Buried Child: Sam Shepard and Ed Harris

Ed Harris and Paul Sparks in Buried Child, at the Pershing Square Signature Center. (Photo: Monique Carboni)

When you watch Ed Harris as Dodge, the contrary, irascible patriarch of Sam Shepard’s Buried Child, in the current revival at New York City's Pershing Square Signature Center, you realize he was born to play this role – or more aptly, that the role has been waiting around for him to get old enough for it. I didn’t see Joseph Gistirak, who created the character at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco in 1978, or Richard Hamilton, who took it over in the original off-Broadway production, but I did see James Gammon in the 1996 Broadway version, and, playing the old man as a kind of ghost sniping at everyone around him as he continues to haunt the dilapidated Illinois family farmhouse, he performed marvels with that whiskey-soaked, hollowed-out voice. It didn’t occur to me that I’d ever see a better Dodge. But Harris injects the character, who’s stationed in front of his TV set, sneaking hits of apple jack until his son Tilden (Paul Sparks) makes off with his bottle while he’s asleep, with a hilariously mean-spirited life force that makes him seem unkillable, even if you know the play and realize he fades out at the end. Harris became famous for playing a straight-arrow American hero, John Glenn in Philip Kaufman’s 1983 The Right Stuff, but he’s sometimes used his classical American looks, that rangy cowboy handsomeness, as a starting point for an in-depth portrait – perhaps most vividly as Charlie Dick, husband to Jessica Lange’s Patsy Cline in the 1985 Sweet Dreams. He’s also used it ironically, as he did, also early on in his career, as the conscienceless mercenary in Under Fire. His performance in Buried Child belongs in the ironic category. You look at this ornery old codger, who doesn’t have a kind word to say about anybody – except, perhaps, his grandson Vince’s girl friend Shelly (Taissa Farmiga), whose obstinacy he can appreciate (he certifies her “a pistol”) – and see the corruption of the whole frontier legacy. It’s Harris’ scheme to make that corruption richly funny.

Neglected Gem #90: Deep End (1970)

John Moulder-Brown as Mike in Jerzy Skolimowski’s Deep End (1970).

Like steaming breath or moving shadows, Jerzy Skolimowski’s Deep End (1970) is impossible to fix in your mind and eye even as you watch it, and afterwards you may be uncertain what you’ve seen, let alone what it has meant. Everything occurs as if incidentally, never with a sense of theme being advanced, story developed, or fate fulfilled. The movie is simply happening. Yet not exactly randomly, for it has an intelligence which is encompassing if not controlling; and not in any documentary sense – it’s too not-quite-real for that. Not “unreal,” and certainly not “surreal,” just … not quite real. Deep End is not easy to describe.

90s Redux: The People v. O.J. Simpson

John Travolta, David Schwimmer and Cuba Gooding, Jr. in The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story.

I still remember the day that the jury in the O.J. Simpson murder trial reached a verdict. I was eleven at the time, and my parents had judiciously shielded me from many of the more gruesome and scandalous elements of the story, but I still knew that it was a big deal, if for no other reason than that a famous football player was on trial. Besides, everyone else seemed fascinated by it; when the verdict came through, I was at recess, and one of the teachers had brought a radio outside so that he could listen to the proceedings. As soon as he relayed the news to me and my fellow fifth-graders, who were huddling close to hear, we took off in a swarm, shouting out the verdict to everyone else on the playground. None of us knew what that decision really meant, but it certainly felt like a momentous occasion.

Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, the creators of FX’s new American Crime Story, presumably planned the first season of their anthology series with the hope that viewers would have a similarly personal recollection of the Simpson trial. In some ways, they’ve set up a tricky scenario for themselves: because the trial received such exhaustive coverage, there’s a lot of it that’s not only a matter of public record, but which also looms large in people’s memories of the mid-90s, restricting the amount of license that they and their cast can take with the story and characters. In that regard, it helps that they’ve chosen to adapt Jeffrey Toobin’s book, The Run of His Life: The People v. O.J. Simpson. I’m unfamiliar with Toobin’s account of the trial, but I’m willing to bet that basing a series like this, which covers fairly recent events featuring many individuals who are still alive, on a pre-existing nonfiction book will help deflect any accusations of rewriting history unfairly.

Neglected Gem #89: Human Resources (1999)

A scene from Laurent Cantet’s Human Resources (1999).

Laurent Cantet’s Human Resources (in French: Ressources humaines) is one of the few movies I can think of that truly delves into issues of labor and class. It’s set in France at the turn of the millennium, where the 35-hour work week is a hotly debated topic, in an auto factory in the provinces. This is the town where the movie’s protagonist, Franck Verdeau (Jalil Lespert), grew up; his father, Jean-Claude (Jean-Claude Vallod), has spent his whole adult life working at the same machine. But it’s Jean-Claude’s pride that he’s educated his son beyond his own station. Now, a year away from a graduate business degree, Franck returns home to intern in the factory on the management side, and it’s his father who emphasizes the importance of keeping his distance from the workers – of eating lunch, not with his dad and the men he’s known since he was a child, but with the boss, M. Rouet (Lucien Longueville), who has taken a liking to Franck and has hinted at the possibility of hiring him in a management position when he gets his degree. When Franck, drawing on what he’s learned in his university classes, comes up with the idea of asking the works to fill out a questionnaire about their feelings on the 35-hour work week, Rouet encourages him. The union has stated its opposition to the proposed change, but Franck – operating out of scholarly curiosity, not out of a political position – suspects that the questionnaire might indicate that the union is out of touch with the point of view of its members. What he’s too naïve to see is that Rouet is seizing on his questionnaire to further his own agenda: to create a wedge between the workers and their union and to make it possible for him to lay off employees, including, as it happens, Jean-Claude.

The Forest: Hiking and Xenophobia

Natalie Dormer in The Forest.

Another day, another bad horror movie.

Or so my life has seemed anyway, as I unwisely took in Jason Zada’s The Forest following on the heels of William Brent Bell’s disappointing The Boy. The Forest, Zada’s feature debut, is about a successful, well-adjusted woman (Natalie Dormer) who goes looking for her troubled twin sister (also Natalie Dormer) in Japan’s “Suicide Forest,” Aokigahara. The “Suicide Forest,” or “Sea of Trees” as it’s colloquially known, is a real place and the site of anywhere from 50-100 deaths a year. It’s the subject of both a popular 20-minute documentary from VICE and the 2015 Gus Van Sant flop, Sea of Trees. Briefly putting aside questions of tastefulness, Aokigahara’s macabre history has ample horror movie potential. The disturbing setting paired with Natalie Dormer, fresh from her roles as rebel filmmaker Cressida (The Hunger Games), and ambitious queen Margaery Tyrell (Game of Thrones), could have made for a halfway decent film. Unfortunately, The Forest instead trips and lands, Natalie-Dormer-in-the-woods style, into the usual xenophobia and nonsense writing characteristic of most of these “East meets West” horror films (The Grudge, Shutter).

All They Have To Do is Dream: The Cactus Blossoms' You’re Dreaming

I’m often surprised that more country music acts haven’t attempted to emulate Phil and Don Everly; perhaps in the great library of American music they are untouchable. But there is one band from Minnesota who has not only embraced the Everly sound – and they’ve carefully made it their own. The Cactus Blossoms have taken a huge musical risk on their Red House Records debut album, You’re Dreaming. Their sound is so much like the Everly Brothers it’s uncanny, but after getting to know their music, you realize this is not simple imitation by a long-shot, nor is it a tribute.

The Cactus Blossoms is a five-piece band with vocals by (brothers) Jack Torrey and Page Burkum. Their album of original songs harkens back to an era in American music that was about telling a great story filled with redemption and personal pain. Torrey and Burkum spent many hours in a St. Paul coffee house performing the Country Songbook. On this, their second album, The Cactus Blossoms re-invent all that history and tell stories of the human condition. “Change your ways and die,” sing Torrey and Burkum with warnings that “A sip of whiskey gets your toes wet, If you dive too deep you get caught in a net.”

The Witch: Think On Thy Sins

Anya Taylor-Joy in The Witch.

I love a film that delivers exactly what it promises. Yes, there is a witch in this movie, and the question of her existence is not a protracted affair like it would be in so many other modern horror flicks (“Is she really a witch, or is she just crazy? Is there a supernatural evil at work, or is it paranoia?”). Less than five minutes into the movie it is made unutterably clear that you are dealing with a bona fide, hut-dwelling, baby-stealing WITCH, and to expect anything less is to be wholly unprepared for the unapologetic cinematic assault that The Witch will make on your sensibilities. There’s a text card that follows the end credits of the film proudly announcing that the antiquated 17th-century dialogue (with its “thou wilt”s and “come hither”s) is based on accurate historical research, and includes direct excerpts from New England journals and correspondences from that time. But this level of dedication to period authenticity is just icing on the cake – the film by itself (a shockingly adroit debut by writer-director Robert Eggers) is an exquisitely crafted exercise in sustained tension and disturbing imagery, that advertises a descent into Satanic madness and gives you exactly that. I’ve been missing some good old-fashioned devilry in my horror fare, and The Witch makes up for any number of half-assed Sinisters and Paranormal Activitys we’ve had to endure for the past decade. Come prepared to witness evil in its truest form – and the finely made film that acts as its earthly vessel.

Spring Awakening: Wedekind with a Rock Beat

The cast of Spring Awakening at Broadway's Brooks Atkinson Theatre. (Photo: Joan Marcus)

The 2006 Spring Awakening is surely one of the oddest triumphs in musical-theatre history. Steven Sater’s book is a faithful rendering of the great (and still shocking) tragedy by the expressionist playwright Frank Wedekind – which had received its first performance exactly a century earlier – about the oppression of adolescents in turn-of-the-century Germany by a tyrannical educational system and parents whose treatment of their children falls along the spectrum from conformist terror and cowardice to insensitivity to downright cruelty. But the score, with lyrics by Sater and infectious music by Duncan Sheik, is contemporary. The combination feels like it shouldn’t work but it does: the musical numbers both comment on Wedekind’s text and place its depiction of teenage angst on a continuum that crosses into the twenty-first century. No one who has read about the epidemic of high-school suicides in Palo Alto over the past several year needs to be convinced of the relevance of Moritz Stiefel’s fate in the second act of Spring Awakening – because, befogged by the behavior of his hormones, he can’t concentrate on his overwhelming load of schoolwork and feels his weak academic performance has wrecked his life irrevocably. The songs in the musical electrify the anguished, overwrought responses of the young characters, as well as their confused, usually botched efforts at sexual experimentation.

Oscar Predictions: Best Documentary Short Film

Nurse Garmai Sumo in the Oscar-nominated documentary short Body Team 12.

At long last, I’ve arrived at the summit of my Oscar-nominated short film mountain. Having covered the Best Animated Short Film and Best Live Action Short Film nominees, the last leg of my journey is devoted to discussing 2016’s Academy Award-nominated Documentary Short Films. While I was looking forward to being an insufferable blowhard and boasting about having seen every nominated short film at whatever Oscar party I (probably won’t) attend, I’m sorry to report that some dreams really don’t come true. As it so happens, I have seen every 2016 nominated short film – except one: Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy’s A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness. While it’s rare to find a cinema that’s screening the Live Action and Animated shorts, it’s rarer still to find one showing the Documentaries. Alas, my local short-film-friendly theatre, Toronto’s TIFF Bell Lightbox, is unable to screen A Girl in the River, due to “rights issues.”

Obaid-Chinoy’s second Academy Award-nominated film, A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness is distributed by HBO (it is worth noting that 3 of 5 nominees this year are) and tells the story of a young Pakistani woman who survives an honour killing exacted as punishment for eloping with her lover. At the urging of community elders, she ultimately forgives her attackers. In the interest of fairness, I’ll be omitting A Girl in the River from my ranking, instead focusing on the four documentaries that I was able to see. It’s unclear whether or not A Girl in the River will be included when ShortsHD releases the Oscar nominated shorts for pay-per-view download on February 23rd but critical reception from critics who have actually seen the film suggests it’s worth looking into.

Without further ado, here’s my ranking of the rest of this year’s nominees for Best Documentary Short Film:

Thumbs down!: The Coen Brothers’ Hail, Caesar!

George Clooney in Joel and Ethan Coen's Hail Caesar!

Hail, Caesar!, the latest film from Joel and Ethan Coen, may be their most lacklustre film to date. The story, set in 1951, revolves around the goings-on when movie star Baird Whitlock (George Clooney) is kidnapped and harried studio executive Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) has to retrieve him before the plug has to be pulled on the studio's expensive Biblical epic, Hail, Caesar!: The Story of the Christ, which stars Whitlock. Hail, Caesar! has a lot of potential as a screwball comedy, skewering as it does everything from self-centered actors to pretentious directors to the leftist politics of the time but the movie is pretty much dead on arrival. The actors are bored and mostly boring, the set pieces, made up fake movies of various genres, musicals, high comedies, Westerns etc., are flat and unimaginative, and the whole production barely makes a comedic ripple. Remember how disinterested and indifferent the Coens were when they won the Best Picture Oscar for No Country for Old Men? Imagine a movie made with that same spirit of ennui and you have Hail, Caesar! in a nutshell.

The Price of Nonconformity in Ludmila Ulitskaya’s The Big Green Tent

Author Ludmila Ulitskaya.

In 2009, the Russian historian Vladislav Zubok (whom some may recall was the perceptive Soviet commentator in the original 1998 CNN landmark series, The Cold War) published Zhivago’s Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia. The monograph is an exploration of a generation of artists, scientists and thinkers who adopted the pre-revolutionary values “to regain autonomy from an autocratic regime.” Born in the 1940s, they were too young to remember war and Stalinist repression. Coming of age in the heady days of the Khrushchev Thaw, they welcomed his de-Stalinization initiatives, were sobered by the “soft” repression of the Brezhnev stagnation but still believed that the 1968 Prague Spring with its promise of “socialism with a human face” could turn into a Moscow Spring. The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia dashed their hopes. After carefully charting and documenting that painful trajectory from Boris Pasternak’s death to the presidency of Mikhail Gorbachev, and examining the differences and tensions between the liberal Westernized dissidents and the nationalist, often anti-Semitic Slavophiles, Zubok concludes that “their behaviour, with few exceptions among the principled dissidents, was checkered by conformism, cowardice, mutual denunciations, cynicism and hypocrisy. Quite a few of them were unable to resist pressures from the secret police, let alone the temptations of self-aggrandizement, vanity and profiteering.” Zubok tempers that harsh assessment by indicating that the dissident movement “deserve(s) empathy not condemnation” and did contribute to the glasnost policies of openness initiated by Gorbachev. Zudok’s conclusion encapsulates the sentiments expressed throughout Ludmila Ulitskaya’s novel, The Big Green Tent (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015, translated by Polly Gannon). His study is therefore an excellent companion piece to her novel. I had hoped that Zubok might have documented more fully his allegation that many of the dissidents were co-opted by the KGB, a phenomenon that Ulitskaya fully explores in Green Tent. 

Podcast: Interview with Daniel Day-Lewis (1988)

Daniel Day-Lewis and Lena Olin in The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988)

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show On the Arts, at CJRT-FM (today Jazz 91.1) in Toronto. With the late Tom Fulton, who was the show's prime host and producer, we did a half-hour interview program where we talked to artists from all fields.

One of those interviews was with actor Daniel Day-Lewis. Day-Lewis was in Toronto promoting his role in Philip Kaufman's adaptation of Milan Kundera's novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being. At the time of our conversation Day-Lewis was on the cusp of his most famous role, portraying Irish writer and painter Christy Brown in My Left Foot (1989).

– Kevin Courrier.

Here is the full interview with Daniel Day-Lewis as it aired on CJRT-FM in 1988.

Tom Fulton was the host and producer of On the Arts for CJRT-FM in Toronto for 23 years, beginning in 1975.

Kevin Courrier is a freelance writer/broadcaster, film critic and author (Dangerous Kitchen: The Subversive World of Zappa, Randy Newman's American Dreams, 33 1/3 Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica, Artificial Paradise: The Dark Side of The Beatles Utopian Dream). Courrier teaches part-time film courses to seniors through the LIFE Institute at Ryerson University in Toronto and other venues. His forthcoming book is Reflections in the Hall of Mirrors: American Movies and the Politics of Idealism. 

Endurance: Alejandro G. Iñárritu's The Revenant

Leonardo DiCaprio in Alejandro G. Iñárritu's The Revenant. (Photo: Kimberley French/20th Century Fox)

In Francois Truffaut's probing essay, "What Do Critics Dream About?" which opens his book of movie reviews, The Films in My Life, he writes, "I demand that a film express either the joy of making cinema or the agony of making cinema. I am not at all interested in anything in between; I am not interested in all those films that do not pulse." Of course, Truffaut (as both movie director and critic) is talking about the kind of visionary work where artists who break the bounds of convention risk not only alienating an audience, but also their own sanity in order to make their movie "pulse." That would include Erich von Stroheim's 1924 epic tale of avarice (Greed), Abel Gance's thrillingly lunatic Napoleon (1927), Orson Welles' groundbreaking Citizen Kane (1941), Bertolucci's equally inspired and crippling 1900 (1976), Martin Scorsese's ambitious musical, New York, New York (1977), Francis Coppola's metaphoric dirge Apocalypse Now (1979), Michael Cimino's amorphous western Heaven's Gate (1980), Werner Herzog's lunatic Fitzcarraldo (1982) and Terrence Malick's madly idiosyncratic The Tree of Life (2011). Whether any of these films achieve the artistic heights their directors intended is not the point. They were clearly movies perfumed in the joy or agony of their creator's need (or megalomanical desire) to stretch the art form – and if they didn't always work, they often made better films possible in those they inspired. But when it comes to Alejandro G. Iñárritu's epic adventure The Revenant, which has been piling up awards and accolades for its own daring, perhaps another category should be considered: the job of making cinema. For unlike the previously mentioned work, Iñárritu conceives his films (21 Grams, Babel, Biutiful and Birdman) as highly controlled endurance tests where the risks become self-consciously employed and (despite the director's enormous skill) the material turns into a mountain of familiar dramatic clichés. Based in part on Michael Punke's novel, which draws on the experiences of the fur trapper and frontiersman Hugh Glass, The Revenant is an epic and artful tale of revenge and redemption, but the motor running this mystical journey is fueled by the same blood lust that powers most commercial exploitation action films.

Getaway: Campo Santo’s Firewatch

Video games are expensive. They’re expensive to develop, to publish, and to manufacture. Your average title, regardless of which gaming system you use, will usually run you anywhere from sixty to eighty dollars or more (in Canada). They’re sometimes cheaper if you shop digitally, instead of trucking to the store to buy a physical disc copy, but it takes patience and a discerning eye to watch out for these infrequent deals. So, naturally, since they can often only afford a few games per year, many gamers are very careful to make sure they’re going to get full value for their gaming dollar.

So the question then is: how do you judge value in a game? It’s easy to associate hundreds of hours of playtime with significant dollar value (and even if your game offers “only” sixty hours’ worth of play time, you’re at least breaking even). This has led to an industry trend of developers artificially padding out their games with time-consuming filler content so that they satisfy this “gameplay hours = dollar value” formula, which is leaving little room for smaller, more compact, and more focused games to compete. An indie developer with a staff of just twelve people may have an excellent game to offer, but they can’t hope to sell more copies than Fallout – so they are being forced to carve out their own niche, catering to a smaller market with shorter, cheaper games. Good thing, too, because allowing these games to exist in their own category means that the occasional special title will shine out, and generate even more buzz than the big dogs.

Case in point: Firewatch, by San Francisco indie dream-team developer Campo Santo, which is available on PS4 and PC for $20, and which has demanded tons of media attention since its announcement last spring. I say “dream team” because the staff at Campo Santo boast impressive resumes, having worked on critically-acclaimed titles like The Walking Dead, Bioshock II, Ori & The Blind Forest, and Mark of the Ninja (not to mention those with experience outside the realm of gaming, like Rich Sommer of Mad Men fame, and revered illustrator Olly Moss, whose custom poster designs have been a staple in the film world for nearly a decade). This gathering of talent is a large part of why Firewatch has been on everyone’s radar, but the primary reason it caught my attention was its setup: it’s 1989 and you play as Henry, a volunteer lookout in Shoshone National Forest in Wyoming, who escapes his troubled past by retreating to these bucolic surroundings, only to find himself caught up in a strange mystery once he ventures into the woods. His – that is to say, your – only connection to humankind is through his handheld radio, which transmits the voice of his boss, Delilah. As Henry, you face strange and emotional questions, and make interpersonal choices that can deeply affect your only meaningful relationship, which only exists at the other end of your radio.

A Classic and a Rarity: Fiddler on the Roof and Cabin in the Sky

Lori Wilner (left), Jessica Hecht and Danny Burstein in Fiddler on the Roof. (Photo: Joan Marcus)

I fell in love with Fiddler on the Roof when, at thirteen, I heard the original cast album; by the time I saw it on Broadway I knew the wonderful Jerry Bock-Sheldon Harnick score by heart and I’d read Joseph Stein’s libretto through several times. (Those were the days when Random House regularly published new playscripts in deluxe hardback copies furnished with production photos.) Zero Mostel had already been replaced in the role of Tevye by the distinguished Group Theatre alumnus Luther Adler; I caught it again on the road a few years later with Herschel Bernardi. In my senior year at college Norman Jewison’s movie version came out, with the robust, warm-toned Israeli actor Topol in the starring role. It managed not only to reproduce the glories of the stage version (including, of course, the Jerome Robbins choreography) but to make a link, in the final moments, to the next chapter of the story of the Jewish diaspora: the exiles from the Russian shtetls, borne away on a raft in the film’s most exquisite image, would be the first generation of Jewish-Americans.

In his magnificent new Broadway revival, Bartlett Sher tries to make the leap to the twenty-first century by bookending the show with his leading man, Danny Burstein, in a parka reading from a book about the Jews of Anatevka before – and after – he dons the hat and prayer shawl of Tevye the dairyman. This frame is meant to situate the story in the larger one about refugees that is still, of course, with us. But it’s too vague to work and frankly, why would you want it to? If you felt the need to imply that the narrative of Fiddler on the Roof is only one chapter in a broader story, then the direction you’d have to head in would lead to the Holocaust – and that would be a truly terrible idea. The subject matter of the musical is rich enough; it doesn’t need generalization. Its great virtue is its specificity.

Two Halves Dance As One: Allen and Karen Kaeja and lifeDUETS

Allen and Karen Kaeja in lifeDUETS. (Photo by Zhenya Cerneacov)

For over a quarter century, Allen and Karen Kaeja have kept it real with contact improvisation, a no rules technique enabling them to move without premeditation. Relying on instinct more than memory to execute a step, as improv dancers they inhabit an animal state and are alive to every sensation alighting on the flesh. Vivacity of expression and being fully in the moment are qualities the Kaejas are best known for, and the choreographers they have commissioned to create new work for their lifeDUETS series have been wise to harness that raw energy for the dances they have designed for them to interpret.

Commemorating the married couple's 25 years as dancers and choreographers, the aptly named lifeDUETS features brave new work, one each by Benjamin Kamino and Tedd Robinson, daredevil choreographers both. The two-pronged program debuted in Toronto in October to packed houses and critical acclaim and is now going on the road. LifeDUETS will open Atlantic Ballet's upcoming festival of indie dance, IMPACTfest, in Moncton on Feb. 16, and next year will travel to the West Coast for performances in Vancouver. There's a reason the Kaejas are in demand.

Laughing at a Frightening World: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

The third season of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver premieres tomorrow night on HBO.

Our world has always been a scary place, but the rise of cable news and the Internet has amplified our sense of it as a hopeless case that’s rapidly falling apart. However, the pernicious effects of our contemporary news media go beyond fostering alarmism and fear; their emphasis on chasing the latest sensational story, and the single-minded focus that media outlets often display once they’re locked in on that story (think of CNN’s infamous infatuation with the disappearance of Malaysian Airlines Flight 370), tend to crowd out deeper, more detailed analysis of long-term trends and under-reported phenomena.

For much of the 2000s, we at least had two nightly television shows that attempted to counter the hysteria and hype. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert scythed through the triviality, sanctimony, and unacknowledged bias that mars so much of our media coverage, using humor as a means to ridicule these flaws. Stewart launched a frontal assault, especially on Fox News, which he came to call “Bullshit Mountain” for its ugly track record of stretching the truth to whip up controversy where none should have existed. Colbert, on the other hand, was more indirect in his criticism, satirizing Fox News and its ilk by creating a self-involved, ostensibly conservative persona who resembled commentators such as Bill O’Reilly (he was so convincing in this fake role that I can recall at least one friend mentioning that his grandmother believed Colbert was sincere, and admired him for it).

However salutary an effect Colbert and Stewart might have had on political discourse in this country, they couldn’t keep at it forever, and in late 2014 and the summer of last year, respectively, they both stepped down to pursue other gigs. Fortunately, one of Stewart’s former “correspondents” (and, for a time, interim host), John Oliver, launched his own show, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, on HBO in early 2014, and it’s built upon the legacy of The Daily Show to become a worthy successor. The show is now entering its third season, which begins tomorrow night.

The Time-Hopping Fun of DC's Legends of Tomorrow

Arthur Darvill (right) and members of the cast of Legends of Tomorrow.

There is no question that DC is doubling down on its efforts to compete with Marvel's multi-platform media juggernaut – and with Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice coming in March, and Suicide Squad and Justice League in the wings, that fight is about to come to the big screen with a vengeance. So far, however, its small screen offerings have been lighter and less compelling than Marvel's recent, more creative, successes – most notably, Daredevil, Jessica Jones and Agent Carter. With the premiere of Legends of Tomorrow on The CW last month, DC now has four primetime shows on the air. Legends of Tomorrow joins Arrow (now in its fourth season) and The Flash (currently in its second) on The CW, while Supergirl premiered on CBS in the fall. Latecomer though it is, Legends just may be the best of its lot to date – it certainly is the most fun.

Oscar Predictions: Best Live Action Short Film

A scene from Basil Khalil's Oscar-nominated short film Ava Maria. 

With two and a half weeks to go, there’s still plenty of time to develop some opinions on the Oscar nominated films. Although not slated for pay-per-view distribution until the 23rd of February, the Oscar nominated short films are still screening in select movie theatres. This week, I’m tackling the five nominees for Best Live Action Short Film, ranking them from weakest to strongest.

Road Tested: Tedeschi Trucks Band's Let Me Get By

Tedeschi Trucks Band (Derek Trucks and Susan Tedeschi) on Austin City Limits, December, 2015. (Photo: Scott Newton)

Last year, when the Allman Brothers and the Grateful Dead called it a day and retired from the road, many fans of the so-called Jam Band experience probably wondered if their favourite free-form rock bands had a successor. I believe that successor is the Tedeschi Trucks Band. Formed in 2010 by Derek Trucks (formerly of the Allman Bros.) and seasoned Blues musician Susan Tedeschi, the 12-piece band took up the challenge and the demanding road schedule in earnest. Trucks and Tedeschi are married, so the decision to start their own band meant, as working musicians, they could tour together. Let Me Get By (Fantasy) is the TTB’s third studio release in five years and it’s easily one of the best albums in the band’s short history – and one of the best records in the first half of 2016. The CD is a “road tested” collection of songs with rich arrangements and a solid mix of blues, rock and soul music, making it a robust and powerful album.

The Hunter’s Dream: From Software’s Bloodborne

I reviewed From Software’s famously difficult Dark Souls four years after its 2011 release date, and was similarly late in getting to its spiritual successor, Bloodborne, released in March of last year. The gaming community was absolutely smitten with this dark and evil-looking follow-up to one of the hardest titles of all time – which struck me as odd. Dark Souls was a somewhat niche experience, suited only to those with extreme patience and perseverance, so why did everyone love Bloodborne? Was it that much easier than its predecessor, allowing a broader audience past its lower barrier of entry? That didn’t bode well at all. I don’t play From Software’s games to have my hand held: I play them to be tested, as a player and as a person, and to emerge from their fiery crucible a stronger and more accomplished gamer. If Bloodborne wasn’t offering that kind of challenge, I couldn’t see why anyone – especially a Souls fan – would give it the time of day.

Then, I played it.

The Winter’s Tale: Branagh and Dench

Judi Dench as Paulina and Kenneth Branagh as Leontes in The Winter's Tale at the Garrick. (Photo: Johan Persson)

Kenneth Branagh’s new theatre company opened its inaugural season at the Garrick in the West End with productions of Terence Rattigan’s Harlequinade (double-billed with his one-woman piece All on Her Own with Zoë Wanamaker) and The Winter’s Tale. Luckily those of us who didn’t happen to be in the neighborhood were able to see the latter in HD. It stars Branagh himself and the great, unstoppable Judi Dench. They give luminous performances as King Leontes of Sicilia, whose fit of jealousy plunges his kingdom into darkness, and his wife’s gentlewoman Paulina, the only member of the court unafraid to stand up to him when he accuses his Queen Hermione (Miranda Raison) of adultery and treason and proclaims the baby she births in prison the bastard son of his childhood friend Polixenes (Hadley Fraser).

Trumpism: A Dangerous Phenomenon

Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

"We ought to keep all these foreigners out of the country, and what I mean, the Kikes just as much as the Wops and Hunkies and Chinks."

“He was afraid that the world struggle today was not of Communism against Fascism but of tolerance against the bigotry that was preached equally by Communism and Fascism. But he saw too that in America the struggle was befogged by the fact that the worst Fascists were they who disowned the word ‘Fascism’…” 

– From Sinclair Lewis' 1935 novel, It Can’t Happen Here.

“It’s not an overstatement to say that in this political climate this election encourages a certain fascist strain. We’re not there yet and our democratic impulses are strong. The disturbing thing is that that fascist tendency can even be glimpsed.”

– Elizabeth Drew, "The New Politics of Frustration," The New York Review of Books, 01/14/16.

It is tempting to compare the Presidential campaign of the pitchfork-populist billionaire Donald Trump with that of Lewis’ Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip, a charismatic Senator who is elected to the presidency in Sinclair Lewis' It Can’t Happen Here. Parts of this 1935 dystopian novel, in which women and minorities – those “who are racially different from us” – are stripped of their rights, dissent is outlawed, and a paramilitary force and concentration camps are established, may initially appear implausible, but it would be a mistake to dismiss any comparisons as ludicrous or farfetched. A large portion of the novel documents how liberties are stripped away and a draconian dictatorship ensues, but I think the most relevant chapters are the early ones that explore Windrip’s appeal before he was elected President and implemented his totalitarian system.

Network Shows Well Worth Watching: How To Get Away With Murder, Quantico and The Grinder

Viola Davis in ABC's How to Get Away with Murder.

This review contains spoilers.
 
Perusing the end of the year Best of ranked lists for television, I noticed the continuing trend of almost everybody’s lists – from Time to Entertainment Weekly – consisting almost entirely of cable TV series, with only the occasional network show, such as Empire or The Last Man on Earth, thrown into the mix. I get that; the TV critics find the lack of censorship and unfettered content that is de rigueur on cable television to be enormously appealing. But that doesn’t mean that network fare is worthless, even if characters say "bullcrap" instead of "bullshit" and nudity can only be implied. Perhaps it’s because I grew up in a world where only network TV, Canadian or American, existed, but my viewing habits still skew towards broadcast programming, though they don’t make up all my viewing. (I eagerly await the fourth season of The Americans which begins on FX on March 16.) Three of the best bets currently on the networks – How to Get Away with Murder, Quantico and The Grinder – prove, too, that variations on familiar themes can be wrung even there, where novelty is not expected to exist. 

Talking Out of Turn #42 (Podcasts): Dr. G. William Jones (1987) and James Earl Jones (1987)

James Earl Jones in John Sayles' Matewan (1987).

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

Tom Fulton, host and producer of On the Arts.

For a few years, I flogged the proposal to various publishers but many were worried that there were too many people from different backgrounds (e.g. Margaret Atwood sitting alongside Oliver Stone). Another publisher curiously chose to reject it because, to them, it appeared to be a book about me promoting my interviews (as if I was trying to be a low-rent Larry King) rather than seeing it as a commentary on the decade through the eyes of the guests. All told, the book soon faded away and I turned to other projects. However, when recently uncovering the original proposal and sample interviews, I felt that maybe some of them could find a new life on Critics at Large.

After the murder of Martin Luther King Jr, in the late sixties, the momentum of the Civil Rights movement seemed to wane. No leader could fill that vacuum and black voices in the eighties became fragmented. Often the question of black identity and culture came up during interviews. The chapter entitled Black Legacies included conversations with figures like author Toni Morrison, film archivist G. William Jones, and actor James Earl Jones. With the Academy Awards approaching – and the controversy over the dearth of black talent among this year's Oscar nominees still heating up – and February being Black History Month, it is timely to bring together the latter two interviews, both conducted in 1987.

Oscar Predictions: Best Animated Short Film

Pixar's Sanjay’s Super Team is one of five films nominated for Best Animated Short Film at this year's Oscars.

Oscar season has begun! While we’re all discussing our picks for this year’s Best Picture and whether or not Leo is finally going to get his Oscar for The Revenant, seeing the nominated short films can sometimes feel like trying to collect all the toys in a series of feature film Happy Meals. Fortunately, ShortsHD has us covered with theatrical releases of this year’s live action and animated shorts in select theatres as well as pay-per-view online streaming. This week, I had the opportunity to catch the Academy’s nominees for Best Animated Short Film at Toronto’s TIFF Bell Lightbox. Here’s my ranking of the five films in this category, from weakest to Oscar-winning:

Where the Wild Things (Guit)ar

Céleste Boursier-Mougenot, from here to ear. (Photo courtesy of the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.)

It feels counter-intuitive that in order to reach the aviary nested inside The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts you must descent several flights of stairs to end up in the basement. But this is where, even in the dead of winter, the birds sing and where they also play, but in ways you'd least expect.

The lower level gallery is aflutter with 70 zebra finches who alight on a forest of open-tuned electric guitars – 10 white Gibson Les Pauls and four Gibson Thunderbird basses – lying strings up on a series of stands erected at the four corners of the temperature-controlled MMFA Contemporary Art Space. Small and grey with tiny toothpick feet and triangular beaks the colour of persimmons, the birds fly on and off the musical instruments, triggering a chordal crescendo of wailing distortion that fluctuates in frequency and intensity in accordance to their perching patterns.

Finding the Good-Bad: RedLetterMedia’s Space Cop

Rich Evans in Space Cop, by RedLetterMedia.

I don’t even know how to approach a review of Space Cop. I’ve covered quirky genre indie films and low-budget retro nostalgia-fests, but these categories fail to convey the mad conflux of genre and influence that is Space Cop. It’s part of both categories, and neither of them. I think that to understand it, you have to understand the people at RedLetterMedia who made it – which admittedly doesn’t speak well of the film on its own terms. For an RLM fan, though, it’s exactly as wonderful, idiotic, hilarious, gross, and terrible as you could want.

Sondheim Confab: Sondheim on Sondheim

The cast of Sondheim on Sondheim (with Sondheim, on screen) at Boston's Lyric Stage. (Photo: Mark S. Howard)

By now there have been almost as many Sondheim revues as Sondheim musicals. The first one, Sondheim: A Celebration, was a one-night-only tribute in 1973, while A Little Night Music was running. It set the tone for subsequent showcases of his songs, combining performances by original cast members, covers (Nancy Walker’s rendition of “I’m Still Here” from Follies has yet to be surpassed) and obscure deleted items: “Silly People” and “Two Fairy Tales” from Night Music, “Pleasant Little Kingdom” from Follies, “Love Is in the Air” and “Your Eyes Are Blue” from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. It was nectar for early Sondheim diehards. Side by Side by Sondheim was put together by Brits and had a successful run in the West End in 1976 (where I saw it) before crossing the Atlantic. Putting It Together also began in London; its 1993 Broadway cast included Julie Andrews and Christopher Durang. Sondheim: A Celebration at Carnegie Hall (also 1993) was televised in truncated form; luckily the entire concert is available on CD. But TV audiences got to see some amazing pieces, like Madeline Kahn singing “Getting Married Today “ from Company, Liza Minnelli and Billy Stritch performing a totally unknown ballad called “Water Under the Bridge” (written for an unproduced movie called Singing Out Loud), and the Boys Choir of Harlem bringing an unlooked-for poignancy to “Our Time” from Merrily We Roll Along. Sondheim’s eightieth birthday was the occasion for another event, Sondheim The Birthday Concert (2010), on Live from Lincoln Center; this one had John McMartin recreating his performance of “The Road You Didn’t Take” from Follies, as withering and heartrending as it had been on Broadway four decades earlier. The show’s finale was breathtaking: dozens of alums from Sondheim musicals marched through Lincoln Center singing “Sunday,” the sublime first-act finale of Sunday in the Park with George. A TV doc called Six by Sondheim in 2013 focused on half a dozen significant songs.

Back to School: James Kudelka At Ryerson University

Choreographer James Kudelka working with dancers from the Ryerson Theatre School. (Photo by Jeremy Mimnagh)

Ryerson Theatre School scored a coup when it secured James Kudelka to choreograph its annual student showcase for five performances in Toronto this past November. A former artistic director of the National Ballet of Canada, Kudelka has created large scale works for classical dance companies and more experimental pieces for modern and contemporary troupes across the continent. As a dancer, he has performed with ensembles and alone with a puppet. Last year, at age 60, he directed his first play while maintaining his credentials as a baker of artisanal bread. Always up to a challenge, Canada's self-described sex and death choreographer was eager to accept the Ryerson University invitation if only because it allowed him, again, to do something new. The challenge was to work with 57 third- and fourth-year students with varying degrees of dance and stage experience and make them look like seasoned professionals. He pulled it off. Kudelka Meets Ryerson Dances 2015 emerged as an expertly designed work of abstract dance performed with commitment by a group of young amateurs.

Departures: HBO’s Intriguing and Difficult The Leftovers

Margaret Qualley and Justin Theroux in The Leftovers on HBO.

This review contains major spoilers for Season 1 of The Leftovers, as well as some spoilers for Season 2.

Television shows can often inspire devotion bordering on the religious, and the recently-concluded second season of The Leftovers on HBO is no exception. Based on Tom Perrotta’s novel of the same name, and overseen by Damon Lindelof of Lost fame, the show has gone from a divisive and little-watched curiosity to one of the most acclaimed (albeit even less-watched) dramas of the past year.

Critic's Notes and Frames Vol. XVI

This story will only be relevant to Canadians. Back in June 1979, Conservative leader Joe Clark had just become Prime Minister and unseated the once popular Liberal Pierre Trudeau to form a minority government. It didn't last long. By March 1980, Trudeau had come back from retirement and brought the Clark government down. Once again, he found himself leading the country, but not with the same romantic zeal into the Eighties that he stoked when he took the nation by storm in 1968.

Chucky's Poor Relation: William Brent Bell’s The Boy

Lauren Cohan in The Boy, directed by William Brent Bell. (Photo: David Bukach/STX)

There was once a really great restaurant review of Guy Fieri’s Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar by Pete Wells for the New York Times that was composed entirely of questions: Had Guy ever actually eaten at his own restaurant? Was he too struck by “how very far from awesome” the Awesome Pretzel Chicken Tenders are? The spirit of that review – of confusion, astonishment – is very close to how I feel about William Brent Bell’s horror film, The Boy, which hit theatres last week. In the interest of sparing Wells the flattery of imitation, I’ll do my best to articulate some thoughts on a movie that inherently resists thinking.

Paradise is a Lonely Place: Dylan LeBlanc's Cautionary Tale

Dylan LeBlanc may soon be a household name in contemporary song writing. In spite of the fact that he's only 26 years old, his tales of woe come from an old soul. His new album Cautionary Tale (Single Lock Records) was released on January 15, and it may be his most extroverted collection to date. LeBlanc debuted in 2010 to critical acclaim for Paupers Field (Rough Trade). His melancholy first album had some critics comparing him to Gram Parsons. In fact Emmylou Harris, who sang with Parsons, adds her voice to “If The Creek Don’t Rise.” Soon LeBlanc was opening for prestigious artists such as Lucinda Williams and Laura Marling. After his 2012 album, Cast The Same Old Shadow, LeBlanc was now opening for Drive-By Truckers and Alabama Shakes. But he didn’t handle his early success very well. His new album is a calm, introspective collection of songs about his life after getting over a bout of excessive drinking and reckless behaviour. Cautionary Tale casts himself as a mystic as opposed to just another singer-songwriter seeking redemption.

The Grandmaster Returns: Ip Man 3

Donnie Yen as Ip Man in Ip Man 3

Martial arts films – at least those given wide Western releases – are generally pretty formulaic. The hero will more often than not be a representation of a figure from Asian history, like Wong Fei Hung (a real-life master of kung fu who has been played by almost all of martial arts cinema’s greats). The narrative will often be pared down to its barest elements, acting simply as a framework in which spectacular action can occur. There’s always a martial arts school, a master, a young upstart, a rival teacher, and a gaggle of gormless disciples. It’s not accurate to say that if you’ve seen one kung fu film, you’ve seen them all, but it’s fair to say that if you’ve seen one of Donnie Yen’s Ip Man films, you’ll know what you’re in for with the third installment.

Ghosts: The Body of an American and Our Mother’s Brief Affair

Michael Cumpsty and Michael Crane in The Body of an American, at the Hartford Stage. (Photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Dan O’Brien’s The Body of an American, currently playing at Hartford Stage, has already been performed at Portland Center Stage in Oregon and at the Gate in London; it’s won four different playwriting awards and is bound for New York. Yet it still feels like a work in progress – like ideas for a play that O’Brien hasn’t worked through. He based it on a series of interactions with journalist Paul Watson, first on e-mail and then during a visit he made to Watson in the Arctic in 2010. Watson reported on war zones throughout the world for The Toronto Star and The Los Angeles Times and early in his career, in 1994, won the Pulitzer Prize for a photograph he took of a dead American soldier, Sergeant William Cleveland, in Mogadishu. (He retired from The Toronto Star last year.) But the play, a two-hander, can’t make up its mind whether it’s about Watson (Michael Cumpsty) or about O’Brien (Michael Crane) writing a play about Watson. The first seems an eminently worthy idea, the second a self-indulgence – especially since, for all of Dan’s claim of identification with Paul, they don’t seem remotely comparable. Considering what Paul has seen in Somalia, Rwanda, Iraq and other places, Dan’s stories about his alienation from his family and his brother’s depression, and in particular his feelings of inferiority in Paul’s presence, his sense that he’s somehow been bested by this reporter, come across as self-aggrandizing and distasteful.

The German Occupation of France: Complexities

German officers at a sidewalk café on the Champs-Élysées in July 1940, one month after the Nazi invasion of France.

“One who has not suffered the horrors of an occupying power has no right to judge a nation that has.”

– Anthony Eden, former British Prime Minister, from The Sorrow and the Pity.

French television refused to air Marcel Ophuls’ landmark 4 1/2-hour documentary, The Sorrow and the Pity (1969); its 1971 cinematic release punctured a powerful myth promoted after the war by Charles De Gaulle: that the French nation by and large heroically resisted the Germans during the four-year occupation. Ophuls makes it clear that the majority of Frenchmen were neither supporters of the Germans nor members of the resistance. Rather, they went along quietly with the wartime collaborationist government of Marshal Pétain. Regardless of how they behaved, for a variety of reasons, the vast majority of French citizens opted for remaining silent, even those who acted heroically.

In his prologue to The Cost of Courage (Other Press, 2015), Charles Kaiser, a former reporter turned author, describes how he first encountered that strange silence when he met the French family that had lodged his uncle, a GI named Henry Kaiser, in Paris during the last year of the war. From his uncle, Charles heard stories of their heroism: “The most dramatic movie about the war,” the nephew writes, “was the one I learned by heart but had seen only in my head.” Yet when he finally met the surviving members of the Boulloche family as a child in the early 1960s, they were reticent about their war experiences: “It would take me five decades, including two and a half years living in France, to unravel the reasons for the heroes’ silence.” It is the author’s connection with this cultured, upper-middle-class Catholic family, particularly with the daughter, Christiane, that gives The Cost of Courage its distinctive resonance. Only after the death of her siblings is Christiane willing to share with Kaiser the family’s harrowing experiences during the Occupation. Assisted by declassified British documents, letters, diaries and conversations with the children of the next generation, the author narrates a powerful account of one family’s courage, guilt and pain. He supplements their story with the larger historical context of the war. Initially, this device appears jarring, juxtaposing a thriller-like narrative written in the present tense with a more conventional historical overview. But as we become accustomed to it, it begins to work, especially when he is able to weave the two threads together with the onset of the Allied invasion of Normandy.