Ol’ Man River: A Song, a Drama and a Life

Stogie Kenyatta as Paul Robeson in The World Is My Home – The Life of Paul Robeson. (Photo by Lexi Lewis)

"Nations go to war, but it’s always our culture that unites us.” – Stogie Kenyatta as Paul Robeson in The World Is My Home – The Life of Paul Robeson.

Rarely do a song’s lyrics reflect the life of its singer, particularly one whose life is largely unknown today. Yet the African American, Paul Robeson, was possibly the most gifted artist – a polymath who could speak and sing in fourteen languages – and one of the most courageous activists of the twentieth century. Although he had appeared at the Cotton Club as a singer in Harlem in the early 1920s, Robeson’s career as an artist was inaugurated in 1928 when he performed the part of Joe in the London production of Show Boat (by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II), which had been a huge hit in New York. The musical chronicles the lives of people working on a Mississippi River showboat, and its black characters reflected the era’s stereotypes. Robeson’s rendition of “Ol’ Man River,” that was specifically written for him, was its most memorable number, no doubt enhanced by his rich baritone voice and large physical presence, and became one of his trademark songs whose lyrics evolved throughout his career. In the 2006 Criterion tribute to Robeson, Sydney Poitier narrates with illustrative visual clips how the words changed as Robeson and the world changed. Beginning with “Niggers all work on the Mississippi,” he altered the word “niggers” to “darkies” within a few years And when he made the film version in 1936, he transformed the opening line entirely to “There’s an ol’ man called the Mississippi; that’s the ol’ man I don’t like to be.” He also eventually changed the defeatist line “I’m tired of livin’ and feared of dyin’” to the more political “We must keep fightin’ until we’re dying” that he first sang in 1938 during the Spanish Civil War, a day that the war stopped so that both sides could hear the man sing. This last lyrical alteration signified his shift from subservience to militancy, and his capacity for seamlessly weaving his artistry with his politics. That trend accelerated after the Second World War in a concert in Warsaw: “The Mississippi was no longer the man I want to be.” From being the most famous black man in the world triumphing artistically and commercially in theatre, film and on the concert stage – and an icon to Welsh miners, anti-lynching marchers in the American south, and anti-fascists everywhere – he became one of the most reviled activists in his native country after the Second World War for his outspoken support for the Soviet Union and his scathing criticism of the United States.

Breaking Away: AMC's Better Call Saul

Bob Odenkirk stars in AMC's Better Call Saul.

"Wouldn't you rather build your own identity? Why ride on someone else's coattails?"

– Chuck McGill to his brother Jimmy (Better Call Saul, "Uno").

My first real introduction to Vince Gilligan's work (outside of the many episodes of The X-Files that bore his name) was The Lone Gunmen, a spin-off from a groundbreaking, blockbuster show – in that instance, The X-Files itself. That series premiered and disappeared in 2001, during its parent series' ever-weakening eighth and penultimate season. (In many ways, those last seasons of The X-Files felt like a pale spin-off of itself, with its signature stars becoming slowly reduced to near "guest star" status.) The Lone Gunman however took its trio of "not-ready-for-primetime" characters from the comic relief background of The X-Files, and built a story with and around them that had humour, poignancy, and most crucially an energy that seemed fundamentally lacking in The X-Files itself at the time. Along with fellow X-Files alums John Shiban and Frank Spotnitz, Gilligan penned most of the episodes. Despite positive reviews, the series suffered terrible ratings and was cancelled at the end of its brief first season. Last winter (not uncoincidentally in the months following the end of Vince Gilligan's Breaking Bad), I binge re-watched all 13 episodes The Lone Gunman (including its cliffhanger-resolving "14th episode" that ran as part of The X-Files' ninth season), and found it even more delightful, and addictively entertaining, than I'd remembered. The Lone Gunman succeeded precisely where many spin-off series fumble: it knew and loved its characters more than it wanted to woo its source series' coveted audience share. It was a show designed to reflect its offbeat and charming characters. The result was a series with a unique voice and tone – an especial challenge precisely for a spin-off to a beloved series – and one that could stand on its own. In short, The Lone Gunmen could justify its own existence.

This past Sunday and Monday, Vince Gilligan returned to the cable airwaves with another spin-off, this time to his critically and audience acclaimed series Breaking Bad.  Better Call Saul takes us half a decade back before the beginning of Breaking Bad and delves into the unwritten back-story of one of the series' most beloved secondary characters: Walter White's shady lawyer, Saul Goodman (played by Bob Odenkirk). So far, so good – but when the prequel series was first announced in the months prior to the airing of Breaking Bad's final episodes, I was definitely of two minds about its prospects. Spin-offs are risky propositions, not least of which because when they falter, they can retroactively diminish the show that inspired them. My concerns about the proposed new series were redoubled after Breaking Bad ended with near novelistic completeness in September 2013. (I'm not sure any television series has ever had so emphatically a beginning, middle, and end as Breaking Bad – and it seemed to me, as the credits rolled on its final episode, that anything added to that universe could only diminish it.) If I remained hopeful at all about the new series, it wasn't because Gilligan had created and helmed what turned out to one of the smartest and most powerful television series of the new millennium: it was because of The Lone Gunmen. And now that the first two episodes of Better Call Saul have aired, I am grateful to be able to say that my faith has been more than confirmed.

Listen to the Lyon: Empire

Taraji P. Henson and Terrance Howard co-star in Empire, on FOX.

By Wikipedia’s count, Empire is the fourth non-documentary TV series to be titled Empire, including a short-lived ‘60s Western featuring the young Ryan O’Neal, an even-shorter-lived ABC Roman Empire drama featuring the young Emily Blunt and James Frain, and a 1984 corporate sitcom that starred Dennis Dugan, on his way to becoming our leading director of feature films starring comedians whose careers were launched by Lorne Michaels after he just stopped caring. Network executives probably like the sound of that title for its blunt, straightforward grandiosity; it captures what they see themselves as controlling and embodying, and imagine that ordinary TV viewers will salivate at the prospect of being given a glimpse of life at the top. Amusingly, the male protagonist of the new Empire is a street artist turned multi-million-dollar mogul who has named his music company Empire Entertainment, which tells you everything you need to know about his taste for grandiosity.

Iris van Herpen: The Future of Fashion

Iris van Herpen holding a bottle of Dom Pérignon Vintage 2004.

Fashion is now. But not in the hands of Dutch fashion designer Iris van Herpen. She projects fashion into the future, re-interpreting couture through a visionary lens. Incorporating a wide range of outside influences, from dance to 3-D computer technology, her designs blur the boundaries between art and science: Clothing as material innovation. “Creation is about constant change and is never finished. I think that is very beautiful,” said the 30-year old fashion sensation during a recent interview in New York City. The occasion was the unveiling of the latest vintage by Dom Pérignon, the 2004 Metamorphosis, for which the former apprentice to the late Alexander McQueen had created a limited-edition champagne box and ferrofluid sculpture. The latter was an extension of research done for her latest Spring/Summer 2015 womenswear collection which was created using metal powder and magnets to move the fashion forward in a new, otherworldly direction. Think spiny carapaces for the body combined with flowing fabrics to get an idea of what it looked like. For Dom Pérignon, van Herpen took the idea of magnetic attraction and applied it to the concept of metamorphosis as well as to the concept of time, an ingredient integral to the making of champagne, in particular the fermentation and aging process.

Hot Mess: Jupiter Ascending

Mila Kunis is Jupiter Jones, in Andy and Lana Wachowsk's Jupiter Ascending.

It’s often been said of Andy and Lana Wachowski that even when they fail, they do so in new and interesting ways with each new project. I think such a sentiment speaks more to the audience member than the artists, frankly – it sounds to me like that person thinks the Wachowskis do excellent work that they simply have trouble understanding, and I don’t count that as a fault. The veteran writing-directing duo have been unimpeachably fearless in their drive to create original, engaging film experiences, and for me their acceptance of risk, which often yields spectacular, visually-stunning, emotionally-challenging rewards, outweighs their occasional missteps in quality. One only needs browse their resume: from the gorgeous Lichtenstein-inspired pop cubism of the narratively-stunted Speed Racer to the beautiful but bloated Cloud Atlas, the Wachowskis have been characterized by their inspired (if flawed) work, and moreover, their willingness to dust themselves off, go back to the drawing board, and try something new. They’re persistent, if nothing else.

It was really only a matter of time before this pattern coalesced into something like Jupiter Ascending – after the heavy century-spanning pseudo-philosophy of Cloud Atlas, it makes sense that the Wachowskis would indulge in some simple escapism. “Simple”, though, isn’t the best term to describe the extravagant, wild, convoluted, and gorgeous Jupiter. “Hot mess” might be more accurate.

Constellations: Love in the Multiverse

Jake Gyllenhaal and Ruth Wilson in Constellations. (Photo by Sara Krulwich)

In Nick Payne’s brainy, open-hearted two-hander Constellations, Jake Gyllenhaal and Ruth Wilson play an English couple – Marianne is a physicist, Roland a beekeeper – who meet at a barbecue, move in together, break up, rediscover each other and get married. It’s the arc of a love affair with a tragic ending, only it takes place, as the program informs us, in “the multiverse,” where, according to Marianne’s research, “at any given moment, several outcomes can co-exist simultaneously . . . [and] every choice, every decision you’ve ever and never made exists in an unimaginably vast ensemble of parallel universes.” So the fleet seventy-minute play (measured in conventional time, that is) consists of a series of short scenes that continually reimagine the scenario. In alternate versions of Roland and Marianne’s opening gambit, they fail to connect because he has a girl friend or is already married and her interest in him ricochets back on her. In alternate versions of their first date, she invites him in but reconsiders and sends him packing, which he understands or resents. The stop-and-start structure recalls David Ives’ comic one-act Sure Thing, an undergraduate directing-class perennial, but the tone is entirely different.

I Kill Therefore I Am: Clint Eastwood's American Sniper

A number of the recent Academy Award-nominated films – all based on true stories – have come under a lot of heat regarding their historical inaccuracies. While the argument of fidelity goes without saying when it comes to documentaries, it's often understood, if not explicitly stated, that a good drama can be based on true events rather than literally depicting them. (Did anyone ever really quibble over whether The Life of Emile Zola or Lust for Life were truly accurate portraits of their subjects?) Most of the squabbling over the recent Selma, The Imitation Game, or Clint Eastwood's American Sniper, though, comes with more political baggage than the nature of Van Gogh's rivalry with Gauguin. This kind of partisan bickering also does more to obscure whether or not these movies are actually any good.

Neglected Gem #71 – Babe: Pig in the City

Those who went to Babe: Pig in the City in 1998 – George Miller’s sequel to his great 1995 Babe – to see another naturalist’s adventure set on the Hoggett farm had their expectations upended. Miller and his co-writers, Judy Morris and Mark Lamprell, clearly had no interest in repeating the achievement of the first film. Though Pig in the City begins with a farm-wide celebration of Babe’s sheep-herding triumphs, within the first few minutes Farmer Hoggett (James Cromwell) is confined to his bed in a cast and a neck brace following a nasty fall down a well – a consequence of a miscalculation on Babe’s part about how best to help “the boss.” Then the bank threatens to foreclose on his property and Hoggett’s beloved pig-faced wife Esmé (Magda Szubanski) hatches a plan to enter Babe in a fair, which requires an international plane trip, and takes Babe away from all of his farm companions, the familiar supporting cast of the first Babe (as well as, of course, Hoggett himself). Mrs. Hoggett’s scheme is set off course when a drug-sniffing customs hound at the airport decides to show off for Babe’s benefit and gets the boss’s wife detained for dope smuggling; by the time customs clears her she and Babe have missed their connections. With no imminent flight available to return them home, they trudge over to the only hotel in the vicinity that welcomes pets. But circumstances conspire to separate Esmé and Babe. First their suitcase and then Babe himself are kidnapped by a family of chimps on the floor below – and one solemn, laconic orangutan, their Uncle Thelonius. They perform with the concierge’s Uncle Fugly Floom (Mickey Rooney, in a wondrous, absurdist Keatonesque cameo), a dilapidated vaudevillian who’s been reduced to entertaining in the children’s wards of hospitals. Then Esmé gets into more trouble with the law (don’t ask). Like Babe’s stint in Fugly’s act, it’s only temporary. But the separation is enough to throw Babe into the cold city of Metropolis, where animals who have been set loose by their humans are as likely to starve as not, and where the prevailing spirit is – if you’ll forgive me – dog eat dog.

Love and Libido: Showtime's The Affair

Fiona Apple’s ”Container” is as disturbing as any theme song ever heard over the opening credits of each episode in a TV series. In this case, it’s the musical coda for The Affair, the first season of which ran from October through December last year on the Showtime cable network. With a big dose of Celtic doom, the nominally simple yet anguished a cappella melody sets the mood for a complex drama about adultery. Apart from politics and religion, arguably there is no greater hypocrisy in many countries than when it comes to the subject of carnal pleasure. In terms of words and images, sex was just sex until the concept of pornography first surfaced during the Victorian era with England’s Obscene Publications Act of 1857. Never mind that prehistoric cave paintings depicted copulation up the ying-yang. And don’t even get me started about erotica in ancient Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Indian and Japanese cultures! The specific draw of in flagrante delicto – which Hank Williams so aptly defined in 1952 as “Your Cheatin’ Heart” – must be powerful. More than half of all married couples in America are apparently unfaithful. That was even true when Mom and Dad slept in separated twin beds on mid-20th-century sitcoms. A society that holds monogamy up as an admirable virtue is a society probably fooling itself.

Canajan Boys

Last summer we were walking downtown in Charlottetown, my wife, my brother-in-law, his wife, and daughter. Just a block from Province House. It was evening, we’d been out for dinner, and to see Anne of Green Gables. We had parked on a side street and were returning to our car, when alongside the church beside which we were parked we saw, to our amazement, a fox. Not just any fox, but a black fox. None of us were ready, with a camera (or phone) so we didn’t get a picture…but all five of us gasped and said, “Look! A black fox!” A man was walking down the road towards us and he declared, “You must be tourists… we see them every day.” Oh sure…I know it’s officially called a ‘silver’ fox, and that they put money in the pockets of poor Islanders for years (and now it’s not politically correct to even suggest that there might be a market for fox pelts…) but, in 1939, 10% of the population of PEI kept foxes. Now the little critters run wild on the main street

Why all this talk about foxes? It’s because Michael Wrycraft’s lovely cover design for Jon Brooks’ new CD features a very distinguished looking fox, not a silver fox… a red one. And this one is not in a city, he’s roaming free in The Smiling & Beautiful Countryside. Brooks is a powerful singer-songwriter who has been well known for his political songs. Songs like “Fort McMurray,” “Hudson Girl,” “Son of Hamas” and “Cage Fighter” (all from 2012’s Delicate Cages CD) dealt with issues as wide ranging as the Alberta tar sands, Quebec language laws, Palestinian suicide bombers, and a mixed martial arts fighter who had been a Bosnian child soldier. The new album, which takes its title from a Sherlock Holmes quote, is something quite different. It’s a collection of murder ballads. Not Ozark murder ballads handed down from generation to generation, but Canadian murder ballads that Brooks has written. Gore, sex, killing, necrophilia: name your poison and it’s here. I saw Brooks play “Delia’s Gone,” another murder ballad, at a Johnny Cash Tribute Show a year or so ago and it gave me a clue as to what this CD would be like. Wrycraft told me then that Brooks wanted to “piss people off” with his new album. This might do it.

Looking for Clues: Three New Mysteries by Alan Bradley,Thomas Perry and Becky Masterman

Fans of Canadian writer Alan Bradley’s Flavia de Luce novels – and I freely confess I am one of them – will remember that at the end of The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches, the sixth in the series, 11-year-old heroine Flavia – poison aficionado, investigator extraordinaire – discovered that her late mother and her very much alive Aunt Felicity, were members of a shadowy group of secret agents known as the Nide. And furthermore, that she, Flavia, was destined to join them. To further this end, Flavia is sent – is “banished” for her sins, she feels – to Toronto, to enroll in Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy, the private school her mother attended as a girl. As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust (Delacorte), Bradley’s seventh Flavia novel, chronicles our precocious preteen protagonist’s adventures in Canada. And you know there will be adventures. Sure enough, on Flavia’s first day at Miss Bodycote’s, a wrapped and mummified body falls out of the chimney into her room, ending up right at her feet. (Flavia has long demonstrated a world-class aptitude for finding dead bodies.) The Toronto police take charge of the body, of course, but that doesn’t stop Flavia from pursuing the identity of the victim and, of course, the murderer. And while she’s at it, she also looks into the ghost said to haunt Miss Bodycote’s and the rumours about girls disappearing over the years. Of course, she must also attend classes – including, much to her delight, a chemistry course taught by a woman acquitted of murder by poison – negotiate girls-boarding-school culture, investigate the school’s staff, and, not incidentally, deal with her training in the tradecraft of spying. It’s a charming jumble of clues, false trails and surprises, all narrated in Flavia’s droll, amusing voice. If I have a cavil, it’s that I miss the village of Bishop’s Lacey and its many delightful characters, the rambling, crumbling de Luce mansion Buckshaw, Flavia’s wicked older sisters, Ophelia and Daphne, faithful family retainers Dogger and Mrs. Mullet, and even Flavia’s sturdy, reliable bicycle, Gladys. So frankly, I was delighted to find that, after solving the many mysteries of Miss Bodycote’s (no spoiler), Flavia is headed back to England.

A Nerd's Work Is Never Done – Angry Video Game Nerd: The Movie & The Legend of The Atari Burial

The Atari dig in Alamogordo, New Mexico, April 2014.

In 1983, Atari, Inc –  the reigning monarch of the global video gaming market at the time –  buried over 700,000 of its popular Atari 2600 game cartridges and consoles in a New Mexico landfill. This was the final act of a company which would shut its doors shortly afterward and fade into pop culture history, thanks to a massive industry blowout now known as the North American Video Game Crash of 1983. The one game which could be said to have caused this collapse was Atari's E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, a tie-in product based on the Steven Spielberg movie.

But how could a single title tank an entire home console empire? The answer is that due to negotiations to secure the film rights taking far longer than anticipated, Howard Scott Warshaw, the game's programmer and lead designer, was given only five weeks to complete the game for release in the 1982 Christmas season – leading to one of the biggest commercial failures in video game history and a title that is frequently cited as one of the worst video games ever released: a cryptic, ugly, and incomprehensible adaptation of a beloved children's film. Burying the hundreds of thousands of worthless, unsold cartridges left over must have seemed like an excellent idea.

But the veracity surrounding the details of the story became unclear with time, and soon few were sure whether or not the infamous Atari burial ever actually took place. Investigations by fans of gaming history produced inconclusive results, and the story soon took on the spectre of an urban legend. Who really knows what lies out there in the New Mexico desert? This mystery resulted in existing copies of the game more than tripling their original value, collectors becoming desperate to own such a rare piece of gaming history – even one so sordid as E.T..

Flesh and Soul: A Life of Tennessee Williams

Tennessee Williams at his desk in 1948. (Photo: W Eugene Smith/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images)

John Lahr’s biography, Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh, which came out from W.W. Norton late last year, evolved in a curious fashion. In 1995 a San Francisco theatrical producer named Lyle Leverich with no other books to his credit published a very fine first volume of a Williams bio called Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams that took the playwright’s story up through the triumphant Broadway opening of The Glass Menagerie in 1945. Lahr had an odd connection to Leverich’s book in a number of ways. Maria St. Just, Williams’ infamously possessive and tyrannical literary executor, had attempted to frighten Leverich off by asking Lahr to write an authorized biography (which he refused to do). Then, ironically, it was Lahr whose help Leverich and his publisher asked in getting St. Just off his back, after she had succeeded in holding up the publication of his book for five years, and Lahr ended up writing a profile on her in The New Yorker. Eventually Tom saw the light of day, but Leverich died four years later, before completing the second part of his project. He and Lahr had become friends, and he had asked Lahr if he would finish the biography if he proved unable to; he went so far as to put that request in his will. That’s how Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh came into being, nearly two decades later. Lahr claims in the preface that it didn’t turn out to be part two of Leverich’s bio but its own stand-alone bio. But though the writers’ styles and approaches are understandably different, there’s so little overlap in the stories they tell that effectively they are indeed two halves of a deeply engrossing story, and readers who want to learn as much as they can about Williams’ life and career are advised to read them back to back. (Each runs roughly 600 pages.)

Impossible Belonging: Sayed Kashua's Second Person Singular

Writer Sayed Kashua (Photo courtesy of Die Welt)

The world of fiction is replete with novels about ‘identity’: sometimes it is about gender, sometimes about the place of a character in a family, or city, or even time period. In other texts the character is concerned with their religious, ethnic, or national identity. All such books point to the fact that our identity is fluid. How we define ourselves, and what content we give to those definitions, changes throughout our lives and is often very (if not wholly) dependent upon the situations in which we find ourselves and to which we must respond. Not only does our ‘identity’ change over time, but we contain multiple identities at any given moment – we dress, speak, and respond to other people differently depending on the context, we consider certain behaviors appropriate in one context and not in another… and this is not a demonstration of our hypocrisy (which would assume that there is some stable identity to which we are being unfaithful) but a demonstration of our multiplicity. Fictional works that focus on identity illuminate the extent to which we human beings, for all of our vaunted uniqueness, are rarely ever the ‘same’ person for two moments in a row.  Sayed Kashua’s most recent novel, Second Personal Singular (published in Hebrew by Keter Books as Guf sheni yaḥid in 2010, and in English by Grove Press in 2012), charts the permutations of his characters identities in a unique context, and with a unique style, that is all the author's own. 

Vincent Mantsoe: Philosopher of the Physical

Photo: Meinrad Heck

There is a point in NTU when South African dance artist Vincent Sekwati Mantsoe starts laughing. His belly roar punctuates the silence cocooning a solo that, he says out loud to the audience, is about “nothing.” Using spoken word and physical gestures, Mantsoe describes an existential state of being, a place where the soul spins blindly in the darkness of a friendless night, seeking comfort in something concrete. It is a vain pursuit, akin to a dog chasing its tail. This way madness leads. When he laughs it is because he recognizes the absurdity of his situation. Resolution is pointless. He will always dance alone. "Even if nothingness pervades,” he writes in his novelistic program notes, “there is always something taking form ... what may be created in your own mind."

Creating meaning in his own mind, and artfully articulating it through dance, is what distinguishes Mantsoe, a choreographer of conscience who blends street vernaculars with traditional African dance forms. Today a resident of France, he has won many awards around the world for his inventive approach to dance making. For the next few weeks Canadians can experience it for themselves. His two-part show, at Toronto's Harbourfront Centre Theatre until tonight, is part of a Canada tour that launched in Montreal and continues through February at venues in Peterborough, Ottawa and Vancouver. Make sure to see him.

Time and Again: SyFy's 12 Monkeys

"She is not your mission. She’s just a puzzle piece." – Dr. Jones to Cole, in the pilot episode of SyFy's 12 Monkeys.

Adaptations of movies to television can be hit and miss, and perhaps the strongest television shows to come from the big screen aren't inspired by the most beloved films. Peter Berg's Friday Night Lights (2004) probably had its fans, but the television series (launched by NBC in 2006, also developed by Berg) made no bones that it was taking off in its own direction, unburdened by the film or book. In fact, I confess that I began watching the series without even knowing about the film, and it so confidently built its world in its extraordinary first season that I've never felt remotely inspired to check out its source material. The other great movie-to-TV adaptation is of course Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer. There, the series quickly outstripped the famously wrongheaded early-90s film and found its voice precisely in the broader continuing storylines so essential to television storytelling.

But adapting films beloved in their own rights, especially arguably classic films like Terry Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys (itself inspired by a then-classic film, in that instance, Chris Marker's incomparable La Jetée) are a different story, both literally and figuratively. When it's a movie that you love, that you've seen multiple times, and that you know backwards and forwards, that is a tough new row to hoe for a new television series. SyFy has bravely taken that on with its new time travel thriller 12 Monkeys, which premiered two weeks ago. And the results, so far, are genuinely promising.  
 

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).