with temperament and sometimes risky. The question of what constituted criticism remained a consistent quest and something we felt in the process of defining. Not all of our writers, for example, were comfortable with the idea of making harsh comments about things they didn't like. As I've come to discover (especially on Facebook), the profession isn't very well understood, or respected today, which makes writers more vulnerable than in any period I can recall. In some areas, critics are even hated, as if our goal is to deprive people of pleasure. (One Facebook 'friend' described what I did as 'parasitic.') So rather than impose a sense of what we should stand for, we became more organic in our approach. That is, we allowed people the freedom to find their true voices and their critical edge in their own time. This decision naturally took the edge off that chip we placed on our shoulder. What became more important, over time, was bringing a self-respect and integrity to what we did on a daily basis.

White Christmas: Seasonal Treat

The cast of Irving Berlin's White Christmas. (Photo: Kevin White)

The stage adaptation of Irving Berlin’s 1954 movie musical White Christmas toured the country for a couple of seasons before opening for a limited Broadway run in 2006. I caught it in Boston nine years ago and found it so satisfying that, when it came through again this Christmas, I went back for a second look. The original production carried a directing credit to Walter Bobbie, with Randy Skinner listed as choreographer; Skinner is now listed as director, too, but the show is almost exactly the one I remembered.

First-Person Singular: Anita Diamant’s The Boston Girl

Anita Diamant's newest novel, The Boston Girl, was published by Scribner on December 7. (Photo: Dominick Reuter)

Novels that take us back in time are a pleasure for a number of reasons. They provide window into worlds which are no less complicated than our own, albeit usually without internet and smart-phones. But the best of these novels are not about gimmicky and nostalgia-inflected descriptions of fashion and ‘quaint’ transportation. In the tradition of Wild Swans and Angela’s Ashes (both of which have notably autobiographical elements) the best invocations of the past are about characters and people. By slowly bringing the reader from the past into the present, such books make the present richer, inflecting how we think of the people around us with an awareness of the depths of history which each of us bear. Anita Diamant’s newest novel, The Boston Girl (Scribner Publishing, 2014), is just such a book—but it also stands out for its writing, sharp pace, and a few other quite remarkable features.  

Agit-Plop: Evan Goldberg & Seth Rogen's The Interview

Probably the biggest irony concerning Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen's political satire, The Interview, is that the controversial events surrounding it, and the global political ramifications its been linked to, will be more memorable in time than the film itself. Who knew that it would take a stoner comedy from Sony Pictures to help launch a terrorist cyber war on the Western world from hackers allied with North Korea – an act that would end up with the film being pulled before its Christmas Day release? After an initial act of censorship, and President Obama slapping the studio and movie venues on the wrist, The Interview is now playing in selected theatres. But is the picture itself worth all the bother? Well, no. But like most things that get censored, the reasons being offered are more troubling – and more illuminating – than the film creating the fuss.

Rolling Deep in 2015: James Corden and The Wrong Mans

Mathew Baynton and James Corden star in The Wrong Mans.

The final weeks of 2014 were bittersweet. Two of the smartest, most original shows in late night television – Comedy Central's The Colbert Report and CBS's The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson – aired their final episodes within hours of one another. Though the shows could not be more different – the first, with tightly-written and sharp political satire, and the second loosely improvisational, sublimely ridiculous and deliberately untopical – their two stars may have been the most genuine late night hosts ever to sit behind a desk. Even if "Stephen Colbert", the character Colbert played so brilliantly for 9+ years, has taken his last bow, we certainly haven't seen the last of Stephen Colbert (though the precise date of his taking over for David Letterman on CBS's The Late Show has still to be announced). However, I can't express how deeply I will miss Craig Ferguson's intimate, deeply human presence on my TV screen, perhaps more especially his tour de force chemistry with "Geoff Peterson", the gay robot skeleton sidekick voiced so brilliantly by comedian Josh Robert Thompson for the past four years. Ferguson and Thompson were like nothing else on American late night television. But, at the same time, these closing doors open others for the coming year.  The Late Late Show will remain a fixture on CBS, as the also-accented James Corden takes over hosting duties in March. Even though we have been given tantalizingly little about what Corden's version of the show will look like, the choice of the British comedian for the job reveals that someone at CBS is doing their job right. Corden is a Tony- and BAFTA-award winning actor and writer, a man whose face an average North American viewer may recognize but whose name won't ring any bells. Across the pond in the UK, he's most famous for co-starring and co-creating Gavin & Stacey, a wildly popular BBC romantic comedy that aired 2007-2010 – though his starring turn opposite Meryl Streep in the recently released film adaptation of Into the Woods should draw some much deserved attention. (Fellow Critics at Large's writer Steve Vineberg has called Corden alternately "irresistible" and "irrepressible" and there is no doubt he is both.) Fortunately, even for those without a taste for Sondheim or fractured fairy tales, there is a simple way to get a glimpse into what Corden promises to bring to American television: tune into Hulu and check out James Corden's wildly entertaining The Wrong Mans, which launched its second season last week.

Booked: Reflections on Jonathan Yardley's Retirement

Over three decades, Jonathan Yardley has written over 3,000 book reviews for The Washington Post. He retired in December. (Photo by Linda Davidson)

I don’t know what ongoing changes in technology and the media landscape are going to do to the state of publishing in this country, but I do feel that I lucked out in growing up at a time when it was possible for a kid with limited resources, far from the center of action, to have a favorite book reviewer. I’m not talking about critics, those people who write big books and give names to decades and generations, but regular, working reviewers, the ones who, instead of being able to pick their subjects, have to be prepared to take on anyone in the room. I’m paraphrasing Wilfrid Sheed, who proudly claimed the designation “reviewer” for himself, but he was (slightly) giving himself anti-airs. Sheed wrote a whole slew of the smartest, funniest, most perceptive book reviews of his time, but he doesn’t quite fit into the mold of regular reviewer, if only because, thanks in part to the publishing-world allure of his family name, most of his output was, thankfully, collected between hard covers when he was still alive to bitch about the royalties.

Best in Music 2014

Rosanne Cash's album The River & the Thread is on John Corcelli's 'Best of' list for 2014 (Photo by Stephen Lovekin)

I’m always impressed by the love and passion other people have for music, usually matched by my own. Time to share! So, here are some of my most notable music moments in 2014.

Middle Earth Mêlée – The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies

Nearly all the film analysts here at Critics at Large have taken a crack at the second of Peter Jackson’s fantasy trilogies centering around Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) and his colourful, high-energy adventure through Middle Earth to The Lonely Mountain (and back again). While my colleagues have enjoyed the movies overall, they've rightly censured the films for the flatness and protraction of their battle sequences, their over-reliance on CGI and technical gimmickry, and the folly of trying to stretch a small adventure novel into a blockbuster trilogy. Peter Jackson's hardly a perfect filmmaker, and one could argue that this latest trilogy of bloated epics is the least worthy of his works (although I would hope that those who’ve seen The Lovely Bones would beg to differ). I don't think many of these directorial choices are necessarily good ones, but as a filmgoer and (an admittedly rabid) franchise fan I must take what I'm given. So: how well does The Battle of Five Armies do what it sets out to do?

Christmas Musicals: Into the Woods and Annie

Meryl Streep and Mackenzie Mauzy in Into the Woods

Rob Marshall’s new movie of the Stephen Sondheim-James Lapine Into the Woods has an insurmountable problem: the show it’s based on. The appeal of this musical, which mixes several fairy tales, has always eluded me. It contains an ingenious opening number in which Sondheim sets all the narratives in motion, and a couple of other songs (Cinderella’s interior monologue, “On the Steps of the Palace,” and “Agony,” a duet between Cinderella’s and Rapunzel’s princes) are OK if somewhat overworked. But the  whole thing is too damn clever by half, with lyrics that tend to make the characters sound as if they’ve been reading self-help manuals.  And by the time the show picks up again after intermission and the characters go back into the woods because their happy endings have begun to fray, the same fate has befallen Sondheim’s inventiveness. The very concept is stupid: if taking to the woods is a metaphor for coming of age, then no one gets to do it twice. And you don’t have to darken a fairy tale dark in order to modernize it; the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen originals are plenty dark enough. Moreover, Sondheim’s idea of “dark” is, to my ears, merely homiletic: “Children Will Listen,” “No One Is Alone.” If I have to pick a revisionist fairy-tale musical, I’ll take Once Upon a Mattress. Revue-sketch comedy trumps pop psychology any day of my week.

Two Historical Novels (Part Two): Sarah Quigley’s The Conductor

Dmitri Shostakovich in 1941. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis

The first part of this piece – which begins with Bob's review of Sean Michaels' Us Conductors, a novel about Leon Theremin – was published here on Critics at Large on December 14. The piece continues here with a look at Sarah Quigley's 2011 novel, The Conductor.

While Leon Theremin was working in the relative safety of a sharashka (a secret laboratory in the Gulag camp system), the Nazis surrounded Leningrad and cut its links with the outside world. The goal was to erase the city, in Hitler’s words, “from the face of the earth." The epic of the Nazis’ 900-day encirclement was a time of unimaginable horror: air-strikes raining down; bodies, often dismembered, frozen in the snow; neighbour distrusting neighbour; and people feeding on glue, sawdust, leather, dogs and cats, while others resorted to cannibalism. Most people attempted to subsist on less than one slice of purloined bread a day. Hunger alone killed 800,000 people by the time the Germans retreated.

Traveling Women: Wild and Tracks

In Wild, Reese Witherspoon gives a fine, intelligent performance as Cheryl Strayed, a young woman who spent three months walking the thousand-mile Pacific Crest Trail as a means of cleansing herself of the wayward, self-destructive life she’d been living, sleeping around and shooting heroin. It sounds like a showy, Oscar-bait role, but Witherspoon (who was also one of the producers) doesn’t play it that way; she keeps her wit sharp and her character carefully grounded in the grittiness of the material but not its (potential) melodrama. And that’s how the performance has been set up, first by novelist Nick Hornby, who adapted Strayed memoir, Lost: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, using a series of flashbacks to sketch in the life that led her here, and director Jean-Marc Vallée, who understates the sensational parts of her story. (He and Hornby restrict the drugs and the promiscuity to perhaps two slivers each of narrative.) Vallée is the Québecois filmmaker who made a splash – deservedly – in Canadian film circles with his 2005 coming-of-age picture C.R.A.Z.Y. and then went international with Young Victoria and last year’s Dallas Buyers Club. I loved Young Victoria, a gentle, complicated historical drama (also a coming-of-age story) but had mixed feelings about the other: engrossing and original as it was, it was pitched close to the melodramatic edge that Vallée is so cautious about steering clear of in Wild, and the film, as well as its two highly touted central performances (by Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto), kept tipping over that edge. The actors were splendid as long as they leaned away from it, toward the humor of their outrageous, opposite-number characters. I have no mixed emotions about Wild. The filmmaking – the way Vallée and his co-editor, Martin Pansa, slip almost subliminally in and out of the past – is stunning. (John Mac Murphy, credited as editor on both Wild and Dallas Buyers Club, is a pseudonym for Vallée.)

Critic's Notes & Frames, Vol. X

Singer Joe Cocker, who sadly died over the holidays at 70 after a battle with lung cancer, could get to the bottom of heartache in a song like no other. Listening to him perform, with his gravel voice, was like hearing Louis Armstrong cured in a blue funk. Containing a melancholic soul that rivalled Billie Holiday, Cocker's ecstatic surrender to the naked emotion in a romantic number, at its best, could transcend masochism. Of all his memorable tracks from "Hitchcock Railway" to his soulful take on "With a Little Help from My Friends," his gospel tinged "Do I Still Figure in Your Life?" asks with maybe the greatest urgency the most poignant demand of his audience.

Film director Carlos Saura has made many dazzling dance pictures before, from Carmen (1983) to Flamenco (1995), but Iberia (2005) may be his most erotic work. Using a studio outfitted with minimalist backdrops of scrims, curtains and mirrors, Saura adapts sections of composer Isaac Albeniz's "Iberia" suite for a number of the biggest stars in the Spanish dance and music world to perform. Yet like Jonathan Demme in Stop Making Sense (1984), Saura makes us conscious of the artifice he's creating, letting us see the cameras, the lights, and the recording equipment, only then to employ the magic of performance to evaporate the artifice. Saura isn't content just capturing that alchemy, though, he goes further inside the process of performance art itself and, while using expressionistic techniques, reaches the purest essence of dance to create a fully realized expression of love for the sensuality of movement.

Biblical Bore – Exodus: Gods and Kings

Christian Bale as Moses in Ridley Scott's Exodus: Gods and Kings

Director Ridley Scott’s latest epic, Exodus: Gods and Kings, makes Moses the second biblical patriarch to have his story butchered by Hollywood this year. The first, of course, was Noah in Darren Aronofsky’s deluded treatment last spring. Scott’s film doesn’t punish its audience with caustic melodrama the way the second half of Noah did. He’s a better craftsman than Aronofsky, and his visual palette more sensible – the movie’s landscape has the craggy wildness you associate with the Old Testament universe. But it matches its predecessor for clouding the meaning of the central narrative themes and injecting bizarre, half-baked spirituality into them. The result is a rare feat: a movie that’s at once both bloated and a fiasco.

Neglected Gem #67: Quick Change (1990)

Bill Murray in Quick Change

Quick Change takes twenty minutes or so to find its tone. In the opening sequence, Grimm (Bill Murray), dressed in a clown suit, robs a bank, holds the customers and employees hostage, and rigs it so his two accomplices, his girl friend Phyllis (Geena Davis) and his pal Loomis (Randy Quaid), hidden among the hostages, are the first to be released – along with Grimm himself, in a second disguise as a whining nerd. But the combination of Grimm’s actions and Murray’s ironies plays a little uneasily; I didn’t laugh much until these three cleared the bank and were putting one over on the exasperated police chief (Jason Robards). At that point, the movie, which Murray co-directed with the screenwriter, Howard Franklin (adapting a book by Jay Cronley), relaxes into a pleasantly off-kilter New York obstacle-course farce with the structure of an anxiety dream. As the trio tries to make their way to the airport with their loot, everything conspires to block their path. Their plan is to divert the cops, who think Grimm’s still inside the bank, until they can make it out of the country, but while Grimm’s talking on a pay phone to the chief, Loomis accidentally leans on the car horn, blowing their cover. Then they get lost and can’t find anyone to give them directions; when they do, finally, he turns out to be another thief (Jamey Sheridan), who holds them up. Their car is towed and smashed, they land a cabbie who doesn’t speak English, they duck into a warehouse full of gangsters – while Grimm, a burned-out city planner, views each encounter as further proof of the hatefulness of New York. That’s why, he explains, he engineered this robbery – to get them safely beyond the city’s scummy reach.

The Geek Shall Inherit The Earth: The Imitation Game

Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing, in The Imitation Game

Filmgoers, like gamers, are natural puzzle-solvers – we like to try and stay one step ahead of a mystery, or piece together a disjointed narrative, or guess at a film’s ending before it arrives. There isn’t much to unravel in The Imitation Game, a film which depicts the life of mathematician Alan Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch) and his attempts to crack the German Enigma code at the secret Bletchley Park facility in World War II, but the way the film positions society’s smartest (and most socially awkward) members as the world’s last hope against the Nazi menace is almost as much a love letter to geeky hobbyism as it is a biopic of the world’s first computer scientist. The film isn’t complex enough to be a puzzle unto itself, but so many puzzles abound for the characters to solve – crossword and code-message alike – that it feels like a celebration of how using brains, and not brawn, is often what wins a global war.