Neglected Gem #78: Conrack (1974)

Most movies about the process of education tend to be fatuous, but there have been some notable exceptions. The subject has produced three masterpieces – Padre Padrone, Aparajito and The Wild Child – as well as The Miracle Worker, The Corn Is Green, the documentaries High School and To Be and to Have, and in recent years The History Boys, The Class and Monsieur Lazhar. Martin Ritt made two wonderful ones back to back: Sounder (1972), adapted from William H. Armstrong’s children’s book set among black sharecroppers in Depression-era Louisiana, and Conrack, which came out two years later. Sounder was acclaimed and Oscar-nominated, but not many people paid attention to Conrack, perhaps because Ritt and the screenwriters, his frequent collaborators Harriet Frank and Irving Ravetch Jr., took such a leisurely approach to the material, Pat Conroy’s vivifying memoir The Water Is Wide, about the months he spent teaching elementary-school black kids on an island off the coast of South Carolina. The picture feels almost meandering, pleasantly so, because it borrows its rhythms from the pace of island life and from Conroy’s unruffled, experimental methodology when he discovers that the boys and girls in his class, criminally neglected by previous teachers who presumably substituted busy work for actual instruction, know virtually nothing. When he asks someone to identify the name of their country, not one hand goes up. The movie’s title comes from the name the students give Conroy because it’s the closest they can come to pronouncing his real one – an error that he bows to philosophically, gets used to, and finally is charmed by (as are we).

Crossing Moral Boundaries in the Historical Mysteries of Joseph Kanon

Novelist Joseph Kanon. (Photo by Axel Dupeux)

Joseph Kanon, the former publishing executive, has demonstrated two great strengths in his novels: his capacity for providing a textured atmospheric backdrop to his murder mysteries populated by both historical and fictional characters, and his ability to convey to readers the pressing moral questions of the moment. In his seven novels, the setting for at least part of each novel has been between 1945 and 1950 where the unresolved issues of World War II are played out.

Vehicles: I’ll See You in My Dreams and Bessie

Blythe Danner in I'll See You in My Dreams.

If Blythe Danner had come into movies in the thirties instead of the seventies, she would have been a star. In Lovin’ Molly (1974) and Hearts of the West (1975), she was as elegant as Claudette Colbert, as funny-sexy as Jean Arthur (and with something like Arthur’s cracked alto) , as quicksilver as Margaret Sullavan, and a transcendent beauty. And, as her performances on the PBS series Theater in America, as Nina in The Sea Gull and Alma in Tennessee Williams’ The Eccentricities of a Nightingale, demonstrated, she had the talent of a young Katharine Hepburn. But though she’s had – and continues to have – a triumphant career as a stage actress, and though, early on, she played leading roles in some TV movies (she was remarkable in A Love Affair: The Eleanor and Lou Gehrig Story and especially Too Far to Go, based on some John Updike stories), this summer’s I’ll See You in My Dreams is her first starring role since Lovin’ Molly. She’s shown up in a lot of films in between, sometimes giving performances of glowing intelligence in bum roles (Brighton Beach Memoirs), sometimes lighting up a whole picture in a supporting part (The Last Kiss, where she played the role of the middle-aged woman terrified of growing older that Stefania Sandrelli had created in the Italian version). But only now, at seventy-two – and still a stunning camera subject – has she landed a film role that really seems to acknowledge what she is: America’s greatest living actress.

Last Days at All Saints': Nurse Jackie

Edie Falco and Tony Shalhoub, in the final season of Showtime's Nurse Jackie.

Tony Shalhoub is a great actor, with an easy mastery of his craft and an ability to instantly connect with an audience that enables him to perform miracles. As the star of the detective series Monk, Shalhoub played a broken man trying to put himself back together, a quiet, recessive man whose grief over the unsolved murder of his wife asserted itself in the form of a steady flood of tics, phobias, and obsessive-compulsive behavior. If Adrian Monk had been played by a different actor, it’s likely that he would have worn out his welcome with the audience, but Shalhoub made him funny and touching, and kept doing it, week after week, for an eight-year run. It was a remarkable feat, but before the show had run its course, even a fan could wish that Shalhoub had the chance to take a break from making a potentially annoying character seem charming and instead take a chance on playing one with a presence as big as his talent. In the seventh, concluding season of the Showtime series Nurse Jackie, Shalhoub plays Dr. Bernard Prince, who takes over as chief doctor in the ER of Manhattan’s All Saints’ Hospital after the departure of the dim but sweetly well-intentioned Dr. Cooper (Peter Facinelli) and immediately establishes himself as the star of the show.

Pulling Off a Miracle: The Sleeping Beauty at Toronto's Four Season Centre for the Performing Arts

The Sleeping Beauty (Photo by Sian Richards)

A ballet based on a fairy tale, The Sleeping Beauty celebrates the victory of order over chaos, a theme the National Ballet of Canada expressed with particular exuberance during the week of performances that opened at Toronto's Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts on June 10. The company was down 18 dancers as a result of injuries, a number representing almost a quarter of its artistic staff, and so the necessity of transforming a situation of adversity into one of triumph wasn't just a fiction. It was a matter of artistic survival. The wounded ran the gamut from seasoned performer to newcomer: principal dancers and soloists right down to members of the corps de ballets. It is unusual for so many dancers to be sidelined at once, and in the days leading up to opening night the situation looked dire. The classical repertoire's most famous ballet is also its most opulent, typically requiring legions of dancers to do it justice. Rudolf Nureyev's lavish version, which the National Ballet has been dancing since 1972, is no exception. Only a large classical dance company – and with 66 dancers the National Ballet is the biggest in the land – can pull it off. So what do you do when suddenly your numbers are down? You panic. Or, if you are Karen Kain, you think on your feet and pull off a miracle.

Over The Hill: Aging Action Stars and the Culture of Tolerance

Harrison Ford in Ender's Game (2013).

When is the right time to give up the craft? How much does age affect your ability to execute your art? With artisans or musicians, it’s when your body fails, when your fingers can no longer keep up with your mind, or when you’ve exhausted your contribution to the medium and you feel that there’s nothing more you can add. Perhaps it’s both, or more. But for actors – especially stars of action cinema – it’s a different story. Money and special effects can go a long way to help Hollywood’s ever-sagging elite stave off the rigours of time, and artificially extend their influence over pop culture.

Peter Pan: An Awfully Big Adventure

David-Birrell as Hook, and-the-Lost-Boys, in Peter Pan, at London's Regent Park. (Photo: Tristram Kenton)

When you attend a play in the Open Air Theatre in London’s Regent’s Park for the first time, your expectations for the actual dramatic experience may be diminished by the beauty of the space itself: it seems that a theatre company wouldn’t have to do much to make an audience happy on a lovely summer’s night. And though I’ve encountered exceptions to this rule, outdoor theatre is typically restrained in its ambitions and certainly in its production values. But Regent’s Park Theatre Ltd. turns out to be a venue for imaginative directors and designers with outsize dreams, artists who clearly think of working in outdoor theatre as an opportunity to try out ideas that are too crazy for the West End and too extravagant for the fringe theatres. Four years ago I saw a wonderful production there of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera with stagecraft so elaborate that watching the stage hands negotiate it added a daredevil circus element to the proceedings. (That was especially true the night I saw the show: it was the first preview, and not all the mechanical problems had been worked out.)

Early this month I saw Peter Pan at Regent’s Park in a version, directed by Timothy Sheader and Liam Steel, that was conceptually brilliant, visually breathtaking and deeply moving – the most thrilling evening I spent at the theatre in a month of seeing plays in London. James Barrie wrote Peter Pan in 1904, but Sheader and Steel have set it a decade later, during the Great War. Jon Bausor’s set looks initially liked a bombed-out factory framed by scaffolding and derricks, on one of which hangs a tattered Union Jack; beneath is a trench erected from torn sides of metal and random lumber. A bomb explodes and the factory turns into a military infirmary where a handful of nurses tend to the wounded: to one young man whose eyes are bandaged, to another who cries out in agony for his mother, to a captain who is fitted for a hook to replace his blown-off hand. One of the nurses (Kae Alexander) retrieves a copy of Peter Pan from under the pillow of the bandaged soldier (Patrick Osborne) and begins to read it aloud to the entire ward, and the play within the play begins. The nurse turns into Wendy Darling, the bandaged soldier (who knows the text off by heart and recites some of it along with her) becomes her brother John, and the rest of the soldiers and nurses in the ward take the other roles. Other uniformed men are stage hands, scaling the heights of the set to manipulate the harnesses that hold Peter Pan (played by Hiran Abeysekera, he’s the only actor on stage who appears only as a fantasy figure) and the Darling children (Thomas Dennis is Michael) as they fly through the air. Naturally, the captain who has lost his hand (David Birrell) shows up again as Hook.

Send Lawyers, Guns & Money: A Live Concert Tribute to Warren Zevon at Hugh's Room (June 19)

As always, the night begins with a quick trip home, jump in the car and head for the huge traffic jam that is the QEW. Tonight it’s not so bad, and I have my old friend Wayne to keep me entertained with tales of his recent trip to Nashville. Wayne’s a songwriter and he makes a regular pilgrimage to Tennessee to sell songs. He meets all sorts of interesting people down there. This time my favourite is the Vince Gill story! But enough about the car ride. We arrive at Hugh’s Room for a concert tribute to Warren Zevon (curated by A Man Called Wrycraft) and are led to our table. The menu hasn’t changed although they disappoint me by telling me that they’re not serving the chicken pan pesto tonight. OK, the penne with rapini then. There are no bad seats in Hugh’s Room (well…the café tables are not comfortable, but you can still see and hear everything) and we’re up close to the stage in front of the PA board. Perfect. Michael Wrycraft is not in the house tonight. It’s been over a year since he went in to hospital for a foot infection and has been recovering. Hopefully he’ll be back hosting his shows in September. The shows lose something without Michael’s presence, his passion and his stories about the songwriter being celebrated. Tonight Bob Reid is hosting. He reads from a biography of Mr. Zevon written by his ex-wife. He chooses segments which relate to the songs about to be performed. Interesting and sometimes quite funny.

French Delights: Late August, Early September, The Lady and the Duke, 5 X 2, and The Taste of Others

While checking out some foreign films I needed for a course I was teaching, I realized once again how many movies that may have come and gone too quickly in the cinemas or did not play commercially there at all – can find a second life streaming, or on DVD. Despite downloading and streaming, however, I still prefer to find my movies the old fashioned way, on screen, or in the video store’s stacks. Here are four French films you ought to check out.

Tabula Rasa: SyFy's Dark Matter

Melissa O'Neil and Marc Bendavid in Dark Matter, on SyFy and Space.

Over the past two weeks, the SyFy channel has premiered two new original scripted shows, Dark Matter (on June 12) and Killjoys (on June 19). Both series are also Canadian in origin, screening simultaneously on Canada's Space Channel. Dark Matter and Killjoys join a growing roster of homegrown Canadian SF television, a list which includes two of the strongest SF shows currently running: SyFy's Continuum (which will air its 6-episode fourth and final season this fall) and BBC America's Orphan Black (which aired its third season this winter). Also, like those two shows, both Dark Matter and Killjoys come with strong female lead characters. All of this speaks well for the current state of genre television. But as strong as it is, among all the time travel, werewolves, zombies, and super-evil biotech operatives, there has been something missing in recent TV: where have all the space operas gone? I like a dark global pharma-conspiracy story as much as the next geek, but sometimes I want a few spaceships with my science fiction. And so when Dark Matter opened to a sweeping starscape and slowly honed in a derelict-looking vessel hanging in space, I have to confess that something long slumbering awakened inside me. To paraphrase Captain Kirk (paraphrasing poet John Masefield), sometimes all I want from my science fiction television is a few ragtag crewmembers, a spaceship, and "a star to steer her by."

The recipe is simple: a small crew of charismatic characters, ideally fugitives from "justice" (or whatever passes for it in the deep, far future), working through their personal issues, making new friends and enemies, and kicking a little space-ass along the way. It's a format that has generated some of my favourite shows, each of varying tone and depth: from the surreal, over-the-top absurdity of Rockne O'Bannon's Farscape, to the nuanced allegorism of Joss Whedon's Firefly, to the unapologetic serialized fun of Andromeda. Ask me again come August, but by the time its first season closes, I am hoping to add Dark Matter to that list.

Pixar’s Inside Out: Freud Would Have Loved This!

Joy, Sadness, and Bing Bong in Pixar's latest animated feature, Inside Out.

Pixar, all is forgiven. The last time I reviewed a Pixar film for Critics at Large, Toy Story 3 (2010), I speculated, that after Up (2009), which I found too mechanical and programmed and the unnecessary, disappointing third in the Toy Story series (a fourth, alas, is on the way), as to whether Pixar Animation Studios, after the near consistent high quality of their movies – Toy Story (1995), A Bug’s Life (1998), Toy Story 2 (1999), Finding Nemo (2003), Ratatouille (2007) and Wall*E (2008) – had lost its mojo. I did not get to Brave (2012), which I heard good things about and did not feel much need to go see, Cars 2 (2011) – Cars (2006) was bad enough – nor Monsters University (2013), the sequel to Monsters, Inc. (2001), one of Pixar’s lesser (but still good) films. In any case, Pixar’s latest movie, Inside Out (2015) is one of the studio’s very best animated concoctions, a psychologically astute and highly inventive movie that Sigmund Freud himself would have loved.

Sibling Rivalry - Ray Davies: A Complicated Life by Johnny Rogan

Johnny Rogan has written about Ray Davies before. He did a biography of The Kinks back in 1984 (The Kinks: the Sound and the Fury), and then in 1998 one of those CD sized anthologies of record reviews, The Complete Guide to the Music of The Kinks. Rogan is nothing if not thorough. His biography of Van Morrison (No Surrender) is the most in-depth study of the Irish songster available. So much so that it was criticized by Kevin Courtney in The Irish Times, who observed: "For fans of Van Morrison's music, No Surrender might seem somewhat blasphemous, focusing not so much on Van the artist, but on Van the not-very-nice man.” One might say that Rogan has taken the same approach in this vast study of Ray Davies.

He calls it “a complicated life” but in fact it’s two complicated lives Rogan is laying bare here. Ray Davies, rhythm guitarist, songwriter, lead singer of The Kinks and his younger brother Dave, lead guitarist, songwriter, back-up singer of The Kinks. You can’t tell one story without the other. Ray, famously tells a story of his life growing up as the only boy in a family of six sisters. On his solo album The Storyteller he recounts how happy he was, until his mother gave birth to a younger child, another boy, and Ray had to share affections with someone else. “When Dave was born, I felt like a little child of two whose parents suddenly go out and buy a dog,” Ray Davies explains, “Of course a kid gets jealous.” Usually a kid grows out of it but this sibling rivalry grew and grew until today the brothers can barely stand to be in the same city. When asked if there will ever be a Kinks reunion they reply, “It could happen, if people behave,” and “It’s time reality took over!” The first response is Ray, the second Dave. It’s unlikely to happen. Long-time drummer Mick Avory wants it to happen, but he definitely wants to be included, and brother Dave stated recently “I don’t want to see the legacy of The Kinks soured by two miserable old men doing it for the money.” No-one does.

Changing the World: The Unique Phenomenon of Game Modding

Only mods can make a fearsome foe look as dapper as this monocle-sporting mud crab from Skyrim.

Mods, or modifications, are one of the many ways that gaming, as a hobby and as an art form, is unique. There’s no convenient parallel to draw from film, or literature, or traditional art – they’re a phenomenon that’s utterly exclusive to their medium, and that makes them a fascinating anomaly.

Anybody can make a mod, be they an official developer or armchair enthusiast. Modding ranges from making small changes to a game’s functionality, appearance, or sound, to creating entirely new games in themselves. They can include new items or weapons, characters or enemies, models, textures, levels, story lines – you name it. Sometimes a modded version of a game will have changed so drastically from its original version as to be almost unrecognizable, whether by increasing the quality of the game’s visuals or radically altering them, sometimes in ways that increase a player’s immersion and sometimes in ways that purposely shatter it (such as The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim’s famous – or, perhaps infamous – mod that places top hats and monocles on wild mud crabs). Mods can devolve a modern game into a classic, and make a decades-old game feel fresh.

Strange Journeys: Kafka on the Shore and Shining City

Kafka on the Shore is an adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s 2002 novel. (Photo: Takahiro Watanabe)

Yukio Ninagawa’s Kafka on the Shore, which I caught during its brief stop in London at the Barbican (it will perform at the Lincoln Center Festival in July), is an unconventional example of East-West translation. Frank Galati adapted Haruki Murakami’s 2002 magic-realist novel for the Steppenwolf Theatre Company seven years ago; the Ninagawa Company has returned it to the Japanese (Shunsuke Hiratsuka did the translation). If this cultural back-and-forth is a little disorienting, that effect seems perfectly appropriate to a stage version of Murakami’s haunting, dreamlike work. Fifteen-year-old Kafka Tamura (played in the Ninagawa production by Nino Furuhata), who is under an Oedipal curse, runs away from his father, a famous artist, and winds up working at a small private library in Takamatsu. The head librarian, a reclusive figure named Miss Saeki (Rie Miyazawa) still lost in mourning over the long-ago death of her lover, may or may not be Kafka’s long-absent mother. (Since Murakami is working on an ambiguous, oneiric level, the question of Miss Saeki’s relationship to Kafka doesn’t have a realist answer.)

Moral Quandaries in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer

The American Embassy in Saigon, on April 29, 1975. (Photo by Neal Ulevich)

“This fantasy of Americans as rescuers has re-emerged in Rory Kennedy’s documentary Last Days in Vietnam … telling a story that is good for the American soul. The movie depicts how, in the final hours of American involvement in Vietnam, a handful of courageous Americans initiated the rescue of 130,000 South Vietnamese allies from the clutches of evil communists…It was exactly what I thought it was going to be, American good intentions get reaffirmed. Although Vietnamese faces end the film, they are just victims who are grateful to Americans.”

– Viet Thanh Nguyen on the Last Days in Vietnam (2014) 

When I first saw Rory Kennedy’s must-heralded documentary, Last Days in Vietnam, I was moved by the humanitarian and heroic impulses of Americans, notably the former US Army officer, Stuart Herrington, to rescue as many as possible South Vietnamese soldiers and civilians on planes, ships and helicopters. These efforts are presented as saving them from an impending bloodbath perpetrated by barbaric hordes from the North. But as I watched the film more carefully and read reviews by Vietnamese who in 1975 were young children, I began to harbour misgivings about the film. There is little in the way of context. Although the film rightly mentions the Communist massacres at Hue, it says nothing about the successive corrupt South Vietnamese regimes that enjoyed no public support, that foisted on its people, for example, the vastly unpopular Strategic Hamlet program that relocated peasants to areas where they would be isolated from the Viet Cong, supposedly protected by militias and barbed wire. Nor does the film allude to the American carpet bombing or the effects of Agent Orange, a toxic herbicide that continues to afflict Vietnamese (and some Americans) suffering from mangled limbs, physical and psychological disorders. We sometimes forget that four million people died, half of them civilian. It does not help that the film frequently shows a map with a spreading, blood-red stain to indicate communist advances, akin to the creeping communism commonly depicted in Cold War-era graphics. And if the Vietnamese are not invisible, they only appear as uniformly grateful.

A much more complex and nuanced perspective about Vietnam and American culture can be found in the dazzling debut novel, The Sympathizer (Grove Press, 2015) by Viet Thanh Nguyen, a professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. When the author was four years old, he escaped from Vietnam with his parents and brother in 1975 and has written movingly about that time and growing up in California.

Still Sticky After All These Years: The Special Edition Reissue of The Rolling Stones' Sticky Fingers

For a broadly acknowledged classic of its form and format, the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers (1971) gets surprisingly little respect. It’s always on the list of greatest rock albums, but always far below Exile on Main Street, its 1972 follow-up. Where the Sticky reissue has gotten minimal media push, the 2010 Exile reissue was a major story, leading the New York Times Arts and Leisure section and spot-lit for a week on “The Jimmy Fallon Show.” According to the Rolling Stones—the band’s authorized oral history-pictobiography—mentions Sticky pretty much in passing, while giving several pages to the gestation, creation, and fermentation of Exile. In his 2010 autobiography, Life, Keith Richards gives Exile a dozen or so dedicated pages; Sticky gets about one and a half.

Nor does there seem any particular reason for the reissue to have occurred right now. Sticky is 44 years old this year—not 45, per a notable anniversary or class reunion. Though it comes garnished with a not-bad bonus disc of alternate takes and contemporaneous live recordings, the Sticky remaster is the same one first released in 2009. But no reason doesn’t mean no rationale. The Stones’ current North American tour, begun May 24 in San Diego, is labeled the Zip Code Tour; the Andy Warhol-designed cover of Sticky Fingers famously features a zipper—called a “zip” in the UK. That’s what the commercial confluence amounts to: zip. In lieu of the new product that has historically eventuated a Stones tour, the band are shoving out, at staggered (and at the top end staggering) price points, multiple repackagings of the album that I, along with a few others, consider their finest. The lasting album serves the perishable tour, rather than the reverse. No respect.

Expanding the Jazz Experience: An Interview with Kurt Elling

Photo by Anna Webber.

Kurt Elling grew up the son of a Luthern church Kapellmeister and learned early on that music is transporting. “It can move people’s imaginations,” says the Chicago-born jazz vocalist and composer in advance of his appearance at the TD Toronto Jazz Festival on June 23. Elling’s own imagination is moved in a variety of different ways. Considered the most influential jazz singer at work in the world today, Elling, 47, constantly gathers material for his expanding repertoire from a variety of sources: pop music and the American song book in addition to ballads in foreign languages discovered while on one of his many global tours. These disparate musical influences become one in the skilled hands of Elling. Passion World, which he released on June 16 on the Concord Jazz label, is a pastiche of European songs and musical styles rendered into jazz, and with Elling’s own distinctive stamp on the final product. Elling, who today resides in New York, will perform selections from the new album at his upcoming Toronto concert along with highlights from his other albums which have paid tribute to Frank Sinatra and also John Coltrane by reinterpreting them using vocalese. With his rich baritone and four octave range, Elling is a master of the genre of jazz that uses the voice as a kind of musical instrument. Words become melodies as they are improvised with a tune. When Elling does vocalese, it’s a tour de force performance, and one of the reasons he’s an in-demand performer. There are other reasons besides, not the least of which is the inquiring mind which Elling uses to enliven and elucidate the songs he sings, breathing into them new life. He explains some of that process with me here in advance of the TD Toronto Jazz Festival.

Charlie Don't Channel Surf: Aquarius

David Duchovny as Detective Sam Hodiak on NBC's Aquarius.

There’s a classic show business trick that producers and directors have sometimes stooped to when working on material with a central figure who, it’s feared, may seem too unusual or unsympathetic to seem “relatable” to the mass audience: miscast the role so ostentatiously that no one could ever believe that the person they’re watching really wants to do the things he’s doing, or believe the things he’s saying. Sometimes, this results in the star winning both popular and critical acclaim, and even awards, since a skilled performer being unconvincing in a big role is plainly acting his ass off. It certainly worked out well for William Hurt when he played a Latin American transvestite in Kiss of the Spider Woman, and for Meryl Streep as the sexually taunting, working-class free spirit Karen Silkwood; the makers of Bonfire of the Vanities were hoping it would work for them when they convinced the young Tom Hanks, with his vast reserves of likability and goofy Everydude aura, to impersonate Tom Wolfe’s arrogant, antiheroic Master of the Universe Sherman McCoy.

Now, on NBC’s Aquarius, we have David Duchovny, as Sam Hodiak, a rule-breaking, head-busting Los Angeles police detective in 1967, casting a cold eye on all the toxic spillover from the Summer of Love. Sam is meant to be an old-school cop with a racist streak, though he also seems to recognize his limitations and to be capable of overcoming them; although he does a double take when he sees that the shaggy-haired, new-style undercover (white) cop (played by Grey Damon) he’s been partnering with has a black wife, he’s protective of the couple when they’re picked on by racists in their new neighborhood. And in his exchanges with the excellent Gaius Charles (formerly Smash Williams on Friday Night Lights) as the representative of the local chapter of the Black Panther party, he mainly expresses frustration with the Panthers for discouraging black people from co-operating with police who are investigating murders in the community. Even when Sam is steamed, he doesn’t throw around racial epithets, and he’s clearly more evolved than the other cops who are his age or older, who can’t understand why he even bothers to investigate the murders of blacks and homosexuals, or why he encourages the token woman in the station house (Claire Holt) in thinking that she might someday be able to do more than make coffee.

Essence and Process: Jean Grand-Maître's Balletlujah!

Canadian chanteuse k.d. lang wonders out loud in Balletlujah!, a new film documenting her 2013 collaboration with the Alberta Ballet, why director Grant Harvey failed to include her way of dancing as part of the on-screen choreography. She asks the question impishly, saying she’s going to have words with him about it, and it’s clear that she’s only joking. Yet she has a point. Her way of dancing is perhaps the only thing missing from a prime time movie that bravely, and with great sensitivity, excavates almost everything else about her, her lesbianism and Buddhism included. Taking as its title the name Alberta Ballet artistic director and choreographer, Jean Grand-Maître, gave to the k.d.lang inspired production he debuted on a Calgary stage two years ago, Balletlujah! is a dance film as biography with an appeal as big as an Albertan sky.

Freak of Nature: Jurassic World

Bryce Dallas Howard, Chris Pratt, Nick Robinson and Ty Simpkins in Jurassic World.

A summer blockbuster that toys with self-awareness is a living oxymoron, like an advertisement that reminds you it’s an advertisement in an attempt to disarm and charm you, while still asking for your money. It’s all too rare that a huge, studio-led tentpole film – especially a sequel in a “classic” franchise – can have its cake and eat it, too. Jurassic World does its damndest, though, and though it’s as cobbled together from disparate genetic material as the dinos it portrays, it manages through sheer, fitful effort to shuffle off its obligations and expectations and deliver an ultimately satisfying spectacle. Life – or in this case, director Colin Trevorrow – found a way.

A Moor and Two Jews: Shakespeare and Marlowe in Stratford and London

Phoebe Pryce and Jonathan Pryce in The Merchant of Venice. (Photo: Tristram Kenton)

Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice is a romantic comedy in which Shylock, the Jewish moneylender who goes to court to collect his pound of flesh from the bankrupt merchant Antonio, is merely the obstacle the hero and heroine must overcome in order to get to their deserved happy ending. He vanishes from the play at the end of the fourth act, so that the entirety of the fifth can concentrate on the trick Portia and her maid Nerissa play on their new husbands, Bassanio and Gratiano, getting them to give away the rings that were their brides’ special gifts to the supposed young judge who rescued Bassanio and his law clerk (really the two women dressed in men’s clothing). The ingenious legal trick Portia employs to release Antonio from his bond to Shylock is necessary to ensure Bassanio’s and Portia’s marital happiness because Bassanio entered into that unholy agreement with the moneylender in order to bankroll Bassanio’s courtship of Portia. Once the case is over, frivolity can resume. And though high school English classes still, apparently, teach The Merchant as a serious drama about anti-Semitism rather than an example of it – just as they did when I was in high school in the sixties – the fact is that, as directors have proven in productions since the Holocaust made the play at least a bone of contention, the only way to fix the problem in it is to rewrite it. I’ve seen three Merchants that did so brilliantly. In the famous Jonathan Miller production from 1970 (televised in 1973), with Laurence Olivier as Shylock and Joan Plowright as Portia, Shylock is presented as a tragic hero; Miller cut the lines that put him in an unflattering light, like the aside that includes his feeling about Antonio, “I hate him for he is a Christian.” Both Trevor Nunn’s 1999 version at the National Theatre, set in the Fascist 1930s, with Henry Goodman as Shylock and the Broadway production Al Pacino starred in, under Daniel Sullivan, in 2010, in different ways, sketched a landscape of such racial hatred that Shylock’s conduct toward Antonio seemed like a lamentable but completely understandable response to his own treatment at the hands of Christians. (The young men Antonio hangs out with in Nunn’s version are little more than privileged thugs.)

Jonathan Pryce gives an intelligent, often tender performance as Shylock in a new production at Shakespeare’s Globe, directed by Jonathan Munby, that does a more than adequate job of rearranging the context so that Shylock isn’t just a villain who gets what he deserves. What he gets in the play, when his suit collapses under Portia’s scrutiny, is poverty – half his goods go to Antonio (Dominic Mafham), the other half to Lorenzo (Ben Lamb), the Christian who has eloped with his Shylock’s daughter Jessica (played by Pryce’s daughter Phoebe Pryce) – and a forced conversion to Christianity. (Jessica has already converted to marry Lorenzo.) Munby stages a baptism scene, in which Pryce’s Shylock cringes as the priest pours holy water over his head; meanwhile Jessica, reading the letter from her father Portia has handed her, intones a Hebrew prayer in counterpoint to the Latin one everyone else on stage is singing (and which she, too, finally joins). She’s the last person on stage as the lights go down. Munby was obviously thinking of the way Miller ended his Merchant, with Jessica (Louise Purnell) alone reading the letter while in the background we hear the Mourner’s Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, which is also recited by Orthodox Jews when a son or daughter marries out of the faith.

Charlie N. Holmberg’s Paper Magicians Trilogy: A Page-Turning Fantasy with Both Heart and Brain

I love books – both paper and electronic. Paper books and e-books provide different and unique experiences of reading, and I am often at pains to explain that the fact that I am joined at the hip to my e-reader does not mean that I love paper books any less. Living in an urban condo with limited space, e-books help me to feed my reading addiction while maintaining some semblance of floor-space. And precisely because it does not contribute to the clutter (my current desk is in fact about to literally collapse under the weight of stacked books), I will often let myself just try out a book on the e-reader that I might not have brought home from the bookstore. If I am feeling able to spend three to five dollars on a book, I can curl up and browse through the bookstore and pick something, virtually at random, to try out. That is precisely how I stumbled last November onto The Paper Magician, the first book in Charlie N. Holmberg’s Paper Magician Trilogy (published by 47North, an imprint of Amazon Publishing). I read it fast enough that I was disappointed when it was over; it was good enough that I was thrilled to find that the second book in the series, The Glass Magician, had already been released, and when I finished that one I immediately went ahead and pre-ordered the last book in the trilogy, The Master Magician, which was magically delivered to my e-reader on June 2nd. (And yes, the thrill of having a pre-order appear just when you have forgotten about it is one of the greatest things about e-readers.)

This Was His Song: William H. Macy's Rudderless

In the opening scenes of William H. Macy's debut film, Rudderless (2014), Sam Manning (Billy Crudup), a divorced advertising executive in Oklahoma, has just landed a large account and is in the mood to celebrate his success. He immediately calls up his son, Josh (Miles Heizer), an Oklahoma University student, whom we've just watched record in his dorm a number of songs he has written, to join him at a local bar. Although Josh is reluctant to go, Sam insists. When he doesn't arrive, Sam figures his son stood him up and leaves him a message admonishing his behavior. Just as he's about to leave, however, Sam looks up at one of the television monitors in the bar to witness breaking news about an outbreak of campus violence that he later discovers has claimed the lives of a number of students including his boy.

The Lives of Others: Netflix's Sense8

Doona Bae and Aml Ameen in Netflix's Sense8.

One week ago today, Netflix's new fantasy/science fiction drama Sense8 became available, and I suspect most everyone who's watched past the third episode have already finished the season. (I also anticipate a good many didn't survive the first hour.) It is, more than any recent Netflix series, essentially a 12-hour motion picture of literally global scope. It tells the story of eight strangers – from across the globe – who are all simultaneously awakened to the fact that they are linked, mentally and emotionally, to one another. As each struggles with the dramas of their own lives, they must also figure out how to band together against powerful forces that aim to identify and destroy them for what they are.

Sense8 is also the first TV project from Lana and Andy Wachowski, the sibling team behind The Matrix films, Cloud Atlas, and Jupiter Ascending. The Wachowskis are joined by television writer and creator J. Michael Straczynski (Babylon 5). This unique team-up has resulted in a highly original and powerful television series, but its pedigree is perhaps the least of the reasons for why you should check it out. Critics has been decidedly mixed in their responses, calling the show alternatingly "maddening" and "beautiful," "confusing" and "poetic." It is, to be sure, at times each of those things – but one thing Sense8 could never be called is "boring."

To Be: The Stratford Festival's Hamlet

Some people say William Shakespeare’s Hamlet is his best play. Some say it is the best play in the English language. Personally, I’d lean toward the latter. The Bard’s great tragedy has it all, wrapped in one poetic, dramatic package: politics, family and political intrigue, jealousy, revenge, incest, madness, a ghost – all are integral parts of the work. Hamlet also contains several meaty, challenging roles, most especially the protagonist and title character, which may be the most demanding part in theatre, and is certainly one against which great actors define themselves. And whatever else you say about it, Hamlet is undeniably the most quoted work in the English language, and includes the single most quoted line: “To be or not to be.” The text is extraordinary. It seems as though every other line has entered our everyday language, in whole or in part: “To thine own self be true”; “To sleep, perchance to dream”; “Brevity is the soul of wit”; “Sweets to the sweet”; “Good-night, sweet prince”; “The lady doth protest too much”; “The devil hath power to assume a pleasing shape”; and, of course, “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.” The list is nearly endless.

The Choreography of Dissent

Dominion at Canadian Stage.

Dance as a form of protest is something of a retread trend right now. Choreographers from around the world, and representing a wide range of genres, are again using the wordless art of the body to draw attention to important societal and political issues. Non-purposeful dance, or dance in the abstract, performed for the sheer enjoyment of interpreting music through movement, is not for them. As seen recently in Toronto where several international choreographers chanced to perform in various venues within weeks of each other during the last week of April and the first week of May, they are more interested in returning to dance as a form of cultural expression dealing with themes of oppression and suffering rooted in the experiences of actual people.

The choreographers in question included Luyanda Sidiya, a participant of Canadian Stage’s month-long Spotlight South Africa dance and theatre festival, whose double bill at the Bluma Appel Theatre on April 22, featured Dominion, an unflinching portrait of militaristic dictatorships in the modern era. The masterfully crafted piece presented the likenesses of Adolf Hitler, Muammar Gaddafi and Robert Mugabe as part of a damning critique of the protest cycle which starts with revolution and ends with repression only to repeat itself endlessly and at great cost to the people who must bend and sway with every turn of the political wheel. Dominion, and its sister piece Umnikelo, a work that almost nostalgically celebrates the unfettered energy, grace and beauty of African tribal dance, spoke to the thwarted idealism of post-apartheid South Africa (which includes the xenophobic violence sparked by anti-immigrant rage which had South Africa in the headlines ironically during the week that that the Spotlight South Africa performances were taking place in Toronto) while responding to the broader issue of abuses of power on a global, if not universal, scale. Communicating the profound message of the work was the ensemble of dancers who make up the Johannesburg-based Vuyani Dance Theatre company of which Sidiya, 31, is artistic director and chief choreographer. The all-black company is remarkably fluent, able to voice several dance languages at once, from Western-style modern dance and ballet to Zulu and other traditional dances of South Africa including Umxhentso, a healing dance of the Xhosa people. Sidiya is a member of that tribe. During a post-performance discussion, Sidiya, winner of the 2015 Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Dance, a leading South African arts prize recognizing artistic excellence in an emerging talent, said that dance for him is a blend of the personal and the political; it is a form of truth-telling. “Dance is an offering of thanks,” he said. “It’s an opportunity to connect with another person and inspire a shift of perspective.”

Unsung and Unknown - The Wrecking Crew & I Knew it Was You: Rediscovering John Cazale

The Wrecking Crew.

It's largely held to be true that when The Beatles invaded America in 1964, one of the seismic impacts they had was in wiping out the Sixties rebirth of Tin Pan Alley. An ambitious group of songwriters (Carole King and Gerry Goffin, Neil Diamond, Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry, 'Doc' Pomus and Mort Shuman) were all situated in the Brill Building in New York City there looking to sell hit songs. And many great ones they did indeed sell. But The Beatles proved that by writing your own tunes and playing your own instruments you needn't be solely dependent on other songwriters to provide your material. Pretty soon, just about anyone who could pick up a guitar started performing and composing – but not all of them could do both. In Los Angeles, there lurked a famous collection of somewhat anonymous session musicians – dubbed 'The Wrecking Crew' – who played on an abundance of familiar hits by The Byrds, The Mamas and the Papas, The Beach Boys, The Monkees, not to mention just about every hit song produced by Phil Spector, including The Ronettes' "Be My Baby," The Crystals' "He's a Rebel" and Ike and Tina Turner's "River Deep, Mountain High." Totally unsung, and yet playing key roles in songs ranging from "God Only Knows," "California Dreamin'," "The Beat Goes On," "Last Train to Clarksville" and "Mr. Tambourine Man" to Frank Zappa's masterful orchestral absurdity Lumpy Gravy (1967), the Wrecking Crew were sonic dreamers and dedicated trench soldiers who conjured up a storehouse of memorable hooks, even if, as a nameless group, they existed in the dark.(The album covers for bands like The Monkees didn't even credit them as the players on the record.)

Comedy, Verbal and Physical: The Beaux’ Stratagem, Hay Fever, & The Play That Goes Wrong

Member of the cast of The Beaux’ Stratagem at London's Nation Theatre. (Photo by Manuel Harlan)

George Farquhar’s delightful Restoration comedy The Beaux’ Stratagem is about two young men, Aimwell and Archer, described as “two gentlemen of broken fortune,” who arrive at a scheme for setting themselves up, they hope, for life. Touring the English provinces, they trade off, one pretending to be a gentleman of means and wooing a rich lady, while the other playacts the role of his servant. In Litchfield, the setting of this comedy of manners, it’s Aimwell’s turn to be the suitor. He casts his eye on Dorinda, while Archer finds himself falling for her sister-in-law, Mrs. Sullen. Unfortunately, Mrs. Sullen is trapped in a miserable marriage to a drunkard and spendthrift whose only evident reason for making the match was his wife’s money. Farquhar’s play comments on the market society that produces such dismal unions; when Aimwell finds himself actually falling for the target of his “stratagem,” he repents his dishonesty and makes a clean breast of it to Dorinda. The play is lighthearted, though, even in its political background. The English and French are at war and the English are holding the French troops in Litchfield as prisoners, but the bonds they constrain them are silken ones: they’re free to roam about and enjoy the pleasures of the town.

The play was first performed in 1707, but Simon Godwin’s richly entertaining production at the National Theatre seems to be set later – the costumes by Lizzie Clachan are Georgian, perhaps just because the clothes from that period are more lush and the shapes trimmer and more flattering. (No one who sees Clachan’s gorgeous outfits is likely to complain about the shift.) She also designed the triple-tiered set, which is built on four staircases and doubles as the home of Lady Bountiful (Jane Booker), the mother of Dorinda (Pippa Bennett-Warner) and Sullen (Richard Henders), and the inn where Aimwell (Samuel Barnett) and Archer (Geoffrey Streatfield) have put up in Litchfield. This scaffold-like construction is convenient for the frequency of scenes in which characters overhear each other’s conversations as well as serving as a kind of metaphor for the interplay of classes. Archer is playing the part of a servant (though, when Mrs. Sullen observes that his manners are “above the livery of a footman,” he covers the discrepancy by confessing that he was born a gentleman) and becomes friendly with Lady Bountiful’s valet, Scrub (dour-looking Pearce Quigley, who reads his lines in a tossed-off, lightly ironic tone that’s very funny), while flirting, in the early scenes, with the innkeeper’s amiable daughter Cherry (Amy Morgan).

The Old-School Spy in the Espionage Novels of Charles McCarry

Novelist Charles McCarry. (Photo by Bill Keefrey)

It is surprising that Charles McCarry is not as widely read as other espionage writers, even though he does command respect from writers like Olen Steinhauer and Alan Furst. Critics have linked him with John le Carré, likely because both writers once served in their respective intelligence agencies. McCarry worked as a field agent under deep cover for the CIA from 1958 until 1967 in Europe, Africa and Asia, experiences that provide his novels with an authentic atmosphere. But I find the comparison odd since no one would confuse McCarry’s sympathetic portrayal of the CIA – affectionately dubbed “The Outfit” in his novels – and his belief that the country’s intelligence agencies are the best bastion for the defence of the American way with le Carré’s conviction that the intelligence methods of both Western and Communist countries were vile and morally senseless. Le Carré likely would not have written that Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism is "a lie wrapped up in a sham surrounded by a delusion,” a statement uttered by the head of the Outfit in Second Sight (1991). Yet both writers share a similar passion in delineating plots that identify and root out the moles that are deeply buried in the higher echelons of their respective secret agencies.

Neglected Gem # 77: Anna and the King (1999)

Anna and the King marks the fourth time the movies have revisited Margaret Landon’s Anna and the King of Siam, based on the memoirs of the Englishwoman, Anna Leonowens, who tutored the children of Siam’s King Mongkut in the mid-nineteenth century. The first adaptation, in 1946, with Irene Dunne as a stiff-necked Anna, smiling that knocked-on-the-noggin Irene Dunne smile, and Rex Harrison done up in ballooning silk knee pants as the King, was rather preposterous. (Lee J. Cobb as Harrison’s Kralahome, or Prime Minister, with burnt amber all over his face and chest, was one of the prime kitsch elements.) But the big, handsome production was very enjoyable nonetheless. The hit Rodgers & Hammerstein musical version, The King and I, came to the screen in 1956, with Yul Brynner repeating his Broadway performance as the monarch whose efforts to bring his tiny country into the modern world has to overcome the obstacle of his own obstinacy, and Deborah Kerr taking over where stage star Gertrude Lawrence had left off. This time it felt as if everyone associated with the project had been knocked on the head. And those who associate the story of the Siamese ruler and the governess with Brynner’s cutesy pidgin English (which won him the Academy Award) and “Getting to Know You” may have little desire to check out this version, with Jodie Foster and Chow Yun-Fat in the leading roles. (Disney released a cartoon version of the musical earlier the same year – an embarrassing reminder, even for those of us who didn’t make it past the trailers, of how icky some of the songs are.) And that would be a pity, because Anna and the King, adapted by Steve Meerson and Peter Krikes and directed by Andy Tennant, does almost everything right that the earlier versions did wrong.

Dead End: A Dissenting View on Mad Max: Fury Road

The influence of marketing divisions on movies right now is so pervasive that what sometimes passes for reviewing could just as easily have been dreamed up in the boardroom. When The Globe and Mail calls Australian director George Miller's return to the action genre in the new Mad Max: Fury Road "a double-barreled shotgun enema to the senses," is that kind of macho hyperbole (fitting to the genre) giving me an idea of what to expect, or is it choice ad copy to sell it? As for the metaphor, who thinks enemas are very pleasurable to begin with, let alone what you are looking for in a good movie?

I know it's not so much that film critics are eager to line up behind the product driven views of executives. Their taste in formula pictures after all is shockingly bad. But the climate reviewers are now working in is not designed for informed criticism, but instead for a style of consumer reporting. After all, if audiences today are being treated (in the crudest sense) as if they were nothing more than consumers, in that same way some of us are now thought of as 'taxpayers' rather than citizens, there is less need to ask questions as to what art is and why it is. Once when I was reviewing Ron Howard's A Beautiful Mind (2001) for CBC Radio, his adaptation of Sylvia Nassar's fascinating biography of mathematician John Nash, I wanted to describe why the movie was such a failure of imagination by describing how Howard turned Nassar's nuanced take on Nash's life and illness into a banal and conventional redemption story. My producer told me to forget the book and just tell the listening audience whether or not they should go to the film. In other words, leave out the context and just whip out a thumb to go yea or nay. It turned into a huge battle which I eventually won, but over time more episodes of this nature would ultimately cost me my job. And here we're talking about a radio network in the public sector not pressured by advertisers. But the mindset of regarding listeners as consumers was already in place.

No Pain, No Gain: Andrew Bujalski's Results

Kevin Corrigan and Cobie Smulders in Results.

It’s no secret that talented directors who work on big studio movies often have to go against their personal tastes and instincts in order to accommodate the demands of their bosses, who have their own ideas about what a movie has to include in order to be salable. The same is sometimes true of well-known indie directors, even those who work on a smaller scale on very personal material, if their recent work has generated more good reviews than box office revenue. Noah Baumbach’s recent While We’re Young stars Ben Stiller as a documentary filmmaker whose creative crisis, which manifests itself in his ability to complete his sprawling, ten-years-in-the-making magnum opus, is all mixed up with his fear of growing older and losing his freshness and edge. For its first two-thirds, the movie offers a spiky, original satirical take on a particular form of contemporary anxiety, but it loses its way in the last half hour—partly because Baumbach goes soft on his hero, but also because the tone goes haywire in a slapstick climax that feels as if it parts of it might have been included to provide footage for the trailer, in the hope that it might trick some people into thinking they were getting something a little less like The Squid and the Whale and a little more like Along Came Polly.

The writer-director Andrew Bujalski doesn’t show any inclination for playing this game; he certainly doesn’t have any knack for it. His new feature, Results, has been called a “rom-com,” in some cases by reviewers complaining that it’s a pretty misbegotten excuse for a rom-com. It’s true that Results doesn’t play by the usual rules of that genre, but I don’t think that’s due to incompetence, or that Bujalski is trying to “subvert” the genre either. I think he’s indifferent to genre. Results starts out with a man in a fish-out-of-water situation: Danny (Kevin Corrigan), a suddenly rich, recently divorced New Yorker who finds himself in Austin and, looking to somehow reboot his life (and end his loneliness) takes out a gym membership. This brings him into contact with two people with whom he has nothing in common: Trevor (Guy Pearce), the owner of the gym, and Kat (Cobie Smulders), a tightly wound trainer whose anger issues are exacerbated by the fact that she’s heading towards thirty without ever having had “a real job” or “a real boyfriend.”

You Can Never Go Home: John Maclean's Slow West

Michael Fassbender and Kodi-Smit McPhee in Slow West.

The mythic loner of the Western has always reflected that split in the psyche of the American character where the hopes of nationhood are continually set against the rights of the individual. The Founding Fathers dreamed up a nation with a standing promise to create a country built on equality and true governance. But the hero of the Western, the one who stood tall to wrest nationhood from the anarchy of the outlaws, best supported D.H. Lawrence's idea that "the essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer." All of which explains why the gunslinger who brings about the law that creates governance doesn't really get to benefit from it. He never comes to live in the home he helps create. Unlike the gangster figure of the Depression Era who chose to live outside the law, and expressed what Robert Warshow described as "that part of the American psyche which rejects the qualities and the demands of modern life, which rejects 'Americanism' itself," the hero of the Western always sought Americanism, and permanent roots, even though, deep down, he knew he'd never have them.

For someone like John Wayne, the idea of home became downright elusive if not an illusion. Despite leading an obsessive search for his niece kidnapped by Comanches in The Searchers (1956), Wayne's Ethan Edwards eventually delivered her home and alive, but Ethan didn't get to share the spoils of residence, instead he's left framed outside the door against the vast country that spawned him. In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), his Tom Doniphon, in a drunken rage, burns down the home he was building for the woman (Vera Miles) he silently loved when he discovered that she had fallen instead for the lawyer (James Stewart) who taught her to read and to dream of a country she could become a citizen of. But Tom Doniphon can't share in that dream of citizenry, he can only exist in its shadow, secretly and silently saving Stewart from the superior gunman Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin). He has to lurk in a dark alley with his rifle aimed at this vicious killer with the purpose of preserving the rule of law so that it will triumph over the brutal vigilantism of Liberty Valance.

Neglected Gem #76: The Sandlot (1993)

The cast of The Sandlot (1993).

I was furious to learn that the late Roger Ebert had once described The Sandlot as a summertime version of A Christmas Story, because that particular revelation, which I had thought was my own unique take, was how I had planned to open this review. Though they’re both seasonal coming-of-age stories set in the 1950s and 60s, sweet glimpses of a narrator’s childhood through a smudged nostalgic lens, The Sandlot doesn’t enjoy the same “classic” status that A Christmas Story does – although it’s easily just as good, which makes it a perfect candidate for the Neglected Gem treatment.

Backstage Musicals in London: Gypsy and Sunny Afternoon

Imelda Staunton in Gypsy. (Photo: Johan Persson)

It’s easy to argue for Gypsy, first produced on Broadway in 1959 and currently enjoying a sold-out revival in London’s West End, as the greatest of all American musicals. (Closest contender: Fiddler on the Roof.) Arthur Laurents’s book, suggested by the memoirs of the stripper queen Gypsy Rose Lee, is in the vein of John O’Hara’s for Pal Joey. Like that 1940 landmark musical, Gypsy has a seedy backstage milieu – second-rate vaudeville houses across the country at the twilight of vaudeville, when talkies were stealing away their audiences, and finally burlesque theatres – and an anti-heroic protagonist. But though Pal Joey’s script is colorful and sexy, the second act is a bit of a shambles (the distinctive characters and the marvelous Rodgers & Hart score bring it home), and the show lacks depth. An exposé of naked show-biz ambition, Gypsy, which has a superb score by Jule Styne (music) and a young Stephen Sondheim (lyrics), is almost O’Neill-like in its intensity and darkness.

Magnificent Century: The TV Show Iran, Israel, Vietnam and the Rest of the World is Watching

Turkish television's Magificant Century has reportedly over 200 million viewers worldwide.

In our current age of interconnectivity, the vast majority of media is almost universally accessible, at least by those privileged enough to have internet access. We are no longer surprised to find out that Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones is almost as popular in England or Russia as it is in the United States or Canada. But while downloads and online streaming have increasingly allowed us to make educated forays into foreign cinema and television, those of us in the English-speaking world often remain woefully ignorant of trends – or manias even – sweeping the rest of the world. Just recently, as the result of a spontaneous Facebook post, I discovered that my guilty television pleasure is in fact a worldwide phenomenon. For years now I have been captivated by the show known in English as Suleiman the Magnificent or, more literally translated from the original Turkish (Muhteşem Yüzyıl), Magnificent Century. I watch it dubbed into Syrian Arabic, where it goes by the title Harim as-Sultan (The Sultan’s Harem); it has also been made available (dubbed or subtitled) in over a dozen other languages. The plot of the show is deceptively simple: it is the story of Sultan Suleyman (1494-1566, reigned 1520-1566) and his relationship with Hurrem Sultan, the Christian slave girl who eventually became his wife and a powerful political influence.