DC’s Doomsday – Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice

Ben Affleck and Henry Cavill in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.

I felt so, so bad for the five- or six-year-old boy sitting with his family in the row ahead of me for my screening of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. He got up from his seat several times and capered about through the aisle, barely paying attention to the noise blaring around him, and when he did, asking pointed and, I thought, very excellent questions like, “Who is that?” and “Mommy, why does Batman hate Superman?” His parents shushed him each time, but I wanted to high-five the poor kid. What a tragedy it is that these people brought him to this film, thinking he would have a fun time watching his heroes on the big screen. What cruelty for Zack Snyder and Warner Bros to have done what they did to these characters, and by extension, to him. When Batman v Superman isn’t a violent, grim, tedious slog, it’s an unforgivable corruption of some of comicdom’s most beloved characters, who are twisted to serve a ten-year marketing plan and Snyder’s galaxy-sized ego. It’s one of, if not the single most unpleasant and incoherent comic book movies ever made. And all I can do for that kid is be grateful that the Marvel movies and shows are still there to remind him how this shit is supposed to be done.

New Work from Steve Martin and Kenneth Lonergan

Paul Alexander Nolan and Carmen Cusack in Bright Star, by Steve Martin & Edie Bricknell. (Photo: Sara Krulwich)

The Renaissance man Steve Martin reinvents himself again as co-composer (with lyricist Edie Brickell) and book writer of the new bluegrass musical Bright Star, which has opened in New York after a premiere production at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre. The show continues Martin’s collaboration with Brickell, which began with the 2013 studio album Love Has Come for You. (A couple of the songs from Bright Star appear on that collection; roughly half of their 2015 album, So Familiar, consists of take-aways from the show.)

Steve Martin’s fans are sure to consider Bright Star an oddity: it does contain some humor but with one significant exception – one of the key dramatic scenes, a revelatory flashback, transpires while one of the ancillary characters is wading in a pond, hunting frogs for dinner – it’s surprisingly lacking in his trademark irony. The musical, set in North Carolina during two time periods (the mid-1920s and the era following the Second World War), tells the stories of a returning soldier in his early twenties, Billy Cane (A.J. Shively), who’s trying to become a fiction writer and, two decades earlier, the travails of Alice Murphy (Carmen Cusack), the woman who ends up mentoring him at an Asheville literary journal. As a young woman, Alice is a renegade in a strict Christian farm town who becomes involved with a rich boy, Jimmy Ray Dobbs (Paul Alexander Nolan), over the objections of his father, the mayor (Michael Mulheren). Though there’s considerable freshness in the storytelling in the first act, the plot itself, which Martin and Brickell devised together, is a melodrama with depressingly familiar tropes. When one character tells another late in act two, just before unearthing the secret of the plot, “I knew this day would come,” I muttered under my breath, “So did I.”

Critic's Notes and Frames Vol. XVII

It's not a surprising irony in the late Sixties and early Seventies, just as many Americans were feeling like unwitting spiritual exiles and no longer wishing to be part of their own country, that many movie-makers began impassioned quests to find it. The results could be as powerfully masochistic as Easy Rider (1969) with its strain of pop religiosity which featured its hippie heroes romantically doomed to crucifixion by the power structure. The outcome could be as ambivalent as John Schlesinger's 1969 Midnight Cowboy (which loved its lost heroes but strangely shared no empathy for the country that produced them). The sojourn could also have the operatic sweep and depth of The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather, Part II (1974) which embraced the tidal pull of the nation along with the very elements that would come to corrupt it. Regardless of the quality of films – from Alice's Restaurant to Nashville – movies were committed to taking the pulse of a country in decline and in distress. 

In the epic striving of Jan Troell's The Emigrants (1971) and The New Land (1972), recently released by the Criterion Collection in their full Swedish versions and immaculately restored on Blu-ray, the director takes in America as an untested promise, or a fever dream that brings forth deliverance. Based on Vilhelm Moberg's epic four-volume novels which account the long journey of Swedish farming families to settlements in Minnesota in 1850, Troell captures in a largely naturalistic style for over six hours both the cost and renewal of that promise without embellishing the hopes of those making the quest, or romanticizing the claims of the new land (which the farmers discover is stolen land from the Sioux). Troell, who shoots, edits and directs his own movies, removes our awareness of film language as if the camera were a portal in which to comprehend a lost period of realism. When he focuses on the life and marriage of Karl Oskar (Max Von Sydow) and Kristina (Liv Ullmann), featuring two actors whose iconic definitions through their work with Ingmar Bergman couldn't be more recognizable, Troell clears a path for both performers to shed that skin and to embellish their work with fresh character etchings. Those nuances not only reveal how the arduous journey tests that marriage, but also the many ways it fulfills it. The marriage between the settlers and their environment, where nature is both unforgiving and inviting, is equally a test of endurance and purpose. That Jan Troell has been an invisible giant on the cinematic landscape – despite the enduring depth of later works like Flight of the Eagle (1982), Hamsun (1996), As White as in Snow (2001) and Everlasting Moments (2008) – may well be due to his gift of letting the story dictate the style rather than imposing his style on it.

Podcast: Interview with Peter Weller (1987)

Peter Weller in Paul Verhoeven's RoboCop (1987).

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. 

In 1987, one of those interviews was with actor Peter Weller who was in Toronto promoting his starring role in Paul Verhoeven's RoboCop. The movie would go on to become one of the highest grossing and best reviewed films of that year, with Roger Ebert specifically praising Weller for the "impressive job of creating sympathy for his character" despite spending most of the film concealed under makeup and prosthetics.

– Kevin Courrier.

Here is the full interview with Peter Weller as it aired on CJRT-FM in 1987.

The Carmichael Show: Topical, Traditional, and Terribly Fun

Tiffany Hagdish, Jerrod Carmichael and Amber Stevens West in The Carmichael Show. (Photo: Ben Cohen/NBC)

At the end of last summer, NBC gave us a gift: six episodes of a sitcom based on the life and comedy of comedian Jerrod Carmichael. The entire short first season of The Carmichael Show was burned off in a blink-and-you-miss-it three weeks, two episodes at a time – normally an indicator of pre-broadcast cancellation. That The Carmichael Show was so refreshingly bold and charming just seemed to make its fate all the more inevitable. And so, when the comedy was renewed by the network just a week after its run ended, I was as surprised as I was delighted. Earlier this month, The Carmichael Show returned to NBC with its 13-episode second season, and now, four episodes in, it should top your list of "the best network shows you probably aren't watching."

J’y Gagne: Mark Osborne’s Le Petit Prince

There was a time – only a month ago, in fact! – when I thought Le Petit Prince was never coming out. In December 2014, I’d seen the trailer for Mark Osborne’s animated adaptation of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s 1943 children’s book and was dazzled by the animation set to a Lily Allen cover of Keane’s "Somewhere Only We Know." Months later, a quick Google search informed me that the film had actually been released in France in mid-summer 2015.  And, although the English voices were recorded first, it would be another seven months before the English dub would be available to audiences, though mainly on the festival circuit. Last month, Le Petit Prince opened to a limited theatrical release in Quebec, and two weeks ago (as The Little Prince) the movie finally opened in the rest of Canada. The film had been slated for theatres in the United States as well; however, at the last minute, Paramount dropped Le Petit Prince and distribution rights were acquired by Netflix.

I first read Le Petit Prince in French, in a grade eleven classroom. It was our assigned novel that year. Saint-Exupéry’s story of a pilot crash landing in the Sahara and encountering a mysterious golden-haired boy from outer space (think David Bowie, but like 8) instantly became one of my favourites. Osborne’s Le Petit Prince is delightful in many ways, but it’s not the book. Purists, take note.

That Old Feeling: Robert Budreau’s Born to Be Blue

Ethan Hawke as Chet Baker in Born to Be Blue.

Whenever a movie comes out about a musician I have high expectations. Will the movie fall into clichés about the troubled artist who’s abused by the wrong people? Or will we witness the story of a gifted individual who sins against his talent? One of the worst films for me was Sidney Furie’s Lady Sings the Blues, the overly melodramatic portrait of Billie Holiday that came out in 1972. One of the best was 2014’s Love & Mercy, a beautifully rendered portrait of Brian Wilson. That picture not only captured Wilson’s talent as a composer, it also took the risk of embracing his mental health and how he was able to find creative relief in his music in spite of the voices he heard in his head. 

The story of the troubled-yet-gifted jazz musician Chet Baker is nicely rendered in Robert Budreau’s movie Born to Be Blue, but it falls short of making the most important connection of Baker with his muse. Ethan Hawke, who plays the famous trumpeter, immerses himself into Baker’s troubled soul with complete abandon. Baker, a heroin addict to the end of his life (he died in 1988 at the age of 58), was one of the biggest stars in music during the mid-fifties with his James Dean look and his romantic music. To make his point, Budreau contrasts Baker’s career with two musicians from the New York jazz establishment, namely Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie, who believed Baker was too cute to be taken seriously in be-bop circles. To them a jazz musician “had to live” in order to be credible. The point is made, but the one-dimensional Miles and Dizzy characters seem like props rather than real people. Actor Kevin Hansard ingratiates Gillespie with humour while degrading Baker on his “flat” singing style. Kedar Brown plays Davis with so much attitude that he left me cold. Miles was edgy and smug by most accounts, but he wasn’t always the prick of the hour. 

The Comeback Kid: Brendan Saye in Romeo and Juliet

National Ballet of Canada dancer Brendan Saye. (Photo: Sian Richards)

Tears flowed recently at Romeo and Juliet and not only during the spine-tingling death scene. This past Saturday's matinee performance in Toronto marked the return of National Ballet of Canada dancer Brendan Saye to the stage after a nearly three year absence battling Lyme disease. Tears of joy and relief streaked the dancer's face as he bowed to members of the audience crying with him during a standing ovation. The 25-year-old had overcome all kinds of odds to perform Romeo so elegantly and with a surfeit of genuine feeling, causing emotions to run high.

She Loves Me: Bock and Harnick’s Musical Shop

Zachary Levi and Michael McGrath in She Loves Me. (Photo: Joan Marcus)

Blithe, melodic and entrancing, She Loves Me, which recently opened in a pleasing revival at the Roundabout Theatre’s Studio 54, is one of those Broadway musicals with a complicated lineage. It began as a 1937 play called Parfumerie by the Hungarian writer Miklós László (it was the last of his plays to be produced in Budapest before he fled to America to escape the Nazis). Three years later it furnished the source material for Ernst Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner, perhaps the greatest of all Hollywood romantic comedies, starring Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullavan. The movies recycled it again in two considerably inferior versions, a 1949 musical called In the Good Old Summertime with Judy Garland and Van Johnson and an updated Nora Ephron comedy, You’ve Got Mail (1998), with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. And in 1963 Joe Masteroff (three years before he wrote the book for Cabaret) and Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick (a mere year before they furnished the score for Fiddler on the Roof) turned it into She Loves Me.

Tensions between History and Film: Bridge of Spies

Mark Rylance (as Rudolf Abel) and Tom Hanks (as James Donovan) in Bridge of Spies.

Near the conclusion of Steven Spielberg’s recent film Bridge of Spies, lawyer James Donovan (Tom Hanks), on a train that takes him from East to West Berlin, looks out in horror at two individuals being shot at the recently built Wall. The scene instantly recalls John le Carré’s 1963 novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, and its 1965 Martin Ritt film adaption of the same name that begins and ends with corpses raked with bullets. Moreover, both films are drenched in atmospherics: the washed-out bluish cinematography of East Berlin in Bridge is similar to the black-and-white desolation and soullessness of the earlier film. The cinematography in The Spy suits the cynicism and betrayal inherent in the plot. Similarly, the visual representation of East Berlin in Bridge compliments the cold desolation of a police state that looks more like war-devastated 1945 Berlin than 1961 West Berlin.

There, however, the similarities end. The contrast in the cinematography between East Berlin and a sunlit Brooklyn is one indication of how Spielberg offers a glossy, more upbeat, interpretation of the Cold War. It is also hard to imagine him including an American official uttering anything like what Control, the head of Circus (an amalgam of MI5 and MI6) says in The Spy to his agent Alec Leamas: “Our policies are peaceful, but our methods can’t afford to be less ruthless than those of the opposition, can they?” Or later when Leamas says to the Communist idealist, Liz Gold (played by Nam Perry in the film): “What do you think spies are? .... They're just a bunch of seedy, squalid bastards like me.” Adam Sisman in John le Carré: The Biography (Bloomsbury, 2015) reveals that the cynicism infusing le Carré’s novel – we are no better than them – reflected the unhappiness in his personal and professional life. Feeling trapped in his marriage, agent David Cornwall (before he became le Carré) was also disgusted by the number of former Nazis courted by British intelligence during the Cold War, and he had to work with them. Yet in the anger that he channelled into The Spy and subsequent novels, le Carré reveals insightful truths about the soul-destroying work of spies and raises questions about the damage that can be done to a free society by the methods that are carried out by the security services, questions that remain relevant today.

Podcast: Interview with Umberto Eco (1983)

On February 19, author, philosopher and semiotician Umberto Eco passed away at the age of 84.

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 Italian novelist, philosopher and semiotician Umberto Eco. On February 19, Eco passed away at age 84. When we sat down together in 1983, his soon-to-be bestselling first novel, The Name of the Rose, had just been translated into English. 

– Kevin Courrier.

Here is the full interview with Umberto Eco as it aired on CJRT-FM in 1983.

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.  

Local Girl Doesn’t “Get” Deadpool, Can’t Understand Fuss

Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool in Deadpool.

This is it. This is the moment where people are going to read something I wrote and tell themselves that I dislike the thing they love because I just don’t understand. “She just doesn’t get it,” they’ll say, “she’s a girl/doesn’t read comics/probably drinks pumpkin spice lattes; Deadpool goes over her head.”

While that characterization isn’t totally accurate, it’s also not entirely wrong. I don’t get Deadpool. I’m putting it out there and I’m not taking it back. I’ve never read a Deadpool comic and I had no idea what he was about until I started researching for this piece. All I know is that my nerdiest male friends were raving about this movie and I had to see it. My critical opinion is that… it was alright, I guess.

Cultural Musings: Son of Saul, Jacques Rivette, Downton Abbey and The Mindy Project

Géza Röhrig in Son of Saul.

Son of Saul: I can see why the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences chose László Nemes’ Hungarian Holocaust drama Son of Saul as the Best Foreign Language Film of the Year. It’s a grim and uncompromising art house movie that easily personifies the perceived intelligent non-Hollywood virtues of movies made in other countries. However, the story of Saul (Géza Röhrig), a concentration camp inmate in Auschwitz, who becomes determined to see that a boy he says is his son be given a proper Jewish burial, also possesses the problems of so many foreign language movies. It’s emotionally dry, quite arid in its execution and in terms of its storytelling, more than a little monotonous.

Toppling Pretensions: The National Ballet of Canada's Mixed Program

Artists of the National Ballet of Canada in Cacti. (Photo: Aleksandar Antonijevic)

At the risk of Swedish choreographer Alexander Ekman rolling his eyes, I will now self-consciously pass comment on Cacti, the prickly but popular work which the National Ballet of Canada performed last week as part of a mixed program at Toronto's Four Seasons Centre. A delicious parody that had the audience laughing start to finish, his 30-minute dance is a critique on art criticism, especially the kind of arid discourse that gives the discipline a bad name. First created in 2010 for Nederland's Dans Theatre 2 and now performed by companies around the world drawn to its irreverent sense of humour, Cacti erupts beneath a pompous voice-over teeming with cringe-worthy pronouncements comparing artistic creation to ant hills and dancers to emotionally stunted delinquents. The verbal drone culminates in the dead-end question, what does it all mean? Answer at your peril. This isn't to suggest that Cacti, a co-production shared by the National Ballet, the Boston Ballet and the Atlanta Ballet, is immune to criticism. It's more that this physically daring piece, set to live musical accompaniment and the dancers' own percussive poundings on large Scrabble-like ivory tiles serving as mini stages, makes meaning take a back seat to sheer enjoyment. Give it up for the needle in your side.

Cacti – so named because dancers actually perform with potted plants in hand – made its Canadian debut last week as the fantastically refreshing finale to a three-part program dominated by two modernist ballets by the late George Balanchine. The Four Temperaments, created in 1946 to Paul Hindemith's commissioned score, and Rubies, a dazzling excerpt from 1967's full length Jewels set to Igor Stravinsky's rollicking Capriccio for Piano and Orchestra, complimented the Ekman work by similarly challenging perceptions and toppling pretensions.

Children, Behave: 10 Cloverfield Lane

John Gallagher, Jr., Mary Elizabeth Winstead and John Goodman in 10 Cloverfield Lane.

Note: This review contains major spoilers for 10 Cloverfield Lane.
 
The title of 10 Cloverfield Lane shouldn’t have the word “Cloverfield” in it. Its original title, "The Cellar," would have been just as mysterious and gripping as the film itself – but it wouldn’t have put butts in seats the way an association with the 2008 Matt Reeves film would. Trailers for Lane popped up only two months before release, to everyone’s surprise (“What? There’s a new Cloverfield movie? Wow… okay!”). I can’t help feeling, however, that slapping a recognizable title on a film that – spoiler – has pretty much zero to do with Cloverfield was an incredibly disingenuous move, one that is made that much more irritating because Lane is a great film in its own right whose branding only weighs it down.

The Color Purple: Voices

Cynthia Erivo in the Broadway revival of The Color Purple at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater. (Photo: Sara Krulwich)

When Cynthia Erivo opens her mouth to sing in the Broadway revival of The Color Purple, she looks as if she’s been touched with grace, and the music that pours out is honeyed gospel. I can’t remember the last time I heard a musical-theatre performer who commanded so much unfiltered power and possessed such purity of tone. The songs by Brenda Russell, Allee Willis and Stephen Bray were obviously written to be delivered with this kind of full-throated intensity – singing that carries the force of the north wind behind it. (I didn’t see the original production, which starred LaChanze and opened in 2005.) The first ensemble number, “Mysterious Ways,” a hymn by a black Baptist preacher (Lawrence Clayton) in small-town Georgia and his congregation, practically rips the seats out of the theatre. It’s in the tradition of “Leavin’ Time” from Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer’s St. Louis Woman and “Walk Him Up the Stairs” from Gary Geld and Peter Udell’s Purlie.

Of Wire and Wood: Two New Albums from Borealis Records

Tom Taylor, Shari Ulrich and Barney Bentall, a.k.a. BTU, have a new album with Borealis Records, Tightrope Walk.

"...a guitar is made of wire and wood ...it’s just a tool when pushing comes to shove..."

Those lines come from a song I wrote a few years ago, but in essence it’s a true statement of how I feel about guitars. They are tools to make music with. In the hands of a gifted player, a guitar can bring an almost endless variety of emotions from both player and listener. On Friday night, Feb. 26, at St. Catharines FirstOntario Performing Arts Centre, Ron Sexsmith used his Taylor to display his incredible skill at songwriting. The following Monday night, Feb. 29, at Hugh’s Room, Simon Townshend owned the small stage, passionately attacking three different axes and a mandolin, and he had The Who’s guitar tech on hand to tune up. There’s no denying it: a guitar is a potent instrument, and probably the one thing that gives me the most pleasure in life apart from my family. That’s why these two new albums from Borealis Records are worth having around.

BTU is not British Thermal Units. It stands for Bentall-Taylor-Ulrich. That’s Barney Bentall, ex-Legendary Hearts, who after spending a few years as a cattle rancher has recently been hyperactive on the Canadian folk scene. Last year saw him release a solo album Flesh and Bone and take part in The High Bar Gang (a gospel bluegrass band whose debut album was one of the year’s highlights. Shari Ulrich was also part of the High Bar Gang, and she released a quality solo CD last year as well.) Tom Taylor hails from Vancouver where he was part of the band She Stole My Beer. Together Bentall-Taylor-Ulrich have crafted a folky new CD entitled Tightrope Walk.

The End of Downton Abbey and the State of Prestige TV

Hugh Bonneville and Michelle Suzanne Dockery in Downton Abbey.

The end of Downton Abbey was hardly the sort of dramatic, divisive event that has characterized the conclusions of so many shows from the so-called Golden Age of Television. There was no climactic shootout with neo-Nazis, no ambiguous ending scored by Journey, no revelation that ended in a Coca-Cola ad. Instead, we got a glimpse of a happy family, still completely intact from the start of the season (if not the series) and enjoying a moment of happiness amid Christmas decorations and falling snow. The finale, which aired on Christmas in the UK and this past Sunday in the States, was upbeat to an almost absurd degree, pairing off almost all of the potential romantic couplings and avoiding virtually anything that would darken the mood. In this regard, it was a fitting end to a series whose initial success and enduring popularity eventually sat at odds with general dismissal from critics.

What about this Place: Louis C.K's Horace and Pete

Steve Buscemi and Louis C.K. in Horace and Pete.

Sometimes I wonder why do we tear ourselves to pieces / I just need some time to think / Or maybe I just need a drink / At Horace & Pete’s.

– from the theme song to Horace and Pete, written and performed by Paul Simon. 

On January 30, without fanfare, press release, or social media campaign, Louis C.K. sent out a mass email to his fans: “Hi there. ‘Horace and Pete’ episode one is available for download. $5. Go here to watch it. We hope you like it. Regards, Louis.” (Subsequent episodes were downloadable at a lesser cost: $2 for episode two and $3 for each episode after that.) For the past six years, C.K.'s Louie has been the standard bearer for indie TV within the network model, so this move to direct-to-consumer series distribution seems, though maybe only in retrospect, like a natural next step for him. Unlike Louie, which remains a comedy (albeit a dark and sometimes surreal one), Horace and Pete is a drama, in every best sense of the word: both in that it has the deliberate texture of a stage production and that it lands with a surprising weight of reality.

What a Charlie Foxtrot: Tina Fey and Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

Tina Fey in Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.

“I’m starting to feel like this is normal. You know it isn’t, right?” says reporter Kim Baker (Tina Fey) to Scottish photographer Iain MacKelpie (Martin Freeman), reflecting on her three years as a foreign correspondent in Afghanistan. From her subject position as a 40+ single New York copywriter, the statement is accurate. For the 30.5 million people who live in Afghanistan, however, “this,” a life marred by war, violence, unstable politics and pervasive patriarchy, is normal. Such is the irredeemable problem that can’t be, shouldn’t be, overlooked at the heart of a frustratingly enjoyable film.

Based on an assuredly less egregious memoir called The Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan by New York Times reporter Kim Barker, dramedy Whiskey Tango Foxtrot follows Tina Fey as Kim Baker (that pesky “r” omitted in the screenplay presumably to avoid confusing a fake woman with a real woman in Google searches), a bored, desk-bound writer who jumps at an offer to be an on-camera war journalist in Kabul, Afghanistan. Despite having zero experience in front of a camera, Baker is offered the position precisely because she is childless, unmarried, and over 40 – in others words, because she is “expendable” by North American standards. An eye roll worthy epiphany at the gym causes her to view her suggested shortcomings as an opportunity for change. Leaving a house key for her “mildly depressive” boyfriend (Josh Charles) so that he can water her plants, Kim ships out to Afghanistan for a brief stint that inevitably stretches into three years. 

Sounds from the Pacific Coast: The Seattle Symphony Performs Charles Ives

The Seattle Symphony conducted by Ludovic Morlot, performing Charles Ives' Symphony No. 4.  (Photo: Brandon Patoc)

When the American composer Charles Ives died in 1954, the Associated Press, in a very short obit, stated that many of his compositions were not performed in his lifetime due to their “difficulty.” AP goes on to say that “critics [have described] his compositions as half-a-century ahead of their time.” For members of the Seattle Symphony under conductor Ludovic Morlot, that half-century is now. The orchestra has just released recordings of Ives’ “The Unanswered Question,” “Central Park in the Dark” and Symphonies No. 3 and No. 4. (In 2014 they released a performance of Ives’ Symphony No. 2, also on their own label.)

This Movie's Got Sand: Gods of Egypt

Gerard Butler in Gods of Egypt.

I don’t know the exact moment Gods of Egypt won me over. It might have been when Horus (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) awakes amongst the remnants of last night’s orgy and we see that, like all gods, he’s twelve feet tall, with a giant-sized Jacuzzi to match. It might have been when it became clear that Gerard Butler (as desert god Set), in true Connery fashion, was going to make no effort whatsoever to mask his Scottish brogue. It might have been when we meet Ra (Geoffrey Rush), god of the sun and father of creation, who chills on his celestial catamaran, pulling the sun on a long chain over the edge of the flat, disc-shaped earth (and occasionally firing off a casual bolt from his laser spear at Apophis, the ever-encroaching demon-worm of chaos, represented by a cloud of swirling teeth and smoke). Or, honestly, it might have been watching the trailer, long before I sat down for the main event, which promised a perfect storm of unconscionable casting and absurd CG shenanigans, and delivered to a degree I never dared hope was possible. If those late-winter blues got you down, there is truly no better cure than a flamboyant, excessive, cocksure trashterpiece like this.

Hughie: Hotel Ghost

Frank Wood and Forest Whitaker in Hughie, directed by Michael Grandage. (Photo: Marc Brenner)

Hughie is an oddity in the Eugene O’Neill canon. He wrote it in the early forties, around the time he was turning out his glorious – and lengthy – late-career masterpieces, The Iceman Cometh, Long Day’s Journey into Night and A Moon for the Misbegotten, but Hughie is a two-hander with a running length of merely an hour. It doesn’t read like an excerpt from a longer work, but it has a tossed-off quality, and I don’t mean that as a put-down. It’s like something O’Neill might have penned in an afternoon to clear his head while he was working on Iceman: the main character, a solitary fellow named Erie Smith who lives in an antiquated, mostly abandoned Manhattan hotel, isn’t very different from the has-beens who inhabit Harry Hope’s saloon, except that his vice is gambling (of all sorts) rather than alcohol. The other character is the night clerk Erie strikes up a conversation with in the wee hours, in what feels like an increasingly desperate effort to forge the same kind of bond with him that he had with his predecessor, Hughie, who has recently died.

Upending Clichés in Outlander

Sam Heughan and Caitriona Balfe in Outlander, adapted from the novels by Diane Gabaldon.

I likely would not have read Diane Gabaldon’s gargantuan 1991 novel Outlander if I had not seen the Starz television series, a faithful adaptation of the novel in which large swathes of dialogue are directly transposed to the script. I surprised myself by watching the entire 16-episode first season, since I haven't paid much attention to the multi-genre of historical fiction/romance and time travel/fantasy. Stephen King’s 2011 Kennedy assassination thriller 11/22/63 was gripping, but to make a substantial investment of time about the life of a twentieth-century woman who stumbles back into eighteenth-century Scotland? My interest was piqued by a few positive notices and a news report that the Irish actress, Caitriona Balfe, had been nominated for a Golden Globe for her role in playing Claire Beauchamp. I am pleased to report that the Outlander series, supplemented by reading the source novel, has been an emotionally powerful and aesthetically-satisfying experience. We are treated to luscious cinematography of the Scottish Highlands (inspired by the television drama, Trafalgar Tours is sponsoring a trip to the Highlands), haunting Scottish folk music created by Bear McCreary, the creation of a complex believable world, strong performances from actors who inhabit three-dimensional characters and scripts that allow them to grow and develop.

History as Mudpie: HBO's Vinyl

Multiple raptures: Bobby Cannavale as Richie Finestra in Vinyl.

HBO has aired only three episodes of Vinyl, its musical comedy-drama about the struggle of record-company boss Richie Finestra to resuscitate his failing label in the shifting rock market of 1973. But it is so far from being a clear success on any level – a smear of silliness and effrontery, of blatant intent and thudding execution – that no one is to be scolded for being disappointed with it. Even its more enjoyable aspects, of which there are several, haven’t come into focus. Yet I’ve decided, after the initial turn-off, that I like the show.

Come Fly With Me: La Sylphide Soars at the National Ballet of Canada

Jurgita Dronina and Harrison James in La Sylphide, at Toronto's Four Seasons Centre until March 6. (Photo: Aleksandar Antonijevic)

La Sylphide is the quintessential Romantic ballet, brimming with light-as-a-feather ballerinas on satin pointes, a central male character probing the meaning of existence, a misty landscape ruled by supernatural beings that flit across the imagination and a theme of doomed love. Its historical importance can’t be overstated, and yet Toronto audiences for the most part stayed away in droves when the rarely seen work opened at the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts on Wednesday for a limited five-day run.

Rows upon rows of seats lay empty for the North American premiere of Johan Kobborg’s remake of August Bournonville’s iconic 1836 work, which is a great pity because this production soars. With a stellar cast lead by dynamic newcomer Jurgita Dronina, a Russian-born principal dancer steeped in the Bournonville style from her years dancing with the Royal Danish Ballet, plus a trendy mad-for-plaid design by the legendary Desmond Heeley and appropriately moody lighting by Robert Thomson, La Sylphide is a high from start to finish.

You’re Only as Old as You Feel: The X-Files Season One, 23 Years Later

Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny in "Ice" from The X-Files' first season.

I was four years old when Chris Carter’s iconic science fiction television series, The X-Files, premiered on Fox in September of 1993 and thirteen by the time it ended. Although I’m retrospectively marvelling at my mother’s parenting, I remember actually watching some of the show during its original run. I came to it well steeped in Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel but, while vampires with tortured souls were my jam as a pre-teen, X-Files was still too much for me. I found it creepy – and I was far too young to appreciate David Duchovny’s weird, unexpected sex appeal. The launch of the show’s much anticipated tenth season this year got me thinking that it was high time I revisited the series as a horror-loving, cynical adult with a soft spot for blue-eyed men. But how does its first season hold up after more than two decades?

Risk and Reward: The Unique Perils of TV Criticism

Bobby Cannavale and Olivia Wilde in Vinyl on HBO.

If there is one huge difference between being a film critic and reviewing network and cable television it's about time and commitment. After two hours, I can quickly dismiss something like the dramatically inept and politically naive Trumbo, which treats the Hollywood blacklist – yet again – in an apolitical style that turns the story into an easy-to-digest morality tale between innocent idealists and HUAC, while shrewdly ignoring how Stalinist policies actually infected and divided the American left. It wouldn't have been quite so easy to write it off had it been a TV mini-series. I would have had to give it more time. You can usually tell after a half-hour whether a film will hold together, come to life, or turn turtle. But it's not so easy with a television series.

Film of Mediocrity – Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny

Michelle Yeoh (centre) in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny.

I was never as big a fan of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) as everyone else was (and that includes the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, as well as the film’s director, Ang Lee). I appreciate it for introducing the majority of Western moviegoers to the wuxia genre, and doing so in a way that was palatable to our sense of aesthetics and storytelling while still remaining (mostly) true to the original form. But compared to classic examples like the Shaw Bros’ The 36th Chamber of Shaolin (1978) and more highly-evolved entries that would follow like Zhang Yimou’s House of Flying Daggers (2004), I found Lee’s film to be a laboured, overwrought affair whose action sequences (choreographed by Yuen Woo-Ping) were like a microcosm of the whole picture: beautiful, but ephemeral and mostly empty.

Imagine the crushing sense of ennui that enveloped me, then, when it became clear that Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny, the Netflix-produced, American-Chinese follow up to Lee’s Oscar-winning original, was just the opposite: an undercooked knockoff with cheap CG effects, connected to the first film seemingly in name only. I won’t be one of those who condemn Sword of Destiny for not being as “brilliant” as its predecessor – I’m knocking it because it couldn’t even manage to be coherent on its own terms.

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.