If You Must Blink, Do It Now: Kubo and the Two Strings

The publicity for Kubo and the Two Strings didn’t hook me because my eyes deceived me; I saw the trailer and thought the strangely-stylized CGI visuals looked janky and oddly angular, and said no thanks. It wasn’t until the film came out and I heard that it had been made by LAIKA, purveyors of stop-motion magic like Coraline and Paranorman, that I suddenly became interested. That wasn’t odd-looking CG I had seen, it was beautiful stop-motion animation! I was amazed at how starkly different my reaction was to the film’s look once I was processing it through the correct lens – to say nothing of how amazed I was by the craft and power of the final product.

Distilled Life: Art of the Recent Future by Malcolm Rains

Lyttos by Malcolm Rains. (Oil on linen, 2016)

“Be like the fox / who makes more tracks than necessary /
some in the right direction / practice resurrection.”

– Wendell Berry 

It’s not only that Malcolm Rains is a master of many styles and that each one looks the way a spoken dialect in language sounds: he is in fact a master stylist, period. Each of his motifs belongs to a broad and deep painting territory which he traverses and revisits the same way we can return to Rome or Athens to follow our own footsteps and yet still feel it’s a first time encounter. There’s something hauntingly familiar, gently reassuring and yet utterly otherworldly in the way this artist can explore major subjects over a long term career trajectory.

One such subject is a domain he has confidently commanded for over a decade, the kind of crisp representation I can only call objective portraiture. Whether it’s the way fruit occupies space on a table, or the way light is refracted from a glowing metallic surface of pure colour, or the way creased paper can assume the awesome stature of a mountain, one recursive element remains shared by them all: optical splendour and its transmission.

Processed Food: Animated Comedy Sausage Party

Sausage Party features the voices of Seth Rogen, Kristen Wiig, and Jonah Hill.

When the trailer for Greg Tiernan and Conrad Vernon’s computer animated comedy Sausage Party was accidentally played before a screening of Disney/Pixar’s family-friendly fish film, Finding Dory, the gaff reportedly “made star [Seth Rogen’s] day.” Truthfully, it made mine too. It’s easy to see how Sausage Party’s cartoony hot dogs, grinning veggies, and bright-eyed baked goods could be mistaken for the heroes of a children’s film if one wasn’t paying attention but, to be clear: this ballsy comedy written by a seven-man team that includes Seth Rogen and Jonah Hill is only fun for kids 18 and up.

Great Screen Matches: Carole Lombard and Fred MacMurray

Fred MacMurray, Carole Lombard and John Barrymore in True Confession (1937).

Perhaps the most underappreciated of the great screen couples of the thirties, Carole Lombard and Fred MacMurray made four movies together at Paramount between 1935 and 1937. (They might have made more, but Lombard died in a plane crash in 1942.) Though her most famous performance is as an heiress in My Man Godfrey opposite that class act William Powell, in her pictures with MacMurray Lombard always plays working-class women, but she has a flickering moonbeam quality, while he’s generally a Yankee everyman. It’s easy to fall in love with her; everything about her is endearing, including her nuttiness. He has the gift of getting an audience solidly on his side, of making us identify with him. (That’s why MacMurray is so effective later on as the dupe in Double Indemnity.) They have a winning casualness when they’re together on screen.

I’d suggest several reasons for the fact that their partnership has been overlooked. MacMurray’s career flattened out when he took the role of the blandly wise, pipe-chomping pop in the TV sitcom My Three Sons in 1960 and stayed with it for a dozen years; by the time the show finally went off the air, his career was pretty much over, and with a couple of exceptions – Double Indemnity and The Apartment, both under Billy Wilder’s direction – no one recalled the movies he’d done before. And the four pictures he did with Lombard have never been ranked among the classics of their era. Moreover, they’re just different enough from each other – and the characters MacMurray and Lombard play in them are just varied enough – that their collaboration isn’t archetypal or easy to categorize.

Force and Gravity and Fire: Dale Chihuly In Conversation

A visitor enjoys Dale Chihuly's Persian Ceiling installation, at Toronto's Royal Ontario Museum. (Photo by AZNModern.com)

Allow contemporary American glass artist Dale Chihuly to shatter a few myths. The first is that glass, the medium which has made him world famous, collected by many of the world's top museums and coveted by an adoring public which can't get enough of his whimsical designs, is a dainty thing lacking in substance, shallow as a bowl. The second is that it's not art but a craft, useful more than innovative. But one at a time.

A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design who turns 75 this month, Chihuly is used to intense scrutiny of work defying easy categorization. Ever since blowing his first glass bubble in 1965, he has built a career on elevating the centuries-old practice of studio glass blowing to the level of fine art. Produced in his Seattle studio by teams of artisans who execute his designs from drawings on paper – a 1976 car accident left him blind in one eye so what he lacks in depth perception he gains in ideas – Chihuly's grandiose glass installations are exhibited in galleries and enjoyed in public gardens where the sturdiest of his pieces easily withstand the elements. More than vessels, they are undulating sculptures whose wafer-thin transparency catch light and cast shadows, heightening the visual drama. You don't drink from them: you devour them, the eyes feasting on their rich and rarefied beauty. But their magnificence doesn't always win people over. Mention the name Chihuly and opinions are often divided.

A case in point is the Chihuly exhibition at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto that runs until January 2. Consisting of 11 massive and immersive installations, the eye-popping show is the brainchild of Diane Charbonneau, the curator of modern and contemporary decorative arts at the Montreal Museum of Fine Art who organized Canada's first Chihuly exhibition in 2013. There, attendance was as strong as the reviews, the Montreal critics generally welcoming Chihuly's oversized glass extravaganzas with open arms. Toronto has so far proven to be a different story.

Notes on Gay Life - Looking: The Movie

The English writer-director Andrew Haigh stepped into the spotlight at the end of last year with 45 Years. Tom Courtenay and Charlotte Rampling play Geoff and Kate, a couple on the cusp of their forty-fifth anniversary whose relationship is shaken by the discovery of the body of the woman he lived with before he became involved with Kate. She disappeared on a hike in the Swiss Alps; her corpse is revealed in a melting glacier, and the thought of her preserved after all these years as she was when he lost her – and, it turns out, pregnant with his baby – prompts Geoff to revisit the life he had before he met Kate and imposes distance between them. 45 Years, which Haigh adapted from David Constantine’s story “In Another Country,” is like a classic film from the British New Wave era of the late fifties and sixties: thoughtful, literate, unconventional, understated and impeccably acted. (Rampling won most of the praise and the Oscar nomination, but good as she is, Courtenay is astonishing.)

In fact, 45 Years was an unusual project for Haigh, all of whose other works has been gay-themed. His previous movies were Greek Pete (2009), a documentary portrait of a rent boy, and Weekend (2011), about a footloose gay man (Tom Cullen) whose one-night stand with a stranger (Chris New) turns unexpectedly into a relationship. Weekend was my introduction to Haigh, and though it’s not up to 45 Years I was struck by some of the qualities that drew critics and filmgoers to the later picture, particularly its unblinkered approach to the subject matter, its unsentimental treatment of the characters, the intricacy of the detail and the intimacy of the acting. And Haigh wrote five and directed ten of the eighteen episodes of HBO’s half-hour TV series Looking, a buddy drama created by Michael Lannan about three gay friends living in present-day San Francisco: Patrick (Jonathan Groff), a video game designer in his late twenties (and the show’s protagonist); Agustin (Frankie J. Alvarez), his college roommate and an aspiring photographer; and Dom (Murray Bartlett), who’s about a decade older and is toiling in the restaurant business with the hopes of finally open his own place. Looking was one of the pleasant surprises of 2014, but it was short-lived: a second season failed to drum up enough viewers to encourage the network to pick it up for a third. (And season two was somewhat disappointing: as is often the case when a TV show with a borderline audience is renewed, Looking jacked up the soap opera element in an effort to make it more commercial.) HBO’s compensation to its fans for canceling the series was a TV movie, recently aired, that Haigh wrote and directed, and I think it’s just as good as 45 Years.

Podcast: Interview with Director Fred Schepisi (1984)

Filmmaker Fred Schepisi.

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.

When I sat down with director Fred Schepisi in 1984, his film Iceman had just been released. In 1993, he would go on to direct Six Degrees of Separation (with Stockard Channing, Donald Sutherland, and Will Smith), based on John Guare's stage play. His most recent film was 2013's Words and Pictures, starring Clive Owen and Juliette Binoche.

– Kevin Courrier

Here is the full interview with Fred Schepisi as it aired on CJRT-FM in 1984.

 

Mind Control: Playdead’s INSIDE

Note: This review contains spoilers for INSIDE.
 
This review is for those who have played INSIDE to completion. If you haven’t, then the following paragraphs – in which I praise this awe-inspiring achievement in design, gameplay, and storytelling and discuss my ideas about what it all means – will make little sense, and will likely ruin for you a game that I’m already considering among my favourites of 2016, and possibly ever. Consider yourself duly warned. (And if you haven’t already, please pick up and play INSIDE at the earliest opportunity – it’s in 2D, it uses two buttons, it’s only about 6-total-hours long, and it only costs $25 across most platforms. No excuses.)

A Voice That Still Matters - Barbra: The Music, The Mem’ries, The Magic & Encore: Movie Partners Sing Broadway

A couple of week’s ago I had the pleasure and the ticket money, to hear and see Barbra Streisand’s concert in Toronto. It was the last of a nine-city “tour” called, Barbra: The Music, The Mem’ries, The Magic and the set list was a cross section of her 35 albums with stories about her life in show business. But I wasn’t there for some nostalgic trip down memory lane, I wanted to hear one of the great voices in music and I wasn’t disappointed. Streisand sang every note with passion and commitment. Her 10-piece band was mixed low as her voice filled the Air Canada Centre in front of a packed house: reaching the ceiling. Streisand is a woman with a very high standard of excellence who sets the bar high and maintains it. Witnessing a Barbra Streisand concert means that you enter her world, which is principally about music but also includes political commentary and a word about her foundation which supports many social justice causes and women’s health.

When it comes to the hits Streisand often tells the story of the time she went to see Charles Aznavour, the popular French singer, at a concert in the sixties, but she was disappointed when he didn’t perform her favourite song; a song she really wanted to hear. That changed her life as a performer because she recognized that many people would come to her concert expecting to hear their favourite Streisand track. Consequently, her recent show included five of her all-time hits, “Evergreen,” “People,” “Happy Days Are Here Again,” “Don’t Rain On My Parade,” and “The Way We Were,” which opened the concert. All the rest of the songs are her picks: eagerly accepted by an adoring audience. For this particular tour she had 35 albums from which to choose a set list. Has she ever cut a bad record? Let’s put it this way: some records are more successful than others but they all have her stamp of excellence even if the music isn’t always memorable.

Love, Death and Rock & Roll: Rich Cohen's The Sun & The Moon & The Rolling Stones

"Menace is most effective when its limits are not known. [Mick] Jagger's 'demonic' persona was not enhanced by the death at Altamont, as some people have supposed; it was destroyed. In the face of one man's real death, Jagger's 'demonic' posture was shown to be merely perverse."

- George Trow, "Eclectic, Reminiscent, Amused, Fickle, Perverse." The New Yorker, May 29 and June 5, 1978.


In his 2012 documentary, Crossfire Hurricane, filmmaker Brett Morgen (Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck) showed how the impudent rebellion of The Rolling Stones' music and their volatile stage performances in the Sixties, which inspired riots everywhere, came from the adolescent impulse to run the table. Unlike The Beatles, who were a still center in a swirling hurricane of love, The Rolling Stones sought out the high winds. They gleefully fanned the flames of discontent until the sweet kick of revolt became a turbulent act of mutiny. But once death greeted them with the passing of co-founder Brian Jones in 1969, and violence and murder answered them at the Altamont Speedway later that same year, the chickens finally came home to roost. From there, it was childhood's end. Their bad boy behavior quickly became a corporate brand of sanctified naughtiness. That branding not only insulated them from the tumult their concerts had created, but it would also rob their music in time of its pulsing vitality. Crossfire Hurricane, taken from the lyrics of their scorching masterpiece, "Jumpin' Jack Flash," is in many ways a coming of age story about the taming of artistic danger.

There's also an urgent quest to peel open the riddle behind that artistic danger (and its taming) throughout author and journalist Rich Cohen's (Tough Jews, The Avengers) captivating new book, The Sun & The Moon & The Rolling Stones (Spiegel & Grau, 2016), and it coils through the narrative like an electrical current seeking ground. Having been drawn to their music at ten, by an older brother who was exiled to the attic of their parents' home with his music, Cohen would ultimately become a writer and journalist covering The Stones as they toured in the Nineties (right at a time where their music was long passed the potency that once stirred him as an adolescent). Using the subject of time as a key metaphor to parse brilliance from longevity, The Sun & The Moon & The Rolling Stones (a gift title from Keith Richards who realizes that The Stones have been a constant in this young writer's life) is made up of fan notes that are cured in a quick critical eye. Cohen fully understands how the distance his generation has had from The Stones' greatest moments is both a handicap and a blessing. "Time would always separate me from these guys, from this generation," he writes without a trace of bitterness for being born at the wrong time. "Above us, the baby boomers., who consumed every resource and every kind of fun. Below us, the millennials, the children of the baby boomers, who've remade the world into something virtual and cold. The boomers consumed their childhood, then, in a sense, consumed our childhoods, too. They overimbibed, lived to such excess there's nothing left for us but to tell the story." Cohen's story has the power to shrink time so that each song he invokes quickly regains its ability to shock and surprise.

Broadway to the Small Screen: Early TV Musicals

Keith Andes and Barbara Cook in Bloomer Girl (1956)

In the heyday of live TV (the fifties), weekly and monthly series regularly offered abridged versions of plays, and between 1954 and 1956 one show, Max Liebman Spectaculars (a.k.a. Max Liebman Presents), which aired every fourth Sunday evening, produced ninety-minute adaptations of Broadway musicals as well as variety showcases and a handful of original musicals. (Liebman was better known for producing the inspired Sid Caesar-Imogene Coca sketch comedy, Your Show of Shows, one of the high-water marks of early television.) Surprisingly NBC preserved these musicals on kinescope, and several have surfaced on DVDs from Video Artists International, which has added to its repertory a couple of the early Hallmark Hall of Fame musicals and one from Producer’s Showcase. The result is a treasure trove for musical-theatre aficionados like me – especially since some of these shows have never been picked up by Hollywood (Bloomer Girl, A Connecticut Yankee and Dearest Enemy) and others were seriously altered – plots rewritten, scores decimated – in the movie versions. One Touch of Venus, for instance, reached the big screen with only a handful of the delightful Kurt Weill-Ogden Nash tunes intact; the Victor Herbert operetta Naughty Marietta and the Oscar Strauss import The Chocolate Soldier were retooled as Jeanette MacDonald-Nelson Eddy vehicles. (You wouldn’t know from the movie of The Chocolate Soldier that it was originally a musicalization – OK, a bowdlerization – of Shaw’s satirical romantic comedy Arms and the Man.) There is a crummy movie musical called A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court starring Bing Crosby, but the longer title, which replicates the name of the Mark Twain comic novel, alerts owl-eyed movie buffs that it isn’t based on the hit show by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, which was produced on Broadway in 1927 and revived in 1943, at the very end of their collaboration.

The Obsessions of George W. Bush: Jean Edward Smith’s Bush

(l.to r. Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, President George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld)

“I am the commander. I don’t need to explain. That’s the interesting thing about being president. I don’t feel like I owe anybody an explanation.”

– George W. Bush

In the first full-fledged biography of the forty-third President, Bush (Simon & Schuster, 2016), the first sentence of the preface, reads: “Rarely in the history of the United States has the nation been so ill-served as during the presidency of George W. Bush.” The reader may well ask who is the author and is he credible. Jean Edward Smith is not a left-wing critic of Bush but a respected scholar who has written several well-received biographies of Ulysses Grant, Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, General Lucius Clay (the military governor of occupied Germany after World War II and hero of the Berlin airlift), and John Marshall, the distinguished Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in the early nineteenth century, an oeuvre that inspired the conservative pundit, George F. Will, to describe Smith as “America’s greatest living biographer.”

Given these distinguished credentials, I was intrigued to read Smith’s hefty volume at eight hundred pages. Besides, I had spent months years ago reading and writing about Bush’s responses to 9/11, his invasions into Afghanistan and Iraq and I did wonder whether I got it right. Based on Smith’s exhaustively researched and fluidly written biography, I did feel affirmed. If anything Smith’s judgments on “Asleep at the Switch” – the chapter title for Bush’s lack of attention to security before September 11 – his overreaction to that tragic day by his decisions to invade two countries, the erosion of civil liberties and “The Torture Trail” – another snappy chapter heading for which Smith excels – constitute a more devastating critique of Bush’s years, especially with regard to foreign affairs. Yet there are surprises as Smith credits Bush with a number of achievements. By mining the important secondary sources, the memoirs of the historical actors, numerous periodicals, government records, and speeches, and – apart from Bush himself – several interviews with key participants, Smith has skillfully synthesized them into a three-dimensional portrait of Bush.

Popular History: Nathaniel Philbrick’s Valiant Ambition

Author Nathaniel Philbrick.

The American Revolution never really goes out of style as a subject for works of both fiction and popular nonfiction, but its popularity does move in cycles, based on either external events or the emergence of especially popular dramatizations of particular episodes from its history. One example of the former came with the rise of the Tea Party early in President Obama’s administration, which sparked an ongoing debate over what the legacy of the Founding Fathers (and the slaves, women, and members of the lower classes whom their prominence tends to obscure) means for the United States today. More recently, the smash Broadway hit Hamilton has offered a new perspective on those same individuals, adding some nuance in its depiction of their sometimes petty infighting and frequent hypocrisy on matters of race.

Nathaniel Philbrick has been one of the best chroniclers of colonial and early American history, including the Revolution. His Bunker Hill (Penguin, 2013) was a thrilling exploration of a series of episodes from the Revolution’s early days that had formerly seemed overfamiliar to anyone with even a passing interesting in the birth of the republic. Philbrick combines a talent for developing a strong narrative drive and well-defined sense of character with respect for the meticulous work of historiographical research. The end result was a book that was both a compelling read and a sharp reappraisal of some of the founding myths to which Americans cling. For instance, his account of the Battles of Lexington and Concord revealed that, far from a glorious victory that showcased the natural skill of plain American militiamen, it was a much more confused and ugly affair in which the Minutemen as often as not came off as inexperienced and woefully inadequate. Philbrick hardly needed to make clear that such an unpalatable truth stood as a contradiction to a certain political orientation’s tendency to see the gun-toting common (white) man as the origin, backbone, and last sure defense of American liberties. Philbrick’s new book, Valiant Ambition: George Washington, Benedict Arnold, and the Fate of the American Revolution (Penguin, 2016) tries to do some similar myth-busting, but it’s marred by odd narrative choices and a rushed, truncated conclusion. As the title suggests, Philbrick frames the book as a sort of double biography of Washington and Arnold during a particular period of the war, starting in the summer of 1776 and ending soon after Arnold’s spectacular betrayal of the Patriot cause in 1780. It’s often a thrilling read: one of the late chapters features a detailed account of the attempts made by John Andre, the British officer who was one of Arnold’s contacts, to escape Patriot territory and make it to British-occupied New York City. A last-minute error led to the revelation of Arnold’s treachery and hairsbreadth escape to British lines, while Andre was ultimately executed.

Kicking and Screaming: The Lifeguard

Kristen Bell in The Lifeguard.

In The Lifeguard, Kristen Bell plays Leigh, a not-quite-thirty-year-old who, reeling from linked disappointments in her Manhattan journalistic job and in her personal life – she feels that her contributions are undervalued at the paper and her editor, whom she’s been sleeping with, turns out to have another, more serious romantic attachment – decides to leave New York. She returns to the small Connecticut town where she grew up, moves in with her parents (Amy Madigan and Adam LeFevre), and gets back her old job as a lifeguard at a community pool. Leigh thinks she’s retrenching, but she’s actually retreating. She reconnects with her best friends from high school, Mel (Mamie Gummer), who’s now vice-principal and married to John (Joshua Harto), and Todd (Martin Starr), who’s gay and single. When Leigh starts to hang out with a pair of disaffected teenagers, Little Jason (David Lambert), the son of the pool maintenance man, Big Jason (John Finn), and his friend Matt (Alex Shaffer), who are making plans to quit school and move to Maine, Mel and Todd, too, get caught up in the seductive limbo of not-quite-adolescence, not-quite-adulthood. Mel is nervous about compromising her authoritarian status vis-à-vis the boys, especially when Todd and Leigh agree to buy beer for them and ask them to score them some pot in return. But Mel is experiencing her own terrors about moving on with her life: though she and John have been trying to get pregnant, suddenly she gets cold feet, worried that she’s inadequate to take on motherhood. Her realization that Leigh and Little Jason have become lovers puts her in an untenable position, and she responds hysterically. For Leigh, the affair is the most radical turn in her defiance of the clock and a sort of glue that makes it harder than ever for her life to get unstuck.

Blind Spots: A Conversation About Don't Breathe

In August 2016, Sony Pictures had an advanced screening of Fede Alvarez's new horror flick, Don't Breathe. Justin Cummings and Danny McMurray both jumped at the opportunity. Instead of fighting to the death over who got to cover the film – as is tradition among critics – they opted instead to try to co-author a review....and the following is the result. Critics at Large is not responsible for any adverse effects that may result from reading this spoiler-heavy conversation between two semi-sober, horror-loving sickos…

jc: Hi Danny!

dm: Hi Justin!

jc: This is strange. I’ve never done anything like this before.

dm: Same! I make a point of never conversing with people so this is new and uncomfortable territory.

jc: It’s okay, horror films about murderous rapists are what bring us together! To start, tell me about your horror background. We both get jazzed up about these kind of films; what are some of your go-tos?

dm: The first horror film I can remember watching is The Silence of the Lambs. Could we call that a horror movie now? Nonetheless, I was probably 7 and was properly horrified. I had to turn it off. As I got older, the tides turned and horror became probably my favourite genre. The good ones get deep into your head and that's kind of cathartic sometimes. The bad ones are hysterical. Wherever a horror movie sits on the good-to-bad spectrum, I love that anything can happen at any time; horror films consistently boast the least predictable kind of storytelling. I watch them all – Asian horror, zombie films, 90s slashers, smaller indie pieces. My favourite is probably 1974’s Black Christmas. How about you?

jc: Much respect for Black Christmas, what an esoteric choice! You're right on the money with your description of what the genre does best, too – its mandate to surprise and move the audience at all costs is what I think makes it an incredibly pure form of cinema. Ultimately, no matter what the movie is, we're all sitting in that dark room together because we want to experience something that jolts us out of our humdrum lives. For me, the ones that provide the juiciest jolts are things like Suspiria, Ringu, Alien, and even recent fare like It Follows. It's gotta get under my skin for it to work.

dm: Yeah, It Follows was a brilliant little gem! Tight storytelling, great camera work. Lately, I've noticed a trend toward these smaller indie companies telling these very minimalist stories. Small cast, small set, very focused plot. It Follows did that really well. It didn't mess around with the spirit world or demonology or any of these massive plot points with endlessly messy implications. Recently, I found both Green Room and Hush were really great examples of minimalist horror movies. They succeeded by doing less. I think Don't Breathe tried to do what they did...

jc: … and didn’t quite hit the mark?

Frozen Music: John Ballantyne’s Persistent Reality

John Ballantyne's Tower Stairs.

“Music is constant. Listening is intermittent.”– John Cage.
 

Paintings such as John Ballantyne’s are invitations to a ritual of looking that engages our imaginations far above and below the apparently straightforward substance of the images represented. They are what they appear to be: placid architectural spaces, portraits of both interiors and exteriors, still life’s with rooms and buildings instead of fruits or flowers, designed and built landscapes at once tightly contained and yet fully open to conjecture. As such they also aspire to be accurate diagrams of something impossible to behold, something which the poet Goethe once offered as an ideal definition of what architecture is and what it does: frozen music. In Ballantyne’s work we witness a certain kind of mathematical precision which is not strictly realistic per se but in fact actually arrives at quite a different destination: a metaphysical dwelling place for the frozen music of form and content. Another primary and recurring focus of his work is the frequent element of illuminated objects which remind of us of the original meaning of the word photo-graphis: drawing with light.

Fiat Lux! some of these images seem to whisper, let there be light, and the purity of Tower Stairs is a good place to begin contemplating the precious qualities not only of painting with light but also paintings of light itself as a subject, and of its palpable yet often invisible personality in our lives. The artist has observed that he sees painting as a tentative step towards realizing “the self”, and to express that process he uses “simple exteriors or interiors of buildings accentuated with light, light as a metaphor, a means of illuminating the subject and, at the same time, symbolizing enlightenment”. But just as enlightenment is not actually as complicated as it first appears to be, these lux meditations are definitely not quite as simple as they first appear to be. He investigates what lies beneath the surface of things and arrives at what the philosophically inclined might call things-in-themselves. This artist is building a staircase to heaven without ever leaving the earth. While Ballantyne’s kind of themes and these accurate depictions of the recognizable world around us are often called photorealism or pictorial realism, I find it more accurate and rewarding to perceive them as magic realism. Either way, the artist’s persistent commitment to capturing the essence of appearances and the mysteries below the surface is laudable in an age still avidly absorbed by both the abstract and the conceptual. As for their visual references or aesthetic geneology, while some viewers may tend to identify a resonance with the Canadian realists Colville or Pratt, or the Americans Wyeth or Hopper, I tend to veer toward their affinity with other more magic realists such as Fransoli, Guglielmi or Helder. They are similarly crisp and tidy, presented in bold outlines, with forms defined by soft but stark lights and gentle but profound shadows.

Doing Time: HBO's The Night Of

John Turturro and Riz Ahmed in HBO's The Night Of.

Note: the following post contains some spoilers.

In HBO's eight-part procedural drama, The Night Of, which concluded this past Sunday night, everyone is doing time. This temperamental thriller, which is based on the 2008-09 BBC series, Criminal Justice, is about the grinding wheels of the system and how it wears down its servants as much as it does the suspects. Unlike True Detective, which imposed a weary existentialism on a conventional crime story, The Night Of reaches inside the conventions of the detective genre to create a darkly lit tone poem where justice becomes merely a flicker of light. The mini-series, written by Richard Price and Steven Zaillian, is clearly set in post-9/11 New York with its mood of suspicion and fear regarding race and religion, but it also reflects an exhaustion where ideals and purpose have been replaced by expedience. That exhaustion contributes to some of the dramatic weaknesses of The Night Of, but if the story sometimes falls into a kind of stasis, the characters don't. The Night Of is about people who've been lulled to sleep but slowly get woken by a dawning nightmare of what they've become.

Helen McCrory in The Deep Blue Sea

Helen McCrory in The Deep Blue Sea. (Photo by Richard Hubert Smith)

Helen McCrory gives an exquisite portrayal of Hester Collyer, the shattered heroine of Terence Rattigan’s 1952 The Deep Blue Sea, in Carrie Cracknell’s fine production at the National Theatre. (Audiences can see it worldwide in the NT Live series in September and October.) Filmgoers on this side of the Atlantic might or might not recognize McCrory from some of her character work in the movies, but in England she’s a star, and deservedly so. This is the third major performance I’ve seen her give at the National: she was the drifting, wounded daughter in Stephen Beresford’s The Last of the Haussmans and an unforgettable Medea (also under Cracknell’s direction). McCrory is an almost frighteningly intelligent actor, and perhaps her most distinctive feature is a wry wit that can be withering; amusement transforms that porcelain face – breaks it up, lends it an almost mandarin quality. As Hester, the wife of a judge who left him nearly a year ago for a younger man with whom she lives in a middle-class apartment house, pretending for reasons of propriety to be married to him, McCrory uses that wit as a means of showing the acuteness of her character’s self-understanding. She’s profoundly and irretrievably in love with a man she knows is incapable of reciprocating because he lacks depth and because his masculine pride and need to protect himself get in the way. I’ve seen two other masterful actresses in this role: Vivien Leigh in Anatole Litvak’s 1955 film version and Blythe Danner in a revival at the Roundabout Theatre in 1998. Leigh brought the role the wracked romanticism for which she was famous; it may be the only one of her post-Blanche DuBois performances that truly showcased her gifts. Danner made the sexual nature of Hester’s feelings for Freddie Page audaciously explicit. McCrory, like Danner, delves into the character’s passion; what sets her apart is a divided consciousness – the sense that Hester is watching herself in a mirror, bewildered by the recklessness of her own actions. It’s the combination of her helplessness and her awareness that make McCrory’s Hester heartbreaking.

B-Movie Fun On TV: FX’s The Strain

Note: the following post contains some spoilers.

I don’t know if the shortened ten episode third season of FX’s The Strain, (less than the first two 13 episode seasons), which begins tonight, signals the end of the series’ run. If it did, it would match up neatly with the trilogy of books written by filmmaker Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth, Pacific Rim) and Chuck Hogan, which I have not read. (The authors, who are executive producers on the series and wrote the intriguing pilot which Del Toro also directed, have indicated that a three to five season run of The Strain would be optimum.) I do know that I look forward to seeing if the motley group of defenders of New York City, beset by a plague of gruesome looking vampires, will prevail in the end, even as the metropolis seems slowly to be falling to the undead. If season one of The Strain introduced the concept, where a plane landing in New York from Germany is found to contain almost an entire load of dead passengers and crew, except for a few mysteriously alive (and infected) survivours, who begin to infect the populace at large, season two upped the ante as a specific group of (anti) heroes united to fight off the invaders, even as a second faction of vampires, with their own agenda, claimed to be aiding the humans in their fight. Season three, from what I gather, will suggest that the city as a whole has been written off by the outside world, which makes the fight to save it all the more desperate and crucial. Whatever the case, I hope The Strain will continue to offer up its unique brand of B-Movie (TV) thrills, social commentary, humourous asides, and, yes, a bit of acceptable silliness in the process.

Tarzan in the 21st Century

Samuel L. Jackson and Alexander Skarsgård in The Legend of Tarzan.

David Yates’ The Legend of Tarzan is the latest in a long line of Tarzan pictures that goes back a century. Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote Tarzan of the Apes in 1912 and it was such a sensation that he penned twenty-three subsequent Tarzan adventures, some of which were published considerably after his death in 1950. (There were also a couple of collaborations, which I take to mean that other writers completed narratives that Burroughs left unfinished.) Tarzan of the Apes tells the story of the protagonist’s being raised, after the deaths of his English parents in the African jungle, by an ape who has just lost her own baby; of his leaving the community of apes and teaching himself to read English (from the books in the hut where his parents died); of his falling in love with an Englishwoman, Jane Porter and then learning of his heritage – that he is John Clayton, the present Lord Greystoke. The first book ends with Tarzan’s keeping mum about his identity as an act of self-sacrifice – so that his cousin, whom Jane is set to marry, can continue to believe himself the rightful heir to that title. (You have to read the sequel, The Return of Tarzan, to get the happy ending to the Tarzan-Jane romance.) Tarzan of the Apes is a full-hearted, engrossing entertainment. It’s also ingenious: a pop-cultural gloss on the age-old nature versus nurture debate and a way of bringing a Romantic fable into the modern age. In the early chapters Burroughs keeps juxtaposing the African jungle with the England Tarzan belongs to by birthright but has never even seen, as in this passage:

With swelling breast, [Tarzan] placed a foot upon the body of his powerful enemy [a lioness], and throwing back his fine young head, roared out the awful challenge of the victorious bull ape. 

The forest echoed to the savage and triumphant paean. Birds fell still, and the larger animals and beasts of prey slunk stealthily away, for few there were of all the jungle who sought for trouble with the great anthropoids. 

And in London another Lord Greystoke was speaking to his kind in the House of Lords, but none trembled at the sound of his soft voice.

Throughout the novel Burroughs refers to his hero alternately by his jungle identity, Tarzan of the apes, and his civilized identity, Lord Greystoke, to remind us that in fact he is both these men in equal measure. He has the fighting strength and speed and survival instinct of a jungle animal (and the airborne flexibility of the particular genus of animal that brought him up) but the intellectual capacity of an exceptional human being and the character of an ideal Edwardian gentleman – which is the source of both his courtly treatment of Jane, though she’s thrilled by his jungle side, and his willingness to bow out in the competition for her love when he senses (incorrectly, as it turns out) that it’s his cousin she truly loves.

You Probably Don't Even Hear It When It Happens: The Sopranos & The Death of the Gangster Hero

“The way the thing builds with the music and everything. To me, it gets me and makes me want to cry,” creator David Chase said recently of the controversial scene which concluded HBO's The Sopranos after six seasons in 2007. That moment, which begins in a New Jersey diner with the pop horror of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’”playing on the jukebox and ends with an abrupt cut to black, has been debated for years and continues to be. People still argue about whether mob boss Tony Soprano was whacked just before he could sink his teeth into some onion rings, or whether the quick shift to dark simply left his fate to our imagination. Whatever audiences chose to believe, David Chase's decision wasn't an arbitrary one. Which is partly why his emotional reaction to its conclusion is not as simple as waving goodbye to a successful franchise. “It’s not because, ‘Oh, there goes the show. There goes part of my life.’ It has nothing to do with that. It’s what’s on the screen.” What's on the screen is an assured understanding that viewers had been inside mob boss Tony Soprano's head for the full duration, just as audiences had once been in the heads of Edward G. Robinson's Little Caesar, Cagney's Tom Powers in The Public Enemy, Muni and Pacino's Scarface and Brando's Godfather. But there's a significant difference this time around. Much had changed in both the gangster genre and our relationship to it.

Vaulting Ambition: No Man's Sky

In the gaming industry, hype can be a deadly thing. As a developer you’re never going to please everyone, no matter how hard you try, but crystal-clear communication from the marketing side – about exactly what your game is, what players will be able to do, and how they will be able to go about it – has become an absolute necessity if you want to avoid the pitfalls of excessive player anticipation. Promise one thing and deliver another (or, god forbid, don’t deliver on it at all), and you’re sure to be crucified upon the hilltop of self-entitlement and petulant rage that is the gaming community. Indie developer Hello Games, known only for their sidescrolling racing games in the Joe Danger series, learned this lesson the hard way this month in the lead-up to the release of their hotly-anticipated spacefaring exploration survival game, No Man’s Sky. Their relative inexperience in the quote-unquote “big leagues” of the gaming market is being sorely tested now, as they scramble to repair one of the year’s more disastrous game launches.

Short Stories: Early Americans by Jane Ira Bloom

In talking about jazz nothing warms my heart more than hearing from a musician who says she loves the notion of being off balance, playing in the moment, and has a keen sense of rhythm. And so it goes for composer and soprano sax player Jane Ira Bloom and her marvelous new album Early Americans (Outline, 2016). The album features 13 tracks all less than six minutes, which is quite the feat for a group of musicians who love to improvise. On this record, Bloom’s 16th as a leader, she’s joined by Mark Helias, bass and Bobby Previte, drums yet it’s only her first trio album. To put out an album of soprano sax, bass and drums immediately tells you that Bloom and her band mates are fearless by not including a piano player or a guitar player to round out the chords that put music into harmonic context. By the same token Early Americans isn’t a wild and crazy record of free jazz that, unless you’re in the room, has a tendency to be self-indulgent. Bloom’s record is much more formal with 12 original compositions and one beautiful cover (“Somewhere” by Leonard Bernstein) gracing the disc. Each work has an emotional appeal and stands self-assured creating a short story aspect to the album.

Fireball Career: Peter L. Winkler's The Real James Dean

Elizabeth Taylor and James Dean in Giant (1956).

Humphrey Bogart once said of James Dean that he “died at just the right time,” explaining that “If he had lived, he'd never have been able to live up to his publicity." Bogart makes a cameo appearance in Peter L. Winkler’s The Real James Dean (Chicago Review Press, 2016), trying to “carry on a gentleman’s conversation” with the new kid in town while the shy, “starstruck” Dean stares at his feet and mumbles. According to Merv Griffin, Bogart finally grabbed Dean by the lapels and called him “a little punk” and a “two-bit nothing” for being so discourteous as not to look him in the eye when spoken to. Given the generational divide as well as the differences in personality between the two men, it’s possible that Bogart thought he was being patronized when he complimented Dean on his technique and got back the response, “Yeah? That’s okay by me.” Their mutual friend Joe Hyams points out that Bogart, having become Bogart by this point, kept his “insecurities” to himself, while Dean, the Method man, wore his on his sleeve, the better to keep them handy for when he needed them to fuel his work. The Real James Dean (subtitled “Intimate Memories from Those Who Knew Him Best”) makes two things very clear: Dean, however much he may have flirted with exhibitionism and self-indulgence onscreen and enjoyed the rewards of success and celebrity off it, was a heroically committed actor who saw himself as an artist, and that side of him is only part—maybe not even the biggest part—of the reason for the impact he made on the culture, and why it continues to reverberate. This isn’t a biography or a critical study but a smartly chosen selection of things written and said about Dean by those who knew him, worked with him, loved him, revered him, are still conflicted about him. It’s fascinating to take in Dean’s life and career through the eyes of so many people who knew him at different times in his life.

The Crooked Timber of Humanity: J.T. Rogers’ Oslo

Jennifer Ehle, T. Ryder Smith, Jefferson Mays and Henny Russell in Oslo. (Photo by T. Charles Erickson)

True political theatre – in which issues are dramatized rather than just personified by characters embodying contrasting views and the text explores a political subject rather than proselytizing - doesn’t come naturally to American playwrights. We tend to look to the Brits for this kind of writing, which is why J.T. Rogers’ Oslo, which recently completed a run in the intimate Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center, in a gripping and poignant production staged with masterly resourcefulness by Bartlett Sher, feels like a particular triumph. (The play will transfer to Lincoln Center’s large space, the Vivian Beaumont, in the spring; the Beaumont is a Broadway house, so the play will be eligible for Tony Award nominations next season.) Rogers’ Rwanda play, The Overwhelming, is modest but effective, at least on the page (I haven’t seen it performed); its virtue lies in its restraint, its refusal to fall into melodrama, and to that end he places an American family transplanted to Rwanda in the center of the play and filters the horrors of the genocide through their response to it. Rogers has written two plays about Afghanistan; the one I’ve seen, Blood and Gifts, which Sher also directed at the Newhouse, is set between 1981 and 1991, and its historical focus is part of what makes it so unusual and intriguing. Rogers is clearly interested in boiling-point locations, but he’s a humanist, not a polemicist, and I think he keeps getting better as a playwright.

The Long Shadow: Carol Anderson's White Rage (Part Two)

President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the 1964 Civil Rights Act as Martin Luther King, Jr., and others, look on.

Carol Anderson’s examination of the backlash against the 1960s Civil Rights legislative achievements during the Nixon and Reagan eras constitutes perhaps the most controversial sections of White Rage. It is no exaggeration to assert that the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, initiated by Lyndon Johnson – whom Anderson rightly acknowledges as an enlightened figure even before he became President – facilitated seismic changes. The new laws did much to curb overt discrimination, open up job opportunities, close the racial gap by the doubling of college enrollment for blacks, and exponentially increase black suffrage. Consider that before the 1965 Voting Rights Act, only six percent of blacks could vote; within three years that jumped to sixty percent. It is significant that these gains rekindled white resentment, and the courts and the governments at the federal and state level found ways to exploit that sense of grievance. Nixon was able to appoint four new Supreme Court judges who reflected his conservative philosophy. The Court continued to undercut the 1954 Brown vs The Board of Education decision by arguing that vast disparity in public funding between white schools and inner city minority schools did not constitute racial discrimination and that the constitution did not guarantee education. State governments found ways to dilute the power of the black vote through gerrymandering, a process in which city, county, or state officials redraw district lines to ensure that Republican candidates are elected. All levels of government slashed the government payrolls that have long served as sources of black employment. Republican administrations sullied African Americans by linking them with drugs and crime. In a recent article in Salon, Anderson cites a 1994 Harpers’ article in which Nixon aide, John Ehrlichman, cynically acknowledged the race baiting deployed by the Nixon administration: “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be against black[s], but by getting the public to associate. . .blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing” the drug “we could disrupt those communities, We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” This is an example of white rage writ large.

Play It Again: Harry Potter and the Cursed Child

Jamie Parker as Harry Potter, in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. (Photo by Manuel Harlan)

The more you think about Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, the odder it becomes. It’s a two-part play, which serves as the long-awaited sequel to J.K. Rowling’s blockbuster series of books about the world of a young wizard (as well as the often excellent movie adaptations), but it’s not entirely clear to me why it seemed so essential to Rowling and her collaborators that this be the case. The play is credited to Jack Thorne, who recently adapted the film Let the Right One In for the stage. However, Thorne, Rowling, and theatre director John Tiffany all share credit for the story. It’s currently running in the West End in London, and a Broadway transfer seems inevitable.

Still Bourne: Paul Greengrass' Jason Bourne

Matt Damon in Jason Bourne.

Jason Bourne is the fifth installment of the espionage franchise and the third in which Matt Damon and director Paul Greengrass have teamed up (the fourth, a spin-off, saw Jeremy Renner in the lead). It's been an exhilarating partnership so far, producing the most taut chase scenes, desperate hand-to-hand struggles, and precision minimalist acting from an ever-expanding cast of characters. I'm happy to report that the latest film retains these features. Greengrass' action direction is uncanny, with several bravura sequences that will leave you slack-jawed. In one, Bourne races through the streets of Athens on a motorcycle in the middle of a full-scale popular uprising, replete with Molotov cocktails, tear gas, fire hoses, and pitched battles between rioters and armored police. It is a staggering, visceral piece of direction. Your sensory apparatus can hardly register the kinetic movement. The only thing I've ever seen that surpasses it is the final minutes of Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men and perhaps Joe Wright’s Dunkirk sequence in Atonement. Damon continues his disciplined approach to the role; Tommy Lee Jones effortlessly steps into the shoes of the villain, nefarious CIA chief Robert Dewey; and Alicia Vikander gets the acting style of the franchise just right in the role of Heather Lee, Dewey’s protege.

But despite this craftsmanship and professionalism, Jason Bourne lacks the human conflict that lay at the core of the previous Damon films, a struggle that connected all of the movies’ elements into a tightly congealed ball. If you recall, the first movies trace the story of how Bourne--suffering from amnesia--comes to remember his past life as a CIA assassin even as he evades the Agency’s desperate attempts to eliminate him. His identity crisis was a moral crisis--he wanted to know the truth of his life so as to atone for the murders he committed. The problem was, he couldn’t escape being an assassin--he kept being forced to use his deadly abilities on the various black ops agents that came after him. Despite his desire to lead a quiet life, he had to keep killing, for the those agents would never have arisen if it weren’t for Bourne himself. He was the prototype, the first experiment in Dick Cheney’s 'dark side' operations. And so killing those agents and exposing their superiors was the only way to undo his painful legacy. That it fit in with his identity quest is what made the movies deeply compelling. This emotional weight lent a further urgency and excitement to the action sequences: the stakes were high.

A Feeling of Magic: Pete's Dragon

Pete’s Dragon was not on my radar. I have little patience for Disney’s current scheme to remake its classic properties in live action, being the kind of curmudgeon who still clings to the belief that these stories are better told through animation, and that CGI will never achieve the same impact and charm as practical effects. I guess I should have learned by now that they know what they’re doing.

If any of those properties were ripe for remaking, Pete’s Dragon fits the bill. The 1977 Disney original, about a boy who escapes his abusive hillbilly parents to live with a dragon in the woods, was a flop in every regard – so much so that it’s widely forgotten as part of the Disney canon. This 2016 update instead makes Pete (Oakes Fegley) the victim of a car crash that kills his parents and strands him in the woods, where the dragon – which he names Elliot, from the dog in his favourite book – befriends and takes care of him. Pete’s not the only one who’s seen Elliot before: tales abound in nearby Millhaven of dragons that haunt the forest, and resident coot and spinner of tall tales, Meacham (Robert Redford), has always claimed to have seen one. He insists there was a feeling of magic when he met the titular beast. It was a feeling that snuck up on him, making him drop his rifle and simply stare in wonder, and a feeling that forever changed the way he looked at the whole world. It takes a while, but Pete’s Dragon slowly begins working that same magic on you, and the moment that you see Pete soar into the air astride his furry friend – both of them whooping, howling, exulting in the sheer joy of it – you’re as entranced as Meacham was.

Palpable Poetry: The Works of Pierre Coupey at the Odon Wagner Contemporary Gallery

Pierre Coupey's After Rilke IV.

The piece below is an edited excerpt from his catalogue essay.

If seeing is believing, then surely two vibrant and dynamic works such as After Rilke III and After Rilke IV, intensify belief, occurring as they do in the almost operatic space where poetry becomes a palpable presence. They are among the few works by Pierre Coupey that have a literal or suggestive title, serving as a signpost to their destination. It’s not that they veer too closely to the programmatic, or offer a concrete story for the viewer to “read,” if only because they reference one of the most hermetic poets of the last century, but they do offer a tantalizing piece of spiritual bait for those of us who enjoy our mysteries served with a hint of metaphor. After all, Rilke is the keen-eyed observer who first interpreted the aesthetic purpose and historical importance of Cezanne when he remarked on that great painter’s work that, “Surely all art is the result of one’s having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further.” And like the poet they reference, these two works, along with their companions, take us immediately to the place where they were made: the very edge of pictorial expression, where no one can go any further, as if arriving at a coast where the land itself disappears.

Although Coupey’s roots and sources derive from Montreal, his point of origin, his major work has been done in Vancouver and he could be considered a West Coast artist. Upon closer inspection, however, one sees that his work eschews any dualism of east and west, and moves from a “third coast” of the mind. There is after all, no east or west in dreams, and his paintings evoke the retinal charms of a certain optical abandon associated with the unconscious. Finally we can envisage a ticket to that ultimate foreign country which Rosalind Krauss identified as the optical unconscious, and which another poet, Wallace Stevens, evoked so magically in his poem “Of Mere Being,” in which he called upon us to imagine “the palm at the end of the mind beyond the last thought” and to listen carefully to the creatures that dwell there in that distance, singing in the palm a song without human meaning, a foreign song. That is what these paintings are singing, a song without words in a language of free-floating forms. All, or most, of this gifted senior painter’s works are untitled and identified numerically, and with good reason: on the third coast of the mind, and in the palm of the mind that makes such works, language pales by comparison to the outright clarity of declarative statements made by each piece. As the artist himself puts it: “The majority of the works in this show are titled Untitled and numbered –– to put the stress on just the bare facts of the paintings themselves: how they were made, what forces went into their desire to be clearly themselves. To relieve them of words, of these words. To let them be paint.” Letting them be paint is the essence of letting us see what we are seeing, just that and only that. Yet language still seductively tempts us to approach the works, with its paltry ammunition in hand, as a kind of talisman that refuses to help us grind the images down into literal, or literary, meaning. Instead they playfully unfold in that Rilkean danger zone of extremity while we adjust to their absolute flatness and utter absence of illusion. If anything, they are all about the meaning of meaning itself, not merely about one meaning or another from the menu available to the modernist canon. They are, perhaps, exactly the drastic measures our drastic
times require.

The Deal with Art in The Art of the Deal: Funny or Die’s Donald Trump “Biopic”

Johnny Depp and Michaela Watkins in Funny or Die’s Donald Trump’s The Art of the Deal: The Movie.

Although one would be hard pressed to say Donald Trump is a stranger to popular media, February 10th 2016 brought the celebrity businessman a seemingly unprecedented level of attention. For starters, he had just won the New Hampshire Republican primary by a landslide, defeating rivals Kasich, Cruz, and Jeb Bush while simultaneously baffling reasonable people everywhere. To coincide with this momentous (and frankly kind of horrifying) occasion, Trump was in the headlines of digital media outlets for a second reason: he had been portrayed in a new biopic by no less than Johnny Depp himself. Collaborating with a team of famous faces, director Jeremy Konner (Drunk History) and writer Joe Randazzo (The Onion) bring the story of Trump’s humble beginnings to the small screen. Or so production company Funny or Die would have you believe. Unbeknownst to people born after the year 1987, Donald Trump once wrote a book. More accurately, I should say “Donald Trump” once “wrote” a “book.” While he denies it through his teeth nowadays his book, Trump: The Art of the Deal, which sold well despite being largely bullshit in light of his numerous bankruptcies, was mostly (if not entirely) written by journalist Tony Schwartz—who describes the experience, in retrospect, as “put[ting] lipstick on a pig.” In Donald Trump’s The Art of the Deal: The Movie, Funny or Die crafts an outlandish 50-minute satire, presenting it as a long-lost companion piece to Trump’s and Schwartz’s bestseller. (Donald Trump’s The Art of the Deal: The Movie, formerly available for free on Funny or Die’s website, was exclusively launched on Netflix on August 1, 2016.)

Issues: And No More Shall We Part and Wild

Jane Kaczmarek and Alfred Molina in And No More Shall We Part. (Photo by T. Charles Erickson)

In And No More Shall We Part, the final show at Williamstown’s Nikos Stage this summer, Jane Kaczmarek and Alfred Molina play a married couple, Pam and Don, struggling with her decision to commit suicide after her treatment has failed to halt the progress of her cancer. She is resolute, while he is reluctant, but against his better judgment he’s agreed to help her. The play begins on the night she has earmarked as her last and flashes back to the day she first broached the subject with him; their most volatile argument on the topic; and the special last dinner he’s arranged for her, when he learns that – against his express wishes – she’s cancelled the invitation to their grown-up kids (fearing that including them might make them legally liable for aiding her in taking her own life).

Molina and especially Kaczmarek give measured, intelligent performances under Anne Kauffman’s direction, but the drama itself, by the Australian playwright Tom Holloway, is painfully banal and uninspired. I’m sure Holloway is sincere and has deep feelings about the material, but he’s got nothing to contribute to the subjects of assisted suicide and the trauma of bidding farewell to a loved one except warmed-over sentiments. The two actors’ best efforts don’t produce much more in the way of character than Pam’s steadfastness and exhaustion, Don’s terror of abandonment and tendency to mask the brutality of the truth; Holloway doesn’t even provide a sense of what their various relationships with their two children might be like, since the kids, offstage presences, are merely a device. (The play doesn’t bother to tell us how the kids responded to the news of their mother’s decision, or what it might have been like for them – or for Pam – to say their ultimate goodbyes.) Since it’s a realist play, these pretty obvious omissions are a little bizarre. Moreover, the placement of the flashbacks feels random. The single moment in the play that’s truly poignant, i.e., poignant because of the way it’s been created and not because of the subject matter, is one where, after Pam, having taken the pills, persuades Don to leave her alone in bed to drift off over a book, and he camps outside the closed bedroom with his hand caressing the door. (The idea is that he won’t re-enter until the morning, when he can report truthfully that he simply came in and found her dead.) At this point, however, Holloway cuts to the flashback of their last meal together, which undercuts the emotional effectiveness of the image of Molina with his hand on the door and seems to have no dramatic logic.

MOR: Showtime's Roadies

The Showtime series Roadies is an ensemble comedy set amid the barely controlled chaos surrounding a tour by a successful, veteran stadium-rock group, the Staton-House Band. The series was created by Cameron Crowe, who directed the first three episodes and wrote the pilot, and it represents his return to conquered territory after a string of projects—the pretentiously vapid Vanilla Sky and the theoretically more audience-friendly Elizabethtown and Aloha—that bombed with critics and audiences alike. Although Roadies is set in the present day, its set-up and tender, hagiographic attitude towards rock and roll as a cultural force hearken back to Almost Famous (2000), Crowe’s semi-autobiographical ‘70s nostalgia trip about a 15-year-old rock journalist (played by Patrick Fugit, currently driving out demons on Cinemax’s Outcast) coming of age while on the road with a band called Stillwater.

In Almost Famous, the hero was mainly focused on the rock stars, and their groupies; this time, the central figures are those wonderful people working behind the scenes to make sure the fans get to see their musical heroes. But even if you’ve never seen a movie about the music business before, you’ll be familiar with these characters. Carla Gugino is Shelli, the perpetually over-worked production manager who’s always dashing from one crisis to the next, who’s just enough older than most of the people working under her for her sexy warmth and glowing smile to have a faint maternal tinge. The one-man fireworks display at the center of it all is the veteran tour manager Phil, a grinning, all-embracing bear of a man who dispenses advice and anecdotes in a way that tells you that he’s the spirit of the music incarnate. The “Blue Collar Comedian” Ron White has a firm handle on his character and has no trouble communicating Phil’s self-image and infectious love of his own bullshit, but Crowe doesn’t have much faith in the audience’s ability to figure anything out for itself, so White is required to growl, “When you’re lookin’ at me, you’re lookin’ at rock and roll in America!” (He is, someone says, “being paid a lot of money to hug people and make them feel good about the old way.”)