Psychiatric Help: Leonard Cohen’s You Want It Darker

Leonard Cohen's new album, You Want It Darker, was released on October 21st. (Photo: Luke Macgregor/Reuters)

Since its release a couple of weeks ago, Leonard Cohen’s latest album has been getting a lot of attention. You Want It Darker (Columbia) is Cohen’s 14th studio album. But rather than write an essay with syrupy accolades and explanatory impressions of the record, I’d rather not compete with the beautiful superlatives of Sylvie Simmons in the November issue of MOJO magazine. Nor try to unfurl the historical and spiritual connection of Cohen to Montreal, his birthplace, as Robert Everett-Green did so nicely in The Globe and Mail on October 22.

Similarly, I have no notion of adding anything more to David Remnick’s excellent profile in the October 17 issue of The New Yorker since I didn’t request an interview in the first place. I want to discuss Cohen’s remarkable timing with this record and the context, at least to me, of his profound ability of holding up a mirror to our world. With the clusterf#%& of the Presidential election campaign to the south, the Syrian Refugee crisis and, as recently reported by the WWF, a shrinking wildlife, Cohen’s poetry and songs are like a cold slap in the face to me. A shake-up of my ego and the ridiculous speed at which the world is cruising along without taking notice of the damage humanity is incurring upon itself. Of course we want it darker and we need a poet, perhaps this poet, to point it out. Finger-wagging won’t do; we’ll tune out. But as emotionally instructive opinion surrounded by the company of music, Cohen hits the proverbial spot as only he can, and for that I’m grateful.

Talking Out of Turn #47 (Podcast): Sidney Lumet (1988)

A scene from 12 Angry Men (1957), directed by Sidney Lumet.

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 Clive Barker). Another publisher curiously chose to reject it because, to them, it appeared to be a book about me promoting my interviews (as if I were 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.

One area of the book concerned the legacy of the sixties. My thinking was (and still is) that it’s difficult taking into consideration the political landscape of the eighties without examining aspects of the sixties. Many ghosts from that period (i.e., Vietnam, the Cold War, civil rights) continued to linger as unresolved arguments that underscored political and cultural actions in the eighties. If cynicism became more the common coin twenty years after the idealism sparked by JFK’s 1960 inaugural address, the voices included in this chapter of Talking Out of Turn set out to uncover what the political lessons of the sixties were. This section included, among others, poet Allen Ginsberg, novelist Ann Beattie (Love Always, Chilly Scenes of Winter), and filmmaker Sidney Lumet.

Director of movies such as 12 Angry Men (1957), The Pawnbroker (1964), Serpico (1973), Dog Day Afternoon (1975), and Network (1976), Sidney Lumet would make many political films in his career, but few of them in the eighties did very well. This includes Running on Empty, a movie that dealt with sixties-era fugitives from the law in the 1980s, that had just been released when I sat down with the director in 1988. In our conversation Lumet ruminates on the problems of making political movies – especially ones that confronted the 1960s – during the Reagan era. Sidney Lumet passed away in 2011 at the age of 86.

– Kevin Courrier.

Here is the full interview with Sidney Lumet as it aired on CJRT-FM in 1988.

 

The Front Page: Old Pros

John Slattery and Nathan Lane in The Front Page at Broadway's Broadhurst Theater. (Photo by Julieta Cervantes)

In recent years every Broadway season has included a top-flight revival of a classic American play. Last year it was Long Day’s Journey into Night, the year before You Can’t Take It with You and Of Mice and Men the season before that. But they don’t always get the respect they’ve earned. The mediocre notices for Jack O’Brien’s production of the 1928 Ben Hecht-Charles MacArthur comedy The Front Page with Nathan Lane and John Slattery have been utterly perplexing. I saw the show just before the press opening and walked away in a state of bliss. O’Brien has gathered together a dazzling cast to mount what I’d say is one of the three best comedies ever written by Americans, and watching them parry and thrust, negotiate Hecht and MacArthur’s hilarious banter and glide through the perfect mechanics of the farce plot with acrobatic grace is akin to buying a ticket for a revue in vaudeville’s heyday and discovering that every single act is good enough for the coveted penultimate slot on the bill.

Politics along the Danube: Reflections of a Study Trip River Cruise (Part 2 of 2)

Hungarian Jews waiting in line at the Swiss embassy in Budapest, 1944. (Photo by Agnes Hirschi, Carl Lutz's daughter)

Last August I had the good fortune to be a member of a study trip river cruise along the Danube that sailed from the port town of Vidin (after two days in Sophia, Bulgaria) to Passau in Germany and concluded with a two-day trip to Prague, Czech Republic. It was an exhilarating experience because of the significant ports of call at which we stopped and the stimulating conversations with fellow passengers. But my lasting impressions were more about what was imparted or omitted by the local guest lecturers and tour guides, and their often selective or subjective remarks. This piece is also informed by my exchanges with others about those experiences, as well as my supplemental reading. Part 1 of this piece was published two weeks. The second, and concluding, part is below.
– Bob Douglas

Arriving in Budapest and opting for the Jewish sites tour rather than a general city tour turned out to be one of the best experiences of the trip. The guide was excellent, wonderfully integrating historical, personal and the contemporary at both the places we visited and in the talk she gave at the “Glass House.” At one time a glass factory showroom owned by a displaced Jewish manufacturer, during the war it was the location at which the Swiss diplomat, Carl Lutz, sheltered 3,000 Jews by annexing it to the Swiss legation, thereby extending diplomatic immunity to the place. It is now a museum to honour Lutz.

Living in Hell: J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy and the White Working Class

Author J.D. Vance. (Photo: Naomi McColloch)

It’s hard to say which is the most arresting anecdote in J.D. Vance’s memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. There’s the story about the time his beloved grandmother – “Mamaw” to Vance and his sister – nearly blew off an interloper’s head in backwoods Kentucky during her girlhood. There’s the one that Vance recounts about his opioid-addicted mother nearly swerving off the road while screaming at him, then chasing him and forcing him to take shelter in a neighbor’s house, only to break down the door just before the cops showed up. Then there are the fleeting but haunting images of rural poverty that he witnesses when he returns to “hillbilly” country, such as the eight pairs of eyes, belonging to hungry and neglected children, that he catches staring out at him from a rundown shack.

Vance’s memoir, which recounts his early life as the son of self-described “hillbillies,” isn’t all despair and misery, however. His grandparents, Mamaw and Papaw, seem to have fled their small Kentucky community to settle in Middletown because of a teenage pregnancy scandal. Miscarriages, alcoholism, and domestic violence followed, but eventually the couple achieved an unconventional but workable equilibrium, which allowed them to provide a degree of stability to Vance and his sister Lindsay when their mother’s life went off the rails. There’s a fair degree of warmth in the book, as well as recurring moments when he steps back from the narrative of his life to cite experts who have studied the social decay of the white working-class milieu from which he comes. It’s an admirable attempt to provide some perspective and to contextualize his personal experiences. In some ways, it’s eye-opening: hillbilly culture, according to Vance, is indeed violent, but it’s also not quite the reactionary, Bible-thumping stereotype advanced by those who are unfamiliar with his world.

Let's Get Small: Netflix's Easy

Malin Akerman and Orlando Bloom in Easy.

The Netflix series Easy was created by the independent filmmaker Joe Swanberg (V/H/S), who also directed, produced, and edited it, and is the sole writer credited on each of its eight half-hour episodes. It’s an anthology series set in Chicago, a collection of self-contained stories about the relationship and career problems of a couple of dozen characters, some of whom make fleeting appearances in one episode but may return to play a more prominent role in another. Many of the characters are involved in some kind of creative work, from acting or writing to setting up an illegal – dare one say, “indie” – brewery. And most of them are in their twenties or thirties and either just getting the hang of adult life or struggling with the conflict between reaping the rewards of committing to a long-term relationship or starting a family and settling into a rut and closing off other unexplored possibilities. (There are also a few older characters who are weighed down by regrets and blown chances: Jane Adams as an aging actress and Marc Maron as an autobiographical cartoonist who’s one part Robert Crumb to two parts Marc Maron.)

Critic’s Crypt: Threequel Thursday – The Exorcist III & A Nightmare on Elm Street 3

Ed Flanders and George C. Scott in The Exorcist III (1990).

The Halloween movie season is, for me, as much about discovering new favourites as revisiting old ones. Classics like Suspiria, Poltergeist, Halloween, and Evil Dead 2 are like friends I welcome back each year with open arms and a beaming heart, and I’m ever eager to add new friends to that group. That’s why I make time every October to fill in the gaps in my horror repertoire that represent the sequels, prequels, and other continuations of movies I already know and love. Over time I’d heard many good things about two such cinematic hellspawns, which both happened to be the third entry (a.k.a. “threequel”) in a series that suffered from a sub-par sequel: The Exorcist III (1990) and A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987).

Love Me T.O.: In Conversation with Author Piers Hemmingsen

A Beatles' press conference at Maple Leaf Gardens before they took the stage on Aug. 17, 1965. (Photo: John Rowlands)

Canadian Beatles authority Piers Hemmingsen served as guest curator on the multimedia BEATLES 50 T.O. exhibition, and this Saturday he will give a talk at Toronto's Market Gallery, where the show continues until Nov. 12, explaining his role and the role Canada played in making the Fabs famous in North America. The author of the recently self-published book, The Beatles in Canada: The Origins of Beatlemania!, Hemmingsen is a retired computer programmer who spent the last seven years investigating the topic. He knows what he's talking about.

His sizeable tome -- an expansive 468 pages -- grafts little-known fact to revealing interviews with such important early Beatles figures as Paul White, the former Capitol Records Canada singles promoter who in 1963 was the first to release a Beatles' record – "Love Me Do" – in North America. Canadians reacted. More than 100,000 eventually signed on to join the Toronto edition of a Beatles fan club that ended up being the biggest of its kind in the world. The U.S. had nothing comparable. When the Beatles touched down in New York in February 1964 for the first of three Ed Sullivan Show appearances, Toronto sent down two of its teenagers to handle the deluge of fan mail. Beatlemania had erupted on the continent and Canada helped make it happen, ushering in the pop-centred British Invasion which would come to shape the 1960s.

Those sparks flew for the first time over 50 years ago with Toronto, or T.O. as it is familiarly known, emerging as the North American city where the Beatles played the most during their touring years. Their last concert in Canada took place at Maple Leaf Gardens, the city's major hockey arena, in 1966. That transitional year forms the focus of When the Beatles Rocked Toronto -- whose displays of rare Beatles memorabilia, including the infamous "butcher" album cover, Hemmingsen organized, borrowing from public and private archives across the country as well as his own collection.

"The Beatles’ story is a great story. They were never happy to live with what they had already recorded and they always strived to improve with each new release," said Hemmingsen during a conversation which took place earlier this week in Toronto. "There was a start and an end, just like life. Their messages of love and peace are universal messages that will reverberate for a long time to come."

Here's more of that conversation:

Critic’s Crypt: Extreme Home Makeover – The Amityville Horrors, Old and New

James Brolin and Margot Kidder in The Amityville Horror (1979).

I’m going to open with a confession: despite moonlighting as a film and television critic, I have a notoriously bad memory for film and television. Friends and coworkers regularly quote movies and TV shows to me, often ones I’ve seen and loved, and I respond with a blank stare. I used to try to maintain my cultured façade by discreetly Googling the reference in question but I’ve given up on that as I’ve gotten older (… mostly because sometimes I get caught). My abysmally bad memory is how I wound up writing this piece. My colleague Justin suggested I do a Critic’s Crypt piece: maybe I could compare an original with a remake. The horror genre is rife with remakes! So I said, “Sure! I’ll write on The Amityville Horror! I love that movie.”

Upon re-watching “that movie,” I’ve recognized that I don’t actually love it. Rather, I fell into the trap of misremembering a classic – and it cost me five hours of my life. Let this be a lesson.

Minimalists: New Plays by Simon Stephens and Steve Martin, and Camelot in Westport

Denis Arndt and Mary-Louise Parker in Simon Stephens' Heisenberg, at New York's Manhattan Theatre Club. (Photo: Joan Marcus)

In his two-hander Heisenberg, Simon Stephens sets out to provide a dramatic illustration of Heisenberg’s principle that the more precisely you measure an object, the more it eludes your attempts. His guinea pigs are Alex Priest (Denis Arndt), a seventy-five-year-old Irish butcher and lifelong bachelor residing in London, and Georgie Burns (Mary Louise Parker), a transplanted American thirty-three years his junior who approaches him in the street, a complete stranger, and kisses him on the neck – an action that occurs just before the play begins. Georgie explains that from behind Alex looked so much like her recently deceased husband that she couldn’t help herself; she also identifies herself as a waitress at London’s legendary restaurant Ottolenghi. In their second encounter, at his shop, she recants, insisting that everything she’s told him was a lie. Now she says that she works at a receptionist in an elementary school, that her husband left her and their son has emigrated to America, cutting off all contact with her. After Georgie and Alex become lovers, she asks him for money to look for her son in Hackensack, his last known location. Did she decide to try to get money out of Alex after sleeping with him, or was he a mark she targeted from the outset?

New Harlem Renaissance: Marvel's Luke Cage

Mike Colter as Luke Cage, in Marvel's Luke Cage on Netflix.

Five months have passed since the events of the first season of Jessica Jones, and the scene has now shifted uptown from Hell's Kitchen to Harlem, where Luke Cage (Mike Colter, The Good Wife) has been keeping to himself, working two minimum-wage jobs and living anonymously above a Chinese restaurant. He has revealed his abilities to 'Pop' Henry (Frankie Fraison), a paternal figure who runs a barbershop where Cage works, but otherwise is largely content to sweep hair and wash dishes. All that changes when a kid from the shop, also under Pop's wing, gets caught up in some dirty business with local drug dealer and club owner, Cornell "Cottonmouth" Stokes (Mahershala Ali, House of Cards). Cage stops laying in the cut and steps – hoodie, bulletproof skin and all – on to the streets. There is a lot that is great about Luke Cage, even more that is very good, and, unfortunately much that is ultimately disappointing.

Talking Out of Turn #46 (Podcast): Robert Altman (1983)

David Alan Grier, Matthew Modine and Michael Wright in Robert Altman's Streamers (1983).

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 Clive Barker). 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.

One chapter, titled The Ghosts of Vietnam, featured interviews with a variety of authors (Robert Stone, Brian Fawcett) and filmmakers (Oliver Stone, Louis Malle) who dealt in their work with various aspects of the legacy of the Vietnam War and how it was felt in the Eighties. The American obsession with Latin and South America during the Reagan years seemed to be an ill-advised attempt to exorcise the ghosts of the earlier conflict. One of those interviews was with filmmaker Robert Altman, who I sat down with in 1983 to speak about his new film, Streamers.

The films of Robert Altman's films constantly had the buzz of Vietnam behind them, whatever their explicit subject matter – e.g. MASH (1970), McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), and Nashville (1975) – but Streamers, a screen adaptation of David Rabe's play of the same name, was Altman's first film to deal directly with the conflict. Though Streamers isn't among Altman's best movies, his thoughts about the project and about the Vietnam conflict were fascinating.

– Kevin Courrier.
 
Here is the full interview with Robert Altman as it aired on CJRT-FM in 1983. 

 

Principal Photography: In Conversation with Gregg Delman

Misty Copeland by Gregg Delman was published in the U.S. by Rizzoli at the end of September. (Photo by Gregg Delman)

New York-based photographer Gregg Delman photographed ballerina Misty Copeland over a two-year period, from 2011 to 2014, before she became internationally famous as the first African-American to become a principal dancer at American Ballet Theatre, one of the world's top classical dance companies. Their collaborative sessions yielded thousands of images, 95 of which have just been published in a gorgeous new cloth-cover book by Rizzoli. Misty Copeland by Gregg Delman, officially released on Sept. 26 with a Manhattan book launch party attended by both artists, is a feast for the eyes that deepens the intimate relationship between dance and the still image.

For fans of Copeland, the book immortalizes the California-born ballerina who today is the most talked about dancer since Mikhail Baryshnikov defected from the Soviet Union in 1970s. Her fame arises from her status as a ballet iconoclast whose pronounced musculature and ample bosom represent a sharp departure from the pale and frail ballerina stereotype that has dominated the popular imagination since the early 19th century. It's a welcome change, and one which Delman appears to have presciently anticipated. His erotically charged images spotlight the dancer's voluptuousness and daring artistry. They celebrate a powerful dancer who is also a strong woman, in control of her destiny. Delman calls it an accurate portrait.

"Dancing is something Misty does but she's much more than a dancer," said Delman during a recent interview in New York, close to his Chelsea studio. "Anyone who meets her can see the energy she has. I always knew she'd be something. She was already something for me from the beginning. She was this incredible muse." Here's more of that conversation:

Critic’s Crypt: J-Horror Genre Slugfest – Kairo & Hausu

The girls arrive at the titular House (Hausu, 1977).

I’m comfortable admitting that I felt a certain amount of trepidation about this particular Critic’s Crypt. Japanese horror films like Ring (1998) and Noroi: The Curse (2005) have always had a way of getting under my skin the way no Western horror movie can (in fact I still maintain that in addition to being far superior to its Hollywood remake, Ring is the scariest movie I’ve ever seen). I’ve been trying to put my finger on it for years, but I think it simply comes down to the difference in cultural sensibilities between Japan and the rest of the world, and how that manifests in terms of horror. What the Japanese find frightening is represented in a much more subtle and insidious way than our Hollywood-bred jump-scare fare, relying far more often on the audience’s imagination and playing on fears and doubts that – to me, as an uncultured gaijin, anyway – are just as scary in their probing truth as they are in their foreign incomprehensibility.

Often it’s about the way j-horror (as it’s affectionately known here) will take ordinary, innocuous things and – by connecting them to the strange, the supernatural, and the psychotic – make them terrifying. Whether it’s an unlabelled VHS tape, a flock of pigeons, a crumpled garbage bag, or a TV screen left on static, this genre excels at forcing you to re-examine the world around you with suspicious, fearful eyes. The potential freak-out factor extends beyond the threshold of the theatre doors, making your walk home in the sunshine as nerve-wracking as a night-time shortcut through a cemetery. In short, I can’t really articulate exactly why, but Japanese horror movies scare me good.

So, in a month that’s so far been pretty light on true horror, I had to steel myself for what I expected would be the most harrowing viewings of Halloween 2016. I chose an old and a new, neither of which I’d seen before: 2001’s Kairo (aka “Pulse”), about ghosts who invade our world through the internet, and 1977’s Hausu (aka “House”), about… well, we’ll get to that. To my immense surprise, neither really represented j-horror the way I had expected – but in their unique twists on the formula, they were exemplars of how broad and varied and surprising the genre can be. Plus, I made it through without mentally scarring myself! So, that’s a win.

Riding the Rails: Billy Bragg and Joe Henry

Billy Bragg and Joe Henry's new album is titled Shine A Light: Field Recordings from the Great American Railroad.

At first glance the musical combination of Billy Bragg, beloved son of the British left, and American songwriter Joe Henry would be unusual. But the fact of the matter is that the two musicians met over thirty years ago in an office waiting room at Warner Brothers. Henry’s wife was a publicist with the label at the time courting Bragg to radio stations and newspaper interviews. Their introduction was “the start of a beautiful friendship” that eventually put Joe Henry in the producer’s chair for Bragg’s album, Tooth & Nail (2013), and finally as a partner on their new album Shine A Light: Field Recordings from the Great American Railroad (Cooking Vinyl). It’s an album of train songs recorded in various train stations from Chicago to Los Angeles. Bragg, Henry and a small crew set out to capture history, by taking a trip through the Midwest United States by rail. The first track released, as a single, was “Midnight Special,” documented on a video by Ray Foley.

Daydream Nation: FX's Atlanta

Donald Glover and Brian Tyree Henry in Atlanta.

Donald Glover, the star and creator of the FX series Atlanta, maintains a rap career under the name Childish Gambino, and anyone who saw Glover as Troy Barnes on Community will think they have an idea of what a childish Gambino is like. Troy, a high school football star tentatively easing into adult life as a community college student, initially came across as kid’s idea of a confident, swaggering jock, but that’s because his aggressive, socially well-adjusted persona was a pose. Once Troy embraced his true character as a lonely nerd in search of a playmate and began spending all his time playing games and obsessing over old TV shows with the master nerd Abed (Danny Pudi), he grew increasingly childlike, to the point of losing his jock’s sexual aura and becoming a human stuffed animal. It was to Glover’s enormous credit that he managed to make this seem less like a regression than like the self-realization of someone who’d been hiding behind a false front and needed some time in the playroom before becoming an adult.

For fans of Community, or even Glover’s often witty and intoxicating nerd-rap, the first surprise of Atlanta is that Glover – lithe, bearded, and heavy-lidded – is very much an adult. As Earn, who’s back home in Atlanta after dropping out of college, he has the presence of a man who’s been kicked around the block a few times and is ready to claim his place in the world and do right by the people he cares about. If anything, he’s more precariously lost than Troy, in the limbo of his community-college safe space, ever was. Earn arrives in town with no money, job, or prospects, just an uncertain relationship with Vanessa (Zazie Beetz), a schoolteacher who’s the mother of his baby daughter. Troy’s face would sometimes freeze in an expression of smiling terror when he was afraid reality was about to catch up with him and present him with something he couldn’t bluff his way out of. Panic seems to be outside Earn’s emotional range, even when, in the wake of a ridiculous shooting incident, he’s arrested and has to spend most of a night and much of the next day idly waiting for bail money to arrive.

The Cherry Orchard at the Roundabout: The Upside and the Downside

Harold Perrineau, Diane Lane and John Glover in the Roundabout Theater's The Cherry Orchard. (Photo: Joan Marcus)

Diane Lane gives a warm and luminous performance as Ranevskaya in the newly opened Roundabout Theatre production of The Cherry Orchard. Though she’s done relatively little theatrical work, Lane has the aura of a great stage personality, the kind playwrights built vehicles around in the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth. As Ranevskaya, who, with her brother Gaev (John Glover), embodies the last vestiges of the bankrupt Russian aristocracy, incapable of saving themselves, she gets at both the high-comic and the tragic undercurrents of Chekhov’s masterly final play – and at its magic, too. It’s the most radical of his pieces, giving rise to sudden shifts of mood and tone as well as revealing the contradictions that make his characters both intricate, impressionistic reflections of real human experience and unsolvable mysteries. Ranevskaya is frivolous and generous, foolish and worldly-wise, life-embracing and haunted – and Lane suggests all of these aspects.

Politics along the Danube: Reflections of a Study Trip River Cruise (Part 1 of 2)

The still-visible damage from the NATO bombing of Belgrade. (Photo: David Orlovic)

Last August I had the good fortune to be a member of a study trip river cruise along the Danube that sailed from the port town of Vidin (after two days in Sophia, Bulgaria) to Passau in Germany that concluded with a two-day trip to Prague, Czech Republic. It was an exhilarating experience because of the significant ports of call at which we stopped and the stimulating conversations with fellow passengers. But my lasting impressions were more about what was imparted or omitted by the local guest lecturers and tour guides, and their often selective or subjective remarks. This review is also informed by my exchanges with others about those experiences, as well as my supplemental reading. Part 1 of this piece appears below. Part 2 will be published here in two weeks.

– Bob Douglas

 
The first sentence of Alan Furst’s wonderfully crafted novel, Night Soldiers, reads: “In Bulgaria, in 1934 on a muddy street in the river town of Vidin, Khristo Stoianev saw his brother kicked to death.” Although a powerful sentence, it did not originally leap off the page until I reread large sections of the novel when I returned home from the Danube cruise. Nor did I initially give Furst’s map of the Danube from 1934-1945, which graces the beginning of the book, more than a cursory glance until recently. Only the first thirty-five pages and the last section of Night Soldiers are about his activities along the Danube, but those pages resonate more deeply. They also provide striking insights that I thought were sometimes missing when I listened to the Bulgarian lecturer and guide.

Hope for Network Drama? This Is Us and Pitch

Justin Hartley (centre) in This Is Us. (Photo: Ron Batzdorff/NBC)

It’s become something of a truism in TV criticism that the networks have ceded virtually all of their creative prestige (and, increasingly, their ratings) to cable and streaming outlets such as FX, HBO, and Netflix. With the recent conclusion of The Good Wife, which at its height was arguably the best thing on TV, there didn’t appear to be much worth watching. A new slate of network shows that featured multiple time-travel thrillers and another Kevin James-fronted sitcom didn’t threaten to shake up this dynamic very much. However, two new shows, NBC’s This Is Us and Fox’s Pitch, offer some suggestions for the direction in which networks might have to go if they want to produce material that can compete in the era of so-called “Peak TV.” This isn’t a coincidence: both are narratively adventurous and rely heavily on flashbacks and plot twists, and both were created (or, in the case of Pitch, co-created with Rick Singer) by Dan Fogelman. Fogelman has established a track record as a writer and producer capable of creating movies and TV shows that are entertaining and unique; his romantic comedy Crazy, Stupid, Love was one of the few enjoyable examples of that genre in recent memory, and the late, underappreciated Galavant was an oftentimes delightful TV musical that presaged the cult success of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.

Curtis Hanson: A Career in Perspective

Eminem and Curtis Hanson (right) on the set of 8 Mile in 2002. (Photo: Eli Reed)

Film director Curtis Hanson, who died in September at the too-young age of seventy-one, was stuck in B-movie territory for a decade and a half before he graduated, in 1987, with the thriller The Bedroom Window. (One of his last B-pictures, Losin’ It, about three SoCal high-schoolers who drive to Tijuana to get rid of their virginity, was coarse and chaotic but very likable. One of them was played by Tom Cruise, just months before Risky Business made him a star, and I’ve never enjoyed watching him as much since.) Once he made it to the majors, so to speak, Hanson made eleven pictures, and I like all or part of every single one except for his first hit, the witless 1992 Gothic The Hand That Rocks the Cradle – it was efficiently directed, but the dunderheaded script was insurmountable. What made him so reliable a filmmaker was a combination of his bred-in-the-bone understanding of genre conventions, his transparent love of actors and his undervalued gift for getting fine work out of them, and his relaxed finesse as a storyteller. This last is no surprise: from his first days in movies, the early seventies, he was a screenwriter as well as a director, penning the compulsively watchable, enjoyably amoral Canadian mystery The Silent Partner (directed by Daryl Duke and starring Elliott Gould, Susannah York and Christopher Plummer) in 1978 and contributing to the scripts of Samuel Fuller’s White Dog and Carroll Ballard’s Never Cry Wolf in the early eighties. And he kept his hand in: he wrote The Bedroom Window and co-wrote the best picture he ever turned out, L.A. Confidential, with Brian Helgeland, as well as one of his last movies, Lucky You, with Eric Roth.

Critic’s Crypt: Demonic Double Bill – The Omen & The Exorcist

Lee Remick, Gregory Peck and Harvey Stephens (centre) in The Omen (1976).

Critics At Large is pleased to present the second installment of CRITIC’S CRYPT, a new column in which our writers compare, contrast, and explore two horror films that are linked by a common element. This time around, Justin Cummings brings together The Omen (1976) and The Exorcist (1973).

The Omen (1976) and The Exorcist (1973) are connected by more than just the stink of a demonic presence. Both are about children who act as vessels for evil spirits, yes. Both revolve around the perversion of the sacred and the innocent, true. Both are pretty damn terrifying, of course. But – despite their differences in quality and execution – the thing that most strongly links these films is a core theme that I think goes under-discussed in most conversations about these two classics: parenthood.

Season of the Witch: Adam Winguard’s Blair Witch

When the audience at San Diego Comic Con’s advanced screening of The Woods filed in to catch the latest offering to the “found footage” horror genre, they had no idea that they were actually sitting down to the long-rumoured sequel to 1999’s The Blair Witch Project. Until that moment, every promotional piece for the film—from the trailer to the movie posters—had been labelled with Blair Witch’s fake name, The Woods, in an effort to throw fans off the trail and deflect the criticism director Adam Winguard knew he would face for resurrecting the 17-year-old franchise. Whether or not it was cowardly for Winguard to dodge due criticism for his work by hyping up a fake movie, it’s hard to deny the effectiveness of his plan. The Woods intrigued and excited horror fans. A month after Blair Witch’s release, however, the film is regarded as a box-office flop. Many chalk up Blair Witch as just another unnecessary sequel that regurgitated The Blair Witch Project’s plot without offering anything new. Yet despite the deluge of negative reviews that I’ve been wading through, I have to confess that I love this film and I think it's brilliant.

The Secret Life of Energy - New Works by Zhang He

Zhang He's Bouquet

“Wonder is not only our starting point; it can also be our destination.”- Sharman Russell

Energy. The source of all things, material and immaterial. If energy (chi) has a signature, it could resemble the abstract calligraphic dance of paint in the hands of Zhang He. If the creative principle or force behind nature were potentially an algorithm, a program for infusing the formless with structure, then its designer’s autograph might resemble the vibrant paths of these bold images. Both Rejoicing and Becoming, which might be different words for the same phenomenon, seem to be signed by a free form force of nature. At the abstract or atomic level, energy is a trickster, what indigenous peoples call a shapeshifter: one second it’s a leaf, the next minute it’s a tree, the next century it’s a mountain. He’s paintings feel like a portrait of the trickster in action, and they give what used to be called action painting a new lease on life, a secret life. There is an atomic ambiguity at work here, and whether they metaphorically depict trees, flowers, tidal waves or volcanic eruptions, as Abundance, Bouquet, Between Waves or Fireworks all seem to do, they each share the element of exploding into an eternity of colour. Consider for a moment the rich potential of two surreal sciences: erotic botany, or the intimate study of the porno-blossom; and crypto-botany, or the exploration of mythical and non-existent plants. Now imagine paintings that appear to depict the secret inner life of flowers and to quietly steal into their leafy bedrooms during their silent romantic romping. Now look at the vividly riotous yet somehow elegantly sedate paintings of Zhang He. You get the picture, literally and figuratively. They possess an abstract eroticism. To properly witness his ecstatically embracing flower shapes in their clustering clouds of damp colour is to almost blush at having interrupted a private rendezvous between roots, soil and sunlight. You can almost feel his brushstroke petals breathy quivering. Abundance, Fruition and Peaks, for example, all give us an organic snapshot of energetic growth occurring before our eyes, or even inside our eyes.

Judy Garland Sings: Chasing Rainbows

Ruby Rakos (centre left) and the cast of Goodspeed's Chasing Rainbows. (Photo: Diane Sobolewski)

Ruby Rakos is so good as the teenage Judy Garland, née Frances Gumm, in the new musical Chasing Rainbows: The Road to Oz that she alone justifies the trip to see the production at the Goodspeed Opera House. As a vocalist Rakos can harness both a belter’s power and a crooner’s sweetness; if you think you’ve heard enough covers of “Over the Rainbow” to last a lifetime, you might reconsider when you hear her marry delicacy to emotionality in the show’s finale. In her youth Garland had a remarkable ability to use that powerful, controlled alto to channel a depth of emotion that was startling in an adolescent. (She was sixteen when M-G-M cast her as Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz and took her career into the stratosphere.) That’s why, in the musical, her mother, Ethel Gumm (Sally WIlfert), relentlessly promotes her as the little girl with the grown-up voice – though that description shortchanges her other quality, a rousing Midwestern-flavored ebullience that gave her swing numbers, like “Everybody Sing” (from The Broadway Melody of 1938) and “Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart” (from Listen, Darling) a soaring, look-ma-no-hands vocal athleticism. Rakos gets all of that without ever trying to imitate Garland; and because she’s a real actress as well as an accomplished singer, she also gets her subject’s vaudevillian wiseacre side and her neediness, that almost frighteningly intense wide-eyed dreaminess. And she can hoof. Not only can you see why she was cast; you can’t imagine a search for a young Judy that could turn up anybody else in her class.

Spooky Action at a Distance: Timeless and Frequency

Peyton List stars in Frequency, new this season on The CW.

This television season, joining a crowded time-travel-themed field already occupied by Doctor Who, Legends of Tomorrow, 12 Monkeys and The Flash (which is owning its time travel elements even more deeply in its current third season), are ABC’s adaptation of the 1979 film Time after Time and Fox’s Adam Pally-helmed sci-fi/comedy Making History, NBC’s Timeless and The CW’s Frequency. We’ll have to wait until early in 2017 for the first two, but last week the first episodes of Timeless and Frequency premiered. With only one episode apiece having aired, both are entertaining additions to the genre, but Frequency is off to the much more promising start.

Things Went Down: Joel Selvin’s Altamont

Things went down we don’t understand, but I think in time we will.

– The Grateful Dead, “New Speedway Boogie”

It’s been 47 years: were The Dead right, wrong, or both? There are different kinds of understanding – factual, emotional, metaphorical – but even combined, they will never add up to any final understanding, any state of Zen, when it comes to certain things. The Altamont concert of December 6, 1969 – the free show that climaxed the Rolling Stones’ autumn tour of the United States – was a day-long cataclysm which the evidence suggests was, for the vast majority in attendance, a uniquely dumb and ugly experience. But it may also have been, as Joel Selvin calls it in the subtitle of his new book, “rock’s darkest day.” It was certainly, as has been pointed out many times, a gruesomely apt metaphor. It illustrated contradictions that were intrinsic to the era, to the people, and to the style of music which brought 300,000 to a racetrack in the windy voids near Livermore, California, to see Santana, The Flying Burrito Brothers, The Jefferson Airplane, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, The Grateful Dead (who didn’t play), and The Rolling Stones. Like a knife, a metaphor needs its absolute edge, its implacable point. At Altamont, that point was the stabbing, as The Stones played “Under My Thumb,” of Meredith Hunter, an 18-year-old from Berkeley who happened to be black and flashing a gun, by Hell’s Angel Alan Passaro, a 22-year-old from San Jose who happened to be white and wielding a knife. Other, mostly unidentified Angels finished the lynching Passaro had begun, and Hunter was dead before the ambulance came. “A young black man murdered in the midst of a white crowd by white thugs as white men played their version of black music”: thus did Greil Marcus summarize the metaphor, the knife point of the event.

Critic's Crypt: Stuart Gordon's Re-Animator & From Beyond

Jeffrey Combs in Stuart Gordon's Re-Animator (1985).

Critics At Large is pleased to present CRITIC’S CRYPT, a new column in which our writers compare, contrast, and explore two horror films that are linked by a common element. For our first installment, Justin Cummings tackles two Lovecraftian horror adaptations by director Stuart Gordon.

I mourn daily the gross appropriation of the works of Howard Philip Lovecraft in popular culture. I blame those (like the bacon-loving patrons of theCHIVE and its ilk) who attach empty-headed significance to the icon of Cthulhu the same way Bill Watterson’s Calvin is grotesquely bandied about by idiots everywhere on pickup truck window decals. Cthulhu is inescapable in today’s culture, filling store shelves with squid-faced plush dolls and bumper stickers, bought by consumers who couldn’t name you a single Lovecraft story, let alone have ever taken the time to read one. Lovecraft himself was a weirdo and a racist: a brilliant asshole through and through. His writing is the product of a deeply troubled mind, which grasped at the greater truth he desperately hoped was hiding behind the drudgery of daily life – an artist with great talent plagued by financial trouble and an inescapable sense of despair. He was what you might charitably call the “sadder but wiser” sort of guy, whose stories were almost always linked by a general fascination about “that which man was never meant to know.” It’s horror, to be sure, but intellectual horror; stories inspired by and largely about ideas that are too frightening for the human mind to comprehend. These tales were never typified by gore, sexual content, or general gross excess, although you could be forgiven for thinking so based on adaptations like Re-Animator (1985) and From Beyond (1986). It’s these kind of representations of his work which, I think, have led to an inaccurate perception of what the tales of Lovecraft are really about, and of why his work remains so influential long after his death (at least to those who read it).

On their own terms, Re-Animator and From Beyond are terrifically fun splatter pictures. They’re among the premier examples of genre convergence in horror cinema, combining science fiction, comedy, and body horror in ways that still feel fresh and charged with energy. In fact, they share more than just genre: they both star Jeffrey Combs and Barbara Crampton, and are both directed and co-written by Stuart Gordon. Viewed as a double bill (an experience I can enthusiastically recommend), they feel like sister pictures – two different expressions of the same creative spark. Re-Animator is an adaptation of Lovecraft’s short story “Herbert West, Re-Animator,” which is both longer and far less entertaining than Gordon’s version, and From Beyond is a greatly expanded version of the original 7-page story of the same name. They were produced and released back-to-back in a storm of cheap shoots, fake blood, intense performances, and some genuinely excellent filmmaking craft, all inspired by Gordon’s experience in the world of theatre and his interest in the blood, the shock, and the passion of the Grand Guignol tradition.

The Masculine Ideal

Paul Newman and Sally Field in Absence of Malice (1981).

During the Christmas season, back in 1981, while visiting some friends of mine in rural Caledon, Ontario, I suggested going to neighbouring Orangeville to see a movie. The theatre in town was a duoplex with Sydney Pollack's legal drama, Absence of Malice, in one, and Burt Reynolds' adaptation of William Diehl's pulp potboiler, Sharky's Machine, in the other. But rather than making a quick choice on arrival, we ended up hitting a great divide. A huge argument broke out that almost sent us back home. The women were keen on Absence of Malice, where Paul Newman played a Miami liquor wholesaler, the son of a deceased mobster, who suddenly became a suspect in a front-page story about the possible murder of a union official. The men were primed and determined to see Burt Reynolds as an Atlanta narcotics sergeant working a drug case who gets demoted when, in pursuit of a drug dealer, he accidentally shoots a bus driver. We ultimately decided to split up and see our respective films before we ended up seeing nothing. (Full disclosure: I went with the women.)

Dueling Guitars: John Scofield and Charlie Hunter

Nothing brings me more pleasure than listening to two musicians who are still growing as guitar players. Case in point: Charlie Hunter and John Scofield. Both players have recently released new albums that are interesting to the ear, full of energy and in the groove.

Airbourne: Carlos Saura and Jota

A scene from J: Beyond Flamenco, directed by Carlos Saura.

Director Carlos Saura has done it again: he has used dance as a source of inspiration for one of his masterfully made movies. But instead of fiery flamenco -- the subject of the trio of dance films, Blood Wedding (1981), Carmen (1983) and El Amor Brujo (1986), which first made him internationally famous in the 1980s -- Saura, now 84, has turned to jota, a lesser known dance and musical genre born of his native Aragon.

J: Beyond Flamenco (also known as Jota de Saura), a 90-minute art-driven documentary that had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, tells the story of jota (the j is pronounced like an h), a traditional dance performed in rapid 6/8 time and to a variety of instruments, from Galician bagpipes to Castilian guitars and castanets. Jota, as Saura proudly shows, is the dance of the Spanish people, what they have performed since the 1700s at burials, weddings and street festivals like the one reenacted for the camera at the film's end. But over the centuries it has morphed into an art form of great intricacy, delicacy and poetic expressiveness. The high elevations and airborne allegro movements – including sautés, jetes, cabrioles and entrechats – show jota (the word means "jump") to have a strong affinity with ballet. The artistry is elegantly sublime.

Master Acting Classes: The Firm (1993)

Sydney Pollack’s 1993 The Firm, out of a John Grisham novel, is a thriller about a young Harvard Law graduate named Mitch McDeere (Tom Cruise) who is wooed and hired by a prestigious Memphis firm and then discovers that anyone who’s ever tried to leave it has wound up dead. This sounds like the premise for a sci-fi fantasy – you expect to find out that the partners are body snatchers or the undead – and considering how preposterous the plot is, it might have been more satisfying if it had been. (The firm’s real secret, that it launders money for the Mafia, is both dumb and flat.) And Cruise is awful. In one episode, his mentor, Avery Tolar (Gene Hackman) – the characters’ names are more entertainingly florid than the story line – takes Mitch along on a business trip to the Cayman Islands, where he’s seduced on a moonlit beach by a young woman (Karina Lombard) he rescues when he finds her being slapped around by a date. Cruise is so inexpressive in this interlude that all he can manage is a wary, semi-frozen stare. Like a lot of his parts, this one shows off his athletic prowess, in this case his running, and it sure is a lot more impressive than his acting.

Mind Control in Stephen King’s End of Watch

Author Stephen King. (Photo: Eric Feferberg/AFP/Getty Images)

When I began reading the first installment of Stephen King’s hard-boiled crime trilogy – the critically acclaimed and Edgar Award-winning Mr. Mercedes (2014) followed the next year with Finders Keepers and concluding with End of Watch (Scribner, 2016) – I wondered how long King would confine himself to the genre’s conventions. He did pretty well for over two and a half volumes, then he veered into his comfort zone, the realm of horror that draws upon tropes of the Gothic. As a crime novel, End of Watch generally works because King finds a way to retreat and provide the police with a reasonable explanation for the resolution though we, the readers, know that the conventions of a police procedural cannot explain what has occurred.