Holiday in Oregon: Jeremy Saulnier’s Green Room

Alia Shawkat and Anton Yelchin, in Jeremy Saulnier’s Green Room.

Horror stories have a long history of using seemingly bland, everyman characters as their protagonists: the college sorority girls (Black Christmas), the nice, normal family (Sinister, The Amityville Horror), the young attractive co-eds (Until Dawn, The Cabin in the Woods). There’s no denying that the formula works. Seemingly “normal” characters not only serve as an anchor in the unpredictable, swirling insanity of horror movie plots, they also force us to consider the absurdity of “normal people” through the revelation of some inevitable character flaw (e.g., both Nick and Amy Dunne in Gone Girl, or Jason Bateman in the sorely underrated 2015 thriller, The Gift); they’re the quintessential blank canvas upon which filmmakers paint any number of issues, hang ups, or dark pasts.

Green Room, Jeremy Saulnier’s latest thriller (Murder Party, Blue Ruin), does not do this. Instead, Green Room takes the time to open on atypical characters and establish a story for them, independent of the madness that follows. The Ain’t Rights are a punk band composed of singer Tiger (Callum Turner), bassist Pat (Anton Yelchin, Star Trek Into Darkness), guitarist Sam (Alia Shawkat of Arrested Development fame) and drummer Reece (English actor Joe Cole, Skins). They’re the model of punk life, living out of a van, siphoning gas to get around, and crashing at random promoters’ homes as they take their act on the road in search of good times and a handful of cash. As their tour hits a dead end, an acquaintance hooks them up with a gig at a Nazi skinhead roadhouse in rural Oregon with the assurance that, as long as they don’t talk politics, doing a show there should be just fine – should being the optimal word, here; as we can tell from the trailer, obviously things do not proceed in a manner even vaguely resembling “fine.”

Neglected Gem #93: The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1976)

Robert Duvall as Watson and Nicol Williamson as Sherlock Holmes in The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1976).

Of all the large-screen versions of Sherlock Holmes stories, perhaps the best is The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, which arrived at the end of 1976. Sumptuously encased in some of the most luxurious costume and production design and cinematography ever lavished on an adventure story, it was the best of that year’s Christmas presents, the one that – depending on your modus operandi – you either wanted to unwrap right away or else save for last. (Oswald Morris’s lighting, Ken Adam’s production design and Alan Barrett’s costumes have been lovingly preserved on the Blu-ray disc.) Truth to tell, 1976 didn't offer such a tantalizing Christmas for movies: the other big releases were Rocky, Network, The Last Tycoon, A Star Is Born, Silver Streak, Bound for Glory, Nickelodeon and The Pink Panther Strikes Again. The only other movie that offered audiences a treat was John Guillermin’s remake of King Kong – and its delights were buried in a pile of disparaging reviews. But King Kong and The Seven-Per-Cent Solution were alike in that they were both witty and unstinting in their determination to treat the viewer’s senses.

Captain America: Civil War – A Situation Pointed South

Chris Evans and Robert Downey Jr. in Captain America: Civil War.

If you had told me in 2011, after I had just seen Captain America: The First Avenger, that not only would Steve Rogers become one of my favourite superheroes, but that his third sequel would be the absolute gold standard for all superhero movies to follow, I would have laughed in your face. Who gives a crap about Mister Stars and Stripes and his magic shield? But you should cut me some slack – in 2011, there was no way to know yet that Marvel’s plan to dominate the comic book movie market would be such a grossly profitable global success. Captain America: Civil War is pretty much as good as it gets – and I don’t mean that in an equivocating, “we’ll take what we’re given” kind of way. I mean that the ensemble superhero movie has never been done this well before, and likely won’t ever be again. For Marvel and the world of comic book cinema at large, Civil War is a triumph.

Pasek & Paul: Dear Evan Hansen

Ben Platt and Rachel Bay Jones in Dear Evan Hansen. (Photo: Matt Murphy)

Dear Evan Hansen, which is selling out at New York’s just-off-Broadway 2econd Stage Theatre, is just about the damnedest musical I’ve ever seen. Steven Levenson’s book focuses on a teenage boy – the title character, played by Ben Platt – who struggles with self-image and anxiety problems so severe that he trips over himself whenever he tries to make contact with anyone besides his overloaded, trying-to-stay-positive mother (Rachel Bay Jones), who is raising him alone, and his classmate Jared Kleinman (Will Roland), the son of family friends, whom he’s known all his life. (Presumably Evan is so used to Jared’s sarcasm and casual insults that he barely hears them.) Evan’s therapist has given him an assignment to write cheerleading letters to himself to start his day, but the one he prints out at school on the first day of the new year isn’t positive; it lays bare his defeated state of mind. When another young man, Connor Murphy (Mike Faist), whose own depression manifests in erratic, explosive bursts of unpredictable behavior, takes the letter away from him in school and later kills himself, his parents (John Dossett and Jennifer Laura Thompson) assume that it’s a suicide note left for Evan, a close friend they had no idea he had, and they go to see him. Too nervous and cowed to set them straight, Evan winds up weaving a complicated fantasy scenario around this secret friendship. When he finds himself invited into their family as – increasingly – a kind of idealized substitute for their lost son, he can’t resist the attention he’s getting, attention that he’s never had from his father (who’s remarried and lives across the country with a new set of children) or even his mother (who, for all her concern for Evan, is trying so desperately to keep them afloat financially that she’s scarcely ever at home). And Connor’s sister Zoe (Laura Dreyfuss), whose name is embedded in the “Dear Evan Hansen” letter because Evan has a crush on her, is an added bonus.

Jack in the Box: The Criterion Blu-ray Release of Five Easy Pieces

Jack Nicholson and Karen Black in Five Easy Pieces.

Unlike many of the key actors who became part of the American New Wave of the Seventies, Jack Nicholson was paradoxically alluring. Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino, Robert de Niro, Diane Keaton and Warren Beatty etched their eccentricities and differences in characters that formed clear lines of definition to form a close rapport with the audience. Whereas Nicholson rode a wobbly wavelength in search of a port that never arrived. There was no perceived goal of resolution in the characters he played early in his career. He was the man in the mirror seeking out definition while simultaneously railing at the world around him for continually honing him in. And, yet, movie audiences still became closely allied with his smart-ass independence. As critic Steve Vineberg remarked in his book Method Actors: Three Generations of an Acting Style, if Nicholson was playing a son of a bitch, he was his own man, and on terms that had their own unorthodox integrity. Hoffman and Pacino tied themselves close to the Method style and that inspired them to dig for the passport that defined their characters, Vineberg went on to suggest, but Nicholson cut loose from all those ties to create a compelling portrait of solitude.

In his Westerns, John Wayne sought to build a sense of community out of his stance as a loner, but he was always cast out in the end into the very wilderness that spawned him. Nicholson was instead a hermetic figure forever living in bustling communities, but more content to be the jack-in-the-box surprise who popped out aggressively with a lewd grin and bopping eyebrows and keeping everyone on their toes. This aggression he displayed was also key to the roles that made him a star. It set him apart from his contemporaries who chose instead to go deeper into the interior of their characters to explore the promise that abandoned them. In an age when America's greatest ideals were up against defeat and failure, it was no surprise that Jack Nicholson didn't wear that defeat quietly – or passively. His George Hansen in Easy Rider (1969) warned Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper that their country would strike out violently at those seeking freedom, but his spiky humour made him a more memorable victim than Fonda or Hopper's mythic martyrs would be by the end. Detective J.J. Gittes in Chinatown (1974) didn't simply recoil from the evil deeds of John Huston's powerfully rich patriarch, he mocked them. In The Last Detail (1973), his navy lifer, Billy Buddusky (perhaps the doppelganger of Melville's Billy Budd), could be the cock-of-the-walk showing a good time to a young navy recruit he's taking to the brig, but his tap-dancing profanities proved to also mask his own impotence. Nicholson's sly and subtle paradoxes, a key to his success as a movie star, would bloom even later in his career in movies nobody saw. In The Border (1982), playing a quietly righteous border patrol agent, he defies the corruption offered by his partner (Harvey Keitel) by confronting him and literally drawing a line in the sand that he says he won't cross – only to walk over that line right after he finishes his confrontation. In that lightning quick moment, Nicholson reminds us of both his defiance and his vulnerability.

To the Bitter End? Reflections on Quitting TV Shows

Chris Noth and Julianna Margulies on The Good Wife, which will air its final episode tomorrow night on CBS.

How many times have you found yourself struggling to finish a novel, or gritting your teeth through the last quarter of a movie that’s gone from promising to painful over the course of its running time? We've all bailed on something that’s failed to keep our interest, but usually if we’ve invested a certain amount of time and gotten a decent amount of enjoyment out of a particular work, we stick it out to the end in order to be able to assess it in its totality.

However, that way of analyzing the relative costs and benefits of staying with a work until it’s over tends to go out the window with television. I’ve been wrestling with the decision to quit or keep watching a number of shows recently, something which is at least in part a function of this so-called era of Peak TV, in which there’s always something else on that’s more vital and compelling (or so we’re told, at least, by friends and critics alike). True, the knowledge that a show may have entered a death spiral, at least in terms of quality, is usually discouragement enough to keep us from committing to more of it. At the same time, the longer-term, more involved nature of the medium means that we come to grow attached to characters (and perhaps the actors portraying them) more readily than we might in a two-hour movie or play, and are therefore willing to forgive some lapses in quality. Besides, expectations for how TV shows treat plot have changed over the last decade or so: where once we expected them to just carry on until they ended, now we operate, for better or worse, on the assumption that there will be some sort of narrative and/or thematic payoff to longstanding storylines and character dynamics, even if they have grown increasingly strained and implausible by the end. TV’s rise in prestige means that there’s an increasing tendency to want shows to feel artistically complete.

UVPD: Uncanny Valley Police Department – Revisiting L.A. Noire

Detective Cole Phelps in Team Bondi’s L.A. Noire.

This month marks five years since Team Bondi’s one hit wonder, L.A. Noire, was released for the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 consoles to critical acclaim. Its innovative game design and ground-breaking facial animation technology caused a stir in its heyday, earning the game an astonishing “perfect” rating from UK’s The Guardian and a score of 89/100 from Metacritic. While L.A. Noire undeniably set a new standard for certain areas of video game development, its use of Depth Analysis’ MotionScan technology to capture and recreate realistic facial expressions seemed to cause a baffling rash of critical blindness in 2011. L.A. Noire was a nifty game. But perfect? Definitely not.

Distilled Cinema: Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!!

Blake Jenner, Ryan Guzman, Temple Baker in Everybody Wants Some!!.

I’ll concede that filmmaker Richard Linklater didn’t need to follow up his audacious and experimental 2014 film Boyhood with something equally ambitious. He could be forgiven for taking an artistic break, after that 12-year-plus ongoing project, and making something lighter and less taxing. But I cannot for the life of me conceive what he was thinking by proffering Everybody Wants Some!!, a lifeless, pointless and utterly unoriginal concoction that will, no doubt, soon be completely forgotten by anyone but his most diehard fans.

Character Study: Don Cheadle's Miles Ahead

Don Cheadle as Miles Davis in Miles Ahead.

In 1989, Miles Davis published his autobiography with co-writer Quincy Troupe. It’s an invigorating read as Davis talks about his life in music and why he chose a career in jazz, “The greatest feeling I ever had in my life, with my clothes on, was when I first heard Diz and Bird together in St. Louis, MI, back in 1944.” Davis was referring to Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker the seminal progenitors of be-bop, a highly inventive and stylized extension of jazz music.

While he cites that moment as a turning point in his artistic career, Davis also opens up about a dark period in his life from 1975 to 1980. This chapter is particularly important because Miles completely lost that precious moment he experienced in 1944 and turned to alcohol, sex and drugs. He put down his horn, closed himself off from the world and bottomed out: “I became a hermit, hardly ever going outside. My only connection with the outside world was mostly through watching television, which was on around the clock … the house was filthy and real dark and gloomy.” He goes on to say “sex and drugs took the place that music had occupied in my life until then and I did both of them around the clock.” Davis’ drug of choice at the time was high quality cocaine. He writes, “after a while, all of this got routine and boring, but only after I had had my fill of it.” Which leads us to the center of Don Cheadle's first directorial effort, Miles Ahead.

New Jack Kitty: Key & Peele’s Keanu

Keegan-Michael Key, Jordan Peele, and Keanu (right) in Keanu. (Image courtesy of Warner Bros.)

Films based on sketch comedy groups – from Monty Python & The Holy Grail to Wayne’s World – often use an episodic style where the story is really just a placeholder that allows gags to happen. Although this is appropriate considering the rapid-fire sketch DNA they share, and makes for the kind of light, low-risk entertainment that is often satisfying enough on its own, deep down it has always disappointed me. I like stories, especially funny ones. I like my funny stories to be well-told, and to have characters that grow and change and teach me things, just like characters in a drama or an adventure movie would. I would count Monty Python & The Holy Grail among my favourite comedies of all time, but even as the Pythons deliberately eviscerated the typical formula (including a narrator, for example, but having him hacked to death by a knight on horseback, and interrupting the climactic battle scene with modern-day bobbies who take our heroes into custody), I craved a real resolution to Arthur’s quest. Surrealist British genre subversion aside, I don’t ever see any real reason that comedies can’t be as smart and as interesting as any other kind of movie.

That’s why Keanu, written and produced by sketch comedy duo Key and Peele (Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele), is one of the best comedies I’ve seen in a long, long time: it manages to tell a compelling story with actual characters that is also gut-bustingly hilarious.

Anything Goes: Cole Porter at the Goodspeed

Desirée Davar (as Erma), and members of the Goodspeed cast, in Anything Goes. (Photo: Diane Sobolewski)

East Haddam, Connecticut’s fabled Goodspeed Opera House initiates its 2016 season with Anything Goes, Cole Porter’s breezy 1934 musical set aboard a cruise ship crossing the Atlantic. And though the Goodspeed voyage, under Daniel Goldstein’s direction, isn’t without its obstacles, overall it’s a pleasurable one. The libretto to Anything Goes was originally written by Guy Bolton and P.G. Wodehouse, though Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse revised it before the Broadway premiere, and over the years it’s been re-revised continually: every time it’s newly mounted in New York it’s tinkered with and the song list altered to add or substitute Porter jewels from other shows. Since the 1962 production (with Eileen Rodgers and Hal Linden), the 1987 production (with Patti LuPone and Howard McGillin) and Kathleen Marshall’s ebullient, deluxe 2011 production (with Sutton Foster and Colin Donnell) have all been recorded, Porter aficionados can check them against each other and evaluate the addenda and omissions. In terms of the libretto, there are three versions – the 1934, the 1962 (by Bolton himself) and the 1987 by Crouse’s son Timothy and John Weidman, which Kathleen Marshall hewed to and which Goodspeed has chosen to produce as well. (If you want to know what the show sounded like in 1934, get a copy of the 1989 EMI studio recording overseen by John McGlinn, who conducts the London Symphony Orchestra behind a disparate ensemble including opera diva Frederica Von Stade and the peerless Jack Gilford.)

Talking Out of Turn #43 (Podcast): Ariel Dorfman (1983)

Author Ariel Dorfman.

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.

In 1984, Paul Mazursky made Moscow on the Hudson, a poignant comedy about exile and homesickness, which starred Robin Williams as a Russian musician touring with the Moscow circus who spontaneously defects in New York City. The movie ostensibly deals with the complex set of emotions set loose when he finds his freedom. His actions trigger a mixture of homesickness, sadness, and the longings for a sense of place that come when (for political and ethical reasons) you are forced to leave home. With those themes in mind, I devised a chapter called Exiles and Existence where a number of artists (including authors Jerzy Kosinski, Josef Škvorecký, and Neil Bissoondath) examined what it means to find yourself in a new land while looking back at the home you abandoned. 

In 1983, one of those interviewed was Chilean-America author, academic, and human rights activist Ariel Dorfman. Now more widely known for his 1991 play Death and the Maiden, at the time I sat down with Dorfman his recent book Widows had just been published in English by Pantheon Books. It was his first novel to be translated into English.

– Kevin Courrier.

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

Advocacy and Accuracy: Kirby Dick's The Hunting Ground

A scene from Kirby Dick's The Hunting Ground.

“Despite significant progress over the last few years, too many woman and men on and off college campuses are still victims of sexual abuse.”

– Vice President Joe Biden at the 2015 Academy Awards 

The persuasive power of advocacy journalism and documentaries is undeniable, but they have their detractors in large part because they offer viewers only one perspective or one that is not even-handed. Think of the conversation around An Inconvenient Truth, Davis Guggenheim’s 2006 Oscar-winning film about Al Gore's efforts to explain global warning. Yet Guggenheim’s recent foray, He Named Me Malala, is an inspiring portrait of the Pakistani teenager and 2014 Nobel Peace Prize, Malala Yousafzai, which I expect has few detractors, at least in the West. Or consider the highly popular Making of a Murderer, the Netflix series that revisits and forcibly challenges a decade-old murder conviction. This documentary series, reminiscent of Errol Morris’ 1988 pioneering The Thin Blue Line has elicited viewers’ visceral outrage about the original conviction. Although the filmmakers have been generally praised for their muckraking efforts, a few critics, notably Kathryn Schulz writing in The New Yorker, persuasively provides a counter argument.

A similar controversy has been stirred by the incendiary The Hunting Ground about the prevalence of sexual assault on American campuses and the apparent indifference of university administrators in addressing the complaints of the victims. Writer-director Kirby Dick and producer Amy Ziering, who previously collaborated on the documentaries Outrage, about homophobia among American political elites, and The Invisible War, about sexual assault and its cover up in the military, do provide a disturbing picture of a serious problem. If seen in isolation from the critical responses to the film, most viewers likely will be enraged by what has been occurring on American campuses as portrayed in The Hunting Ground.

First-Person Hitler: Look Who's Back

Franziska Wulf and Oliver Masucci in Look Who's Back, currently streaming on Netflix.

“In the year 2014, if someone comes to the central square in Bayreuth [Germany] pretending to be Hitler and if that is tolerated by the general public, then I have to say: that is bad for Germany…"

– an unnamed German citizen, in an unscripted scene from Look Who's Back

"I can work with this."

– "Adolf Hitler" in Look Who's Back

 
In 2012, author Timur Vermes' comic novel Er ist wieder da (He is Back, in English) was published in Germany, and it quickly became a bestseller. The satirical story, told from the point of view of Adolf Hitler, describes the unlikely scenario of Hitler suddenly returning to modern-day Germany (then 2011), becoming a YouTube sensation, and eventually, in the book's final pages, mobilizing his fame to return to politics. The book was translated into English in 2014 by Jamie Bulloch as Look Who's Back (MacLehose Press). Last year, the novel was adapted into a film by German filmmaker David Wnendt (Wetlands, 2013). Three weeks ago, the English-subtitled version of Look Who's Back appeared on Netflix.

Reading Look Who's Back in English is a strange experience. Despite its controversial protagonist, its true subject matter is our own times, the cult of celebrity, and of course the state and self-understanding of contemporary Germany. The English-language translation helpfully includes an appendix that offers non-German readers a crib sheet on the lesser-known Nazis whose names appear in the book, a primer on German political parties and their acronyms, and some background on popular German TV personalities. Though most of the references will still fail to resonate for those of us who aren't current on German chat shows and comedians, we still share enough of the world for most of Vermes' satire to land. In the novel, everyone responds to "Hitler" as if he himself were the satirist, a bold comedian taking broad swipes at culture at large – a truth teller, a Method comic with a square mustache and a Nazi uniform. As a character and a narrator, Vermes' Hitler is a man who knows fully who he is and what he believes and seems utterly unable to dissemble – but no-one he who hears him takes him at his word. Instead, it is received as brilliant and pointed cultural critique, and he is eventually embraced by politicians and people of all political (and non-political) stripes. No-one takes Hitler seriously, it is implied, because no-one seems to take themselves very seriously.

Neglected Gem # 92: And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself (2003)

Antonio Banderas, Matt Day, Carl Dillard and Eion Bailey in And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself (2003).

The HBO movie And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself is a satirical comedy that the writer, Larry Gelbart, built up from an oddball historical footnote: in 1914 Pancho Villa invited Mutual Films to send their star director, D.W. Griffith, to Mexico to film the revolution. In his tabloids, William Randolph Hearst was editorializing fervently against Villa’s uprising, so Villa hoped that he could counter his bad press by going Hollywood – or at least Fort Lee, New Jersey, which in 1914 was where American movies were being made. I have no idea how faithful Gelbart is to the facts (a prefatory note tells us, “The improbability of events depicted in this film is the surest indication that they actually did occur”), but he landed on an irresistible subject and the movie, directed by Bruce Beresford, is terrific. In it, Antonio Banderas gives a sly and exuberant performance as Villa – it’s an ideal role for him – and the talented young actor Eion Bailey (who later played a major role in Band of Brothers and recurring roles on ER and Ray Donovan) is Frank Thayer, whom Harry Aitken (Jim Broadbent), the head of Mutual, sends down instead because Griffith’s too busy. The movie is shaped as Thayer’s coming of age: he falls in love with the revolution, becomes Villa’s buddy and romanticizes him, and then he has to acknowledge the more unpleasant truths about him. He even gets the girl – the actress Teddy Sampson (Alexa Davalos), who appears in the movie he makes about Villa. Dramatically, Gelbart and Beresford need Thayer to filter Villa’s actions, which are complicated and sometimes contradictory. But though Bailey is very good and his story is interesting in its own right, it’s Banderas’s Villa who mesmerizes the camera and claims ownership of the movie. Beresford shores up the two leading men with a colorful supporting cast: Broadbent, Michael McKean as William Christy Cabanne, who takes over from Thayer and makes a commercial seven-reeler about Villa, and Kyle Chandler as Raoul Walsh, who stars in it; Saul Rubinek as Villa’s American liaison; Colm Feore as Griffith; Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Anthony Stewart Head as William Benton, a rich Englishman whose Mexican ranch Villa bleeds of its cattle (and then shoots Benton when he objects); and especially Alan Arkin as Sam Drebben, a Bronx-Jewish mobster who goes to battle with Villa. Arkin’s performance, gruff and robust and hilarious, ranks with the blistering comic work he did in the seventies in movies like Hearts of the West, Rafferty and the Gold Dust Twins, The Seven-Per-Cent Solution and The In-Laws.

Podcast: Interview with Robert Moog (1986)

Inventor Robert "Bob" Moog. (Photo courtesy of The Bob Moog Foundation)

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 1986, one of those interviews was with engineer Robert Moog, inventor of the Moog synthesizer and pioneer of electronic music. He passed away in August 2005, at the age of 71.

– Kevin Courrier.

Here is the full interview with Robert Moog as it aired on CJRT-FM in 1986.

Swords, Sorcery, & Social Justice – The Huntsman: Winter's War

Emily Blunt (left) and Charlize Theron in The Huntsman: Winter's War.

Watching The Huntsman: Winter’s War, a sequel to a fantasy retelling of Snow White that I never bothered to see, I got the distinct impression that I was watching something made for someone else. The elaborate costuming, hammy overacting, and romantic subplots should have been clues, but all it took was a cursory scan of the audience filing out of the cinema afterward for me to finally realize who that “someone else” was. I was surrounded by my comrades, my kin, my counterparts in the endorsement of shlocky fantasy cinema: female nerds.

I make the distinction from any other brand of nerd simply because I believe – at least in terms of what our modern theatres have to offer – that they’re an ill-served subset of our culture. Examples of enjoyable fantasy cinema aimed at a female audience are few and far between, and I think that’s deplorable. For every big-budget adolescent male power fantasy, from Hercules to Gods of Egypt, there’s a pathetic Mortal Instruments or a forgotten Beautiful Creatures, like stringy bones tossed to a starving dog. Our culture gives these dedicated dorks no real choice: they can enjoy, despite themselves, the male-dominated films that are given reasonable budgets and good marketing, or they can settle for the scraps left over. Many girls adore Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films – mostly because they’re excellent – but they do so in spite of the trilogy’s almost medieval lack of female representation. Really, there’s no reason we can’t incorporate elements that are relatable to women into these crappy fantasy films, is there? This isn’t the nineties anymore, when Happy Meals were as segregated as the two halves of the dance floor at a Hasidic wedding. Everyone deserves a trashterpiece now and again, right?

Constructing Musicals: Jack Viertel’s The Secret Life of the American Musical

Cast of Fiddler on the Roof on Broadway, 1977. (Photo: Bobby Bank)

Jack Viertel’s new book The Secret Life of the American Musical (Sarah Crichton Books) is a gift for those of us who love musical theatre; I read it over just a couple of days and would have devoured it in a single sitting if time had allowed. Viertel, a one-time dramaturg, drama critic and arts editor who is now, among many other accomplishments, the artistic director of City Center’s Encores! series, has taught musical theatre at NYU’s Tisch School for the last ten years, and this volume emerged from his classes as well as from his extensive experience with musicals over the past three decades. I suspect it would be impossible to find anyone who knows more about the subject, and in The Secret Life of the American Musical he offers a comprehensive master class in how good musicals are constructed. Even for those of us who have seen and listened to hundreds of musicals, the book is a series of revelations – mostly because of his method of juxtaposing shows that are vastly different in style, tone and subject matter to show how the same principles operate across the spectrum.

Off the Shelf: John Gregory Dunne's Monster (1997)

When studying film in college during the Seventies, I read critical books that were about the themes, issues and the craft of movie-making. But by the Eighties and Nineties, most of the books I encountered – good ones, I'll admit – like Final Cut (about the Heaven's Gate disaster), Outrageous Conduct (about the Twilight Zone tragedy) and The Devil's Candy (about The Bonfire of the Vanities fiasco) were more about the failure of the American movie industry. (Ironically, most made for more compelling drama than the films that inspired them.) Now it would be tempting to add John Gregory Dunne's Monster (Random House, 1997) to this ignominious list, but for the fact that it is not much more interesting than the movie that spawned it. Monster initially reads as an absorbing and a painfully comic tale that pits the creative writer, with his unreasonable demands, against the corporate system, one that produces inhabitants who wear pinstripe suits with suspenders, slick their hair back with grease and have Perrier breath. But the book loses its nerve part way through and turns pretty schizoid. If the first half of Monster suggests how Hollywood's corporate brass turn writers into cookie-cutters, by the end, Dunne is practically providing trays to put the cookies on.

Able Archer: How Comedies Mature (or, at least, Age Gracefully)

The seventh season of FX's Archer premiered on March 31st.

I’ve spent approximately 30 hours of my life watching a goofy cartoon about a super-spy’s ridiculous adventures. That might seem like a waste, were it not for the fact that, as it progresses through its seventh season, the FX comedy Archer remains one of the funniest things on TV. In its most recent seasons, that’s been a function of its willingness to significantly tweak – I won’t say reinvent, because it remains fundamentally the same show – its basic formula to stay fresh. It’s a reminder of how even shows that are light, trifling entertainment (and it’s no disparagement to Archer to call it that) can find ways to develop and even, in their way, grow.

As Mark Clamen’s 2012 review of the show for this site indicates, Archer isn’t exactly highbrow. It’s frequently violent and crude (albeit loaded with surprisingly intelligent references, a trademark of creator Adam Reed’s work). While it functions as a satire of the James Bond franchise and all of the hyper-masculine trappings that go with it, it’s still often gleefully immature and politically incorrect. It’s also a great showcase for the voice-acting talents of a number of underappreciated actors, including H. Jon Benjamin in the title role of secret agent Sterling Archer, Aisha Tyler as his long-suffering girlfriend Lana, and Jessica Walter as his mother (she’s essentially reprising her role from Arrested Development here, but she does it so well that it doesn’t matter). Perhaps the best example of how Reed understands how to utilize his talent is his use of Judy Greer, who’s so well-known for playing second bananas that she’s gamely made fun of herself for it. In Archer, she gets a chance to shed that bland persona, playing the deeply demented Cheryl (or Carol, or any of a variety of other names), a role that provides some of the strangest, and occasionally most disturbing, jokes on the show.

Time's Marrow: Anthony Hamilton's What I'm Feelin'

Anthony Hamilton newest album is What I'm Feelin'. (Photo: LaVan Anderson)

We are pleased to welcome Dylan Hicks as a guest contributor to Critics at Large.

Late last year, R&B singer Anthony Hamilton enjoyed some internet attention for gospel, doo wop, and other old-school rejiggerings of Drake’s “Hotline Bling,” Silentó’s “Watch Me (Whip/Nae Nae),” and 2 Chainz’s “Watch Out.” The videos, showing Hamilton performing either with his road band or a cappella with his background singers, the HamilTones, were as much settings as covers, or at least the lyrics were often loosed altogether from their original musical contexts. Links were no doubt prodded in part by the comedy of anachronism, and as such the interpretations were related to novelty groups like Big Daddy, who in the eighties and nineties covered then-current hits in fifties styles. But Hamilton's spirit was of continuity rather than incongruity, with his message being that music, particularly in the hands of virtuoso vocalists, is endlessly malleable because – in some essential, time-blurring way – it’s all the same stuff. A similar spirit pervades Hamilton’s albums, including the just-released What I’m Feelin’ (RCA Records). His music is frequently referential but not retrogressive, steeped in the past but not wistful for it.

Alien Conspiracy: Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt’s Season Two

Ellie Kemper in Netflix's Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.

Dear Reader,

By the time you are reading this, I will have finished the recently released second season of Netflix’s Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. I may also have won the lottery, or gotten dressed – perhaps even both. Whatever the case, it’s important to note that, at the time of my writing, I have only seen ten out of this season’s thirteen episodes that follow on the success of the 2015 Netflix exclusive series written by Tina Fey and Robert Carlock (30 Rock, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot). At this juncture, season two’s stage appears to be set and its various storylines are careening toward a conclusion. While I’m open to the unlikely possibility that the next three episodes could upend everything I thought I knew about Kimmy Schmidt, the recurring themes evident in this season have led me to a bold and all-encompassing conclusion: Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, at its core, is a story about aliens.

Blended Sound: Lola by Carrie Rodriguez

Carrie Rodriguez's new album, Lola, was released by Luz Records in February.

If it’s right to judge a book by its cover, then perhaps it’s right to judge an album by the musicians who play on it. That’s probably an unfair assessment but I think Carrie Rodriguez can make a case for her new album, Lola (Luz Records). Her new record features a band called The Sacred Hearts – featuring guitarist Bill Frisell, Viktor Kraus on bass, Brannen Temple on drums, David Pulkingham on nylon string and electric guitars, and Luke Jacobs on lap & pedal steel guitars. Raul Malo, the leader of The Mavericks, sings a lovely duet with Rodriguez on track one, and Max Baca, founder of the Grammy Award-winning band called, Los Texmaniacs, plays on the last two cuts. It’s a group that has a fully informed country sound, with enough Mexican influence to make it special. The record was recorded in Austin, Texas, and it sounds like they left the door to the studio open to get that mystical part of the world into the room.

The Ascent of Man-Cub: Jon Favreau’s The Jungle Book

Mowgli (Neel Sethi) and Baloo (voiced by Bill Murray) in Jon Favreau’s The Jungle Book.

I don’t understand Hollywood’s obsession with realism. I mean, I understand it mechanically – as our capacity to create more detailed visual effects grows with technology, so does our desire to push the envelope and chase that ethereal “photo-realistic” carrot – but realism in film is so often employed with little regard for the tone, style, or intent of a particular story. The examples are far too numerous to name, but it’s everywhere if you pay attention. (This obsession is shared by the gaming industry, too, whose foamy-mouthed quest for ever more ridiculously detailed visuals has been leaving smart and satisfying game design in the dust for decades.) Jon Favreau’s mega-budget amalgamation of Disney’s 1967 animated Jungle Book feature and the original writings of Rudyard Kipling was immediately off-putting for this reason: this is a fairy tale, heavy on whimsy and light on subtext, about a boy raised by wolves who is mentored by a panther and sings with a bear. Why did it need to look so realistic? Why did we need another version of this story with Avatar-esque visual fidelity and what seems like a tenth of the style or charm? You painstakingly animate an incredibly convincing CGI jungle cat and then manipulate his mouth to match Ben Kingsley’s voice work and, instead of being wowed by the verisimilitude, my brain plummets straight into the uncanny valley. Did we learn nothing from Babe?

I suppose all the more kudos are due to Favreau and his band of intrepid visual effects artists, because his Jungle Book – while never shrugging off the weird tonal clash between the realism of the visuals and the whimsy of the story – is engrossing, charming, and utterly gorgeous. I frequently forgot that I was looking at a young actor (Neel Sethi) clambering around on a green-screen sound stage; the computer-generated flora and the fauna that occupy it are that instantly convincing, and Sethi, who plays Mowgli with perfectly charismatic precociousness, plays off his CGI counterparts with natural ease. The Jungle Book, more than any film I’ve ever seen (yes, including Avatar), deserves to be seen in 3D – Favreau uses it far more to add depth to the frame and fill his environments with detail and life than to indulge in gimmicks and have things poke through the fourth wall at you. The illusion, as tenuous as it might seem from the outside, is rarely shattered while you’re in the theatre. It’s a remarkable achievement in technical effects.

Arnold Wesker (1932-2016)

Playwright Arnold Wesker (1932-2016) at the Durham Book Festival in 2008. (Photo: Simon James)

The angry young man movement, which attacked England’s obstinacy about holding onto its vision of itself as an empire after the Second World War and quarreled with the bourgeois gentility of the mid-century English drama, detonated the British theatre in the mid-1950s. But except for John Osborne, whose Look Back in Anger and The Entertainer are still performed as Tony Richardson’s film versions continue to represent the exciting early years of the English New Wave, the playwrights who came out of that movement have mostly been forgotten. One of them, Arnold Wesker, died last week at the age of eighty-three. His output included fifty plays as well as fiction, poetry, essays and memoirs, but only in the first five years of his theatrical career did he write plays – five of them – that made both critics and audiences sit up and take notice – though unlike Osborne’s plays or Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey, they never developed lives beyond English shores. They were The Kitchen (1957), which the National Theatre revived in 2011, Chips with Everything (1962), and – book-ended by these two – the plays known as “the Wesker trilogy,” Chicken Soup with Barley (1958), Roots (1959) and I’m Talking About Jerusalem (1960).

The trilogy – in particular the first and third plays – is about the golden promise of socialism and how its true believers handle the fallout when, inevitably, it smashes up against the realities of the world. Political idealism is a great subject, yet only a handful of playwrights have chosen to dramatize it since Sophocles in Antigone. Clifford Odets took up the challenge in Awake and Sing! and Paradise Lost, both written in 1935, and John Guare in his Lydie Breeze plays in 1982, and more recently it’s provided one of the themes for Richard Nelson’s Apple family plays (which were written to coincide with significant American political moments) and Temple by the talented young English playwright Steve Waters. The Wesker trilogy is a kind of British equivalent to the Odets plays, and just as Odets found his home with the Group Theatre, the Wesker plays were produced at the Royal Court, the heart and soul of the angry young man movement.

Podcast: Interview with Frank Oz (1986)

Audrey II and Rick Moranis in a scene from Frank Oz's Little Shop Of Horrors (1986)

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 1986, one of those interviews was with director Franz Oz, who was in Toronto promoting his musical comedy Little Shop Of Horrors, a film featuring Rick Moranis, Steve Martin, and a 15-foot-tall talking plant. At the time, he would have been better known for his work with Jim Henson, voicing Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear, and Animal on The Muppet Show and Cookie Monster, Grover, and Bert on Sesame Street. Little Shop of Horrors was Oz's first feature film that didn't involve Henson.

– Kevin Courrier.

Here is the full interview with Frank Oz as it aired on CJRT-FM in 1986.

The Political and the Personal: The Crime Novels of Todd Babiak

Author Todd Babiak.

The political and the personal underpin and course through Todd Babiak’s harrowing sometimes violent Come Barbarians and its sequel, Son of France (HarperCollins 2016). A former Albertan journalist and the author of light social satire novels, Babiak, after having read the oeuvre of John le Carré and a smattering of Graham Greene, turned to the crime/thriller genre without sacrificing the quality writing of his earlier literary works. Like his protagonist, Christopher Kruse, Babiak moved with his family to southern France. Like Kruse, Babiak learned early the art of self-defence and became a security agent who in the course of his work needed to “hurt” people. But now with a family, Babiak jettisoned that life, but draws upon that personal experience to create Kruse, his most rounded character. During the year in France, he absorbed its ultra-nationalist politics that provides the backdrop for both of these compelling thrillers.

When Two Become Two: Netflix's Love

Gillian Jacobs and Paul Rust in Love, currently streaming on Netflix.

 This review contains spoilers for the first season of Love. 

Netflix is positioning itself to become the go-to venue for down-to-earth stories of modern, urban love. In November, they gave us Asiz Ansari's poignant and personal Master of None, and in February they premiered Love – starring comedian Paul Rust and Gillian Jacobs (Community). Surface similarities aside (both depict Millennial-aged characters and their struggles for love and money, with pointed reflections on dating in the era of Facebook and texting, and a surprising number of key scenes which take place around craft service tables), Love quickly distinguishes itself from its onscreen neighbour with its psychological nuance and its dogged willingness to let its characters make poor and morally problematic decisions.

Co-created by co-star Rust, former Girls-writer Lesley Arfin, and Judd Apatow (Freaks and Geeks, Knocked Up), Love is neither a straightforward romantic comedy nor an "anti-rom-com" in the fashion of FX's You're the Worst or the Apatow-directedTrainwreck. ( As I wrote in my review of the FX comedy back in 2014, the thing about anti-rom-coms is that, for better or for worse, they almost always end up being rom-coms.) In contrast, Love is more interested in being real than in being subversive.

Reanimating a Beloved Corpse: Burr Steers’ Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

Lily James as Miss Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

There are so many times in my life where I wish I had a time machine. It would have a vast array of applications, both big and small, from correcting gaffs in my own life (looking at you, English degree) to visiting some of history’s greatest moments. Today, I would like a time machine so I can visit Jane Austen around 1814 and inform her of her looming 2016 screenwriting credit for Burr Steers’ Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. There would be lots of explaining to do:

–  "... so because of this ‘public domain’ idea, in 202 years you're going to be credited as a writer on a zombie movie."
– “Why are they called ‘zombies?”
– “I think it’s a Haitian voodoo thing!”
– “And they eat brains? Why brains?”
– “I… ah… you know, I don’t know, Jane. It’s canon. I’m sure it’s on the Wikipedia page.”
– “Should I have included zombies in the original?”
– “No. Definitely not.”

As a fellow spinster writer, I feel a kind of kinship with Jane Austen. I’d like to think she’d be pleasantly amused by this news – more so, I’m sure, with the assurance that the reviews aren’t great and yet not a single critic faults her for the film’s problems. It’s almost as if she wrote all the good parts of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies’s screenplay and somehow we all know it.

Going Dark: The Choices Narrow as Another Video Store Closes in Toronto

Happier days at Queen Video in Toronto.

The recent closing of the flagship store of Queen Video in Toronto, after nearly thirty-five years in business, was illuminating on so many levels, from what it augured for the future of film viewing at home to what people were most interested in snapping up as the store sold off most of its 50,000 titles (some were transferred to the still-existing Queen Video outlet, further north in the city). As I picked through the detritus of what was still left on the premises on Queen Video’s last day, after a 23-day sell off of stock when DVDs were down to $1 a pop, I was saddened that another great rental outlet was closing even and, more significantly, aware of what that closing actually meant.

Cooder-White-Skaggs at Toronto's Massey Hall (April 11, 2016)

Ricky Skaggs, Mark Fain, Sharon White, Joachim Cooder & Ry Cooder in NYC in Nov. 2015. (Photo: Chad Batka)

There was something going on at Massey Hall in Toronto last night – something physical, and something decidedly spiritual. It wasn’t your ordinary concert. Although Massey Hall has hosted more than its share of special shows, there was something different about this one. Everyone knew it. The anticipation ran high. My friends on Facebook were posting last week about how excited they were, how they felt "like 12-year-olds waiting for Christmas." When I sat down in my seat you could hear folks all ‘round talking about how they had been counting down the days. Then, at 8:00 on the dot, as is customary at this hallowed hall, Ricky Skaggs, his wife Sharon White, and Ryland P. Cooder came onto the stage. They were followed by Ry’s son Joachim, Sharon’s sister Cheryl, their dad Buck White and Ricky’s longtime bandmate Mark Fain. It was truly a family affair.

Cagney: Dancin’ Fool

Josh Walden, Robert Creighton and Jeremy Benton in Cagney. (Photo: Carol Rosegg)

Jimmy Cagney was one of the spryest and most distinctive dancers ever to make movies, but only a fraction of his dozens and dozens of Hollywood pictures showed off that particular corner of his super-size talent. He made six musicals in all, and only two are well known: Yankee Doodle Dandy, for which he won the 1942 Oscar for his portrayal of George M. Cohan, a vaudevillian from a theatrical family who became the first American-born purveyor of musical comedy, and the 1955 bio of Ruth Etting, Love Me or Leave Me, in which Doris Day gets all the numbers and Cagney plays (memorably) her gangster boyfriend, Martin Snyder. TCM junkies who have toted up hours watching the Busby Berkeley spectaculars from the thirties are familiar with Footlight Parade (1933). Cagney plays a producer-director of elaborate curtain-raisers for talkies who has to step in at the eleventh hour for a drunken actor to perform the ineffable “Shanghai Lil” opposite Ruby Keeler, bafflingly cast as a Chinese waterfront barfly who’s remained true to her wandering sailor beau. Like several of Cagney’s numbers in Yankee Doodle Dandy (“You’re a Grand Old Flag,” “Give My Regards to Broadway” and the title song), “Shanghai Lil” is a high point in American film musical history, mostly because of his contribution. Cagney had a long movie career, but it’s a pity he didn’t get to star in more musicals. In my personal pantheon of film-musical performances, his George M. Cohan sits right at the top, next to Barbra Streisand’s as Fanny Brice – another musical-theatre icon from the early twentieth century – in Funny Girl. What the two portrayals have in common is that, unlike in more recent dramatizations of musicians, neither star makes an effort to mask his or her patented style or explosive personality to sound like the real-life character.

The off-Broadway show Cagney (at the Westside Theatre) isn’t a compendium of moments from the handful of Cagney musicals, though it does include “Grand Old Flag,” “Yankee Doodle Dandy” and a medley of other songs from Yankee Doodle Dandy presented in the context of a World War II USO tour. It’s a new musical bio with its own original score, like Funny Girl or The Will Rogers Follies, and it doesn’t expend much time on Cagney’s movie musicals. Footlight Parade doesn’t merit a mention; aside from Yankee Doodle Dandy, only The Seven Little Foys – a 1955 Bob Hope movie in which Cagney made a cameo appearance as Cohan – shows up. But since Cagney is a musical, and Robert Creighton, who plays him (and who worked on the music and lyrics with Christopher McGovern), is a song and dance man, it’s Cagney the dancer we have in our heads when we leave the theatre. The choreographer Joshua Bergasse has recreated some of Cagney’s routines and invented others, and the six-member ensemble includes three superb male dancers: Creighton, Jeremy Benton as Hope and Josh Walden as Cagney’s brother Bill. (The others are all perfectly proficient, but Bergasse has built the choreography around these three.)

Beauty in a Box: Ballet Jörgen’s The Sleeping Beauty

Saniya Abilmajineva and the dancers of Ballet Jörgen in The Sleeping Beauty. (Photo: Lawrence Ho)

Watching Ballet Jörgen’s new production of The Sleeping Beauty in Toronto recently brought to mind IKEA, an association prompted by artistic director Bengt Jörgen’s Swedish heritage and the fact that his version of the mother of all classical ballets is compact and collapsible, much like a BJURSTA extendable table. Though inspired by Marius Petipa’s original 1890 choreography and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s majestic score (heard on tape), Jörgen has broken free of constraints imposed by tradition, slashing scenes (like the longer than long Prologue) and condensing the usual three acts into a quick paced two. But smaller doesn’t mean less. Camillia Koo’s spare but effective sets and costumes sparkle under Rebecca Picherack’s honeyed lighting design, and while there are just over 40 dancers (the 22-member ensemble augmented by 24 children and youth recruited from local dance schools), the impression is of an engagingly unified and committed ensemble performing with the vigour and professionalism of a full-sized company. At the centre of it all is a sparkling ballerina by the name of Saniya Abilmajineva whose brilliant command of technique and playful elegance made this version of The Sleeping Beauty something of a revelation.