On Finishing Last: Shane Black’s The Nice Guys

Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe in Shane Black’s The Nice Guys.

Shane Black has been operating, to use the gaming term, on "god mode" for most of his career. He's one of those filmmakers whose most dismal failures (see: 1987’s The Monster Squad) are still sharper, funnier, and cleverer than anything else on the marquee. This isn't to say he's immune to failure, far from it; even when his films are as smart and compelling as The Long Kiss Goodnight, for example, they're likely to do just as well at the box office as that one did (which is to say, not at all). In lieu of significant financial returns, Black has carved out a nonetheless comfortable niche as a purveyor of genius-level shlock, a peddler of pulp with aspirations of grandeur that, like the characters in his noir-tinted screenplays, never gets the riches and recognition he (probably, mostly) deserves.

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005) is one of my favourite films, and it’s hard not to see The Nice Guys as a spiritual successor. They’re similar on the surface: a washed-up detective takes a rough-and-tumble type under his wing to help uncover a mystery lurking at the edge of civilized society, set against the glitz, glamour, and hidden agendas of the City of Angels. Everyone has a secret. And everyone has a price. It’s a noir potboiler setup so familiar that, were it not for Black’s talent at executing this kind of stuff (and the relative lack of noir mysteries in cinemas, especially at this time of year), it would be downright boring. Thankfully, a tight script, a great cast, and a consistently charming sense of humour save it from the same fate that Black’s other works have suffered.

Complications: Lucy Prebble's The Effect

Susannah Flood and Carter Hudson in The Effect, at New York City's Barrow Street Theater. (Photo: Sara Krulwich)

In The Effect by the young British playwright Lucy Prebble, a woman and a man in their twenties who have volunteered to take part in a six-week clinical trial for a new anti-depressant fall in love and start breaking the rules governing the procedure: first they wander out of bounds and then they have sex. The play, which is being given a fine production under David Cromer’s direction at the Barrow Street Theatre in the West Village, is intriguing and enjoyable, though – at least at a first viewing – a bit elusive. The first act takes the form of an unorthodox romantic comedy in which Connie (Susannah Flood) and Tristan (Carter Hudson) struggle to interpret their feelings, and each other’s feelings, when they’re aware that their emotional and sexual responses may be the consequence of the drug they’re being fed every morning, the dosage of which is being increased gradually. That is, the drug they may be taking, or only one of them may be ingesting, because some of the volunteers are in fact being given placebos. Dr. Lorna James (Kati Brazda), who is administering the trial for Dr. Toby Sealey (Steve Key), is also aware of these variables, though not, as it turns out, of all of them. She and Toby debate the other possibility – that it’s sexual attraction that is altering Connie and Tris, not the drug, and if that’s the case their incipient relationship may be corrupting the data. Love is so complicated and unpredictable to begin with that the idea of a play where drugs may be adding another layer of lunacy to romantic chemistry is irresistibly playful. There are more complications too. Lorna and Toby once had an affair, at a moment when her life was falling apart. And – unlike the subjects of the trial – she has a history of depression.

Cold War, Warming Up: FX’s The Americans

Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell in FX's The Americans.

One of the unique aspects of television as a popular medium is its ability to foster and deepen longstanding relationships between a given program’s audience and characters. Whereas a movie generally has to establish a connection within a two to three-hour time frame, TV shows can build on our emotional ties to characters and the situations in which they find themselves over years. Done properly, this sustained engagement can lead to especially satisfying – or devastating – payoffs to long-running plot or character dynamics, as well as an increasing sense of connection to shows that might initially come off as a bit distant and chilly. This has especially been the case for me with FX’s superb The Americans.
 

Coming of (a New) Age: The Diary of a Teenage Girl

Bel Powley and Alexander Skarsgård in The Diary of a Teenage Girl (2015).

In 2003, the movie Thirteen, written by fledgling actress Nikki Reed (Twilight) and Catherine Hardwicke garnered critical acclaim for its bold, provocative portrayal of the seedy secret lives of early teens experimenting with drugs, sex, and alcohol. While films like American Pie (1999) offered a frank but socially acceptable look at the first sexual forays of young men, Thirteen followed the trajectory for exploring budding sexuality in young girls set by a long history of grim, moralizing tales from Samuel Richardson’s 1748 novel, Clarissa, to Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac (2013). Although still largely regarded as one of the more honest and realistic glimpses into what teens are up to behind closed doors, Thirteen did nothing new for women’s sexuality or autonomy – it reminded us, as stories have told us since time immemorial, that young women who give in to sexual desire, who dare to experiment with sex or drugs, are opening the door to a world of victimhood, shame, and regret.

Tackling almost exactly the same subject matter as Harwicke’s Thirteen, Marielle Heller’s The Diary of a Teenage Girl differs only in setting, critical buzz, and, most importantly, tone. Adapted from a semi-autobiographical graphic novel by Phoebe Gloeckner, the 2015 film offers a candid and refreshing story of a teen girl’s incredibly messy first sexual experiences growing up in 1970s San Francisco. Minnie Goetz (newcomer Bel Powley) is a 15-year-old who likes drawing (the film is embellished with 70s-inspired, Monty Python-esque comic drawings from Minnie’s imagination), doesn’t love school, and lives in a cozy, liberal household with her free spirit mother (Kristen Wiig), gawky but adorable little sister, Gretel (Abby Wait), and any number of mom’s party friends who’ve come to crash for the night. After he accidentally grazes her boob with his hand, mom’s handsome underachiever boyfriend Monroe (Alexander Skarsgård, complete with bell-bottoms and porn-star mustache) becomes the object of Minnie’s overwhelming teenage lust. The two embark on an ill-advised affair behind her mother’s back which Minnie chronicles in an audio diary comprised of a series of unmarked cassette tapes carelessly strewn about her bedroom. Naturally, Minnie’s sexual awakening via Monroe leads her to satisfy her curiosity about a slew of other taboo subjects which she also records for posterity, alongside her musings about standard 15-year-old topics like whether or not losing her virginity makes her look different, if paramour Monroe masturbates thinking about her, and, less directly, about the complex and often confusing overlap between a good lay and actual love. The diaries, like Minnie, are unreserved and unashamed; her voice is clear, direct, and distinct while being unmistakably teenage.

Rachel & Alice & Obama

Anne Hathaway in Rachel Getting Married (2008).

In a campaign year which has been filled with anger, violence and rancor, there hasn't been a spirit of hope that many drew from Obama's first ascension to the Presidency. What we have been witnessing in the primaries so far is an ugly reaction to it. Donald Trump, a demagogue Paul Bunyan, lumbers across the land promising walls – both real and figurative – to keep out Muslim and Mexican immigrants and restore America to a greatness he perceives as a land that never had Barack Obama as President. (Trump is the paranoid Truther who first began assailing the presidency by challenging the legitimacy of Obama's citizenship.) The Republican Presidential hopeful isn't stoking the ideals in his country but playing instead to its discontent. Stirring and seeking anger wherever he finds it, especially in the white working-class, he isn't interested in salving the sources of their wounds, but marshaling the power of their rage to vote him in. On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton talks and conducts herself as the power broker politician. If Trump speaks to the ugly underside of American exceptionalism, Clinton addresses the unidentifiable masses that make up the country. Given that she comes across like a high-powered CEO who has a demographic sense of her own constituents, it's understandable that she hasn't convinced many disenchanted younger voters to hop on board. They've chosen instead the populist caboose of socialist Bernie Sanders who reaches out to their despair like a crotchety Woody Guthrie and invokes a Promised Land that will build bridges rather than Donald Trump's walls. But his own campaign has been lately doing its own share of erecting walls especially in the face of Clinton's ascending victory as the Democratic choice for President. Unless these two sides truly make peace, a Trump victory is not only highly possible, it will most certainly be a reality. And we'll have as the new President, the anti-Obama.

Cuban Missiles of the Human Kind: The Ballet Nacional de Cuba's Don Quixote

Photo by Nancy Reyes, courtesy of Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal & Ballet Nacional de Cuba.

The castanets heard clicking through Don Quixote, the ballet that opened at Place des Arts on May 4 for a three-night run, echoed the rat-a-tat-tat of heartbeats thrilling at the return of Ballet Nacional de Cuba to Montreal following a five-year absence. The Ludwig Minkus score might have been canned, but the pulse of the Iberian rhythms felt vivid enough for the capacity audience to stand on its feet and clap along, simulating the passions of the fiery fiesta erupting on stage.

Prima ballerina assoluta Alicia Alonso – and rare is the dancer in the history of ballet who owns that superlative title – created her version of the 19th century classic to restore the ballet to its Latin origins. While based on the Spanish novel that Miguel de Cervantes first published in 1605, Don Quixote has been in foreign hands since first appearing as a ballet in 1869. Transplanted Parisian Marius Petipa adapted Cervantes' story for the Imperial Ballet of Russia, working closely with composer Minkus to produce a four-act Spanish-accented extravaganza that many companies around the globe have since included in their repertoires. Alexander Gorsky updated the Petipa ballet for Moscow in 1900, and this is the version Alonso relied on when creating her version of Don Quixote in 1998. She likely learned it growing up, instructed by Russian teachers.

Barron and Charlap: The Art of the Jazz Trio

In 1961, at 19 years of age, a young pianist named Kenny Barron broke into the heart of the jazz scene just as it was peaking in popularity and innovation. Barron (born in Philadelphia, the city of John Coltrane) moved to New York and free-lanced with the young lions Roy Haynes, Lee Morgan and James Moody, three different and yet distinct voices in American music. As the jazz form stretched out, he enriched his musical vocabulary and became a working sideman. Barron proved himself worthy of such stellar company by cutting his first record in 1962 with James Moody. Moody recommended the young piano-player to Dizzy Gillespie. Gillespie was infatuated with the Afro-Cuban sounds in those days and his influence on Barron was profound. Between 1962 and 1968, Barron had steady work with either Gillespie or Moody in a rich repertoire of standards, be-bop and Afro-Cuban music. By 1971 he joined the truly adventurous reed-player Yusef Lateef for six albums released on Atlantic Records. Barron’s talent lie in his ability to fuse all these musical styles (be-bop, Latin, Avant-Garde) while building his own voice, making him one of the most versatile pianists in jazz. As the decades followed, Barron quietly made his mark as a soloist and bandleader. Over the years, he’s cut some memorable records with Stan Getz and Charlie Haden. His splendid 2014 release with bassist Dave Holland, called The Art of Conversation (Impulse), was marvelous recording.

Kenny Barron’s new release is called Book of Intuition (Impulse) and it’s everything one would expect from this veteran musician: passion, joy and sensitivity. Kiyoshi Kitagawa, bass, and Johnathan Blake, drums, round out the trio on this occasion.

One Last Adventure – Uncharted 4: A Thief's End

A Thief's End is the fourth and final game in Naughty Dog's Uncharted series.

I’ve never reviewed an Uncharted game, because I’ve found it to be a mostly disposable series. Nathan Drake (Nolan North) going off on his light, fun, Indiana Jones-style adventures resulted in some eye-catching setpieces but few lasting memories for me (and, in hindsight, it may have been that same resemblance to Indiana Jones which failed to charm me; you have to work real hard to beat Indy at his own game). The high level of visual polish and cinematic flair of Drake’s globetrotting quests provided some temporary “wow moments,” and the characterization and mo-cap performance of Drake and his companions were definite touchstones in turn of the century storytelling in games, but these elements were hamstrung by lackluster combat sections, which interrupted the smooth linear flow of story and gameplay (mostly revolving around traversing the lush environments and solving ancient puzzles). The Uncharted series always struck me as a series of impressive, if slightly forgettable games – until the fourth iteration, that is. Drake’s adventures came to an end, and it was there at the edge of the map that Uncharted and I finally made communion.

Do I Hear a Waltz?: An Encores! Misstep

Melissa Errico and Richard Troxell in Do I Hear a Waltz? (Photo: Sara Krulwich)

Stephen Sondheim’s only collaboration with Richard Rodgers was the 1965 musical Do I Hear a Waltz?, adapted by Arthur Laurents from his 1952 Broadway success The Time of the Cuckoo. Shirley Booth had starred in the play, as a lonely Midwesterner who comes to Venice on vacation in the hopes of enjoying a romantic fling, and Katharine Hepburn took over the role in David Lean’s 1955 film version, Summertime. Though Sondheim’s early musicals were partnerships with other composers – West Side Story with Leonard Bernstein and Gypsy with Jule Styne – he had established himself as a composer-lyricist with A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and Anyone Can Whistle at the beginning of the sixties. But Rodgers was, of course, the fabled writing partner of Sondheim’s adolescent mentor Oscar Hammerstein II, and Laurents was the man who wrote the book for Gypsy, so he agreed to the collaboration. But these two men of strikingly different sensibilities didn’t get along, and though the musical had a modest run it didn’t make much of an impression. (Neither did the leading lady, Elizabeth Allen.) And Sondheim has never thought much of it; in interviews and in his book Finishing the Hat he’s referred to it, quoting his friend, Rodgers’ daughter Mary a “why?” musical – as in “Why bother turning this material into a musical?”

Last weekend’s revival by Encores! marks the first time Do I Hear a Waltz? has been produced in New York since the original production. I saw the show as a teenager and know the cast album well, and I’ve always thought that the material was interesting and the score had considerable charm. Except for a couple of songs in No Strings, it’s the only late Rodgers score worth listening to; the ballads are especially lovely. Leona, the protagonist, thinks of herself as independent and resilient, but she’s febrile, with an all-or-nothing romantic fervor and fragile sensibilities; “Why is it I get so easily hurt?” she asks herself in one lyric, and the answer seems to be that she alternates between asking too much and not having the flexibility or the courage to accept what she’s offered if it’s not perfect. “Throw the dream away,” the Venetian shopkeeper Renato Di Rossi, who courts her, pleads in another song; he’s married, but in a union that has long since passed from passion into a state of mutual respect, and he doesn’t have money. The musical pits Leona’s Yankee puritanism with a more relaxed European attitude toward sex, embodied not only in Renato but also in Signora Fioria, the middle-aged proprietor of the pensione where Leona stays with two American couples. Signora Fioria seduces the younger of the two men, a painter named Eddie Yeager, whose marriage to the naïve, trusting Jennifer has begun to fray at the edges. When Leona spots Eddie going off in a gondola with the hotelkeeper, her moral shock is piled on top of her difficulties in taking Renato as he is, for good and for ill. The second act is overloaded: Laurents introduces one too many plot strands and the climactic scene teeters on the edge of melodrama, or perhaps goes over that edge, depending on your point of view and, I would think, the quality of the production.

Truth and Consequences: Reflections on the Jian Ghomeshi Scandal

Jian Ghomeshi (right) exiting a Toronto courthouse with his lawyer Marie Henein. (Photo: Frank Gunn/AP)

As I was writing about Kirby Dick’s disturbing, albeit flawed documentary, The Hunting Ground, that profiles several women who were victims of sexual assault on American campuses and the apparent official indifference they confronted, it was hard not to think about the outcome of the Jian Ghomeshi trial and the firestorm that it created here in Canada. As most people know, that trial was a high profile case of a former marquee radio host for the CBC that publicly terminated him in the midst of several allegations of disreputable behaviour towards a number of women. The juxtaposition of the American film and the Canadian trial is unsettling because my responses are complicated. Initially, I experienced an almost visceral antipathy toward the male perpetrators. It was easy to feel a sense of outrage about what happened to these young women in The Hunting Ground and the suffering they endured, exacerbated by the blaming-the-victim rhetoric and hostile responses they encountered, even though I believe that the filmmakers could have done a better job at vetting at least one of the women. At the outset of the Ghomeshi trial, I was quite prepared to jump on the media bandwagon and consign the accused to Dante’s Second Circle of Hell for “carnal malefactors.” My feelings of antipathy toward Ghomeshi deepened after reading a powerful online account by Jessica Knoll, who recounts her own gang rape that inspired her novel, Luckiest Girl Alive, and the subsequent vicious treatment she received by her peers and at least one teacher who regarded her as a slut. That essay is of course totally unrelated to the Ghomeshi trial but it did contribute to my mindset that the justice system in general does not always serve women who are the victims of sexual assault.

However, as the Ghomeshi trial unfolded with the cross-examination of the three witnesses and the revelations of sandbagging the media, the police and Crown prosecutors, it became apparent that the Crown’s case was imploding. The inconsistencies between what they told the authorities and what was revealed in the court, their behaviour after the alleged attacks, that included the email collusion among the complainants who were determined to “cook his goose” and “make the predator pay for all the shit he has done” had impeached their credibility. A not guilty verdict was not unexpected and neither was the outraged reaction.

Off the Shelf: Arthur Kent's Risk and Redemption (1996)

Like many television news viewers, I didn't truly become aware of journalist Arthur Kent until 1991 when he was ducking Saddam Hussein's explosive little presents over Dhahran during the first Gulf War. At that time, while decked out in his leather jacket, and his sweeping dark hair blowing in the night air, he emerged with the sexual panache of a movie star. He was America's own Mel Gibson from Peter Weir's The Year of Living Dangerously, caught in the hail of rocket fire, and barely letting it ruffle his locks. This striking image not only won him the moniker "Scud Stud" from female fans rooting for him all over North America, it also won him no end of grief when he refused to be NBC's answer to Geraldo Rivera.

The great story behind Arthur Kent's 1996 memoir, Risk and Redemption: Surviving the Network News Wars (Viking), is how a reputable correspondent, who covered some of the biggest news events in his era, was forced to take the NBC television network to court in a $25 million dollar defamation and fraud suit because the corporate climate of turning hard news into celebrity worship rendered him unable to do his job. But Arthur Kent was also caught in a profoundly ironic trap because it was becoming the "Scud Stud" that actually brought him to international prominence. Risk and Redemption is Kent's attempt to separate what makes a journalist from what makes a luminary. And although you come away from the book cheering Kent's integrity, intelligence and victory, there is still something romantically self-serving about it. He comes across as someone beyond the temptation of stardom – even though television news, the profession on he's chosen, invites it. The incongruity of how the image of the "Scud Stud" (which Kent himself created) shaped a network's perception of him as a journalist, and perhaps implicated him in their corporate plans, doesn't envelop the book as much as I hoped it would.

Big Big Love in Small Places: Sky 1's After Hours

Rob Kendrick, Jaime Winstone, and James Tarpey star in After Hours

Some things you'll do for money /
And some you'll do for fun /
But the things you do for love are gonna come back to you /
One by one.

– "Love, Love, Love" by The Mountain Goats.

Last fall, as audiences worldwide were gearing up for the new Star Wars film, Netflix subscribers were immersed in the dark reality of Jessica Jones' Hell's Kitchen, and our (morbid) fascination with Donald J. Trump was still in its near infancy, the UK channel Sky 1 premiered the first six-episode season of After Hours – a small comedy, set in a small town. After Hours is part coming-of-age story, part love letter to indie music, and it was one of the most delightful things I watched on television in 2015.

Set in Shankly, a fictional northern English village in decline (named, likely, in homage to The Smiths), After Hours is the first television project of John Osborne – poet, radio writer, Edinburgh Fringe-alum – and fellow poet Molly Naylor. Their story centres on recent high school graduate Willow Hannigan, played by James Tarpey (The World's End) in his first television role. When his girlfriend Jasmine (Georgina Campbell) breaks up with him and his short-term travel plans fall through, Willow finds himself suddenly stuck in Shankly with little to look forward to beyond the nightly pleasure he derives from tuning into a local Internet radio program called After Hours – finding solace and friendship in the show's hosts long before their paths ever cross. Broadcasting off a ramshackle canal boat, radio hosts Lauren and Ollie (Jaime Winstone and actor/musician Rob Kendrick) send their laid back joie-de-vivre out to the world, one streaming kilobyte at a time. After witnessing his break-up, Lauren takes Willow under her wing and brings him – literally – on board to help produce their radio show. Before long, Willow finds a new confidence and begins to realize that his small town still offers real opportunities – even if few of the financial sort.

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.