Conflict in Context: War on the Silver Screen

Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove (1964) is one of the many films profiled in War on the Silver Screen

Anyone looking for a history of film will find a plethora on the market. Among them are Norman Cousins’s compendium of world films Story of Film (published by Pavillion books in 2004, with a new edition in 2013), followed by his fifteen-hour mega-documentary of the same name, and The Big Screen: The Story of the Movies (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012) by film scholar and author of twenty books, David Thomson. Both volumes demonstrate the vast knowledge of their authors about films and filmmaking. Yet there is relatively little about the larger historical context within which the films were made. For example, in Thomson’s chapter on war, he does write a few insightful sentences on context but they are dwarfed by the dizzying array of films he mentions and only briefly comments upon. Looking for that context narrows the options. What I have found most valuable is Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies (Henry Holt & Co, 1995), edited by Mark C. Carnes, that consists of sixty reviews of historical films by historians and other authorities in the field. I liked these reviews because most of them do not, in the words of one reviewer, “quibble about inaccuracies, simplifications, invented characters, imagined dialogue, anachronisms” but focus on whether the film is true to the spirit of the character or historical issue. The reviewer of the film, Malcolm X (1992) criticized director Spike Lee for underplaying the political evolution of the eponymous character, and the reviewer of All the President’s Men (1976) acknowledged that although the film was accurate, it was untrue because it misleads the audience into thinking that the revelations of two reporters were responsible for the downfall of Nixon even though the film ends with the re-election of Nixon. The actual history behind these films is largely confined to a sidebar on each page. Of the sixty entries, seven of them are on the subject of twentieth-century war films. More recently, Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War (Penguin Press, 2014) by Mark Harris is very good on how that war shaped the career of five Hollywood directors, but there hasn't been a book that provides an overview of how war films have shaped their audiences’ consciousness – until now. 

War on the Silver Screen: Shaping America’s Perception of History (Potomac Books, 2014), a crisply and accessibly written monograph by historian Glen Jeansonne and film critic David Luhrssen, is a welcome corrective. The authors combine their talents to argue that war films have done more than books or history lessons to influence people’s perception of war. Their thesis is bracing, perhaps even self-evident, but it is difficult to prove with empirical evidence. The book’s greatest strength is that it gives almost equal space to the historical context as it does to the films themselves. I do have some reservations about their treatment of the films they have chosen for major analysis and with certain key omissions.

“Beyond Endurance” and BBC's Drama of the Week Podcast

Dominic West plays Ernest Shackleton in Meredith Hooper's radio play "Beyond Endurance" on BBC's Drama of the Week

I'm writing this from Toronto, Canada. Many years ago, our national broadcaster (CBC) pulled the plug on spending for the production of radio drama. It was, in retrospect, the exact worst time to do so. Given the media landscape and the rising popularity of podcasting and archived content, interesting, relevant and new audio drama could have been a popular and important part of the CBC's content mix. This, however, is not a lament about the (mis)management of the CBC. It's a look at another national broadcaster's continued commitment to audio drama: namely, the BBC. And more specifically, since I'm writing this from the other side of the pond, I want to talk about the free BBC podcast Drama of the Week, which can be found in iTunes. 

Indelible Voices: José James, Laura Marling and Angelique Kidjo

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Billie Holiday, one of the most influential jazz vocalists in music. On April 7, Cassandra Wilson released her interpretations of the Holiday songbook on Coming Forth By Day. Last year Canadian vocalist Molly Johnson released the personal but slightly uneven tribute to Lady Day called, Because of Billie. And while José James isn't a household name I think his tribute to Holiday may actually nudge the male vocalists in the jazz world to cover the famous torch singer's most popular songs. Yesterday I Had The Blues (Blue Note) has all the makings of an arranged marriage between singer and song, but producer Don Was goes a step further by creating a real blues record that is thoughtful and well paced. James’s soulful renditions are backed by some of the most articulate and seasoned musicians today. Jason Moran, piano, John Patitucci, acoustic bass and Eric Harland, drums, is a trio that pushes and pulls the music while maintaining a solid foundation on which James can feel the lyrics. His first rate version of “Strange Fruit” uses multi-tracking in way that completely re-invents the song. What was once a call to the injustice of black Americans in 1939 when the song was first heard, now becomes a work song fresh from the cotton fields of the 1800s. For James, the music of Billie Holiday has deep roots going much further back in time.

Digging the Roots: Jayme Stone’s Lomax Project & Ken Whiteley’s Beulah Band

Alan Lomax (1915-2002) was one of the great field collectors of American (and international) music. Together with his father John he traveled the countryside in an old car, lugging a 300 lb. recorder to track down the authentic musicians, and capture their songs and performances. Woody Guthrie, Big Bill Broonzy, Muddy Waters, Leadbelly, and many more in the USA and across the sea Elizabeth Cronin, Hamish Hamilton, Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger are among the hundreds of names with whom he worked gathering songs and stories recordings of which now reside in the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress. His biography is entitled Alan Lomax: the Man Who Recorded the World and that’s no exaggeration.

Jayme Stone is a Canadian banjo player. He won a Juno Award in 2008 for his instrumental album The Utmost, and another Juno the following year for Africa to Appalachia (with Mansa Sissoko). His records dig into the history of the banjo, its roots in Africa, and the variety of sounds it makes. Now he combines his interest in the sound of the banjo, with a collection of songs from the Lomax bag to “renew this material [nineteen…songs…collected by…Lomax].” The result is startling. These songs were captured on the road with an acetate disc-cutter and cactus needle stylus. Wherever Lomax found a player he stopped, the sounds on his records were full of the surrounding lifestyle of his subjects. Wind, rain, ocean roar, kitchen noise, neighbourly chitchat and intricate finger-style guitar, rough-hewn vocals, tin whistles, whatever. These sounds influenced Stone to bring together some like-minded friends to update this homemade music. It all remains handmade and homemade, (in the studios of Canterbury Music, Toronto and eTown Hall in Boulder Colorado) by friends and collaborators like Tim O’Brien, Eli West and Julian Lage (guitar), Brittany Haas and Bruce Molsky (fiddle), Joe Phillips and Greg Garrison (bass) and a handful of other singers and instrumentalists including Stone’s own banjo.

For Your Ears Only – Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island (1979)

What album would you take with you if you were isolated on a desert island? It's always been a tempting question, or a popular party staple in which you get to display your cultural credentials without giving away too much about yourself. For critics, especially those always armed with their lists of favourites, it offers a casual forum to defend your tastes, test the wits of others, plus flex some muscle by bragging about rare records that nobody else could give a fuck about. In the literal sense, the idea of the desert island has always been a bit ridiculous. (What critic would ever want to be isolated on a desert island with no access to concerts, free music, or even an outlet to express his or her persuasive views?) After all, isn't music, even in the current age of solitary streaming, best enjoyed in a communal environment. Maybe now, as music is perpetually pigeonholed by genre, we don't even need a desert island because you can retreat to one anytime you like. But the desert island seems to negate the whole purpose of music. It denies music an audience, save for that one lone fan, to test its true value. Yet this question became the subject of a 1979 book called Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island, in which twenty prominent American rock critics were asked by fellow scribe Greil Marcus to contribute an essay in response to this hypothetical request.

Palace of Lies: HBO’s Going Clear

Scientology is markedly different from most other religions, not only in its practices but in how it’s perceived by the public. Has there ever been such a universally disparaged belief system? It’s easy for scoffing cynics to dismiss the teachings of L. Ron Hubbard as pure nonsense – and they’re unequivocally right to do so – but to level the same cynicism at the people who willingly choose to ally themselves with his hated institution is to fundamentally misunderstand, or at least disregard, what keeps them there. For the most part, these aren’t suckers and rubes being conned into participating in something against their will: these are intelligent, thoughtful skeptics, who will defend the benefits of Scientology even when faced with overwhelming evidence of its corruption and malpractice. And so the casual question of how anyone in their right minds could jibe with this stuff becomes a very important one: a question of how belief itself can be dangerous.

Documentarian Alex Gibney shoulders the burden of this question, and of the vicious wrath that his exposé would come to invite from the famously litigious Church. Gibney has established himself as a filmmaker unafraid to venture into the dark corners of society and, of course, tell a good story in the process. Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief, based on a book of (almost) the same name by Lawrence Wright, achieves both as a fearless examination of Scientology’s inner workings. Gibney conducts interviews with eight former members of the Church, including Hollywood screenwriter/producer Paul Haggis (a Scientologist for nearly three decades) and several former high-ranking members of the organization like Mark Rathbun (the Church’s second-in-command) and Mike Rinder (former head of the Church’s Office of Special Affairs), whose shockingly damning testimony has earned them accolades from film critics and vitriol from current Church members in equal measure. But what is it, I can hear you asking, that’s so shocking? What could they possibly reveal about this laughable dog-and-pony show that you wouldn’t already know – or, more troublingly, that the Church is desperate to deny? The Church of Scientology’s policy of loudly and ruthlessly denouncing its critics and apostates is well-known, so this may not seem like unusual behaviour. But Gibney’s interview subjects speak candidly about common practices of systemic verbal and physical abuse and behaviour control which borders on brainwashing. Their claims of unchecked corruption at the Church’s higher levels and of the attacks inflicted on its willing members are just cause for retaliation, which makes the effect of Going Clear incredibly potent. These people sat down to speak with Gibney knowing full well that doing so was dangerous to their personal and financial futures, because if leaving the Church wasn’t enough to provoke its wrath, defaming it so publicly certainly is.

Getting High: Robert Lepage’s Needles and Opium

Wellesley Robertson III and Marc Lebrèche in Robert Lepage's Needles and Opium. (Photo by Nicola-Frank Vachon)

Carl Fillion’s set for Needles and Opium, written and directed by the Québecois auteur Robert Lepage and produced by his company Ex Machina – which Boston’s ArtsEmerson series brought to the Cutler Majestic Theatre last week for a four-day run – is an open four-sided figure, like a section of a dollhouse, that hovers and spins above the stage. Most of the time it stands in for a room in the Hotel Louisiane or a recording studio, both in Paris, but depending on how Bruno Matte lights it or how the images designed by Lionel Arnould are projected onto it – and depending, of course, on how it turns – it can become an alleyway outside a nightclub, the interior of an airplane or the backdrop for a nocturnal walk through New York City. And often it emulates the disoriented state of one of its three characters, the French poet and filmmaker Jean Cocteau (Marc Labrèche), who took opium, the jazz trumpeter Miles Davis (Wellesley Robertson III), who took heroin, and the play’s protagonist, a Québecois actor named Robert (also Labrèche). Robert finds himself in Paris recording the voice-over for a documentary about Davis’s lover Juliette Gréco while trying to deal with a break-up the anguish of which has swallowed him alive, demolishing sleep and leaving him so vulnerable to sentimental triggers that an allusion to Davis and Gréco’s romance in the voice-over script makes him break down in the middle of the recording session. (He’s chosen to stay in Room 9 of the Hotel Louisiane because that’s where Davis and Gréco stayed when he first came to Paris in 1949 – which was also the year Cocteau wrote A Letter to Americans on the flight back to Paris from New York. The Cocteau sections of the piece are derived from that work and from Opium, the Diary of a Cure.) Needles and Opium suggests that Robert’s unmoored mental condition and his romantic addiction is like the drug habits of his heroes. But in Lepage’s brilliantly conceived text, their stories also intersect with Robert’s in terms of love and loss: Cocteau writes about the death, from typhoid fever, of his twenty-year-old protégé, the prodigious writer Raymond Radiguet (the author of the tender romantic novel Devil in the Flesh, published in 1923, the year Radiguet died).

Unexpected Joys: Honoré de Balzac’s The Vendetta

Very few book-lovers actually disdain the classics – your Victor Hugos, your Dostoyevskys, your Henry Jameses – but they can be difficult to pick up and really enjoy. This is not because of any fault in their writing, but because there is nothing quite so capable of sucking the joy out of a new book like being told over and over again what an ‘important’ book it is. Almost anything from the canon of classic fiction authors is going to be important – we all know that. But the joy of a new book is also the joy of uncovering something new and unexpected, however famous the author might be. For several years in my teens one of my favorite books was Anna Karenina, and I would ascribe the great love I had for that book to the fact that I picked it up almost entirely blind, without knowing the first thing about Tolstoy, Russian literature, or really anything at all. If I remember correctly I was about to go on a trip and could only take one book… so I decided to find a nice long one.

Honoré de Balzac is an author that I was never really attracted to – I’m guessing my disinclination can be partially explained by the fact that I was assigned selections from his magnum opus, The Human Comedy (La Comédie humaine), in my high-school French classes. (Books assigned in high school never get the love they deserve. My recent advice to a 15-year-old book lover about to be assigned To Kill a Mockingbird in English class was to read the book beforehand so she could actually enjoy it.) The Human Comedy is a massive compendium of almost all of Balzac’s works, broken down into sections and subsections, containing in the final analysis over 2,000 individual characters. As epic and challenging as such a work is, there is a problem with approaching Balzac through such a tome: it is just too damn much. In the flurry of narratives and characters (though they are almost uniformly wonderfully written and remarkable stories) the individual tales get lost. Such is the case with The Vendetta, written and first published in 1830 and included in Scenes from Private Life in 1833 before being final subsumed into its eponymous section of The Human Comedy. It’s re-release in 2008 by Herperus Press, with a new translation by Howard Curtis, gives us the opportunity to appreciate this novella on its own.

Taming the Beast: Cavalia's Odysseo

A lone horse saunters onto the sand-strewn stage under the 125-foot White Big Top at the edge of Toronto’s waterfront which opened to the public earlier this week. The animal is one of 72 steeds giving heft and direction to Odysseo, the second equine show created by Cirque du Soleil co-founder Normand Latourelle following the outstanding success of Cavalia in 2003. Like that first now internationally touring production, Odysseo uses horse power to drive its unique theatrical presentation into the stratosphere. Original music by composer Michel Cusson, a towering set design by Guillaume Lord, atmospheric lighting by Alain Lortie and large-scale video projection on a rear screen as big as three IMAX theatres combined, round out a theatrical production as transporting as it is awe-inspiring in its command and control of unbridled nature. This Quebec-made production, first unveiled in Toronto in 2012 and back in the city until May 10, gives new meaning to telling a tail.

Due Midwest: Battle Creek

Dean Winters and Josh Duhamel star in Battle Creek, on CBS.

Russ: "You can't be a cop and be this naïve. It's just not possible."
Milt: "I agree"
                               – Battle Creek (Series Pilot, "The Battle Creek Way")

I wasn't planning on writing on CBS's recent series Battle Creek, despite its notable pedigree – co-created by Breaking Bad's Vince Gilligan and House's David Shore. In the months leading up to its mid-season, March 1st premiere, mentions of Battle Creek in the press were afterthoughts in the build-up to the much more highly anticipated Vince Gilligan series, AMC's Breaking Bad spinoff/prequel, Better Call Saul. Indeed, the story behind the CBS series promised to be more interesting than the series itself: CBS dusted off a shelved spec script Gilligan wrote in 2002, years before Breaking Bad made Gilligan one of Hollywood's hottest commodities, and optioned Battle Creek into series just days before the acclaimed AMC hit aired its final episode. The story behind that story became more interesting still when months later, David Shore, creator of Fox's long-running cranky medical drama House, came on board to co-develop the new series with Gilligan. But as interesting as that story was, the premise of the new series remained altogether familiar, and even unremarkable: a mismatched buddy-cop comedy/drama set in a beleaguered police department. By the time the series premiered last month, I confess I'd completely forgotten to watch out for it, distracted by the evolving brilliance of Better Call Saul (whose 10-episode first season came to a triumphant close a few days ago). It was almost three weeks later that I finally watched the premiere episode, following an offhand recommendation from a friend. True to its lineage, Battle Creek turned out to be much more than the sum of its parts. It boasts a charismatic ensemble of actors, sharp and often hilarious writing, and a unique combination of unabashed sentimentality undercut with bitingly sharp edge. I quickly consumed all previously-aired episodes and the series soon joined a very short list of television shows I watch almost as soon as it airs. Unfortunately though, the series has been suffering from consistently weak ratings from the beginning and seems destined to join another, less vaunted, list of mine: television shows cancelled before their time.

The Lower Depths: American Crime

Caitlin Gerard and Elvis Nolasco in American Crime, on ABC.

The current TV schedule is clogged with shows that use geopolitical and corporate paranoia, apocalyptic fantasies, and the never-ending battle between those guided by faith and ideology and the members of the reality-based community as the grist for sprawling murder-mystery conspiracy thrillers, such as American Odyssey, Dig, Fortitude, and whatever is taking up space right this minute on SyFy. American Crime, which was created by 12 Years a Slave screenwriter John Ridley for ABC, is vastly different. It’s set in a tawdry, exhausted, post-crash America, with a cast of characters who are in the process of being ground up not just by The System, but by life itself. In the unglamorous setting of Modesto, California, a young man named Matt Skokie has been murdered; his wife, Gwen (Kira Pozehi), has been badly beaten and spends the first few episodes in a coma. In a TV landscape where the heroes are searching for answers or stumbling across clues that unlock mysteries that will dictate the fate of whole civilizations, American Crime is full of people who are doing their damnedest to keep the truth hidden, even from themselves.

Neglected Gem #74: Daughter of the Nile (1987)

I’m not too surprised that Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s moving and memorable drama Daughter of the Nile (1987) isn’t highly regarded by the cinematic cognoscenti who so admire his work. Compared to his best known and praised films – Dust in the Wind (1986), City of Sadness (1989), The Puppetmaster (1993) – Daughter of the Nile is a quick ride of a movie, mostly devoid of Hou’s static long shots, (overly) leisurely pacing and slow buildup to mood and emotion. (Significantly, film programmer James Quandt, who wrote the film notes for the recent Hou retrospective at Toronto's TIFF Cinematheque at Bell Lightbox (formerly Cinematheque Ontario), never mentions the film; it is one of the few Hou titles not referenced in his lengthy piece.) In short, Daughter of the Nile is a film that those filmgoers who like their movies to actually move will be happy with. Not incidentally, it’s also a rich, evocative tale that lingers in the memory long after the credits have rolled.

Risk and Reward: Dark Souls & The Balance of Difficulty in Gaming

A scene from From Software's Dark Souls II.

“Hand-holding” is the anathema of modern game design, viewed by many as the ball to which creative, risk-taking design is chained. It’s a necessary evil: developers will want their game to reach as many players as possible, and in capturing a market outside of those who already play games frequently, they must introduce their complex mechanics to a layperson who may never have held a controller in their hands before. Guiding them along with clunky, immersion-breaking tutorials or pop-up hints – holding their hand, as it were – may be helpful for them, but it’s also patronizing and frustrating for those who can pick up a game’s mechanics quickly, or those who enjoy the process of sussing it out. Think of it this way: the first screen of Super Mario Bros never included a prompt that said “Press A to jump”, did it?

And because games are such a massively lucrative global market, this design philosophy has become ubiquitous, permeating almost every new studio title that is released. It’s an alarming trend, indicative of an increasingly profit-fueled industry that is content to deliver lazily-designed games so long as they move enough copies (the parallels with Hollywood are, of course, too obvious to explore). Nintendo’s recent The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, for example, was rightfully slammed by industry critics for its blandly repetitive and lackluster design, and its reliance on hand-holding to teach its simple mechanics – something that was particularly upsetting considering the ingenious design of early Zelda titles, which encouraged exploration and risk-taking. Even if their hand-holding isn’t as widespread as that, most games will at least include a section at the outset that explicitly tells the player how to play the game, usually through a box of text that most people won’t even bother to read. No matter how right these developers are about how stupid their demographics might be, nobody likes being told what to do. They just want to play the game.

Lerner and Loewe and a Touch of Cy Coleman

Vanessa Hudgens stars in Gigi, at Broadway's Neil Simon Theatre. (Photo by Joan Marcus)

Gigi, which is now being revived on Broadway, has a long lineage. Initially it was a story by Colette, written in 1945 and set around the turn of the century, about a teenage Parisienne (the title character) who comes from a family of highly respected courtesans and is being brought up by her grandmother, Mamita, and trained by her great-aunt Alicia to follow in their footsteps. (Her mother took another path: she’s a singer in the ensemble of the Opéra Comique and barely present in her daughter’s life.) When Gaston Lachaille, a millionaire playboy who, through his friendship with Mamita, has been a sort of big brother to Gigi all her life, realizes that she’s grown into a beautiful and desirable young lady, Alicia and Mamita make complicated legal arrangements with him to take over her care. But Gigi has a mind of her own and, though she has fallen in love with Gaston, she resists the life of a rich man’s mistress. The story is a delightful comedy about the tension between social and sexual mores on the one hand and emotional authenticity on the other, and about impulses that flout convention – and upset the apple cart everyone has been riding without thinking much about it.

Notes from the Other Side: The Evil Hours and The Invisible Front

US soldiers participating in the Yoga For Veterans program. (Photo: Give Back Yoga Foundation)

“No other people in history has sent as many (soldiers) as far away with as little sacrifice demanded of the average citizen as we do. No other people in history is as disconnected from the brutality of war as the United States today. Were the truth of war to become apparent to Americans, we wouldn’t continue to train, equip, and deploy warriors the way we do. Nor would we ask them when they came home if they killed anyone.”
—David F. Morris, The Evil Hours.
 
“Must you carry the bloody horror of combat in your heart forever?”
—Homer, The Odyssey, cited by Yochi Dreazen in The Invisible Front.

 
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) was officially recognized in 1980 by the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III) in large part because of a decade-long campaign by Vietnam veterans to secure wider knowledge and research into the affliction they suffered. But as David J. Morris asserts in his compelling The Evil Hours: A Biography of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015), psychological trauma has always been “part of the human condition,” but badly misunderstood. Part memoir, cultural history, investigation into the scientific research and critique of modern treatment, Morris interweaves the wisdom of psychoanalysts, poets, novelists and historians, with his own struggle with post-traumatic stress. Recognizing that most PTSD sufferers are not veterans, Morris supplements his “biography” with the stories and insights of non-military victims of PTSD, including natural disaster survivors, mountain climbers, and raped women, thereby imbuing his study with a wider human dimension.

Brother's Keeper: Netflix's Bloodline

Ben Mendelsohn and Kyle Chandler in Bloodline.

A number of years back, I had people consistently recommending that I watch Damages (2007-2012), a television procedural thriller about a ruthless high-powered attorney (Glenn Close) and her young protégée (Rose Byrne) that she was both tutoring and perhaps trying to murder. After all that praise, I couldn't wait to catch up with it. When I finally did, though, I couldn't believe how ridiculous it was. With barely a shred of dramatic believability, Damages kept the audience in total suspense by withholding plot points, using flashforwards and flashbacks while offering up one outrageous red herring after another. Damages wasn't neo-noir. It was inadvertent high camp. Watching Glenn Close grandstanding in the manner of Joan Crawford in her gargoyle roles, and glaring into the camera in an endless series of frozen close-ups, became a hilarious parody of malevolent evil. Created by brothers Glenn and Todd A. Kessler, Damages streamlined a dramatic formula that had already been successful for a number of other hit shows that liked to define themselves as 'dark' by employing what a friend of mine cleverly calls "cozy cynicism."

Comeback: Al Pacino in The Humbling

Philip Roth’s 2009 novel The Humbling, one of his last before he gave up writing for good, didn’t get the attention it deserved, and Barry Levinson’s marvelous movie version effectively didn’t even get released. It played New York and Los Angeles briefly at the end of the year for awards consideration, then went straight to iTunes. The story concerns Simon Axler (Al Pacino, giving his finest film performance since the nineties), a sixty-seven-year-old actor who suddenly discovers he can no longer summon up his acting gift at will, and under the stress of that recognition collapses on stage of a heart attack. Eventually he tries to kill himself with a shotgun – inspired by Hemingway – but he bungles it and winds up in a psychiatric hospital. When he gets out, he retires to his house in upstate New York, more or less fazing himself out of life (and certainly out of his career). But then he becomes romantically involved with Pegeen Mike Stapleford, (Greta Gerwig), a college theatre professor in her thirties who has been living with a woman (the dean of the college, played by Kyra Sedgwick) and hasn’t slept with a man, she tells Simon, in sixteen years. She also happens to be the daughter of two of his best friends (Dianne Wiest and Dan Hedaya) – actors, too, which explains why she was named for the heroine of John Millington Synge’s great Irish comedy The Playboy of the Western World.

No Fate: David Michôd’s The Rover

Guy Pearce and Robert Pattinson in The Rover.

“You do a thing like I did, it should really mean something. But it just doesn’t matter anymore.” 

The hostility of the Australian outback lends itself nicely to tales of the apocalypse, and its barren wastes look wonderfully alien and foreboding on film. There’s a sense that the wilderness is encroaching on civilization, slowly and inexorably reclaiming what we fragile beings have taken. It's no wonder that everyone’s gone insane in the world of Mad Max (1979). If all that’s left to live for is water and fuel – or, excuse me, petrol – then society’s laws aren’t worth a damn. So has it always been for these stories, and so it is for The Rover, a film with less than half the fun – but more than twice the heat – of its pulpier kin.

The Trouble With Paradise: Randy Newman's "Something to Sing About" and "I Love L.A."

Before singer/songwriter Randy Newman began work on his 1983 album, Trouble in Paradise, he was spending more time sitting around watching television and lounging by the pool than he was writing songs. "The gardener had contempt for me," he told Arthur Lubow of People Magazine. "He had to water around me." His inactivity was also having a strange effect on his family. "What made me really bad in those days is the kids would go off to school in the morning and I'd say, 'So long kids, you know, work hard and stuff,' and I just didn't do anything. [My son] Eric didn't know what I did. He thought I got paid for my tan." To solve his own trouble in paradise, Newman rented a room in Los Angeles with a piano and no telephone to disturb him.

It Follows: Never Go Anywhere With Only One Exit

Maika Monroe in David Robert Mitchell's It Follows.

It Follows is based on a very simple premise: make an unlucky choice of whom to sleep with, and it will begin to follow you. It might look like someone you know or love, or it might be a stranger. It comes directly at you, at a walking pace. Only you can see it. Wherever you are, it’s somewhere out there, walking straight towards you, and it never, ever stops. With gorgeous cinematography, a brilliantly intense score, and masterful direction from David Robert Mitchell, It Follows is a profane homage to ‘80s horror fare – a grotesquely vulgar love letter written in beautiful calligraphy.

Secrets and Lies: Ghosts, A View from the Bridge, and Cymbeline

Jack Lowden and Lesley Manville in Ghosts, at Trafalgar Studios. (Photo by Hugo Glendinning)

Richard Eyre’s production of Ibsen’s Ghosts, starring Lesley Manville, which opened at London’s Almeida Theatre in 2013 and then moved to Trafalgar Studios, is booked into the Brooklyn Academy of Music for a month beginning Easter weekend. Aside from Manville, I’m not sure which members of the original cast will be appearing in Brooklyn; it is to be hoped that all of them will. I’ve seen a digital transcription of the production as it appeared at Trafalgar Studios, and it’s gripping. Eyre, who also adapted the text, orchestrates the play at a breathless pace, bringing it in at just over an hour and a half without intermissions. (There are three acts, and other versions of it I’ve seen have tended to run about an hour longer.) The urgency of the show dominates the experience, as well as the intimacy of the house, which you can feel even when you see it in HD; I’m not sure how well the second will translate in the BAM space, but certainly it’s well worth seeing in any environment.

Where Dreams Don't Go to Die: John Lennon's "God" and The Beatles' Love

Eight months after The Beatles broke up in 1970, John Lennon released Plastic Ono Band, named after his new group. But rather than being a utopian vision from a collection of musicians shaping the future of a Seventies counter-culture, it was instead a solo autobiographical record which began as a stark recollection of Lennon's traumatic childhood. One listen to the album’s intensely austere songs made it clear that the world of possibility Lennon once heard in Elvis Presley's "Heartbreak Hotel," or the inclusive spirit he once proclaimed with The Beatles on "There’s a Place," he was now refuting. Lennon stripped the songs of their quixotic power for the purpose of discovering the naked truth about himself. "Mother" opened the album with the peeling of funeral bells, as Lennon ranted angrily at the father who abandoned him as a boy and at the mother who was killed soon after. "I Found Out" expressed his angry contempt for religion and the pop culture The Beatles helped inspire. "Working Class Hero," a mournful old-fashioned folk ballad, despaired of an authoritarian society that stripped its citizens of their souls. Critic Albert Goldman, in his controversial biography The Lives of John Lennon, compared the theme of Plastic Ono Band to The Who’s rock opera Tommy. "For what is the famous rock opera about?" Goldman asks. "A boy traumatized by his mother’s cheating loses all his senses but the most primitive, the sense of touch. He employs this mute yet passionate faculty to become a pinball hero—a symbol of rock ’n’ roll. Acclaimed by the world’s youth as a pop star, he continues to evolve, becoming first a guru and ultimately a saint. There is the legend of John Lennon to a T." On Plastic Ono Band, Lennon set out to reveal himself as a new man who was reborn.

Representation: Disabled Theater at Harbourfront's World Stage

At the beginning of Disabled Theater, which is playing at Toronto’s Fleck Dance Theatre as part of Harbourfront’s World Stage, the 11 members of the cast enter one at a time and stand centre-stage, in silence, for one minute. Then they exit and the next cast member comes out. That’s well over 11-plus minutes of silence, which can be pretty challenging for an audience, and also for the cast members. But Jérôme Bel, a Swiss director and choreographer living in Paris, is not afraid of a challenge. (Even the show’s title is somewhat controversial, as became clear in a pre-show chat session, in which one person drew applause when she objected to the term “disabled” as inherently divisive and demeaning.) In this work, a co-production with Zurich-based Theatre HORA, is designed to present people who “are not represented in the public sphere,” Bel says in the program notes. “If one is not represented, one doesn’t exist. And representation is my job.”

iZombie: She Is What She Eats

Rose McIver in iZombie, on The CW.

iZombie is a blast. When I first heard of The CW show's Millennial-cum-zombie plotline, I immediately developed some clear, but entirely mistaken, assumptions about the series. But two increasingly entertaining episodes later, iZombie has already wormed its way into my heart (as well as into my thankfully still skull-ensconced brain.) At its core, iZombie is a light crime procedural with a fantasy conceit – a fresher-faced cousin to ABC's Forever, which also follows the adventures of a medical examiner with a secretly personal connection to death who sometimes partners with a homicide detective – and with its clever writing, charming cast, and a strong female lead with genuinely interesting relationships, iZombie has demonstrated more potential than many longer-running series.

Scenes From a Marriage: Kaeja 25

Kaeja d'Dance (photo by Aria Evans)

Wedding dresses sparkle and shimmer in Taxi!, a new work by Karen Kaeja whose world premiere took place at Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre Theatre on Tuesday night. Significantly, at least one of the gowns was worn by the choreographer’s husband, Allen Kaeja, who earlier in the evening unveiled a world premiere of his own, .0 (point zero), a wonderfully unpredictable work about unpredictability. The wedding dress prop instantly telegraphed that Taxi!, at least in part, is about marriage, an arena of human experience which similarly could be characterized as being fraught with uncertainty. There are highs, lows, and never ending piles laundry. Taxi! could be described a mirror of a life lived. But it is also a reflection of mating rituals in complicated times. Its spunk, subtle poignancy and unmistakeable sense of humour make it a keeper.

Carrion Discomfort: Buzzard

Joshua Burge stars in Joel Potrykus’ Buzzard.

As Marty, the title character of Joel Potrykus’ Buzzard, Joshua Burge has the bantamweight build and long, skinny face of a classic smartass, urban American type—a synthesis of James Woods, Richard Belzer, and Steve Buscemi for the post-slacker era. His eyes are alternatively heavy-lidded and wreathed in boredom or as huge and searching as a baby’s; his sarcastic asides and random outbursts of disgust (“Taco Bell sucks!”) are delivered in a husky, nasal voice that seems to weigh more than his body. Marty has a temp job in the mortgage department of a bank, but he spends all his time at work running petty scams, such as ordering expensive office supplies that he then steals so he can lope over to the supplier’s nearest branch store and pocket the case returns. In the movie’s long, transfixing first scene, the camera holds him in close-up as he dully instructs a bank clerk to cancel out his checking account, then announces that he wants to open a new account, so he can collect the fifty dollars the bank is offering as a come-on for virgin customers.

Everything in Its Proper Place: Patrick Rothfuss’s The Slow Regard of Silent Things

“Some places had names. Some places changed, or they were shy about their names. Some places had no names at all, and that was always sad. It was one thing to be private. But to have no name at all? How horrible. How lonely.”

It was dangerous for Patrick Rothfuss, author of The Kingkiller Chronicles novels, to release a side project in the midst of a highly-anticipated release schedule – something that fellow fantasy author George R.R. Martin knows all too well, being constantly hounded by fans to quit lollygagging and finish his own long-awaited series. The risk these authors run is to alienate loyal fans left unfulfilled by an incomplete narrative – a “what’s this new book, and why isn’t it the sequel we’ve been waiting for” situation – which is a valid concern, but one that I think devalues the creative spark which led to the work that fans crave in the first place. Authors, like any artist, are led by the collar by their own inspiration, and must follow where it leads. It’s not hard to imagine that after inhabiting the same world, the same characters, and the same story for years on end that their brains would cry out for creative release in any other direction.

The vocal minority, unfortunately, directs the ebb and flow of narrative trends (just look at popular Hollywood films for proof). The problem is that the vocal minority is just that – the smaller group – and doesn’t really represent what many people want. Formulaic “excitement” has a short shelf-life, and risky, unconventional fare can be surprisingly successful based on the needs of this silent majority. It was uncommonly brave for Rothfuss to take the risk he took and devote a novella to a side character of little significance to the Kingkiller series’ plot. It speaks to his love for her, and his willingness to go wherever his creative instinct takes him. Auri had things to tell him, and he had the presence of mind to listen. That he had to interrupt his blockbuster bestseller series in order to transcribe her tale speaks to his strength as an artist, and his remorse at keeping the vocal minority waiting (with apologies to his fans spilling out both online and in the liner notes) speaks to his fine character as a person. The Slow Regard of Silent Things, then, is a gift – not asked for, but gratefully accepted both for its own beauty and for the peace of mind it doubtless brought its creator.

On the 20th Century: Spiffy Ride

On the 20th Century, the 1978 musical currently being favored with a gold-standard revival by the Roundabout Theatre Company, is adapted from one of the great Hollywood screwball farces of the thirties, Howard Hawks’ Twentieth Century. Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur based their screenplay on their 1932 Broadway show, which had begun life as an unproduced play by Charles Bruce Milholland called Napoleon of Broadway, but the Hawks movie is better than its source. (The Roundabout produced the straight version in 2004, with Alec Baldwin and Anne Heche.) The 1934 film Twentieth Century is often labeled a romantic comedy, but really it’s a hard-boiled comedy like Hecht and MacArthur’s The Front Page and Kaufman and Hart’s Once in a Lifetime; the only love affair the two protagonists, down-on-his-luck showman Oscar Jaffe and his ex-wife and one-time star Lily Garland, now a movie celebrity, conduct is with themselves. Twentieth Century is perhaps the most extravagant and hilarious display of narcissism in the history of movie comedy, and the incandescent spectacle of John Barrymore and Carole Lombard as the dueling egotists – who suggest utterly heartless counterparts to the hero and heroine of Kiss Me, Kate – hasn’t dimmed in the intervening eight decades. The picture is called Twentieth Century because almost all of it takes place on the gleaming art deco train, a landmark of its era, that carries Oscar and Lily from Chicago to New York. Oscar and his hard-drinking sycophants, his press agent (Roscoe Karns) and business manager (Walter Connolly), have thirty-six hours in which to save their wobbly producing enterprise, battered by one expensive, misbegotten flop after another, by convincing Lily, who walked out on Oscar long ago, to sign on for a new show with him.

The musical hasn’t been produced on Broadway since its original 1978 run, when it was directed by Harold Prince and starred John Cullum and Madeline Kahn. (Kahn’s performance on the cast album is remarkable, but she dropped out after only nine weeks and was replaced by Judy Kaye.) The show ran for a year and a half and toured the country, yet despite its success and despite the first-rate book and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green (among their best work) and the robust, tuneful and varied Cy Coleman music (his best score except for City of Angels), it’s never enjoyed the reputation it deserves. The Roundabout production, directed by Scott Ellis and choreographed by Warren Carlyle, showcases what’s so special about the musical. The David Rockwell set – a beauty – and Donald Holder’s glistening lighting design even manage to replicate, more or less, the complicated stagecraft of the 1978 version (with its much touted Robin Wagner setting), which includes not only a series of cross-sections of the train but, at a climactic moment (the mid-second-act ensemble number “She’s a Nut”), turns it around so that it travels toward the audience with the “nut,” a devout Baptist named Letitia Peabody Primrose who’s been masquerading as a millionaire philanthropist, implausibly but uproariously strapped to its front.

On the Altar of Perfection: Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Satan in Goray

Isaac Bashevis Singer, in New York City in 1975. (Photo credit: Bruce Davidson)

Messiahs are seductive characters, for at least one very obvious reason: the Messiah, by definition, perfects the world. Different religious traditions have different understandings of what (or who) the Messiah is, different estimations of the amount of blood and gore that will precede the Messiah, and different illustrations of what the world that the Messiah ushers in will look like. But they agree that the coming of the Messiah will in some way make the world the way it should be, and could be if it was not for the imperfections of human beings and human leadership. If we are being honest, this Messianism is not limited to religious traditions – the notion that there is one person, one idea, or one system that, instituted perfectly, can obliterate the injustices in the world is also found in apparently secular political theories like capitalism, Marxism, and fascism. In all its forms, Messianism encourages a single-minded devotion to a particular future, encouraging those entranced by that vision to devote all their energy to its fulfillment. In Satan in Goray (1955), Isaac Bashevis Singer illustrates the ways that Messianism can inspire and destroy a community. Few novels so well demonstrate the destructive power of inspiration itself, while giving just due to the brilliance and beauty that makes such inspiration powerfully seductive. 

Get On Up: Shot in the Arm

Get On Up, the James Brown biopic, is full of life, most of it supplied by Chadwick Boseman, the remarkable actor and dancer who gets down Brown’s startlingly kinetic presence. Boseman didn’t make much of an impression as Jackie Robinson in the bland 42, but he’s mesmerizing as the charismatic and tyrannical Godfather of Soul. Brown’s sense of himself as a one-man band whose fellow musicians – and wives - he sees as no more than necessary echoes of his presence alienates everyone around him, even, eventually, his best friend and loyal colleague Bobby Byrd (Nelsan Ellis), who sticks around longer than anyone else. But his musical inventiveness is as outsize as his personality. The musical numbers, directed with a great deal of skill by Tate Taylor, do exactly what they need to do: they replicate the excitement of seeing James Brown.

The Cost of Sacrificing Liberty for Security: Guantánamo Diary

A Guantanamo detainee being led by a guard in March 2002. (Photo: Andres Leighton)

“Those who surrender freedom for security will not have, nor do they deserve, either one.”

– Benjamin Franklin cited by Mohamedou Ould Slahi in Guantánamo Diary.

On November 20, 2001, Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a 30-year-old electrical engineer and telecommunications specialist from Mauritania, received a visit at his house from two Mauritanian officers summoning him to answer questions at the country’s intelligence ministry. “Take your car,” one of the men told him, as Slahi stood in front of his house with his mother and his aunt. “We hope you can come back today.” He has not returned. After spending a week in a cell in his native country, the authorities found no evidence against him. However, at the behest of the Americans, Slahi was rendered to a black site in Jordan for six months, and then flown blindfolded, shackled and diapered to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan for two weeks; from there he was transported to Guantánamo in Cuba where he remains incommunicable to this day. Three years into his detention, Slahi wrote in basic idiomatic English he obviously picked up from his guards – his fourth language and acquired in Guantanamo – a manuscript which was immediately classified. It took years of litigation and negotiation by Slahi’s pro bono lawyers to force the military to declassify a redacted version, heavily black-barred (that sometimes goes on for pages, some of it to conceal the identity of his interrogators, guards and fellow detainees).

Blame it on Hamilton: A Celebration

It’s Tuesday after Juno week in Hamilton. The big poster designed by Tom Wilson still overlooks James Street. Swag bags are emptied though, and the blue boxes are filled with was passed for swag in some of those bags. Booklets, ads, tickets are blowing down the road. All that remains are the memories. Memories of that week when all the clubs were full of people, and music was played everywhere. Even Limeridge Mall had an event. A music event! Not a sale. The libraries had an event, believe it or not. Hamilton Public hosted a concert in the round on their 4th floor. And McMaster Libraries did a demonstration of electronic instruments for attendees! Give your head a shake. I was there, participating, demoing the Makey Makey and my colleagues showed off the Atari Punk Console, the Little Bits Synth Kit and a theremin that was also built from a kit. The theremin was the big draw. After people bought their beer at the bar they were pulled over by the sounds of alien invasion coming from the weird black box. They then stayed to twist the knobs of the punk console or bang away on the banana piano. Yep, it’s a piano with bananas for keys (or forks, or tofu, or even raw meat). Fun wow!

Storybook Movies: Paddington and Cinderella

The English filmmaker Paul King, who wrote and directed Paddington, seems to have come out of nowhere. (His résumé includes only one previous feature – something called Bunny and the Bull, which never opened in the U.S. – and a handful of obscure TV credits.) And he comes fully formed, with style, sensibility and a level of inventiveness and filmmaking expertise that ought to make other novice directors green with envy – or inspire them to go and do likewise. Paddington, based on the Michael Bond children’s books about a Peruvian bear who’s adopted by a family of Londoners (King and Hamish McColl worked up the screen story), is so accomplished visually, so funny and enchanting, that watching it makes you feel a bit delirious.

Neglected Gem #73: Speed Racer (2008)

Emile Hirsch in Andy and Lana Wachowski's Speed Racer.

Is there such a thing as a “delayed-onset masterpiece”? Is it possible for a film to be purposefully designed to achieve “cult favourite” status some five-to-ten years after its initial release? It hardly seems like such a thing could (or would) be done intentionally, but it’s hard to ascribe any other methodology to the directing work of Andy and Lana Wachowski. Maybe they’re just continually a few years ahead of the curve?

I’ve described their films as flawed but inspired, and the more I consider their body of work, the less I find that these flaws detract from the experience – whether it’s the Orwellian dystopia of V for Vendetta or the neo-noir cyberthrills of The Matrix and its sequels, the only real issue I have that remains constant is overindulgence. The Wachowskis seem to allow their creativity to get the best of them, and after intoxicating themselves on a subject, attempt to cram all the ideas that emerge into the final product, for good or ill. Perhaps it’s their ability to operate as a duo that stops this from completely crippling each film – keeping each other in check is doubtless one of their many talents – but it does result in longer runtimes and more complicated plots than are necessary to communicate the most exciting and valuable parts of their projects. In every other sense, the Wachowskis have cemented themselves as ingenious and artful filmmakers, providing a unique vision on par with Guillermo del Toro or even Steven Spielberg. With the Wachowskis, you never know what you’re going to get, but you can be sure it’ll be unlike anything else on the marquee.

Playwrights With and Without Agendas: Reverberation and The Colored Museum

Luke Macfarlane and Aya Cash in Reverberation. (Photo: T. Charles Erickson)

Reverberation, which just closed at Hartford Stage in Hartford, Connecticut, is the first play I’ve seen by Matthew Lopez, whose The Whipping Man was well received in New York in 2011. Reverberation is a brand-new play about the debilitating consequences of grief and the interplay of loss and sexuality. Its thirty-five-year-old protagonist, Jonathan (the Canadian-born actor Luke MacFarlane, best known for the TV series Brothers and Sisters), has lived alone in Queens since his partner of fifteen years, Gabriel, was beaten to death in front of his eyes. His grief has paralyzed him.  He works out of his apartment, rarely venturing outside; he doesn’t keep up with friends; he turns down his parents’ offer to visit them in Oregon for Thanksgiving or Christmas. His only ongoing contact with the world is in the form of one-night stands with men he meets on Grindr, and he prefers them to visit him and gets rid of them when the sex is over. That’s what happens in the opening scene, where he has an intense sexual encounter with Wes (Carl Lundstedt), who’s twenty-three and so knocked out by the experience that he’s eager to see Jonathan again. “You fuck like you invented it,” he tells Jonathan, and a month or two later, when he gets up the nerve to come around to see him again, he’s both more graphic and more lyrical about what made Jonathan a more powerful, and also more poignant, lover than anyone else he’s known. By then we’ve figured out that Jonathan’s sexual performance is his way of holding onto his life with Gabe – of channeling those emotions once more – but he can only parcel them out in discrete, limited interactions. 

Critic's Notes and Frames Vol. XIII

In Steven Knight's Locke (2014), which recently came out on DVD and Blu-ray, Tom Hardy plays Ivan Locke, a construction foreman who, the day before he must supervise a large concrete pour in Birmingham, learns that a colleague with whom he had a one-night stand with seven months earlier has gone into premature labour with their baby. Despite his huge job responsibilities and his wife and children still awaiting him at home, he decides to drive to London to be with the woman carrying his child.

From the moment Hardy makes a crucial turn in his car onto a highway of his choice, he never veers from its destination despite the demands over the phone from all the important people in his life. For just over 80 minutes, as we stay focused almost entirely in close-up on Hardy's face, he remains steadfast and glued to the road, as if it were a lifeline pulling him towards a liberation that comes at a price. While he fields a never ending series of desperate phone calls, and hears voices that compete with the ones already in his head, Hardy sustains a tightrope act not easy for an actor to pull off in such a minimal dramatic concept. Yet he finds a way to enlarge the confined space of the vehicle by drawing us into his battle with larger worlds outside that car: one world which has defined him, one that has harnessed him, and another that holds a mystery for which there is still no easy conclusion.

Talking Out of Turn #36: bp Nichol (1988)

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show, On the Arts, at CJRT-FM in Toronto. With the late Tom Fulton, who was the show's prime host and producer, we did a half-hour interview program where we talked to artists from all fields. In 1994, after I had gone to CBC, I had an idea to collate an interview anthology from some of the more interesting discussions I'd had with guests from that period. Since they all took place during the Eighties, I thought I could edit the collection into an oral history of the decade from some of its most outspoken participants. The book was assembled from interview transcripts and organized thematically. I titled it Talking Out of Turn: Revisiting the '80s. With financial help from the Canada Council, I shaped the individual pieces into a number of pertinent themes relevant to the decade. By the time I began to contact publishers, though, the industry was radically starting to change. At one time, editorial controlled marketing. Now the reverse was taking place. Acquisition editors, who once responded to an interesting idea for a book, were soon following marketing divisions who were only concerned with whether the person doing it was hot enough to sell it.

For a few years, I flogged the proposal to various publishers but many were worried that there were too many people from different backgrounds (e.g. Margaret Atwood sitting alongside Oliver Stone) which made it look as if they hadn't read the outline. Another publisher curiously chose to reject it because, to them, it appeared to be simply a book about me promoting my interviews (as if I was trying to be a low-rent Larry King) rather than seeing it as a commentary on the decade through the eyes of the guests. All told, the book soon faded away and I turned to other projects. However, when uncovering the original proposal and sample interviews a number of years ago, I felt that maybe some of them could find a new life on Critics at Large.

Tom Fulton, producer of On the Arts. 

In a decade, that many considered to be drowning in narcissism, I decided to include interviews in Talking Out of Turn with artists who posed alternatives in the Eighties to self-centredness when it came to examining the self. That included Wallace Shawn talking about the process of making (with Louis Malle and Andre Gregory) the highly experimental fictional documentary My Dinner with Andre (1981), D.M. Thomas inserting into fiction the theories of Freud and the horror of the Holocaust in The White Hotel (1981), and William Diehl, a pulp fiction writer (Chameleon, Sharky's Machine), who was also a pacifist who wrote violent dramas to purge himself of the turbulence he had within him. The chapter on biography also included the Canadian poet bp Nichol whose life work in both narrative and experimental poetry was almost always autobiographical in nature. Whether it was his epic poem, The Martyrology or the more compact Selected Organs (Black Moss Press, 1988), Nichol never lost touch with his personal attachment to language which became a living organism in his work. One might call Selected Organs a body of work and a work of the body. It was also only a portion of a larger volume (planned over eight years) to be titled Organ Music, which featured autobiographical chapters focusing on the organs: The Vagina, The Mouth, The Chest, The Tonsils, The Hips, etc.