Still Crazy After All These Years: Revisiting Network (1976)

Peter Finch's Howard Beale is "mad as hell" in Network.

The last few months I've been noticing, especially in the news feed of Facebook, this continued reverence for Sidney Lumet's 1976 film Network, his loud and abrasive adaptation of Paddy Chayefsky's broad satire about the shift in television journalism from hard news to glib entertainment. The picture seems to be getting acclaimed all over again for its sheer prescience in revealing how the corporate control of television news has turned the sacred screeds of Edward R. Murrow into the boorish rantings of Bill O'Reilly. Whether talking about Donald Trump's candidacy for President, the shout-fests that litter the prime time broadcasts on Fox News, or more recently, the tragic shooting deaths of TV reporter Alison Parker and photographer Adam Ward live on morning television in Virginia (simply because the news anchor in Network is murdered on air due to poor ratings) folks online are revisiting the picture for clues to see how it all went wrong. You'd think that Lumet and Chayefsky were sages who saw it all coming. I've often made the case that Robert Altman's Nashville (1975), or Arthur Penn's Alice's Restaurant (1969), had their ear to the ground in anticipating the political and cultural changes taking place in the culture. But those films were pensive and elliptical works that called upon the audience to contemplate what some of those shifting dramatic themes were all about. Network doesn't allow you to think; it tells you emphatically (and with a tin ear) what to think. Network is a noisy collection of broadside rants that – seen today – are no more perceptive than one of Bill O'Reilly's nightly belches. Instead of being an outrageous and equal opportunity satire that spares nobody, Network is full of homilies that reveals more of Paddy Chayefsky's fortune cookie idea of humanism than it does leveling with the dumbing down of the glass teat.

Make Time for Some Other Space

The cast of Other Space, currently streaming on Yahoo! Screen.

"In 2054, to celebrate the end of the war between the United States and Switzerland, a multi-national corporate coalition created the Universal Mapping Project to explore the known universe for the purposes of scientific inquiry. The following is an account of the UMP Cruiser, an exploratory vessel that went missing in 2105."

– from the opening of Other Space

Other Space tells the story of a crew of inexperienced officers who set off on a routine exploratory space mission, only to find themselves sucked through a rift in space that thrusts them into another universe. Lost in space, with no way of getting home, they struggle for survival with no-one to depend upon but themselves. In others' hands, this would be the beginning of a traditional science-fiction story – and it has been. Variations on this story have been seen on television for over fifty years: from Lost in Space, to Buck Rogers, to Star Trek: Voyager, to Battlestar Galactica. (Not to mention Andromeda, Farscape, or SyFy's recent Dark Matter.) Other Space is not like any of those shows.

Back in March, Yahoo's online streaming channel, Yahoo! Screen, garnered a lot of attention by bringing back the NBC cult comedy Community for a sixth season. A month later, with far less fanfare, it added another comedy to its small line-up of original programming: Other Space, a science-fiction comedy in the vein of the BBC's long-running classic Red Dwarf. The animated (and often brilliant) Futurama notwithstanding, there have only ever been a handful of science fiction comedy shows on American television, perhaps the most popular being 3rd Rock from the Sun and, I suppose… Alf. (Red Dwarf had a famously failed attempt at an American adaptation for NBC back in 1992, when only a poorly-received pilot was filmed.) But, unless you count NBC's Quark – a one-season wonder from 1978 starring Richard Benjamin, which was Buck Henry's follow-up series to Get Smart – the output has been entirely earthbound. This year, with all the original television being produced, it is very possible this small comedy has escaped your notice. Fortunately we have a few weeks still before the new fall season begins, and you have more than enough time to flip your browser over to Yahoo and watch a new comedy that is at once unassuming and suprising.

Crime Stopper's Textbook: Narcos

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When You Speak Love: Christian Petzold's Phoenix

Ronald Zehrfeld and Nina Hoss

The German director Christian Petzold garnered some deserved attention for his 2012 movie Barbara, which told the story of an East German doctor (Nina Hoss) in the 1980s, banished to a country hospital as punishment for applying for an exit visa, who plots to defect but is sidelined by her emotional involvement in the case of a female patient. As a chronicle of life in East Germany in the years before the Berlin Wall came down, Barbara is smaller-scale than The Lives of Others – one of a small handful of movies since the millennium that truly deserve to be called masterpieces – but it demonstrates a piecing intelligence, a gift for working with actors (Hoss gives a superlative performance), and an easy mastery of film vocabulary. It’s an elegant and fiercely compelling piece of moviemaking, and I think that Phoenix, his new picture, is even better.

Petzold is again working with his co-writer on Barbara, Harun Farocki, and again features Hoss opposite the fine actor Ronald Zehrfeld, who played the head of the clinic Barbara is exiled to. In Phoenix Hoss, in a performance of profound tremulous feeling, plays Nelly Lenz, a Jewish cabaret singer who returns from the camps at the end of the Second World War so badly disfigured that she hides her face under a bandage. Her experience has left her so fragile that she barely seems able to function. She arrives back in Berlin under the care of another woman, Lene Winter (Nina Kunzendorf), who seems to have an administrative job that gives her access to government documents. (I think we’re meant to assume that Lene and Nelly met in the camps, but the movie is rather mysterious on the source of their association.) Lene guides her through reconstructive surgery that leaves her looking somewhat but not exactly like the woman she was before she was taken by the Nazis, and Lene makes plans for the two of them to emigrate to Israel. But Nelly didn’t think of herself as a Jew in the days before the Holocaust, and she still doesn’t. And what she wants is to find her Gentile husband Johnny, a pianist who hid her from the Gestapo in a boat until they finally caught up with her. Lene is convinced that it was Johnny who turned Nelly in at the end, but Nelly is still crazy about him and doesn’t believe her friend’s version of events. Haunting the seedier clubs, she locates Johnny (Zehrfeld), working not as a musician but as a waiter, and of course he doesn’t recognize her. But he notes her resemblance to his wife, who, he is certain, died during the war.

Slacker Central : American Ultra

Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart in American Ultra. (Photo: Alan Markfield/AP/Lionsgate)

In American Ultra, Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart star as Mike and Phoebe: two West Virginian stoners with dead-end jobs and a happy, if troubled, relationship. Mike’s panic attacks prevent them from going on vacation, and his absent-mindedness ensures he almost burns down their house every time he tries to cook. Phoebe has a lot on her plate in taking care of him, but she soon has much more when a CIA operative named Lasseter (Connie Britton) reveals that Mike is a sleeper agent whose deadly skills at hand-to-hand combat have been locked inside his mind, lying dormant. His (mostly) blissful life is a sham, and CIA honcho Yates (Topher Grace) has targeted him for elimination. Stoner laughs and blockbuster action (supposedly) ensue, in the tradition of films like Pineapple Express (2008).

Heigh-Ho, the Glamourous Life: Light Up the Sky at the Shaw

Charlie Gallant, Claire Jullien and Thom Marriott in Light Up the Sky at the Shaw Festival. (Photo: David Cooper)

Light Up the Sky is one of Moss Hart’s solo comic efforts; he wrote it in 1948, long after his collaboration with George S. Kaufman had petered out. It’s about the Boston tryout of a debut play by a young greenhorn named Peter Sloan, the only person involved in the project who isn’t a seasoned veteran. The narcissistic star, Irene Livingston, the lachrymose director, Carleton Fitzgerald, and the cutthroat producer, Sidney Black, have all worked together before, but they’ve been at their best for some reason during rehearsals for Sloan’s show, a post-apocalyptic allegory that opens in the ruins of Radio City Music Hall. Consequently Peter has been deluded into thinking that they’re pure-hearted professionals who think with their hearts and sacrifice themselves for their art. However, when the opening-night audience laughs at the seriousness of their combined efforts, they revert to form, and Sloan, the most vulnerable of them, becomes their pet punching bag.

Critic's Notes and Frames Vol. XV

In the recent issue of Pitchfork, Dhani Harrison describes a conversation he had with his late father about his guitar playing. “My father once said to me, ‘I play the notes you never hear,’” he remembers. “He focused on touch and control partly because he never thought he was any good, really. He knew he was good at smaller things: not hitting any off notes, not making strings buzz, not playing anything that would jar you. ‘Everyone else has played all the other bullshit,’ he would say. ‘I just play what's left.’”

I started to think about what song might illustrate best for me the notion of playing 'what's left.' On Beatles for Sale (or Beatles VI – if you grew up like me in North America), "What You're Doing" has a solo that's quite economical in that George Harrison style. The notes he plays (over-top George Martin's rumbling piano) are picked at with a brightness that gives the song some of its shimmering texture. Yet it still harmonizes with the song's melodic line even when it briefly breaks free from it. Heard here best in mono, rather than stereo, the pieces are always designed to fit the whole.

In the Wake of Joni (Part Two): Wendy McNeill’s One Colour More, Rickie Lee Jones’s The Other Side of Desire and Eleni Mandell’s Dark Lights Up

Last week I started a review of new releases by women who I think have been influenced by Joni Mitchell. This week three more titles from women who, like Joni, pursue their muse with creative enthusiasm and fearlessness. All three albums were released this year.

Wendy McNeill is from Calgary, Alberta, currently living in Sweden. She’s one of the freshest songwriters and performers in Canadian music today. And, like most “over-night success stories, she’s been working at her craft since 1997. Her latest release One Colour More (Hidden Pop) is an eclectic delight to the ears that was first released in Europe. The move to Sweden has paid off because the album is a blend of dream pop, cabaret and folk tunes wonderfully fused together. The adventuresome record reminds me of Joni Mitchell’s music because McNeill isn't interested in just one sound: Each song has its own pallet. This record floats with Italian flare on “In Bocca al Lupa” (into the wolf's mouth) then quickly settles down with a Parisian ballad, “Owl and Boy,” a funny tale about matchmakers. McNeill’s songs are imaginative stories that have a certain mystic charm, as heard on “Papusza and the Crows.”

Spies, Hackers, & Reality Stars: Summer TV Roundup

Shiri Appleby and Josh Kelly on Lifetime's UnREAL.

The growth of television over the last decade-and-a-half has been remarkable. A medium once derided for its vacuity has expanded to dominate much of high culture as well as low, with serious publications featuring detailed exegeses on the nuances of dramas such as Breaking Bad and comedies such as Parks and Recreation. At the same time, TV’s rise has resulted in an explosion of new programming, especially scripted content, leading major critics such as Linda Holmes and Alan Sepinwall to wonder whether, in the latter’s words, there is “too much good scripted television.”

One corollary of scripted TV’s rise has been its expansion to new platforms at the same time that the broadcast networks, once the only game in town, have become increasingly boring and formulaic. “Prestige” television is generally understood to have migrated to outlets such as premium cable, online venues such as Netflix and Amazon, and some basic cable channels such as FX and AMC. However, the proliferation of scripted TV hasn’t stopped there. One of the most notable developments of this past summer has been the appearance of a number of very good shows on unlikely or little-known basic cable channels. The appearance of these shows suggests that even networks that seemed to have found comfortable, if unambitious, niches for themselves are looking to add some of the luster conferred by a quality original series to their reputations. None of these shows represents a radical reinvention of the form, but all of them offer a fresh approach to the now-familiar tropes of television drama.

Neglected Gem #82: Hollywood Homicide (2003)

Harrison Ford and Josh Hartnett in Hollywood Homicide (2003).

Ron Shelton’s Hollywood Homicide is breezy, low-key and smoothly crafted. It’s Shelton’s Hollywood movie (he co-wrote it with Robert Souza), so though it presents a no-big-deal police-procedural plot involving an ex-con (the excellent Isaiah Washington), now managing rappers, who hires an ex-cop (Dwight Yoakam) as a hit man to kill off a band no longer interested in his services, it has a hip, free-wheeling spirit and an almost put-on, not-quite-of-this-world feel. (A car in a chase smashes through what looks like a brick wall but turns out to be a movie-set drop – a good variation on a joke from the king of Hollywood-on-Hollywood pictures, Singin’ in the Rain.) The heroes are two LAPD cops who execute their job with alacrity even though each has more pressing matters on his mind. The older, Joe (Harrison Ford), has a real-estate business on the side that he’s hoping will heft him out of his current financial hole (he pays alimony to three ex-wives). He’s constantly taking calls on his cell, and he even brokers a deal to hook up one of the suspects – the owner of the club where the rappers were murdered – with a past-his-prime producer (Martin Landau) who wants to get rid of his Beverly Hills crib. K.C. (Josh Hartnett), the young stud with whom he’s lately been partnered, gives yoga classes to a room full of nubile females, and tells Joe he’s thinking of quitting the force and becoming an actor. (He throws together a showcase of A Streetcar Named Desire with himself as Stanley Kowalski.) K.C. became a cop because his dad was one and died mysteriously on the job. But though he tracks down his dad’s killer in the course of the movie, Shelton is smart enough not to let that subplot take over or alter the tone. The pieces of the plot fit together, but Hollywood Homicide is directed so that you don’t give them much thought. (You might, of course, if they didn’t fit together.)

Swedish / American Charm: The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend

Author Katarina Bivald. (Photo by Cecilia Bivald)

I don’t usually read books that are designated ‘chick lit’, but I will admit the distinction is an arbitrary one on my part. (I don’t avoid movies labeled 'chick flicks' and don’t, in fact, recognize that distinction. A good movie is a good movie, so why segregate films or books by the supposed gender they are aimed for?) However, I’ve had such a bad run on my reading this year, including the disappointments of Dan Simmons’ sloppily and badly written Sherlock Holmes pastiche The Fifth Heart and Richard Price’s new novel The Whites, written under the pseudonym Harry Brandt and much more conventional than his understated, original masterpieces Clockers, Samaritan and Lush Life. Thus, when my bookstore co-worker, Claire, whose opinion I respect, mentioned in passing that Katarina Bivald’s debut novel The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend (Vintage Publishing) was worth my time, I decided to give it a try. The result was, as the publicists would phrase it, a decidedly good read.

Off The Shelf: There’s Something About Mary (1998)

Ben Stiller and Cameron Diaz in There’s Something About Mary (1998).

The R-rated comedy that also qualifies as a great film is a rare breed. Comedies, according to popular wisdom, are as hard to pull off as dramas, if not more so – and so raunchy, adult-themed comedies face the uniquely difficult task of being funny, smart, and provocative all at once. Peter and Bobby Farrelly, directors of slapstick comedies like Dumb & Dumber, Kingpins, and The Three Stooges, might not outwardly appear to have mastered this tricky balance, but their 1998 gross-out masterpiece, There’s Something About Mary, tips their hand. It’s a film that everyone remembers for a single, horrifically uncomfortable sight gag, but it stands up amazingly well under critical scrutiny. Successors to the Farrelly throne, like the ultra-popular Judd Apatow and his league of friends and collaborators, have gotten it half-right: they make memorable R-rated comedies with funny performances and clever gags, but these films often fall apart in narrative structure, or simply in terms of using film as a medium to its fullest potential. In short, there’s really something about There’s Something About Mary, which sets it apart not just as a fantastic comedy but an excellent film.

Ibsen and Barrie Rarities at the Shaw Festival

Moya O'Connell and Ric Reid in The Lady from the Sea, at Niagara-on-the-Lake's Shaw Festival. (Photo: David Cooper)

The Lady from the Sea is an infrequently performed late Ibsen, one of those realist plays of his that teeters on the edge of symbolism, like The Wild Duck. (He wrote it in 1888, between Rosmersholm and Hedda Gabler.) The character who has earned the title moniker among locals in a Norwegian seacoast town is Ellida Wangel. She is married to a devoted doctor but has grown increasingly distant from him and hasn’t quite taken on the burden of stepmother to his two daughters, Bolette and Hilde. He assumes that the problem is her inability to get over the death of their own child (she hasn’t slept with him since), but it’s more complicated. Ellida is haunted by a lost love, an American sailor to whom she was engaged but who ran away to escape imprisonment for the murder of a ship’s captain. The connection she feels to the unnamed American is powerful, primal and also terrifying, because she senses that he is drawing her into the sea itself, where they threw their wedding rings when they plighted their troth. In the course of the play the stranger returns and calls on Ellida to fulfill her promise to him, refusing to recognize her as a woman married to another man.

In The Wake of Joni (Part One): Iris Dement's The Trackless Woods, Melody Gardot's Currency of Man and Laura Marling's Short Movie

Joni Mitchell (Photographed as part of the Saint Laurent's Music Project)

Last month I was celebrating a friend’s birthday with some fine wine, good company and a lot of music. At the time, Joni Mitchell was in the news having recently lost her voice after collapsing into a coma at home. My friend and I shared some worry over our favourite singer; an artist “we grew up with” all those years ago. The party lingered until we put Court & Spark on our stereo set to honour and celebrate Joni’s beautiful voice. As I said to my friend, who is three weeks older than I am, what can you say about a songwriter who believes that “there’s comfort in melancholy” as she sings on Hejira one of the most prized albums in our collections. I understand that Mitchell is doing much better having suffered an aneurysm that took her to hospital. She’s at home and she’s slowly recovering.

News of Joni’s improving health got me to thinking about some of the women who could be considered disciples or in her creative shadow. Since I’ve completed the principle writing of my book on Frank Zappa, I’ve been able to take the time to listen to some new recordings and revisit some older releases from earlier this year. I have six records all written and performed by women who have found their individual voices without compromise; free to express themselves, they each carry that special “something” that seems to hold that Joni Mitchell temperament.

Genius: James Ponsoldt's The End of the Tour

Jason Segel and Jesse Eisenberg in The End of the Tour.

It's only the end of August and it's already been a terrific year for movies. They've arrived from all corners of the globe and each with very distinct sensibilities that set them apart from the demands of the marketplace towards being generic. Besides the quirky enchantment of Paddington, there was Olivier Assayas' sumptuously satisfying Clouds of Sils Maria, the sublime sweet sadness of the Brian Wilson bio pic Love & Mercy, Carlos Marques-Marcet's erotically charged 10,000 km, Alex Gibney's fearless scrutiny in Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief and his nuanced consideration of Sinatra: All or Nothing at All, the conventions of the western being freshly reexamined in Slow West, and the new rendering of an old theme in Ex Machina. There was the resurrection of director David Gordon Green (George Washington) returning from the wilderness of mediocrity (Pineapple Express) with Manglehorn where Al Pacino equals the bold work he did last year in the largely ignored The Humbling (which was the movie that Birdman pretended to be). If someone was trying to pose the argument that cinema was dead, I would point to these pictures as signs that the art form is still alive and breathing quite nicely. Now James Ponsoldt (The Spectacular Now) caps off the summer with the extraordinary The End of the Tour, a perceptive comic masterpiece that cuts to the quick of timely questions about celebrity and artistic authenticity and the movie does it with an intelligent wit that is as probing as it is poignant.

The Once and Future King: Patrick Stewart and Blunt Talk

Patrick Stewart and Adrian Scarborough star in Blunt Talk, on Starz.

On these pages almost three years ago, I mourned the loss of HBO's Bored to Death. When the Jonathan Ames-helmed comedy (a literate madcap romp with a shameless New Yorker feel) left our cable airwaves, I genuinely expected to never see its like again. I shouldn't have worried – television has provided. With recent shows like Simon Rich's Man Seeking Woman (which will return early in 2016) and Shalom Auslander's Happyish (which sadly will not) arriving to fill the Jonathan Ames-shaped hole on the small screen, it is almost as if there is a trend afoot. (Mind you, with the current surfeit of quality television – coming from the newfangled likes of Amazon, Netflix, and even Yahoo! – we may be in an age with more trends than channels!)

Last week, Jonathan Ames himself returned to television as creator and writer of Blunt Talk, a dark comedy starring Patrick Stewart as Walter Blunt, an aging cable newscaster coming to end of his rope, personally and professionally. The Starz series is notably Stewart's first regular television role since Star Trek: The Next Generation went off the air in 1994. The 75-year-old actor has, of course, been lending his voice and image to American Dad! since 2005 in the recurring role of Avery Bullock, Stan's drug-addicted, polymorphously perverse CIA boss, showcasing the Shakespearean actor's willingness to play with both his image and our ever expanding boundaries of good taste. American Dad! (and Family Guy) creator Seth MacFarlane is actually on board with Blunt Talk as executive producer, so it's not surprising that Blunt has much more in common with Bullock than with Jean-Luc Picard or Charles Xavier.

Cruise Control Freak: On Almost 35 Years of Tom Cruise

Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, now in theatres.

Tom Cruise is the spirit of the 1980s incarnate. This is not necessarily a good thing, unless you’re the kind of person who voted for Ronald Reagan twice and would have jumped at the chance to do it a third time. The ‘70s and ’60s produced a number of movie stars who cultivated images as rebels or outsiders who, one way or another, were unable to make peace with authority and at odds with the status quo. But so did the patriotic ‘40s and the bland, gray-flannel-suit ‘50s; maybe it spoke well of the general mental health and confidence level of Americans of that time that the culture was able to accommodate Brando and Bogart and John Garfield and James Dean alongside such uncomplicated hero figures as Charlton Heston, John Wayne, and Rock Hudson. (Nowadays, Film Studies majors will happily step up to explain that the rock-ribbed all-American types were dizzyingly complicated figures themselves, from Wayne the psychotic racist hero of The Searchers to the closeted gay man Rock Hudson playing all those characters who were defined by the lust they inspired in Douglas Sirk heroines and Doris Day, but that is definitely not how either their fans or the stars themselves saw them at the time.)

In the ‘80s, a lot of Americans felt so disoriented and dispirited over the changes the country had gone through that they wanted to believe in a return to a nonexistent time when Leave It to Beaver was reality TV. The desire must have been very strong, because there are people who, ten years after Reagan’s death, still honor his memory by talking about the president who turned the national debt radioactive and sold arms to Iran as part of a secret, illegal foreign policy strategy as a straight shooter who kept the purse strings tight and never deigned to negotiate with rogue nations. It was in this cultural climate that Cruise, along with Eddie Murphy and Sylvester Stallone, became the biggest box-office draws of the decade by making movies in which they won. It didn’t matter that much what they won; the movies were pure, abstract celebrations of winning, of being top dog, pure and simple, and although the movies tried to adhere to the genre convention that winners win after overcoming great odds, Murphy, in particular, seemed very impatient with maintaining the pretense that anyone could ever stop him from winning or might even briefly keep up with him in a battle of wits. (Stallone, a wizened veteran compared to the other two, had become a star via a movie, Rocky, in which his character “won” something—self-respect, his manhood, the love of a good woman, like that—by losing a big boxing match. If Stallone was once tolerant of anything less than winning 100%, he got over it. Released late in November 1976, after Jimmy Carter was elected president but before he took office, Rocky is a transitional film; it has one foot in the ‘70s and one in the moment before the ‘80s began but after Americans had started to feel that it had had enough bitter post-imperial self-reflection to do it for awhile.)

Return to Greatness: Al Pacino in Manglehorn

As the title character in David Gordon Green’s Manglehorn, a lonely, irascible locksmith in a small Texas city, Al Pacino gives a display of battered grandeur. After too many years of outsize, hammy acting, usually in movies unworthy of his gifts (including the one that finally won him an Oscar, Scent of a Woman in 1992), Pacino has lately returned, somewhat mysteriously, to the understated style, dense with turbulent, conflicted feeling, that placed him at the top of his generation in The Godfather I and II and Scarecrow. I’ve sometimes enjoyed the coarse, ranting, kinetic Pacino that replaced his early deep-dyed Method persona – certainly in Dog Day Afternoon, which he was magnificent in, and also in Sea of Love and Carlito’s Way and City Hall – and I’ve loved him on stage as Shylock (a role he’d botched earlier on screen) and O’Neill’s Hughie and Teach in American Buffalo. But his work in The Humbling and now in Manglehorn has a mournfulness and contemplativeness that take us back to Michael Corleone but have deepened with age and are responsive in new ways (ironic humor in The Humbling, solitariness and haunted nostalgia and sudden, unpredictable bursts of anger) to the unremitting presence of adversity. Though their styles are widely different, what Pacino pulls off in these pictures reminds me of Burt Lancaster’s accomplishments in his late sixties, in movies like Atlantic City and Cattle Annie and Little Britches. (Pacino turned seventy-five this year.)

Swingin’ Sixties: The Man from U.N.C.L.E.

Henry Cavill and Armie Hammer in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (Photo by Daniel Smith, Warner Bros. Pictures)

The bar for espionage antics in 2015 has been raised unreasonably high by Ethan Hunt and his Impossible Missions Force, so I wasn’t sure at all that an old-fashioned Cold War caper like The Man From U.N.C.L.E. could even compete. Sure, it was the first film by Guy Ritchie since his Robert Downey Jr-led Sherlock Holmes sequel, A Game of Shadows, and sure, the trailer promised a heaping helping of old-school charm and mid-60s mod fashion. But is that enough to put it in the ring with what is, in my opinion, the best action spy thriller in recent memory?

Sweet Charity: Manhattan Waif

Julie Martell (centre) with the cast of Sweet Charity, at Niagara-on-the-Lake's Shaw Festival. (Photo by David Cooper)

The 1966 musical Sweet Charity is built around a debased modern version of a fairy-tale heroine, an eternally optimistic New York taxi dancer who falls for men who invariably let her down. The book, which Neil Simon based on the great Fellini movie Nights of Cabiria, employs the Manhattan setting to localize Charity’s story, just as Fellini made use of Rome; one episode, where Charity, in the right place at the right time, finds herself on an improbable date with a dishy Italian superstar who’s just quarreled with his paramour, is straight out of the film. But Simon and the songwriters, Cy Coleman and Dorothy Fields, and the director-choreographer, Bob Fosse – who conceived the project as a vehicle for his frequent muse and one-time wife Gwen Verdon, a magnificent show dancer with an endearing cracked voice full of burgundy bubbles – softened the narrative. Cabiria (played, unforgettably, by Fellini’s wife, Giulietta Masina), is a hooker who pictures herself living out the last act of a romance; the first man who treats her like a lady, Oscar (François Périer), turns out to be a thief who swindles her out of her life savings. (One of Fellini’s coups is the way he uses a pair of props, a cigarette and a pair of shades, to suggest a sinister side to Oscar moments before Cabiria intuits his true intentions.) In the musical, Oscar is a timid, earnest fellow Charity connects with when they’re trapped in an elevator together; their courtship takes them all over the city, including a hippie church and Coney Island).

Racism in Alive in America: Part Two

Part One of this piece appeared on Critics at Large on Sunday, August 16.

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
                                                   ― William Faulkner

Jim Grimsley's contention that “We reserve our special ideological fury for blackness” suffuses Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates. If the tone in most of Grimsley’s How I Shed My Skin is a gentle wistfulness, the mood that percolates throughout Between the World is one of anger, desperation and fear, punctuated by flashes of love for his teenage son, Samori. Coates, the author of the memoir, The Beautiful Struggle, has written in the form of a letter to his son about what it means to be a black man in America today. “In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body – it is heritage.” The violence to which Coates refers encompasses slavery, the terror of Jim Crow, and police brutality right up to the present moment, much of it covered by Grimsley. But Coates’ prose has a much more personal edginess to it as he has internalized and lived that history. The power of his writing in part derives from his capacity to dissolve the distinctions between the past and the present where one seamlessly flows into the other. Read the lyrical passages in Between the World and Me where he urges his son to not only respect all other living human beings but also to extend it to individuals once enslaved.

Coates insists that no amount of false morality about “personal responsibility” on the part of African Americans can shield them from lethal violence. Right from the outset when he attempts to help Samori grapple with his feelings after the police officer in Ferguson who killed Michael Brown was not indicted, Coates refuses to comfort his son or the white reader for whom this book is really intended, with “praise anthems [or] old Negro spirituals.” “There is no uplifting way” to tell the hard realities about brutality in America. Instead of bromides about racial progress, he can only offer the need for struggle, as he sets out to explore the question of how to “live free in this black body” when “black people controlled nothing, least of all the fate of their bodies, which could be commandeered by the police; which could be erased by the guns, which were so profligate; which could be raped, beaten, jailed.” As a result of his own life experiences, he believed he was in a war “for the possession of his body, and this would be the war of his whole life.” This is not a book for those whose only touchstone for improving race relations is Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech or for anyone who wants to see America through the prism of what Coates calls the “Dream” of “perfect houses with nice lawns.”

A Lesson in Tedium: The Kindergarten Teacher

Avi Shnaidman (left) and Sarit Larry in The Kindergarten Teacher.

Nadav Lapid’s The Kindergarten Teacher is an atypical Israeli film, reminding one more of the lugubrious films of the late filmmakers, Andrei Tarkovsky (Solaris) and Theo Angelopoulos (Landscape in the Mist) than of the fine and realistic cinema (Walk on Water, Broken Wings, Yossi) one is used to seeing from that country. It’s a heavy-handed drama that purports to be more than it actually is, one that's sorely taxing to sit through.

Neglected Gem #81: Starting Out in the Evening (2007)

Frank Langella in Starting Out in the Evening (2007).

Brian Morton’s novels – The Dylanist, Starting Out in the Evening, A Window Across the River, Breakable You, and his most recent, Florence Gordon – are small-scale and elliptical but they pierce you to the heart. There isn’t a character or an episode in any of them that doesn’t feel completely imagined, as if he were writing only about people he’s met and situations he’s experienced at first hand or observed acutely and then felt his way through, so the voice is always utterly fresh. The only one I found unsatisfying was the third, Window Across the River, because it had the impression of incompleteness – notes for a novel. But I thought that perhaps he hadn’t added the parts he wasn’t absolutely sure of, and he refused to phony up an ending. Morton doesn’t stint on emotion: you always get the sense that you’re encountering the characters naked. His novels remind me of some of the movies from the early seventies I love, allusive, personal movies like Loving, Blume in Love, Thieves Like Us and The Last Picture Show and the best parts of Up the Sandbox and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, which capture experiences no one seems to have dramatized before or at least not quite in that way.

Off the Shelf: Julie Salamon's The Devil's Candy (1991)

Tom Hanks and Melanie Griffith in The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990).

"Brian De Palma walked right off a cliff when he made his version of the Tom Wolfe novel The Bonfire of the Vanities," wrote Pauline Kael in The New Yorker when the movie opened during the Christmas season of 1990. "It's ingenious; there's clever thinking behind it. And it's a fizzle...like a sci-fi version of a loud, over-bright screwball comedy." In The Devil's Candy: The Bonfire of the Vanities Goes to Hollywood, a fascinating and painfully comic account of the unmaking of a highly controversial book, Julie Salamon (a novelist who was once the film critic for the Wall Street Journal) traces those futile steps that led right up to the edge of that deadly cliff. With a perception that's both poignant and prescient, Salamon gives us a searing portrait of Hollywood studio bungling in the early Nineties. The Devil's Candy is about the desperate actions of Warner Brothers who were hungry for a huge hit – the devil's candy of the title. They took a scabrous best seller with politically volatile material, miscast it, and then hired Brian De Palma, a director known for his own satiric volatility, and essentially asked him to make a feel-good film out of a story about political greed and racism in the Eighties. The movie was both a critical and commercial disaster. Salamon, with a judicious wit, unravels bit-by-bit the cruel process of the whole debacle.

Long Night's Journey into Day: Williamstown Theatre Festival's A Moon for the Misbegotten

(left to right) Glynn Turman, Audra McDonald and Will Swenson. (Photo by T. Charles Erickson)

A three-hour drive through the backwoods of Massachusetts in order to sit through an equally long Eugene O’Neill play gives you a lot of time to contemplate the anxiety-inducing question of whether the production will be any good. Fortunately, the Williamstown Theatre Festival’s A Moon for the Misbegotten features a central performance that just about makes the trip worth it. Moon has become such a fixture in the canon of Great American Plays that it’s easy to forget just how odd it is. O’Neill’s drama, which tells the story of James Tyrone and his final encounter with poor farmer’s daughter Josie Hogan, begins in a semi-comic vein, with stage-Irish horseplay and a flirtation between Tyrone and Josie. There are also elements of rent-day melodrama, with looming questions over who will end up with the farm on which the Hogans live and which Tyrone owns.

Then, as night falls, the play takes a decided turn, leading up to an immensely touching scene in the titular moonlight on the steps of the Hogan farmhouse. The comedy dissipates entirely, and O’Neill’s true intent becomes clear: it’s a dramatic re-imagining of his real-life brother James O’Neill, Jr.’s final days, one in which the playwright gets to write both his brother’s confession of his awful behavior before and after their mother’s death as well as an absolution for these sins. It’s a weird sort of anti-tragedy: at the end of the play, Tyrone exits towards his death, but we’ve come to understand that this is a mercy, and that, thanks to Josie, he’s achieved a modicum of peace. The play ultimately comes to transcend its Realist trappings and approaches closer to Symbolism, with the religiously-charged image of Tyrone lying in Josie’s arms like a modern Pieta. The action, confined to one location and a twenty-four hour time span, begins with the end of one day and the sun’s rising on another, which parallels the shifts in tone throughout the play. Call it Long Night’s Journey Into Day.

Parental Discretion Iz Advised: Straight Outta Compton

Neil Brown Jr., Aldis Hodge, Corey Hawkins, Jason Mitchell and O'Shea Jackson Jr. in Straight Outta Compton.

Here’s a film I never thought I’d see. While seminal rap posse N.W.A (Niggaz Wit Attitudes, for the uninitiated, made up of Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, Eazy-E, MC Ren, DJ Yella, and others) made their careers – and changed the rap genre from the inside out – by describing the harsh reality of their South Central Los Angeles upbringings, that same shocking honesty wouldn’t seem possible in a film produced by the rappers themselves. Would they really be willing to show the seedier parts of their rise to wealth and cultural significance? Would they be willing to throw it all out there, the way they did with their music, warts and all? Well – sort of. Director F. Gary Gray takes the conventional prestige-type approach to his unconventional, prestige-averse subject, which means we get a depiction of the genesis of g-funk and West Coast gangsta rap that humanizes and softens and even lionizes its contributors, but – and this is no doubt due to the real Ice Cube and Dr. Dre’s involvement in producing the film – it also forgets, omits, or otherwise glosses over many of the group’s less flattering pieces of history. It’s a biopic with excellent casting and strongly realized performances that wants less to tell the truth of N.W.A’s challenging story and more to act as a time capsule for posterity: a loving self-written paean to their massive cultural impact and not a cutting exploration of the problems and contradictions that defined their lives and work. But I’ll get into those in a bit.

The Divine: Too Much Going On

Fiona Reid in The Divine: A Play for Sarah Bernhardt, the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake. (Photo: David Cooper)

In 1905, the legendary French actress Sarah Bernhardt brought a troupe of actors to Québec City to perform three plays in repertory. She was already in her early sixties, but according to the nineteenth-century traditions that still adhered into the early twentieth, great stars were thought of as ageless and inhabited their vehicles for decades. So the idea of “The Divine Sarah,” as she was popularly called, continuing to play ingénue roles like Marguerite in Camille by Dumas or the title role in Scribe and Legouvé’s Adrienne Lecouvreur wouldn’t have seemed bizarre to audiences or critics – though realists like Strindberg and Chekhov were breaking ground by challenging this and other implausibilities in a theatre that still clung to the vision of the Romantic age. (Arkadina, the actress in The Sea Gull, is a second-tier diva of the Bernhardt school, and Chekhov has some fun at her expense.) Bernhardt’s visit incited a furor when the archbishop, representing a still feudal and repressive Catholic church, objected strenuously to her appearing on a Québec stage. He would have had many reasons for trying to shut her down: she played male as well as female characters, she didn’t shy away from lurid and controversial subject matter, her offstage lifestyle was unconventional and scandalous, and – not least among the qualities that would have made her an unsavory figure in the eyes of the church – she had been born Jewish, though she’d converted to Catholicism.

This historical incident was the starting point for The Divine: A Play for Sarah Bernhardt, a new work by the Québecois playwright Michel Marc Bouchard that the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake is premiering this season (in a translation by Linda Gaboriau). Bouchard has added several narrative layers. The protagonist isn’t Bernhardt (played by Fiona Reid) but a young seminarian named Michaud (Ben Sanders), the son of a cabinet minister and a devotee of the actress, who is sent to deliver the archbishop’s letter denouncing her but winds up writing a play for her. The hero of his drama – the role she is eager to play – is actually based on his dormitory mate Talbot (Wade Bogert-O’Brien). Talbot is a working-class boy whose mother (Mary Haney) has, through considerable personal sacrifice, placed in the seminary (where his classmates are all aristocrats like Michaud) because the priesthood is the only route of escape from poverty for a boy from his background. Mrs. Talbot and her twelve-year-old son Leo (Kyle Orzech) slave in a shoe factory in wretched conditions; children like Leo, whose employment is officially illegal, are especially vulnerable. (Two little girls recently died horrible deaths here when their hair caught in the machine.) And there’s even more plot: Talbot’s entry into the seminary follows his severe beating of a priest who was initially his intellectual mentor and then began abusing him when Talbot was twelve. Brother Casgrain (Martin Happer), the director of the seminary, offers Talbot a scholarship as well as an education for Leo if he agrees not to make an official complaint about the abuse. Casgrain is also Michaud’s protector: the rules here are strict, but Michaud keeps flouting them, and Casgrain lets him get away with it. (Casgrain sees his younger self in Michaud, though his affection clearly has an un-acted-upon erotic component.) The play also covers Talbot’s coming of age, which includes his sowing his wild oats with an actress in Bernhardt’s company (Darcy Gerhart), with whom he visits an opium den and a gambling house before making love to her.

Racism is Alive in America: Part One

“The two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black; and all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals, if honest and industrious; and hence have a position and pride of character of which neither poverty nor misfortune can deprive them.”

― John C. Calhoun, 1848

Some of the names will be familiar, some may not: Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, Walter L. Scott and Freddie Gray. What they all share in common is that they were unarmed black men who were either killed by the police or in the case of Martin, by an armed killer who was acquitted. Compound these individual killings with the June domestic terrorist act in Charleston, S.C., where a young white man motivated by sheer racial hatred executed nine black worshipers in an historic black church. The zealot left behind a manifesto that leaves little doubt that he was inspired by the Web site of the Council of Conservative Citizens, a prominent white supremacist group that has funded Republican contenders for the Presidency in 2016.

The current incumbent, Barack Obama, has belatedly become emboldened and retrieved his mojo in the twilight of his Presidency, particularly on matters of race. Where once he cautiously deployed the bully pulpit to speak about encouraging personal responsibility, he has now, in columnist Maureen Dowd’s words, “discovered a more gingerly voice.” Consider the following checklist: a searing speech on race relations and his moving rendition of “Amazing Grace” in the Charleston eulogy for the pastor, Reverend Clementa Pinckney. For the first time in American history Obama made a presidential visit to a federal prison to showcase the problem with sentencing policies that have filled the nation’s prisons with nonviolent offenders who are disproportionately African American. There he spoke with felons to say, “There but for the grace of God.” He also told the NAACP that African Americans were “more likely to be stopped, frisked, questioned, charged, detained,” and more likely to be arrested. “They are more likely to be sentenced to more time for the same crime.” But his boldest comments occurred when he chose a podcast with comedian Marc Maron to address race relations. Although he said that they have clearly improved in our lifetime, he made it clear that “we are not cured” of racism “and it’s not just a matter of it not being polite to say ‘nigger’ in public.” Slavery and Jim Crow discrimination cast “a long shadow, and that’s still part of our DNA that’s passed on.” Obama’s impassionate remarks suggest that he is either in tune with the zeitgeist or he has been reading Jim Grimsley's courageous memoir How I Shed My Skin: Unlearning the Racist Lessons of a Southern Childhood (Algonquin Books, 2015) and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ unflinching treatise Between the World and Me (Spiegel & Grau, 2015). Although they are strikingly different in tone and style, they complement each other and offer insightful contributions to the conversation about race in America.

Tales From the Dark Side: The Lust for Vinyl

The last time I wrote about buying vinyl, it was after a Record Store Day. I sent off early in the morning cruising a variety of shops to score some of the exclusive discs that are especially created one day in April for music hungry fanatics like myself. There’s another such day coming up in November. They call it Black Friday. Vinyl is black, you see. Although many of these special releases are pressed on coloured, even multi-coloured vinyl, to draw the rabid collector in even further. But somewhere back in the collector’s history there must be a beginning where this craving began. We all understand cravings these days. The proliferation of vampire and zombie stories, with their creatures’ cravings for blood and brains is just what makes people of a certain age, and bent, to wander the streets searching for a way to satisfy that vinyl-lust. I started to think about the first record stores I ever visited to see what it was that drew me into this dark world in the first place.

Insider Outsiders: Hulu's Difficult People

Julie Klausner and Billy Eichner star in Difficult People, on Hulu.

This past fall, IFC premiered a comedy called Garfunkel and Oates. The short-lived series starred Riki Lindhome ("Garfunkel") and Kate Micucci ("Oates") as a female musical comedy duo trying to make it in Hollywood, one NSFW folk song at a time. Admittedly I came a bit late to the party, only watching the show after IFC had already cancelled it, and only even becoming aware of it because of Lindhome's new Comedy Central series Another Period, which she co-stars and co-created with Chelsea Lately regular Natasha Leggero. (Another Period, a scatological "parody of manners" best described as Downton Abbey meets Keeping Up with Kardashians – and whose cast also includes Mad Men's Christina Hendricks – will finish its first season at the end of the month and is also among the most pleasurable of this summer's guilty pleasures.) Garfunkel and Oates is buoyed by the unassuming charm of its lead players and (unapologetically borrowing from HBO's Flight of the Conchords) provides ample opportunity for well-produced cutaway videos of the kinds of songs that have made the duo famous on YouTube over the years. It also offers a timely glimpse into the pandemic sexism of the internet and the comedy world in general. (Asked by a comedy club owner "Please, no material about your periods," the two acquiesce only to segue into a lengthy on-screen conversation about, of course, their periods.) Garfunkel and Oates – like the act which inspired it – was alternately biting and adorable, and was, for its brief time on our airwaves, always entertaining.

Shows about comedians, with the comics playing slightly tweaked versions of themselves, have long been a TV staple. From Jack Benny to Garry Shandling to Jerry Seinfeld to Larry David to the sublime Louis C.K., the list includes some of the funniest and often most innovative shows on television. (As last year's lamentable Mulaney demonstrates, however, the trope isn't always a guarantee of success: Mulaney felt a little like what I would have imagined the fictional series "NBC" commissioned from George and Jerry in the middle seasons of Seinfeld to have been like.) This past year, along with Garfunkel and Oates, television has added two new shows to that list, both notably about the travails of comedy duos: FX's (already cancelled) mockumentary-styled The Comedians (starring Billy Crystal and Josh Gad), and now Hulu's Difficult People. The latter premiered on Hulu on August 5, and will release one new episode a week until mid-September.

Blast from the Past: The Gift

Joel Edgerton (right) in The Gift, a film Edgerton also wrote and directed.

In movies, the Australian actor Joel Edgerton is best known for playing a wide assortment of muscle men and meatheads. Edgerton was the thuggish small-time crime lord in Animal Kingdom, one of the Navy SEALs on a mission to take out Osama bin Laden in Zero Dark Thirty, and the MMA fighter who reconnects with his estranged brother (Tom Hardy) by kicking his ass in the Octagon in Gavin O’Connor critically acclaimed, sweat-stained male weepie Warrior. (On stage, he has taken on the greatest meathead role in the pantheon of the American theater, Stanley Kowalski, in two separate productions of A Streetcar Named Desire.) When Edgerton finally got the chance to play a character who doesn’t come down to dinner in his undershirt, it was the oafish nouveau riche villain Tom Buchanan in the 2013 Baz Luhrmann travesty The Great Gatsby.

There, he made the fatal mistake of trying to scale his performance to match the bombastic style of his director. Neither Luhrmann nor Edgerton seemed to understand that Tom’s lines about the scientific basis for racism and looking out for number one are enough on their own to mark him as an obnoxious fellow; it isn’t really necessary for the actor to underline things by bellowing every syllable. Edgerton makes his directing debut with The Gift, which he also wrote and acts in, and it’s a bit of a shock: a deft, perfectly controlled little thriller, a commercial entertainment but one that’s smart and detailed and rewards close attention to the nuances of what’s being said and how. It is that rarest of oases in the late summer movie release schedule, an actor’s movie.

Shakespeare For The Masses: Commonwealth Shakespeare Company's King Lear

Commonwealth Shakespeare Company's King Lear. (Photo by Andrew Brilliant)

We are pleased to welcome a new critic, Michael Lueger, to our group.

Reviewing a free production of Shakespeare in the park might seem to miss the point. It seems that every day brings fresh hand-wringing about the future of the theatre, and whether the trends of rising ticket prices and aging audiences have sent it into a terminal decline. In light of such concerns, it’s encouraging that organizations such as the Commonwealth Shakespeare Company (CSC), which has been mounting Shakespeare on the Boston Common for 20 years now, and which staged King Lear from July 22 to August 9, are bringing free productions of classical works to a wide audience. However, the relative decline in the importance of theatre in popular culture means that, for many of those attending events such as Shakespeare on the Common, this may be the only production that they see in the course of the year. Many of the 75,000 attendees (by the CSC’s estimate) who saw Lear this summer will have their impressions of the theatre in general shaped by what they experience at this production, and may base future decisions on whether to attend other shows on its quality. Given those circumstances, it’s worth critiquing the CSC Lear for what it gets right and wrong about presenting Shakespeare to a wider audience.

Jackpot – Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation

Rebecca Ferguson and Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation.

Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt is a gambler, according to terrorist Solomon Lane (Sean Harris), a loose cannon whose reckless success relies more on luck than solid field work – which is one of the reasons the CIA has chosen to shut down his Impossible Mission Force. Luck does certainly play a large role in getting Ethan out of many of the harrowing situations he puts himself in, but it has nothing to do with the success of the Mission Impossible series, which – through experience, dedication, and craft – might have hit the jackpot on a perfect blockbuster spy thriller with Rogue Nation.

1984 in the 21st Century

Simon Coates, Christopher Patrick Nolan, Hara Yannas, Sam Crane, Tim Dutton, Stephen Fewell, Mandi Symonds & Matthew Spencer in 1984, at London's Almeida Theatre. (Photo by Manuel Harlan)

Robert Icke and Duncan Macmillan’s exciting production of George Orwell’s 1984 (they did the adaptation as well as directing it) began two years ago at the Nottingham Playhouse and toured around the U.K. before opening at the Almeida in London and subsequently the West End earlier this year. (It will tour the U.S. this fall, including a stop at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge.) Orwell’s 1949 classic is inherently dramatic, though both movie versions – one in 1956 and a second, naturally, in 1984 – were disappointments. (A 1953 television production for  CBS's Studio One attracted some notice, but I’ve never seen it.) Icke and Macmillan’s 1984 is relatively modest, though the stagecraft in the climactic scene where the Thought Police arrest Winston (Matthew Spencer) and his lover Julia (Janine Harouni) is quite sophisticated. The show has a cast of nine and Chloe Lamford’s set, which looks like a slightly moldy English library from the Depression era, also does service as an office, an apartment and a canteen; it manages to both look anonymous and suggest a nostalgic glimpse of an earlier England.

Off-key: Ricki and the Flash

The following contains spoilers.

Meryl Steep’s terrible performance as Ricki Rendazzo, a ‘rock chick’ who left her family years ago to try for music stardom, only to end up fronting a minor bar band in Tarzana, California, is only one of the many drawbacks of Ricki and the Flash, a movie whose truthfulness is as elusive as Ricki’s dreams of success. As the ‘aging’ Rendazzo, Streep is all pouty lips and pained expressions, outrageous outfits and excessive makeup; what she isn’t is a flesh and blood character. But Diablo Cody’s screenplay doesn’t allow for anyone to create anything memorable on screen and Jonathan Demme’s lazy direction – he’s never been worse – only underlines the emptiness and hackneyed nature of the movie.