Podcast: David Churchill's Dating and the Movies Documentary

In the mid-Eighties, I had an idea for a magazine article on what kinds of movies people chose to see when they went out on dates. Partly, this was inspired by my own wrong-headed, but totally innocent, decision to take a date in high school to see Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs (it was on a Dustin Hoffman double-bill with – of all things – The Graduate). After getting the piece published, I began to think of it further as a radio documentary. While working on On the Arts at CJRT-FM, I started thinking about who I'd interview when I saw that my late colleague and friend, David Churchill, seemed even more interested in the idea. So he took over writing the project with myself producing and Adrienne Markow hosting.

Since it is David's birthday today, and we miss him dearly, it seemed apt to share his work with the rest of you.

Thanks to Susan Green, Avril Orloff, Michael Rechtshaffen, Mary Frances Ellison, Laurie Lupton, Geoff Pevere, Mary McIntyre, Andrew Dowler, Sharon Clapp, Deborah Viner and Eric Montgomery for sharing some pretty unusual dating stores and even more unusual dating films.

– Kevin Courrier

Here is David Churchill's Dating and the Movies as it aired on CJRT-FM in 1988.

New Productions: Chekhov, Shakespeare, Wilde

Moya O’Connell and Neil Barclay in Uncle Vanya at the Shaw Festival. (Photo: Emily Cooper)

Uncle Vanya, staged by Jackie Maxwell (in her final season as artistic director), is the crown jewel among the offerings at the Shaw Festival this summer. (At least, among the shows I was able to see; unfortunately, I arrived too early to catch either Sweeney Todd or Strindberg’s The Dance of Death.) The production draws you in from the opening moment, where the old nanny, Marina (Sharry Flett, infusing the character’s grandmotherly warmth with ironic humor), calls Dr. Astrov (Patrick McManus) on his drinking, and you don’t break free of its spell until long after you’ve wandered out of the Court House, the ideal Shaw venue for Chekhov’s delicate, impressionistic “scenes of country life” because of its intimacy. (It’s where the company also performed a memorable Cherry Orchard in 2010.)

Talking Out of Turn #45 (Podcast): Film Critic Jay Scott (1985)

Jay Scott was film critic for The Globe and Mail from 1977 until his death in 1993.

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., Doris Kearns Goodwin 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.

Talking Out of Turn had one section devoted to reviewers who ran against the current of popular thinking in the Eighties. That chapter included discussions with New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael, who had returned to writing in the Eighties after a brief hiatus as a consultant in Hollywood, talked to me in 1983 about how the Reagan decade was already having a deadening impact on the movie industry; author Margaret Atwood, who turned to literary criticism in her 1986 book Second Words, discussed – from an author's perspective – the value of criticism and how it was changing for the worse during this decade; Vito Russo, who in 1981, wrote a book called The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies, which examined the way gays and lesbians had been portrayed in the history of American movies; and Globe and Mail film critic and author Jay Scott (Midnight Matinees) who spoke about how, despite being one of Canada's sharpest and wittiest writers on movies, he was initially a reluctant critic.

One of Canada's best film critics, Jay Scott died from AIDS on July 30, 1993 – 23 years ago today – but in his short life he left quite a mark on the Canadian cultural scene. When he sat down with me in his hotel room in 1985, we were both in Montreal covering the Film Festival and talking about his book of criticism, Midnight Matinees, which had just come out. He spoke about how his passionate love for movies would ultimately grow into a life of film criticism. No surprise that after our long chat, we both ran off to catch Paul Morrissey's Mixed Blood. I think he enjoyed it more than me.

– Kevin Courrier.

Here is the full interview with  Jay Scott as it aired on CJRT-FM in 1985.

Eleanor Roosevelt through Different Lenses (Part 2): Patricia Bell-Scott’s The Firebrand and the First Lady

Part 1 of Bob Douglas' Eleanor Roosevelt through Different Lenses was published here on Sunday. 

Reading The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship, I noted that although it covers much of the same material and sources as Ken Burns' The Roosevelts, Patricia Bell-Scott offers a new angle and brings Eleanor Roosevelt into sharper focus with a fuller, more rounded portrait, rendering her a more complex individual than served up in the documentary television series. She continued to encourage her husband to live up to his promises and professed ideals but what is different about The Firebrand is that she in turn was challenged by Pauli Murray (1910-85), an African-American socialist activist, lawyer, poet and first African-American female Episcopal priest.

Course Correction: Star Trek Beyond

Chris Pine as Captain James T. Kirk in Star Trek Beyond.

It may seem strange to say, but Star Trek Beyond is sort of the movie we need right now. In a month that has seen more atrocities committed than most of us can stomach, and the needless shooting of yet another black citizen in the U.S. just this week (and then the trailer, that almost felt like a response, for a Marvel Netflix series about an invincible black man), it’s encouraging to see that even our summer blockbusters have the good taste to be about unity, harmony, and hope. Even in the guise of fluffy escapism, Beyond is one of the pieces of entertainment out there right now that helps us address the problems we’re battling in the real world – the problems that prompted Roddenberry to create the brand in the first place. In that sense, Beyond feels the most like real Star Trek of any of these "nuTrek" films – and that also makes it the best of them, too.

Lovesick Movie: I Saw the Light

Tom Hiddleston as Hank Williams in Marc Abraham's I Saw the Light.

Hank Williams was born in a two-room cabin in Mount Olive, Alabama in 1923. He was an over-active child whose enthusiasm for constant play was subdued by the gift of a guitar at the age of seven. The cheap instrument was from his mother and could be considered a blessing and a curse for the young boy who was one restless soul. Williams took lessons from a black street singer by the name of Teetot who taught him a few blues licks and how to sing. He also learned how to drink and to quell his hyperactive soul with alcohol, in between writing songs. By the time he was 21 years old he had his own band, his own radio show and a growing audience. Hank Williams sang about God, love and loss, and having a good time, which was quite the appeal in post-war America. His sound was a mix of country, swing and the earliest form of rockabilly that appealed to the teens. As a man he was charming but reckless with his health and his two wives. He died young while riding in the back seat of one his prized Cadillacs. It’s the kind of stuff that would make a great movie – unfortunately that movie isn’t I Saw the Light, starring Tom Hiddleston as Williams.

Rules of Engagement: Gavin Hood's Eye in the Sky

Gavin Hood's Eye in the Sky is the kind of procedural thriller that clears your head while simultaneously keeping you in breathless suspense. Guy Hibbert's compelling script with its taut intelligence gets into a great subject here: drone warfare. What Eye in the Sky sets out to unravel with sharp slivers of nuance is the moral ambivalence felt by those who execute high-tech strikes against Islamic extremists. Operating from a distance and using drone aircraft and sophisticated camera surveillance, pilots, soldiers and politicians get pulled into the queasy voyeurism of a video battleground. They may be in complete control of the hardware to reduce the collateral damage of innocent human life, but we see that people will always unwittingly stray into the target area. Eye in the Sky skillfully maps out their dramatic strategy, while implicating us as witnesses, but the picture is about our inability to control human behaviour – no matter how sophisticated the technology is. Unlike Hood's earlier Rendition (2007), which focused on the CIA's practice of extraordinary rendition, Eye in the Sky doesn't craft its tale so that every little detail falls neatly into place. Rendition was so concerned about being on the right side of every issue that the audience barely had to break a sweat picking sides. By the end, Eye in the Sky brings comfort and certainty to no one.

Hither and Yon: Theatre Round-Up

The Cast of Goodspeed's Bye Bye Birdie. (Photo: Diane Sobolewski)

This piece contains reviews of Bye Bye Birdie (Goodspeed Opera House), Alice in Wonderland (Shaw Festival), The Stone Witch (Berkshire Theatre Group), and Romance Novels for Dummies (Williamstown Theatre Festival).

Framed by Daniel Brodie’s nostalgic projections that reminds us what we saw on TV in 1960, the revival of Bye Bye Birdie at the Goodspeed Opera House is a little uneven but quite enjoyable, and I don’t think that the director, Jenn Thompson, can be faulted for most of the problems. Time hasn’t been kind to Michael Stewart’s book, a satirical take on the pop-cultural phenomenon of Elvis Presley and his imitators that felt fresh as the country cartwheeled into the sixties and for at least a few years thereafter. Stewart was inspired by Presley’s 1957 army induction. When Birdie is drafted, Rosie, the quick-witted secretary to his combination manager-songwriter Albert Peterson, comes up with the idea of picking one teenage girl from the legion of Conrad’s fans to receive a goodbye kiss from him on The Ed Sullivan Show, guaranteeing that the song with which he serenades her, “One Last Kiss,” will become a big enough hit to bankroll Albert’s departure from the music business and enable him to marry Rosie – a fiancée almost as long-suffering as Miss Adelaide in Guys and Dolls – and realize his original dream to become an English teacher. The adolescent they pick at random, Kim McAfee, has just become pinned to her jittery boy friend, Hugo Peabody. Conrad’s descent upon her small Ohio town, Sweet Apple, doesn’t just unnerve Hugo; it puts all of the teenagers into a state of hormonal hysteria. Albert’s possessive mother, Mae, who views Rosie as competition, arrives on the scene, too, to block her marital plans.

Eleanor Roosevelt through Different Lenses (Part 1): Ken Burns' The Roosevelts

Eleanor Roosevelt speaking at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1933. (Photo: Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library)

Since Ken Burns adapted David McCullough's book, The Great Bridge, about the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge, to an Academy Award winning Brooklyn Bridge (1981), he has produced and directed numerous masterful feature length documentaries for PBS. His signature trademarks are a combination of still photos, archival film footage, unseen actors reading the words of historical characters, apt American music and an array of historians, journalists and (if possible) surviving contemporaries who offer compelling anecdotes and insights into the era, an issue and the characters. Burns avoids dramatic re-enactments. His oeuvre includes The Statue of Liberty (1985), the iconic The Civil War (1990), Baseball (1994), The West (1996), Lewis & Clark (1997), Not for Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony (1999), Jazz (2001), The War (2007), The National Parks (2009), Prohibition (2011), The Dust Bowl (2012), The Central Park Five (2013). Most recently PBS has aired Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies (2015), a six-hour treatment of Indian-American physician Siddhartha Mukherjee’s Pulitzer prize-winning biography of cancer, the one film Burns did not direct because he was so personally connected to the subject: his mother died of cancer when he was a young boy. In 2016, he returned to directing and producing the thrilling Jackie Robinson that excelled in weaving together sport, politics and race.

It is, however, Burns’ 2014 mammoth seven-part, fourteen-hour The Roosevelts: An Intimate History, on the private and public lives of Theodore, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, that is the one I will be discussing today – focusing mostly on the second generation of Roosevelts. As with many of the films cited above, Burns collaborated with biographer and historian Geoffrey C. Ward, who wrote the elegant and accessible script and is one of the historians – along with Doris Kearns Goodwin, David McCullough, Jon Meacham and journalist George Will – who offers trenchant insights. Actor Peter Coyote won an Emmy award for his compelling narration. The stellar cast of actors’ voices include Meryl Streep for Eleanor Roosevelt, Paul Giamatti for Teddy Roosevelt, and Edward Herrmann for FDR, an astute choice since he persuasively played the role in the television series Eleanor and Franklin (1976) and Eleanor and Franklin: The White House Years (1977).

Sophomore Slump: Checking In on UnREAL

Shiri Appleby and Constance Zimmer in UnREAL.

At the end of last summer I wrote about three promising new series – UnREAL, Mr. Robot, and Deutschland 83 – that appeared on television screens over the summer of 2015. One year later, the travails of the first two (Deutschland’s future is uncertain, but a follow-up series probably won’t appear for some time, if at all) offer some insights into how shows can struggle to build on the success of a good first season.

UnREAL, in particular, has caused me to think about a recent suggestion by New York Times TV critic James Poniewozik that “shows get backlash in [Season 2] for flaws that were there in [Season 1] but de-emphasized” because of the thrill felt by critics and audiences alike when they encounter a new show with a unique perspective. It’s a bit of a special case, but True Detective serves as a good example: the first season of HBO’s (now possibly defunct ) anthology crime series met with hysterical raves from just about everyone, except for a few dissenters, which included Critics at Large's Phil Dyess-Nugent. However, those dissenters were vindicated with the advent of Season 2, which featured a new cast and had new directors behind the camera. The main constant was creator Nic Pizzolatto, whose overblown, self-important writing had been a major, if largely unnoticed, flaw from the beginning. With the absence of Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson to make his dialogue work, or director Cary Joji Fukunaga’s direction, the flaws with Pizzolatto’s show became glaringly apparent.

Sing Street: Junior Musical

Ferdia Walsh-Peelo and Mark McKenna in Sing Street.

Sing Street is the third of the Irish writer-director John Carney’s low-key urban musicals, following Once (2007) and Begin Again (2013). Like Once, it’s set in Dublin (Begin Again took place all over New York), but for the first time Carney’s focus is teenage musicians rather than adult ones. The period is the mid-eighties. His hero, Conor (Ferdia Walsh-Perlo), is a fifteen-year-old whose parents (Aiden Gillen and Maria Doyle Kennedy) shift him to a Christian Brothers free state school as an economic measure when they’re beset with financial woes. The usual rocky transition to a new environment for a sensitive kid trying to find himself is exacerbated by a bully named Barry (Ian Kenny) who singles Conor out for special attention, but Conor eventually figures out how to deal with him, and as it proceeds the movie treats him with unexpected affection. (His father is a brute.) The bigger bully is the headmaster, Brother Baxter (Don Wycherley), who humiliates Conor when he wears brown shoes rather than the requisite black ones to school and protests that a new pair isn’t in her parents’ budget, and wallops him when he comes to school wearing make-up – part of his new glam-rock look. The band Conor and his friend Eamon (Mark McKenna) start – Conor plays guitar, Eamon (who’s skillful on several instruments) on bass, with three other kids (Percy Chamburuka, Conor Hamilton and Karl Rice) backing them up – winds up as partly a rebellion against Brother Baxter’s tyranny and the deadly atmosphere of Synge Street School. But Sing Street isn’t really about the power of music to stave off the workaday misery of a Dublin existence, like The Commitments. The band, which they dub Sing Street, begins as a romantic gesture. Conor is entranced by a girl named Raphina (Lucy Boynton) who has quit school with the hope of pursuing a modeling career in London and hangs out in the meantime outside a home for girls across from Synge Street – her digs since her dad is dead and her bipolar mother is in and out of psychiatric institutions. To get Raphina’s attention, Conor claims to be in a band and invites her to appear in their videos. Then he has to get an actual band together and shoot an actual video, which neither he nor Eamon knows the first thing about. The loose, seat-of-their-pants approach of the boys – including Conor’s first new friend at the school, nervy Darren (Ben Carolan), who declares himself their manager – is part of the movie’s charm.

A Tale of Two Hannibals: Michael Mann’s 1986 Manhunter

William Petersen as Will Graham in Manhunter (1986).

Hannibal Lecter, the psychiatrist who moonlights as a cannibal (or is it the other way around?), has been a household name since 1991’s The Silence of the Lambs. In Jonathan Demme’s thriller based on the novel by Thomas Harris, Sir Anthony Hopkins ushered the good doctor into the cultural milieu opposite Jodie Foster’s FBI Agent Clarice Starling. Eleven years later, Hopkins reprised the role in 2002’s prequel, Red Dragon, which explored the relationship between Dr. Lecter and his first FBI pet, the fatally empathetic FBI profiler Will Graham (Ed Norton). While the film received mixed reviews, the unique relationship between Graham and Lecter captivated audiences, paving the way for another adaptation in yet another eleven years. In 2013, Mads Mikkelsen brought the character to the small screen in Brian Fuller’s critically acclaimed TV series Hannibal. Co-starring Hugh Dancy as the newest and shiniest Will Graham, the series finally explored the largely untouched inception of Graham’s friendship with Lecter, culminating three seasons later in a rehashing of Red Dragon’s hunt for serial killer Francis Dollarhyde (Richard Armitage).

Bookended by two other middle-of-the-road titles (namely, 2007’s origin story Hannibal Rising and, at the opposite end of the storyline, 2001’s Hannibal) cinema’s favourite cannibal has had a rich and lengthy on-screen life. But did you know (and I’m looking at you, Millennials) that The Silence of the Lambs wasn’t Hannibal’s big screen debut? And, furthermore, that Red Dragon isn’t the first time a director has tried to tackle the symbiotic relationship between Graham and Hannibal that the TV series ultimately popularized? I didn’t. So imagine my surprise when my monthly trip to Toronto’s Royal Cinema to catch the latest neo-noir film selected by the Neon Dreams Cinema Club exposed me to Michael Mann’s Manhunter – a film I’ve somehow managed to avoid despite my deep adoration for Doctor Lecter’s corpus.

Stranger Things Are Happening on Netflix

(From left) Caleb McLaughlin, Finn Wolfhard, Millie Bobby Brown and Gaten Matarazzo in Netflix's Stranger Things.

Here’s something you probably already know: the thing about nostalgia is that it wears off pretty quick. All the recent properties – hell, nearly all properties, recently – that aim for relevance and goodwill by direct association to the things you recognize and love from years past are usually flashes in the proverbial pan. Nostalgia for the stories you loved as a child, or for your childhood itself, has no real lasting value. It offers neither satisfying catharsis nor a profound dramatic payload. It’s simply a warm fuzzy feeling in the moment, and the movies and books and games and comics and music that weaponize it in the service of their own interests are often emotionally empty at best, and deeply upsetting at worst.

So then, I ask myself, what’s nostalgia’s place in pop culture? It would be wrong to dismiss it entirely. It’s a great feeling, however fleeting, and it’s the business of entertainment to make us feel things. How can nostalgia be employed tactfully and tastefully, and to what end? I’ve thought on this long and hard, and to me, the ideal scenario is one in which nostalgia is simply a doorman – a smiling friend who greets us warmly, and waves us through the gateway of the screen into something new and wonderful… into something like Stranger Things.

Talking Out of Turn #44 (Podcast): Bharati Mukherjee (1985)

Author Bharati Mukherjee in 2011. (Photo: Jennifer Roberts)

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, Neil Bissoondath, and Ariel Dorfman) examined what it means to find yourself in a new land while looking back at the home you abandoned. 

In 1985, one of those interviewed was author Bharati Mukherjee. Already the author of two novels and a memoir (with partner Clark Blaise), her first collection of short stories, Darkness, had just been published. Born in Kolkata and educated in India and the U.S., Mukherjee had lived in Montreal and Toronto for over a decade before returning to the United States to accept a university teaching position. To date, she has written eight novels, including Jasmine (1989) and most recently Miss New India (2011). 

In this interview we explore the idea of those sometimes necessary (but painful) trade-offs immigrants have to make in order to become a citizen of another land. The stories collected in Darkness are a living, breathing testament to those conflicts. She tells us, "I'm a comic writer who chases the darkness."

– Kevin Courrier.
 
Here is the full interview with Bharati Mukherjee as it aired on CJRT-FM in 1985. 

Comedies: The Chinese Room, How the Other Half Loves, The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God

Sue Jean Kim, Brían F. O’Byrne, and Carson Elrod in The Chinese Room. (Photo: Daniel Rader)

The Chinese Room by the Irish playwright Michael West, at Williamstown’s Nikos stage, is a sci-fi comedy with serious overtones. Brían F. O’Byrne plays Frank, an inventor of artificial intelligence who discovers that his partner is closing him out of the company they founded together and phasing out some of his creations, “humanoids” like Susannah (Sue Jean Kim), of which Frank keeps the prototype in his house. To preserve the memory that his wife Lily (Laila Robins) is rapidly losing, Frank has transferred it to Susannah. But the combination of Lily’s confusion (she doesn’t remember that she’s at home, and most of the time she doesn’t know who Frank is), the tensions in their marriage that are now being channeled through Susannah’s persona, the bugs in the humanoid model (Susannah keeps faltering and having to be rebooted), and the demands of his little boy, Zack (Elliot Trainor), now exacerbated by his removal from his own company, have turned Frank’s life into chaos. The emissary from Frank’s partner, who arrives to collect the passkey to the system, is a robot known as Daniel (Carson Elrod), and his insistent presence – he’s been programmed not to leave Frank’s house without the item he was sent to retrieve – adds to the mix.

French Roast: Netflix's A Very Secret Service

Hugo Becker and Mathilde Warnier in A Very Secret Service, currently streaming on Netflix.

Netflix's maturation as a television provider has been meteoric, but the road it's taken has in general been familiar: the same trajectory – albeit under a very different production model – has been travelled by AMC, and HBO before that. But the most exciting features of that journey has been growth in genuinely new directions, largely unexplored by traditional network and cable channels – features that emerge from Netflix's still unique global reach. Even as Hulu and Amazon give Netflix a run for its money in the U.S,, both services remain unavailable beyond American borders where their original shows still find themselves circulating under traditional distribution deals. In Canada, we have seen the recent broadcast premiere of Amazon's Bosch on CTV, and other Hulu and Amazon originals have been licensed to Canadian streaming services like shomi and CraveTV. Netflix, along with Hulu, Amazon, and iTunes, has opened a door to a world of international television with already established audiences in the home country – mainly British, but also (among others) Spanish, Italian, French, Scandinavian , South American, Israeli, and a surprising number of South Korean shows – a televisual archive that sometimes spans decades. This newly legal and one-click access to well-subtitled original language productions is certainly unprecedented for North American and global subscribers, but over the past several months, Netflix has been quietly setting the stage for something else entirely: global premieres of new, non-English language series.

Since last summer, Netflix has premiered new, first-run shows from Japan (Hibana), Mexico (Club de Cuervos), and this May, its first French series (Marseilles, a raw but compelling drama starring Gérard Depardieu as an embattled mayor of Marseilles). It has also been securing the worldwide exclusive distribution rights for a number of foreign series, also marketed under its "Netflix Original" brand – on July 1st, the French-language A Very Secret Service, which premiered on ARTE France as Au service de la France last fall, joined the growing list of shows.

High and Low: Notes on Film Criticism and Hitchcock/Truffaut

François Truffaut and Alfred Hitchcock.

Why is it that some people think film critics (to paraphrase Cyndi Lauper) don't want to have fun? More to the point, why do people get so upset when you don't have the kind of fun they had at a hit movie even though you can explain clearly why it didn't deliver for you? (People never get this incensed when the picture is a commercial failure.) If I find a picture sluggish and heavy-spirited, as I once did with Ivan Reitman's massive 1984 hit Ghostbusters, why shouldn't I say so? Just because it was intended to entertain and make money for the studio doesn't make that a criteria for evaluating its quality. A good critic always judges a film on whether or not they are enjoying it, but they also go further to try and articulate why (even though, according to some moviegoers, you're not supposed to have a contrary opinion when the picture is a huge Hollywood production with a pedigree). Yet, as in politics, the Emperor sometimes has no clothes. But those same folks who always strip the Emperor down to the buff in politics seem to feel that the same doesn't apply to the popular arts which you should just let wash over you. This may explain why there's been such an uproar over the new remake of Ghostbusters where people are insane with rage that Hollywood has dared to reboot a 'classic.' Meanwhile, others get appalled if you diss the original. They assume that, due to your discriminating intellect, you can't simply party down and enjoy getting slimed.

If audiences develop their taste for art by first having an appetite for mindless entertainment, as Pauline Kael once suggested in her essay, "Trash, Art, and the Movies," it's because good criticism makes that process possible. My own movie collection, for instance, ranges from Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game to Dumb and Dumber. Obviously, there's a world of difference between them, but both movies are enjoyable on the terms they offer. There's an irresistible charm that silliness and even stupidity can provide when it's done with a certain tone and skill, just as a profound work with an artist's vision can irrevocably change the way you walk and talk. Yet there's a kind of snobbery that crosses between both high and low tastes. For instance, I know some very literate friends who'd be stunned that I'd even consider Dumb and Dumber a good comedy because their intelligence and higher tastes prevents them from getting in touch with the polymorphous infant in themselves. There are others, no doubt, who think my love of Renoir means I should get out more. Movie pleasure can be delectably superficial, or it can deliver a deeper satisfaction, the same way one develops a taste for better wine while still having the occasional desire to chug a beer.

Farewell to John McMartin (1929-2016)

From left: Alexis Smith, John McMartin, Dorothy Collins and Gene Nelson in the 1971 production of Follies.

During my junior year in college, Stephen Sondheim’s Follies tried out in Boston and I saw it on opening night, with John McMartin – who died last week, at the age of eighty-six – in the leading male role. The musical is set at a reunion of showgirls in the about-to-be-torn-down Broadway house where they appeared in annual editions of an elaborate revue, and the main characters are two couples – one-time chorines and best friends and the men they married – whose lives turned out to be marked by longing, regret and increasing bitterness. McMartin played Ben Stone, celebrated diplomat and author, who starts out by denying that he wishes he’d lived his life differently, then falls in love all over again with the woman he didn’t marry (played by Dorothy Collins) – or rather, with his romanticized memory of her and of the man he used to be. I’ve never forgotten McMartin’s devastating performance. In act one, when he sang “The Road You Didn’t Take,” Ben’s supposed refusal to admit that his might not have been the right road, McMartin’s pebble-strewn tremolo conveyed the heartbreak and the escalating rage bubbling up beneath his insistence. It remains one of the greatest dramatic performances of a song I’ve ever experienced in a theatre. At the last televised birthday tribute to Sondheim, in 2010, McMartin reprised it. He was eighty by then, but astonishingly his rendition had lost none of its emotional power.

Competitive Endurance Journalism: HBO’s Tickled

A scene from Tickled.

I knew pretty much nothing about Tickled, a documentary by New Zealand directors and journalists David Farrier and Dylan Reeve, before I saw it. I had read a description that painted it as an innocent and curious examination of the alleged sport of “competitive endurance tickling” that quickly morphs into something far more bizarre and disturbing, but that was it. I’m hoping that by discouraging you from reading this until you’ve seen the movie, I can help you experience the film the way I did, which was to be led by the hand down a deep rabbit hole of the human psyche in one of the more vocal and memorable theatregoing experiences of my life. See this one, and report back.

Well-Tempered Piano Players: Joey Alexander and Ramsey Lewis

Joey Alexander at the piano. (Photo: Rebecca Meek)

The 30th Annual Toronto Jazz Festival wrapped up a couple of weeks ago and in spite of the often-confused line-up that included KC and the Sunshine Band and Sarah McLachlan, the real focus was on jazz piano players. Among the featured musicians in the festival were the wonderful Bill Charlap Trio, Montreal’s Oliver Jones, Australian Matt Baker, newcomer Alfredo Rodriguez from Cuba, and the one and only Chick Corea. But the important concert for me was on June 30th at Koerner Hall. The very popular Joey Alexander and his Trio made their Toronto stage debut in a double bill with the “legendary” Ramsey Lewis Quartet. The concert was a fine example of the generational shift in jazz: Alexander is 13 years old; Lewis turned 81 last May. What Lewis and Alexander shared was the importance of improvised music and the need to break new ground. Jazz wouldn’t be jazz without it. The result was an engaging evening of music that was frequently challenging to the ears.

Ahead of the Curve: Edgar Degas at the MoMA

The Ballet Master (Le Maître de ballet), by Edgar Degas, c. 1876. (White chalk or opaque watercolor over monotype on paper)

Edgar Degas: A Strange New Beauty is a deeply intriguing exhibition of rarely seen work by the great 19th century artist, and among the best ever to explore the multifaceted Frenchman’s modernist tendencies. Better known for his pastel portraits of ballerinas, Degas is here presented as a maverick experimentalist working in the comparatively dark medium of monotype, a technique involving drawing in black ink on a metal plate that was run through a press to create a one-off print. Printmaking usually creates multiples of the same image. But Degas used monotyping to be unique. The technique allowed him to be spontaneous and inventive in creating single plates with a heightened tactility that made the paper it was made on come alive.

The Museum of Modern Art show, up until July 24, consists of approximately 120 monotypes organized by senior curator Jodi Hauptman with curatorial assistant Heidi Hirschl, senior conservator Karl Buchberg and independent Degas art historian Richard Kendall. Arranged chronologically, from the 1870s to the 1890s, they share gallery space with some 60 related works, including paintings, drawings, pastels, sketchbooks, prints and book illustrations. The range and breadth of work alone shows Degas to have been an exceedingly prolific and curious artist who transgressed boundaries while single-mindedly pursuing unorthodox subjects and artistic methods. People often lump Degas in with the Impressionists. But as this excellent exhibition makes clear he cannot be so easily defined. Degas outstripped his contemporaries by using liquid ink and not just colour to suggest the ambiguity of modern life. It’s a remarkable achievement, and thrilling to observe in a show that gives free rein to the artist’s fascination with pliable form.

Three Musicals: Threepenny Opera, Little Shop of Horrors, and The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk

Rosalie Craig and Rory Kinnear in The Threepenny Opera at London’s National Theatre. (Photo byRichard Hubert Smith)

There’s an exciting new production by Rufus Norris of The Threepenny Opera at London’s National Theatre, with Rory Kinnear, dashing and ironic and brilliant, as Bertolt Brecht’s anti-hero Captain Macheath ("Mack the Knife"), the audacious and unsettling gangster whose insatiable taste for the ladies is his downfall. The trademark supertitles are missing, but Norris knows his Brecht. The National’s current artistic director, he staged London Road there in 2011, a Brechtian musical based on interviews with the residents of a middle-class neighborhood where a serial killer has been dispatching prostitutes; it’s one of the most extraordinary evenings I’ve ever spent in a theatre. Norris made a film of it last year but it wasn’t released on this side of the Atlantic. He’s directed Threepenny as a mélange of carnival side-show, music hall entertainment and pantomime (in the English sense of the word). Vicki Mortimer’s set is a constantly revolving series of scaffolding and flats dressed with construction paper – the actors make their entrances by tearing through it. At the top of the first act, members of the ensemble enact a comic dumb-show version of Mack’s nefarious deeds behind a cut-out frame while the Balladeer (George Ikediashi, who shows up later with a Jamaican accent as the pastor who marries Mack and Polly Peachum, and then in drag at the whorehouse) sings the “Moritat,” a.k.a. “The Ballad of Mack the Knife.” The eight-member band, including music director David Shrubsole on piano and harmonium, appears in the midst of the action, and on some numbers Shrubsole, looking like a seedy undertaker in black with a top hat, accompanies Polly (Rosalie Craig) or Jenny (Sharon Small), cabaret style, on one of the ballads. For the “Army Song,” Mack and his pal Tiger Brown (Peter de Jersey), the chief police inspector, hold onto each other in terror, lit by a downstage special, while lanterns swing ominously back and forth upstage, and on the final verse bloody body bags drop down from the flies. (Paule Constable designed the expressionistic lighting.)

Picture/Portrait: De Palma & Eat That Question: Frank Zappa In His Own Words

I can't think of any other film director whose work continually captivated me but has drawn such violent reactions from various friends than the movies of Brian De Palma. It didn't seem to matter whether it was ones that I loved (Hi Mom!, Phantom of the Paradise, Carrie, The Fury, Dressed to Kill, Blow Out, Casualties of War, Carlito's Way, Femme Fatale and Redacted), ones that I didn't (Sisters, Scarface, Body Double, The Black Dahlia and Passion), or ones with virtues disguised by their compromises (The Untouchables, Raising Cain, Snake Eyes and Mission to Mars), folks had an axe to grind and I was often the stone used to sharpen it. From the moment one individual introduced me to the fiendishly clever 1974 musical comedy, Phantom of the Paradise, I was drawn into De Palma's spiky impudence. The devious way he deployed irony to give genre pictures a wicked vitality I found to be both darkly funny and emotionally searing – even heartbreaking. This equivocal approach may account for most of the strong reactions I got from various moviegoers. Often when artists use irony, it's with a knowing sense of detachment, and the film congratulates you on your hipness while keeping you cocooned in your certainties. But De Palma played out life's failures on a grand operatic scale. He drew us into a waking nightmare and then proceeded to pull the rug out from under our convictions. That's maybe why one friend, who I took to The Fury after he returned from a yoga retreat, didn't speak to me for months. Subjecting him to a hallucinatory thriller about two teenagers with telekinesis and where De Palma (as critic Terrence Rafferty once wrote) "generate[d] horror from nightmarish exaggerations of the experience of adolescence: the feeling that your impulses have gone out of control, that even your own body is alien, perhaps hostile...," put him in touch with basic drives the weekend in the country was supposed to cleanse. A few years later, when we went to see Blow Out, he took a swing at me afterwards. (Luckily, he missed.) The picture was about a man whose gifts fail him when he tries to unravel a political conspiracy and save the one person he cares about most. What may have disturbed him was that it went against the grain of having our virtues overcome the desires of those who continually undermine them. Needless to say, he never again went to another Brian De Palma picture with me. But others eagerly took his place popping out of press screenings, or surging through crowds of people having a Christmas libation, to demand what I thought of Scarface, or verbally confronting me over how Carlito's Way infuriated them. One much friendlier critic years later, after seeing his Iraq War drama Redacted, even told me, "He better not be kidding."

Nothing Any Longer is Forbidden: Nazi-Occupied France on Stage, Small Screen, and Page

A scene from Soulpepper's production of Incident at Vichy. (Photo: Cylla von Tiedemann)

Part of knowing who we are is knowing we are not someone else. And Jew is only that name we give to that stranger, that agency we cannot feel. Each man has his own Jew, it is the other. And the Jews have their own Jews.

– Leduc, in Arthur Miller’s Incident at Vichy

 
In love we find out who we want to be; in war we find out who we are.

– Kristin Hannah, The Nightingale

As the lights go down, we hear the ominous sound of a train, chilling because the setting is 1942 in France. Incident at Vichy then opens with a daily occurrence: the systematic rounding up of suspected Jews by the Vichy government as it submitted to German racial laws. On this particular day, a number of men and a teenage boy have been shuttled into a ramshackle detention centre and lined up on a bench, none of them certain why, initially thinking that perhaps the authorities are interested only in checking their papers. But as they get called in one-by-one for questioning (off stage), they begin suspecting more sinister motives – there is talk about trains locked from the outside and rumours about work camps – while at the same time they protect themselves with self-delusions that freedom will come, particularly after the first man called in, the businessman is given a pass to leave. Of course the audience knows precisely the reason: most of them are Jews and the Nazis' purpose is to identify individuals who belong to their designated “inferior races” so that they can be dispatched by train east to Poland. The discrepancy between the audience’s knowledge and the uncertainty of the characters contributes to the tension (for some audience members at the Toronto Soulpepper performance I attended that tension was clearly unbearable expressed through fidgeting, movement as if to leave but decide to stay, almost a mirror of what was happening on stage) that Arthur Miller’s ninety-minute one act 1964 drama is designed to generate.

Independence Day: Resurgence – Definitely Bigger than the Last One

Well, let’s not waste any time: Independence Day: Resurgence would have been far better with Will Smith in it. He’s been replaced by a gaggle of charisma-free B-listers and a host of returning faces who gamely try to fill the void, but they can’t save the film from its asinine script and its lack of interesting action. It’s a ridiculously, overtly, willfully stupid film, and it knows it; this is both bad (because we should not forgive a work its sins simply for making confession – I’m looking at you, Jurassic World) and good (because self-awareness helps the comedic aspects, intentional or otherwise, land on their feet, and is really the only reason the film works at all). Thank our malevolent alien overlords for Jeff Goldblum.

Podcast: Interview with Eli Mandel (1981)

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 1981, I sat down with Canadian poet Eli Mandel, whose book Dreaming Backwards: The Selected Poetry of Eli Mandel (1954-1981) had just been published. In 1968, Mandel won the Governor General's Award for An Idiot Joy. Mandel would pass away in 1992 at the age of 69.

– Kevin Courrier.

Here is the full interview with  Eli Mandel as it aired on CJRT-FM in 1981.

Dead Ends: Sunset At The Villa Thalia, American Son, and The Spoils

Ben Miles, Elizabeth McGovern, Sam Crane and Pippa Nixon in Sunset At The Villa Thalia. (Photo: Geraint Lewis)

On a trip to London three years ago I saw a ghost play called Bracken Moor that worked moderately well as a thriller (it had some nifty effects). But the venue was a well-known left-wing suburban theatre called the Tricycle, and you really had to stretch to see it as a political work. The main character was a factory owner insensitive to the needs of his workers, but that story was definitely secondary to the ghost story, and the class conflict was entirely superficial. The playwright, Alexi Kaye Campbell, has a new play at the National called Sunset at the Villa Thalia that is more overt about its political leanings but, I would say, just as superficial and almost as preposterous. Set in 1967 and 1976 in a small Greek town, it centers on two couples. Theo (Sam Crane) and Charlotte are a young married couple who have rented a house so he can work on his new play. They have met Harvey (Ben Miles) and June (a blonde Elizabeth McGovern), émigré Americans living in Athens for the moment, in a bar and have invited them over for drinks. Harvey is a State Department “floater” whose work is just about finished in Athens, where, at the end of the act, the junta overtakes the government. Aggressive, seductive with both Charlotte and Theo, he ends up manipulating them into buying the house when he finds out that its owners, Mr. Stamatis (Christos Callow) and his daughter Maria (Glykeria Dimou), are desperate for money to finance their emigration to Australia. When Maria admits, in tears, that she’s reluctant to let her father sell the house because she made a promise to her grandmother, its original owner, that she’d always take care of it, Harvey spins a scenario that convinces her that if she moved to Australia and started a new, hopeful life, she’d be keeping faith with her grandmother rather than betraying her. Maria is persuaded; so is the initially skeptical Charlotte. She and Theo buy the place and in act two, when Harvey and June come by to visit, they’ve been living there for nine years, now with two children. That’s when the chickens come home to roost.

Fresh Angles for Overexposed Weiner: Kriegman & Steinberg’s Tragicomic Political Documentary

Anthony Weiner in a scene from Weiner, a documentary by Elyse Steinberg and Josh Kriegman. (Photo: James Estrin)

Former Congressman Anthony Weiner made international headlines (and what headlines they were) in 2011, when he accidentally tweeted a photo of himself in his underwear on his public twitter account. The incident, dubbed “Weinergate” by political pundits and late night TV hosts alike, brought disaster to Weiner’s political career. Although he initially blamed his questionable social media behaviour on “hackers,” a little digging proved that Weiner’s wiener pic was part of a larger series of bad choices involving several simultaneous online affairs he conducted behind his pregnant wife’s back. At the urging of no less than Barack Obama, Anthony Weiner resigned from Congress in the wake of his sex scandal but by 2013, he returned to the spotlight with an ill-fated campaign for the New York mayoral race. Weiner, a new documentary by Elyse Steinberg and former Weiner chief of staff Josh Kriegman, tells what should have been the disgraced politician’s 2013 comeback story. Instead, what Kriegman and Steinberg wound up chronicling is something entirely different and infinitely more interesting.

Recovery: People, Places, & Things and Cost of Living

Jacqui Dubois, Denise Gough and Sally George in People, Places & Things. (Photo: Johan Persson)

Denise Gough has received a great deal of justified praise (and the Olivier Award) for her energetic, incisive and often uproarious portrayal as Emma, an actress who enters a rehab clinic for drug and alcohol addiction in Duncan MacMillan’s People, Places & Things. (The play began at the National Theatre and transferred to the West End, where it recently ended its run.) Gough’s performance is a miracle of controlled chaos. The play is entirely in Emma’s point of view, and for much of the first act the character’s perspective is splintered (in some scenes half a dozen mirror images of Emma are on stage at the same time) and her sense of time is skewed. Like most movie and theatregoers, I’ve seen dozens of dramatizations of addiction but I’ve never encountered one in which the protagonist’s desire for help is balanced so finely against her resistance against the institution – any institution – that exists to provide it. Brilliant, well read, anti-authoritarian, fiercely atheistic, Emma uses her wit and powers of intellection and acerbic gifts, as well as her acting smarts, to push back against every tenet of the twelve-step self-help philosophy that underpins her treatment once she’s admitted to the clinic. “Have you read Foucault?” she demands of her doctor (Barbara Marten, who also plays her therapist and her mother). “Or Derrida? Baudrillard? Barthes?” “You’re an addict because of Post-Modernism?” the doctor, trained to recognize bullshit in all its forms, replies drily.

Legacy: On the Evolving and Consistent Charm of HBO's Veep

Tony Hale and Julia Louis-Dreyfus in HBO's Veep.

Silena: So who called me a cunt?

Amy: Uh...

Silena: Was it everybody?

Amy: Pretty much, yeah.

                                            – Veep, "C**tgate" (Season 5, Episode 6)

This review contains major spoilers for the fifth season of Veep .

I haven't written about Veep since the end of its somewhat alienating first season. At the time what frustrated me the most was the character of Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) herself, specifically how the show wanted the series to be about her and yet adamantly refused to give viewers anything real about her to hang on to. The same seemed true of all the show's characters: it was a world populated by people whose dreams had already grown so narrow that it hardly seemed to cost them anything to sacrifice them at the altar of politics as usual. As I wrote at the time, "[A] political series whose basic claim is that politics is almost exclusively about the practice of maintaining power from election to election, dominating the news cycle, and scoring points on petty grudges hardly seems like a revelation in the American political context. The only way to draw viewers in enough to care is to detail the painful personal compromises and costs of a life lived in that context." The irony, I noted, was that the less characters have inner lives of any substance, the less devastating are the trials and humiliations they suffer – and that devastation is the stuff of dark comedy. Looking back from the vantage point of the end of Season 5 (as Michael Lueger observed at the beginning of this season), the pathos and the exquisite agony that were absent from Veep's freshman season have emerging ever since – and it is in the fields of pathos and hilarious agony that the show has kept growing, and growing on me, ever since. Though the sixth episode of season five –– quoted above – will likely go down in television history as the one where the (still largely taboo) C-word was used repeatedly and unselfconsciously, this is also a moment that paradoxically displays Veep’s current maturity. In the episode, it's been leaked to the press that a high-level staffer was overheard referring to the President by the "word," and, seemingly appalled, President Meyer launches an internal investigation. But with this small exchange, she confesses that she has few illusions about the love or loyalty of her team. Louis-Dreyfus plays the short scene with a perfect combination of resignation, exhaustion and relief – a passing moment of genuine, and even poignant, self-awareness that reveals just how tired Selina Meyer has become after a lifetime of having to pretend otherwise.