The White Card: Be White, Baby

Patricia Kalember and Karen Pittman in The White Card. (Photo: Gretjen Helene Photography)

For the production of Claudia Rankine’s play The White Card, about race in contemporary America – a co-production of American Repertory Theater and Arts Emerson – scenic designer Riccardo Hernandez has built a black-box space inside the stage of Boston’s downtown Emerson Paramount Center. Except that it’s a white box, with the audience seated on painful white chairs, tennis-court style, on either side above the narrow cream-colored playing area (with matching furniture). The symbolism is painfully obvious. Moreover, having wriggled back and forth on those goddamn chairs for eighty intermissionless minutes, perhaps I may be permitted to advance the theory that the level of discomfort, too, is deliberate. Could this be director Diane Paulus’s take on Brechtian theatre – keeping the audience alert at what amounts to a droning lecture on white privilege by literally making us squirm?

Lingering Darkness – Hank: The Short Life and Long Country Road of Hank Williams

Hank Williams performing on The Perry Como Show (November 14, 1951).

The worst part about reading a biography of country-music legend Hank Williams is that if you know anything about the history of music, you know how his story ends. Mark Ribowsky’s new biography, Hank: The Short Life and Long Country Road of Hank Williams (Liveright), was published last year. It’s thoroughly researched and thoroughly engaging because the author is deeply connected to his subject. In fact, Ribowsky’s tome is constantly looming on the dark side of Williams’s life, yet he succeeds in telling the tale of the beloved son of Alabama, who, in spite of his alcoholism and ramblin’ lifestyle, was “fresh, taut, [and] vibrant” on his recordings. To him Williams was a man who had “an instinct for turning pain into commercial gain” and expressing that pain with a degree of authenticity few of his peers, such as Ernest Tubb and Eddie Arnold, possessed. For Ribowsky, Williams changed the sound of country music, bringing “hillbilly” to the mainstream of American culture by wearing his heart on his sleeve. Yet his talent couldn’t save him from his inner struggles often expressed by his destructive, mood-swinging behaviour.

Make Politics Boring Again: Political Podcasts and the Trump Era

The NPR Politics Podcast

On February 28, Matt House, Communications Director for Senator Chuck Schumer, pointed to a correction in The New York Times regarding a meeting between Donald Trump and Congressional leaders: “An earlier version of this article misstated the timing of a similar televised meeting. It was in January, not last year.” “The media pace of this presidency is captured perfectly” by the correction, he commented, and it’s hard to disagree. The relatively staid pace of normal politics has been swept aside and replaced by what feels like a bad plot from a later season of 24. Sickening though such developments might be for those of us who are living through them and wondering how they might turn out, they have at least been fodder for a host of podcasts that aim to combine the compelling narrative drive of non-fiction hits like Serial with analysis of the constant torrent of disturbing new headlines.

Given that the presidency has been debased to the level of a cut-rate reality-TV series, it’s fitting that attempts to recount and make sense of developments in Washington have themselves often come to resemble shows that recap something like Big Brother or The Apprentice. Some, like FiveThirtyEight’s Politics Podcast or The NPR Politics Podcast, tend to focus primarily on summarizing recent events. FiveThirtyEight’s emphasis on analyzing the news via a data-driven approach tends to make it rather drier, and at times it gets bogged down by founder Nate Silver’s tendency to focus on criticizing media organizations who adopt a less quantitative approach to politics than his own outfit. By contrast, NPR’s podcast plays it straight and earnest, particularly in their weekly episode, typically produced on a Thursday, in which they summarize the past week’s events and offer additional analysis for listeners who might need additional context for some of the discussion. The latter approach is more effective, allowing the rotating cast of reporters and editors who host the show a chance to delve into important stories without alienating those whose knowledge of politics might be somewhat more superficial.

When Housewives Were Chemists

Photo by Nicki Dugan Pogue.

Not many foods deserve a biography. Those that do generally either date back to prehistory (bread, wine, beer) or were among the essential building blocks of empire (tea, sugar, bananas). But chemical leaveners, including baking powder, had humble origins and, not terribly long ago, they altered the way we eat dramatically. Imagine no cookies, cupcakes, pancakes, waffles, biscuits, doughnuts, or quickbreads. Okay, now stop imagining that: I don’t want to traumatize anyone. But chemical leaveners made all of them possible.

With Baking Powder Wars, food historian Linda Civitello has recovered the forgotten story of how chemical leaveners changed the way we eat – the story of an “indispensable, invisible ingredient.” Its protagonists are, at the outset, American women. This is because, though baking was largely professionalized in Europe, in much of North America it was the domain of housewives. In fact, Protestant moralizing on this continent associated baking with feminine virtue. Before the advent of chemical leaveners, baking meant bread, and bread meant yeast. Even the rare cake was leavened with yeast.

The Empty Place Inside: Alex Garland’s Annihilation

Natalie Portman in Annihilation.

I enjoyed the hell out of Jeff VanderMeer’s novel Annihilation, but I was skeptical it could be effectively translated to the silver screen. Big surprise, I know, but this particular story, in its abstract, expressionist horror, seemed like it would be uniquely difficult to adapt. Unless, of course, there was a great sci-fi craftsman like Alex Garland at the helm. That would change things.

And change things Garland did, making choices in writing and directing a film version of Annihilation that clarified the novel’s abstractions, crafting a story (which, at its heart, is itself about the agony of change) that is very different from its original form, partly to appeal more to a broad audience, and partly because a good deal of interpretation is required in order to bring VanderMeer’s oppressively vague prose to a more concrete visual medium. Annihilation is not going to appeal to most audiences, but then, neither did the novel. I think what Garland achieves with his adaptation far surpasses his source material, as he finds a way to take a gloomy Lovecraftian horror story and mine it for a shattering emotional payload.

Iconosphere: Cinema in the History of Art

William Holden, Sunset Boulevard, 1950.

“Movies are magic” – Van Dyke Parks

When I was a kid in the 50s and 60s, growing up in the wasteland suburbs outside Toronto (Don Mills was, by the way, among the first such planned outliers in North America; it looked rather pleasant and was a splendid locale for experimenting with Aldous Huxley’s spiritual vitamins) and where I spent much of my time watching television like most of my fellow baby boomers, I was also treated to a rather unique experience that my fellow truants were not.

While whiling away the dreamy hours in front of that magic flickering box I would occasionally be taken aback by the sight of my own surname on the screen as the writer and producer of many a classic black-and-white film being screen on the new medium of TV.

There was, in those days, an almost total absence of the specifically programmed content we take for granted today, and instead the new-born networks would recycle movies from the early age of cinema for unsuspecting viewers such as myself. And when I asked them who this “Charles Brackett” was, their perhaps too-casual, somewhat innocent suburban response was something along the lines of “Oh ,yeah, I think he was part of the American branch of the family who had something to do with Hollywood.”

Something to do with Hollywood? He was, in fact, a member of Hollywood royalty, having also been a member of the Lost Generation in Europe along with Hemingway and Fitzgerald (both of whom he knew and nursed through their hangovers) before coming to New York and being a member of the Algonquin Room circle along with Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley (more help with hangovers, Charlie being teetotal) while also serving as the drama critic for The New Yorker.

Like other talented writers (including of course, Fitzgerald and Faulkner) he was eventually financially lured to Hollywood, where he was teamed up by Paramount Studios with a recent émigré from Austria who barely spoke English, to write screenplays for the great Ernst Lubitsch.

Mark Morris's Pepperland: Getting High

Mark Morris Dance Group in Pepperland. (Photo: Gareth Jones)

Pepperland, American choreographer Mark Morris’s latest work, is a new Beatles-inspired dance and, to paraphrase the Fabs, it takes you on a boat on a river to travel back to a not-so-distant time when patchouli scented the air and love was all you needed to change the world. Inspired by Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band but taking its title from the George Martin instrumental in the animated film Yellow Submarine, the Beatles project which soon followed the 1967 record that Rolling Stone calls the greatest rock album of all time, the nearly hour-long work reimagines the Swinging Sixties as a Technicolor dream. That's how Paul McCartney once described the decade he and his bandmates not only dominated but redefined. Accordingly, the mood is nostalgic in a sunny, giddy, carefree sort of way. The dancing, dexterously and whimsically performed by 14-members of the Brooklyn-based Mark Morris Dance Group, skips and leaps and somersaults. The direction is up.

Murder on the Orient Express on Stage: Riding High

David Pittu, Leigh Ann Larkin, and Evan Zes in Hartford Stage's Murder on the Orient Express. (Photo: T. Charles Erickson)

What two sets of filmmakers (screenwriter Paul Dehn and director Sidney Lumet in 1974, screenwriter Michael Green and director Kenneth Branagh in 2017) couldn’t manage to do – turn Agatha Christie’s 1934 mystery Murder on the Orient Express into entertaining dramatic stuff – playwright Ken Ludwig and director Emily Mann have managed with seeming effortlessness. The production from the McCarter Theatre Center (where Mann is artistic director), currently playing at Hartford Stage, is charming, funny and stylish. The veteran Ludwig, whose long list of credits includes Lend Me a Tenor and the book for Crazy for You, the Gershwin musical that began life as Girl Crazy, has taken a light, parodic approach to the famous Christie material, her tenth Hercule Poirot adventure – which begins when the eccentric Belgian detective, with the aid of his train-line director friend M. Bouc, cadges a last-minute seat on board the unexpectedly crowded Orient Express from Aleppo to Istanbul. The first night of the trip, an American gangster calling himself Samuel Ratchett is stabbed to death in his compartment. The next day, while Poirot is interrogating the other first-class passengers and the conductor, the train is immobilized by a snowstorm – and in both the Lumet and the Branagh versions, the movie follows suit.

Power Over Truth: Michael Wolff and David Frum on Trump's First Year

Photo by Drew Angerer.

"Again, I just wrote what I thought and what I heard. That's one thing about the book: There really aren't any politics in the book. I have no side here. I'm just interested in how people relate to one another, their ability to do their jobs and a much less abstract picture of this world than whatever the political thesis may or may not be." – Michael Wolff, Hollywood Reporter

Even before the publication of Michael Wolff's mega-bestseller, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House (Henry Holt and Company, 2018), media outlets, among them The Guardian and New York, offered their own searing scoops: Trump's former strategist, Steve Bannon, claimed that the June 2016 meeting between Trump's son and Russian officials was "treasonous" and "unpatriotic"; Trump expected that he would not win the election nor did he covet it. Instead, he anticipated that he would become the most famous man in the world, a martyr to "Crooked Hillary," and that his daughter, Ivanka, harboured presidential ambitions.

Wolff, an award-winning journalist writing in such prestigious publications as New York and Vanity Fair, and the author of a biography about the media mogul, Rupert Murdoch, has garnered a reputation in the journalistic world that is not "bullet proof," according to Kyle Swenson of the Washington Post. Drawing upon a large array of critics who skewer Wolff as a purveyor of celebrity gossip and for being less than scrupulous with the truth – one questions his journalistic ethics for "pushing the facts as far as they'll go and sometimes farther than they can tolerate" – Swenson leaves us with the impression that Wolff should be read cautiously.

Poised Between Dark and Light: Nova's Fresh Take on Classical Dance

Choreographer Nova Bhattacharya. (Photo: John Lauener)

I wasn’t sure what to expect from Nova Bhattacharya’s latest show, decoding bharatnatyam. Would it, as the title implied, unravel the millennia-old classical Indian dance style’s rhythmic and imagistic complexities to make them better understood by a general audience? Would it seek to solve a problem? Stem the narrative flow? Such an analytical approach threatened, in my mind, to suck the life out of a dance whose ancient mysteries, incubated in India’s holy temples, constitute its enduring charm. But, after savouring the delights embedded in this three-part program that opened on Valentine’s Day at the intimate Citadel + Compagnie performance space in Toronto’s Regent Park, it turns out I had worried for nothing.

Death By Franchise: The Cloverfield Paradox

Gugu Mbatha-Raw in The Cloverfield Paradox, currently streaming on Netflix.

Note: This review contains spoilers for The Cloverfield Paradox (as well as Bad Robot’s other Cloverfield films).

I’m very fond of Dan Trachtenberg’s 10 Cloverfield Lane, but as I mentioned when I wrote on that film in 2016, its connection to Bad Robot’s Cloverfield brand is not only unnecessary, it’s actively detrimental to the film’s overall quality. But, since it wouldn’t have been green-lit without this connection, I have to grin and bear it, because the taut little thriller living inside that brand-name wrapper is worth it. The Cloverfield Paradox, unfortunately – the next in what has apparently become a series of spec scripts turned into franchise films by Bad Robot – does not have the added benefit of being excellent on its own. It’s a scattered and inconsistent sci-fi thriller whose Cloverfield connections are even more painfully shoehorned in than its predecessor’s.

Breathe: Lifeline

Andrew Garfield and Claire Foy in Breathe, directed by Andy Serkis. (Photo: David Bloomer)

Early in Breathe, there’s a moment that recalls The Sea Inside, Alejandro Amenábar’s superb triumph-of-the-spirit movie about the efforts of Ramón Sampedro (played by Javier Bardem), paralyzed and confined to his bed for years, to get the government of Catholic Spain to grant him permission to kill himself. Like Ramón, Robin Cavendish (Andrew Garfield) in Breathe – another real-life character stricken with paralysis, in his case from an attack of polio in the late 1950s – imagines himself getting up from his bed. But those mind escapes are a motif in The Sea Inside; in Breathe it happens just once, when Robin, in the depths of depression, has essentially retreated from life. Breathe is the anti-Sea Inside. It’s about how Robin’s wife Diana (Claire Foy), who refuses to allow him to give up on life, which would also mean giving up on her and their baby son Jonathan, engineers his liberation from the hospital where he’s being treated like a virtual corpse – and then, with Robin’s input and the aid of a delightfully imaginative and proactive group of friends, including the inventor Teddy Hall (Hugh Bonneville), devises a series of strategies to give Robin a mobile and fulfilling life. They progress from a ventilator set up in their bedroom in a wonderful old country house Diana buys on the cheap to a ventilator-fueled wheelchair to an automobile built to accommodate Andrew and his needs.

The Luxury of Principle – The First Season of Star Trek: Discovery

Jason Isaacs and Sonequa Martin-Green in Star Trek: Discovery.

Note: This piece contains spoilers for the first season of Star Trek: Discovery. 

Admiral Cornwell: We do not have the luxury of principles.
Michael Burnham: That is all we have, Admiral. A year ago . . . I stood alone. I believed that our survival was more important than our principles. I was wrong.

– Season 1 finale, Star Trek: Discovery

Last Sunday, the explosive first season of Star Trek: Discovery came to an end. The series premiered on CBS All Access (and on CraveTV, in Canada) with a splash back in September. At the time, our own Justin Cummings wrote powerfully about the feature-length premiere episodes, which introduced us to this new Trek space, set a decade before the adventures of the Enterprise crew we know so well from the original Star Trek series. Other Star Trek series before it had war stories, some told over the course of multiple seasons, but Discovery showed up on a war footing right out of the gate. Those first two hours promised a darker, more morally ambiguous Trek story – Star Trek in extremis, so to speak. Now, 4.5 months and 15 episodes later, one thing is clear: it has been a heck of a journey, and Discovery has more than earned its place in the expansive Star Trek universe.

Podcast: Interview with Roch Carrier (1987)

Roch Carrier, in 2017. (Photo: Ryan Remiorz)

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 writers and artists from all fields. In 1987, I sat down with celebrated Québécois novelist, playwright and children's author Roch Carrier.

In 1987, his novel Heartbreaks Along The Road (De l'amour dans la ferraille, 1984) had just appeared in English translation. Born in 1937, Carrier is most famous for his 1979 short story "The Hockey Sweater" and his landmark 1968 play La Guerre, Yes Sir! Recipient of the Order of Canada and winner of the Stephen Memorial Medal for Humour, Carrier remains one of Quebec and Canada's best-known and most beloved writers.

– Kevin Courrier.

Here is the full interview with Roch Carrier as it aired on CJRT-FM in 1987.

Hey, Look Me Over!: Also-Rans

Vanessa Williams and members of the ensemble in Hey, Look Me Over! at New York's City Center. (Photo: Joan Marcus)

Artistic director Jack Viertel’s concept for Hey, Look Me Over!, which opened the twenty-fifth anniversary season of Encores!, was to put together a revue of excerpts from shows that have never been revived in City Center’s beloved series. But to be honest, what you come away from the show with is a pretty good understanding of why you wouldn’t want to see a production of Wildcat (Cy Coleman & Carolyn Leigh, 1960) or Milk and Honey (Jerry Herman, 1961), Sail Away (Noël Coward, 1961) or, God help us, Greenwillow (Frank Loesser, 1960). I’d be more curious about checking out Jamaica (1957), which Harold Arlen and E.Y. Harburg wrote for Lena Horne, or All American (Charles Strouse and Lee Adams, 1962), which originally starred Ray Bolger, or Herman’s Mack and Mabel (1974), in which Robert Preston played silent-comedy king Mack Sennett and Bernadette Peters played his star and romantic partner Mabel Normand. I’d seen only one of the shows included in the compilation, George M! (1968), which the Goodspeed Opera House produced some years ago, a bio of George M. Cohan that isn’t remotely in the same class as the movie Yankee Doodle Dandy – though it must have been worth seeing on Broadway with Joel Grey. 

Witness for the Affirmation: Ronald K. Brown in Toronto for Black History Month

Members of Ronald K. Brown's Evidence dance company performing Four Corners. (Photo: Saya Hishikawa)

Shoulders rippled like water, hips swayed like trees in a summer breeze, spines slithered like snakes and feet, bare yet sure, beat out intricate rhythms like maracas upon the stage floor. This was movement so luxuriantly tactile you wanted to wrap your own body in it. But there was no tearing it off the backs of the dancers in Evidence, the New York dance company led by acclaimed American choreographer Ronald K. Brown, who has also created works for Alvin Ailey American Dance Company and Philadanco, among other leading contemporary dance companies in the U.S. As seen recently at the Fleck Dance Theatre in Toronto, where they performed during the first weekend in February following a 12-year absence, the six-member ensemble embraced Brown’s fusion of traditional West African, Caribbean and modern western dance styles (including the black American vernacular dances from Soul Train) with an air of self-possession that made the movement theirs, and theirs alone. Tall, small, slim and curvy, they performed Brown’s exuberantly physical and intensely contemplative choreography with a commitment that felt fresh and alive. Their dancing rolled and sung. It radiated heart. The dancers looked regal without pretension, and beautiful without vanity. This was dance in which meaning and movement forged an intimate partnership, and a strong visceral connection, with the audience.

Critical Drinking – Eric Clapton: Life in 12 Bars

 

Eric Clapton: Life in 12 Bars, Lili Fini Zanuck’s documentary, is a well-intentioned film seeking to understand the complicated life of the British guitarist. But when Zanuck tries to make connections between Clapton’s addictions and his failed relationships while he pursued a career in music, she gets too bogged down in the details and misses the bigger, redemptive picture. Zanuck is best known as a film producer and the wife of the late Richard Zanuck, who died in 2012. She won an Academy Award for producing Driving Miss Daisy in 1989 and she’s directed a few music videos including Clapton’s “Tears In Heaven” and “Pilgrim.” But this is her first full-length documentary, produced for Showtime, which recently made its debut on television. The movie premiered in 2017 at TIFF. 

The Post: The Old Hollywood Machinery

The Post, about how its daring 1971 coverage of the Pentagon Papers put The Washington Post in the front rank of American newspapers, is a newspaper picture with a pedigree. Steven Spielberg, working with his usual team of experts – cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, editor Michael Kahn (working with Sarah Broshar), production designer Rick Carter and composer John Williams – directed from a screenplay that Liz Hannah co-authored with Josh Singer (co-writer of Spotlight). And his cast, headed by Meryl Streep as publisher Kay (Katharine) Graham and Tom Hanks as editor Ben Bradlee, presents the most impressive collection of character actors, culled from stage, movies and TV, on screen in the past year, all of them working at the top of their game. Bruce Greenwood plays Robert McNamara, Defense Secretary under JFK and LBJ, who ordered the Pentagon Papers, forty-seven volumes that documented the history of White House obfuscation about the Vietnam War; Matthew Rhys (of The Americans) is an uncanny visual match for former Marine Daniel Ellsberg, who, having drafted the study in 1966, brought it to light by having a copy left on the desk of a general assignment reporter at The New York Times. Bob Odenkirk is Ben Bagdikian, assistant managing director for national affairs at The Post, who guesses that Ellsberg – a one-time colleague of his at the RAND Corporation – is the source of the leak and tracks him down so that, when an injunction from Attorney General John Mitchell ties the hands of The Times, preventing it from offering any further coverage, The Post can pick up the ball. Tracy Letts is The Post’s chairman of the board, Fritz Beebe; Bradley Whitford, looking like an old-world southern gentleman in a bow tie, is Arthur Parsons, a composite character based on several Post advisers who discourages Graham from publishing articles about the papers; Jesse Plemons (of Friday Night Lights) is the senior legal counsel for the paper, whose youth amuses Bradlee. Sarah Paulson plays Ben’s sculptor wife Tony. Carrie Coon plays editorial writer (and future editorial page editor) Meg Greenfield and Jessie Mueller is Judith Martin, who, when the main part of the narrative begins, has been denied an invitation to cover presidential daughter Tricia Nixon’s wedding because she crashed Tricia’s older sister Julie’s wedding three years earlier. The ubiquitous Michael Stulhbarg, who also appeared in two other high-profile Christmas-season releases, The Shape of Water and Call Me by Your Name, is Abe Rosenthal, managing editor at The Times. David Constabile and Johanna Day are Graham’s close friends Art and Ann Buchwald.

Love Thy Neighbour: Paddington 2

I haven’t seen the first Paddington film from 2014, but after sitting through its sequel, that feels like a mistake I should rectify – not because I feel like I missed some crucial backstory, but simply because I need more films like this in my life. Paddington 2 is a sweet and charming piece of family entertainment, never stooping to the treacly in its celebration of kindness, friendliness, and tolerance. It treks into some dark places in its effort to brighten up the world, while staying lively, fun, truthful. . . and full of marmalade. I loved it.

Fabula: The Mythological Mind of Joachim Waibel

Telephone, Sculptural Object, 2015: rotary phone, tarred and feathered.

“You never see further than your headlights. But you can make the whole trip that way.” – E.L. Doctorow

Joachim Waibel works with fabricated dreams. A mixed-media visual artist and poet, his art practice is interdisciplinary and multi-faceted and has one common denominator: he uses whatever symbolic form in whatever medium best conveys his philosophical interests at the moment of creation. From drawing and painting to photography and film, from conceptual sculpture to concrete poetry, his creative approach is living proof that the medium is the message. Originally from Germany, where he was born in 1959, he relocated to North America in 1973 and has since explored many avenues of self-expression, in keeping with his eclectic cultural upbringing and diverse experiences as a maker. He is very German but he is also an international citizen of a conceptual country without borders. He is in fact a neo-faber, a new maker, and his active Vancouver-based studio is exploring fresh and flexible ways to operate above and beyond the traditional gallery system. He is also a postmodern renaissance man of sorts. A new maker of what? A maker of tall tales told visually, of fabula, the original name for all our stories and narratives. Out of the seductive stories that he weaves he also manufactures a steady stream of hypnotic miniature worlds for us to contemplate and even to dwell in temporarily.

Barenaked Lady: The Life and Times of Josephine Baker

Josephine Baker, the dancer who shook Paris to the core.

Her ass, if you'll pardon my French, made Josephine Baker famous. It was as expressive as her face and she bared it on the stage of the Folies Bergère in Paris for all to see, when she made her European debut in 1925 wearing only a belt of bananas. Everyone wanted a piece of it – impresarios, politicians, journalists, even royalty – and while she exercised ultimate control, her croupe, as the writer Georges Simenon affectionately called it, succeeded in wiggling its way into the popular imagination as a brash new symbol of the times. Her dancing was natural, untaught, rhythmic, sensual, writes the late Jean-Claude Baker, in Josephine: The Hungry Heart, and she could do it for hours without sweating.

La Baker, as her adoring French fans called her, personified the shedding of inhibition that came with the Jazz Age.

The Film Critic as Moral Haranguer: A.O. Scott on Woody Allen

Diane Keaton and Woody Allen in Play It Again, Sam (1972).

Though I often disagree with his esthetic judgments, I have always had a great deal of respect for the New York Times film critic A.O. Scott – for his intelligence, for his literacy, for his skill at advancing an argument, and above all for the quality of his prose. And until now I’ve always thought him fair-minded. But his article, “Coming to Terms with Woody Allen,” which appeared in print in the Times on Friday, February 1, is shocking: a spurious and opportunistic personal attack masquerading as an analysis of Woody Allen’s movies. (You can access it online here.)

Yes They Can: Naomi Alderman's The Power

The 2017 publication of Women & Power: A Manifesto by the eminent classical scholar Mary Beard offers a witty and caustic literary and historical overview of how women have been ridiculed, demeaned and silenced. She begins with the moment that Telemachus in The Odyssey told his mother Penelope to shut up, go to her room and resume her own work leaving public speech to men. Eventually, Beard spotlights the moment over two millennia later when Senator Elizabeth Warren was silenced for quoting from a letter by Coretta Scott King (the widow of Martin Luther King), while others, like Bernie Sanders, were not. Beard is a particularly apt scholar to pen this manifesto considering the inflammatory vitriol that has been hurled at her for her speaking publicly about controversial issues. Her manifesto could be read in conjunction with Naomi Alderman's speculative-fiction novel, The Power (Little, Brown and Company, 2017) since she speculates what would happen if men were removed from their perches of power, demeaned, violated and silenced.

The Power is couched as "a historical novel" written by Neil Adam Armon. It is framed by an exchange of letters thousands of years into the future between Neil, who pleads for patronage from an address at "The Men Writers Association," and a woman called Naomi. He explains to her that he has written a novelized history after his academic studies have been ignored. Naomi’s responses, especially in the back end, are flecked with ridicule, charged with sexual innuendos, and downright condescending. Even before we read the novel within the novel, this literary conceit signals that we are entering into a vastly changed reality: the traditional schematics of sex and power are reversed with women exercising the real power while men are the disrespected other.

A Familiar Formula: Fox’s The Resident

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a doctor on a network drama seems like he’s kind of an asshole, but his unconventional approach ends up getting results that no one else can achieve. He’s also sexy and brooding, clearly haunted by a past that he won’t open up about, but which has turned him into the person he is today. If that sounds familiar, you’ve hit on the central problem with The Resident, Fox’s new medical drama. In an era of so-called “Peak TV,” where there’s a show for virtually every taste, this one (co-created by Amy Holden Jones, Hayley Schore, and Roshan Sethi) feels too generic to stand out and merit the requisite investment of time and attention.

That’s too bad, because in this case the asshole doctor in question is played by Matt Czuchry, who’s distinguished himself through his work in supporting roles on Gilmore Girls and The Good Wife. Cary Agos, his character on the latter show, was a fascinating combination of conflicting impulses, someone whose aggressive ambition concealed unexpected complexity and humanity. He brings much of the same charisma to his role here as Dr. Conrad Hawkins, the titular resident. When new hire Devon (Manish Dayal) arrives for his first day on the job, Conrad’s predictably awful to him, but Czuchry lets us see how he’s testing this inexperienced and overconfident naif (Devon’s straight out of Harvard) to make sure he’s not going to get someone killed.

All the Money in the World and Phantom Thread: Another Planet

Michelle Williams and Mark Wahlberg in All the Money in the World.

All the Money in the World, Ridley Scott’s movie about the 1973 kidnapping of sixteen-year-old John Paul Getty III – known as Paul – garnered considerable attention when, following the sexual harassment claims against Kevin Spacey, Scott replaced him with Christopher Plummer in the key role of Getty Sr., Paul’s grandfather – considered in his time to be the wealthiest man in the history of the world – and re-edited the movie at the eleventh hour. But the movie died at the box office anyway, and that’s a real shame because it’s a first-rate psychological study. In the opening voice-over, Paul (Charlie Plummer) begs us to forgive the behavior of his family because, he explains, they’re rich and the rich live on another planet. Hollywood has turned out many cautionary fables over the years that present the very rich as embodiments of the American dream gone sour. (Perhaps the latest famous example is Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood.) David Scarpa, who wrote the screenplay for All the Money in the World (based on John Pearson’s book, Painfully Rich: The Outrageous Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Heirs of J. Paul Getty), takes a different approach: he depicts extreme wealth, wealth beyond one’s wildest dreams, as a pathology. Plummer’s J. Paul Getty may be a supporting part – the main characters are Paul’s desperate mother, Gail Harris (Michelle Williams), who has to fight to get her ex-father-in-law to agree to pay her son’s ransom, and Fletcher Chase (Mark Wahlberg), the ex-CIA man whom Getty dispatches to negotiate with the kidnapers – but he’s at the heart of the film. And Plummer hovers over even the parts of the movie he’s not in, the way Brando hovered over The Godfather even during the many scenes when he wasn’t on screen. Plummer, who turned eighty-eight right around the time the picture was released, gives a performance that deserves to become legendary. We’ll never know what Spacey brought to the part, but when you watch Plummer you can’t imagine why Scott cast Spacey in the first place; it seems as if he’d be completely wrong for it.

Load Checkpoint: Metal Gear Solid 2 (2001) – Engulfed In Truth

Raiden, in Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty (2001).

 “Our beloved monsters . . . enjoy yourselves.” – Colonel Campbell

By 1999, only a year after the release of Metal Gear Solid, Hideo Kojima’s plans for its sequel were already fully formed. Titled Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, and developed for Sony’s Playstation 2 console, this sequel aimed to surpass its predecessor in every possible way, offering new gameplay mechanics and technical upgrades that would take advantage of the PS2’s upgraded power, and a narrative experience that would attempt no less than a deconstruction of the medium itself. Prior to its release in 2001, anticipation for this new chapter in the Metal Gear saga reached a fever pitch in both Japan and North America.

Initial reactions, however, were starkly divided. While it was praised for its technical achievements, many players were put off by the game’s lengthy and convoluted cutscenes, some of which were described as “incomprehensible.” Fans of the coherent (if complex) plot of Metal Gear Solid were baffled by the tangled, surreal structure of MGS2, which built up so many betrayals and reversals that it became difficult to separate fact from fiction within the text of the game itself. And most infamously, nearly everyone who had enjoyed the series so far were disappointed when, after an introductory chapter starring Solid Snake (David Hayter), the game’s protagonist viewpoint shifted to a new character, code-named Raiden (Quinton Flynn), whom you control for the remainder of the 12-to-15 hour experience. Many were strident in their criticism of this choice, to the point of refusing to play (and even boycotting) the game.

Well-worn Experience: Dance Hall by Jerry Granelli

Drummer Jerry Granelli in the studio. (Photo courtesy of DL Media)

I don’t know if it’s been properly proven but the adage that some things get better with age can often apply to a musician. In the case of Dance Hall (Justin Time), the new album from drummer Jerry Granelli, experience makes for great music. On this session, the producer is Lee Townsend, whose know-how makes him one of the best sound designers in the business. Dance Hall features guitarists Bill Frisell and Robben Ford, two of the most interesting and, I will say, distinguished musicians of the past 30 years. On electric bass is J. Anthony Granelli, Jerry’s son and long-time music director. To bring all this musical experience into one studio to record cover songs, no less, speaks to the essence of Granelli’s respect for and personal appreciation of popular song. As he says in the liner notes, “the key for me was not doing covers, but finding songs that were personal to my journey” and what a journey it has been for the famous drummer, who turned 77 on December 30th.

"My God, What a Woman!" Sarah Bernhardt Revisited

Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923) as Floria Tosca in an 1887 stage production of Victorien Sardou's La Tosca.

The great – and inimitable – Sarah Bernhardt was a bird of many colours. Once the reigning symbol of France, she was the daughter of a courtesan, herself trained in the silken ways of harlotry. An art nouveau icon (vividly immortalized by the painter Alphonse Mucha) whose first ambition was to be a nun, she wore pants and played men's roles, though she was eminently feminine. An actress who was also a writer, a painter and a sculptor, she was the first international superstar.

The Divine Sarah, as she is called in the dazzling biography The Divine Sarah: A Life of Sarah Bernhardt (Knoft, 1991) by Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale (a former piano duo turned biographers, both now deceased), was the greatest performer of her day. Following an excellent convent education secured for her by her mother Julie (Youle) Bernard, a Jewish demimonde from Amsterdam who bore Sarah and her two younger sisters illegitimately, Bernhardt (the name is derived from grandfather Bernard and grandmother Hart) trained at the Conservatoire in Paris, where she was born in 1844. She started her career at the Comédie-Française, but was fired after only three years because of her outrageous temper.

Bad Dates and Una: Bad Dates and Worse Ones

Haneefah Wood stars in Theresa Rebeck's Bad Dates at the Huntington Theatre Company. (Photo: T. Charles Ericson)

Theresa Rebeck’s Bad Dates was a hit for the Huntington Theatre in 2003, so the company has elected to resurrect it this season on its mainstage, which means that it programmed two one-woman shows back to back. (Mala closed last week in its South End space.) Bad Dates is by far the superior play – and the superior performance, by the bright-eyed, charismatic L.A. actress Haneefah Wood. It’s enjoyable if not memorable entertainment. I knew I’d seen Julie White in the show fifteen years ago but couldn’t recall a thing about it except the premise – a middle-aged single woman tells the audience about a succession of eagerly anticipated evenings with men that, one after the other, go wrong. The play hails from the Sex and the City era and the character shares with that series’ narrator-protagonist, Carrie Bradshaw, an obsession with expensive footwear and a frankness about life in Manhattan for an attractive thirtysomething with a career who’s trying to find the right man – though in this cases Haley Walker, who manages a relatively high-end restaurant for some shady people, is also raising a teenage daughter on her own.

Grown-ish: Smart, Funny, and more than merely Serious-ish

Trevor Jackson and Yara Shahidi in Grown-ish.

Grown-ish has been a weekly delight in my household since it first premiered on January 3. As a regular viewer of Black-ish, I’ve known about the college-set spinoff of ABC’s hit family comedy since last May, when its (literal) parent series aired an underwhelming backdoor pilot for the show near the end of its third season. It wasn’t the weakest episode of Black-ish’s otherwise strong season – that award goes to its cringe-worthy season premiere, set awkwardly within a half-hour advertisement for Disney World – but outside of spelling out the broad situation and setting of the new series, which would follow the Johnsons’ eldest daughter Zoey (Yara Shahidi) to nearby fictional Southern California University, it gave few indications what was to come. But as we approach the midway point of Grown-ish’s “freshman” season (the 7th of 13 episodes airs this Wednesday), a couple of things have become clear: the first is that Yara Shahidi (who has been capably playing her own age since she was introduced as a 14-year-old in 2014) has proven herself wholly capable of helming her own series, and the second is that Grown-ish has quickly developed its own tone and voice, already making it much more than a Black-ish side project.

Down That Lonesome Road: Sophie Huber's Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction (2012)

Actor Harry Dean Stanton.

Back in 1984, I was scheduled to do a taped radio interview with actor Harry Dean Stanton from his hotel room during the Toronto International Film Festival. Having been a character actor with memorable supporting parts in numerous films from Cool Hand Luke to The Rose, Stanton had just landed his first real starring role in Wim Wenders' laconic drama, Paris, Texas, where he played a lost soul estranged from his family who wanders out of the desert one day to reunite with them years after disappearing. The studio, 20th Century Fox, was eager under the circumstances to get Stanton plenty of publicity despite the fact that the actor wasn't the least bit comfortable being thrust into the spotlight. Despite his reluctance to be showered with attention, however, he could be thorny. I didn't help my cause that day by accidentally missing the initial press screening and having to attend the Festival one (which was taking place just before I was to go meet Stanton). Paris, Texas turned out to be over 2-1/2 hours long which meant I had to leave the film a half-hour early to make the interview in time. While I wasn't comfortable having to depart the picture early, I still felt confident enough to do the interview after what I had seen. But maybe what I shouldn't have done was tell Stanton that I had had to leave before the film ended because from the time we started rolling tape, he rolled back into a cocoon. Looking at me with complete indifference, he let me ask about fifty questions in ten minutes – questions went beyond Paris, Texas back through his earlier film career and even into his life in music – to which he provided cryptic one-word cryptic answers. Finally exasperated, I turned off the tape recorder and Harry Dean looked at me with the satisfied grin of someone who had just won a round of arm wrestling. As I looked up to say, "Well, that's it," he answered back quickly, "It sure is." He grabbed his jacket and departed the hotel room with such speed that it was if he wanted to leave no trace of ever having being there. For years, I was baffled that we hadn't managed to get past our great divide, but having recently caught up to Sophie Huber's lovely and satisfying documentary, Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction, I came to recognize something I probably missed that day. (David Kidney first touched on the film for Critics at Large a few years back when he reviewed the soundtrack.) For an actor whose career lit up the background shadows of movies, being visible and being recognized came with certain obligations by those who wished to engage him. As Stanton never said a word, or looked into a camera lens, without making that moment matter, you were expected not to take those moments lightly either.

Justice Served at the High Temple of Art: The Connoisseurship of Paul Magriel

Bronze statuette of a veiled and masked dancer from the Greek Hellenistic Period (3rd to 2nd Century B.C.) from the Met that enthralled Paul Magriel.

Of the millions who flock yearly to New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, only a handful know what to look for, and how. It always drove Paul Magriel crazy. "The random business of people walking in, taking in 25 paintings, one after the other, it's just mind-boggling," the self-taught art connoisseur once fumed. "You have to separate your time, your consciousness and your visual sensibility and be so specific about what you're doing and how you're doing it that you get some benefits, otherwise it's such a waste. It's not only a waste – it's an abuse of the artist. You're not giving him justice."

To make sure justice is duly served at the high temple of art that is the Met, in 1982 Magriel began leading unofficial tours of its varied and rich collections. A regular visitor of the museum for more than five decades, he had been dismayed to see so many people shuffling through the Met as if it were a cultural shopping mall, plugged into their Acoustiguides, staring in a daze at dozens of pictures at a time, buzzing around the big exhibits heavily publicized by the museum, and ultimately ignoring the store of treasures in the Met's incomparable holdings of roughly three million objects. He started by taking friends, one or two at a time, on tours that concentrated on his own favorite objects, a range far-reaching in style, theme and material, but all chosen for having given him immense pleasure. After developing four 90 tours of about 25 objects each, word quickly spread.

Podcast: Interview with Frederik Pohl (1987)

Frederik Pohl (1919-2013).

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 writers and artists from all fields. In 1987, I sat down with renowned science-fiction writer and editor, Frederik Pohl.

Last Monday, we lost another science-fiction and fantasy icon, author Ursula K. Le Guin (The Left Hand of Darkness, 1969; The Dispossessed, 1974), who passed away at the age of 88. I was never privileged to speak with Le Guin, but her passing called up a conversation I had with one of her contemporaries, fellow science-fiction writer Frederik Pohl. Over the course of his 75-year writing career, Pohl authored and co-authored (collaborating with such writers as Isaac Asimov, C. M. Kornbluth, and Arthur C. Clarke) more than 65 novels and dozens of short story collections. In 1987, Pohl had just published his novel Chernobyl, a book conceived and written only months after the terrible disaster at its nuclear plant. Pohl passed away in 2013 at the age of 93.

– Kevin Courrier.

Here is the full interview with Frederik Pohl as it aired on CJRT-FM in 1987.

Ellipsis: The Art of Benny Profane

Future Relics: Image Object #1: “How to Want What You Have”(Cabinet interior view)
Carpet, painting, poem, rulers, teacups, light bulb, coin, pocket watch, film canisters

Ellipsis: The Art of Benny Profane is an imagined exhibition curated by Donald Brackett.

1. Exhibiting the Living Archive
One day after an especially long and arduous shift in the dream factory, the art critic arrived home to discover his mailbox stuffed with letters from artists, from painters and icon makers to be more exact, each one proposing a highly appealing yet physically impossible exhibition. They had the tone of epistles from an extinct race, and from a long ago time, each one lamenting their personal sentence to The Outpost. Comparisons between Kafka's "In The Penal Colony" would not at all be out of order here, for sure enough, each icon maker does in fact bear a personal tattoo identifying his or her affiliations in the hierarchy of art history: a dream tattooed.

So it came to pass that either in their own media or in a different one unknown to them, they were choosing to express, albeit only metaphysically since most of the concepts could never be realized by the curator, their feelings as exiles from the mainstream of twenty-first-century culture, in that traditional form of lamentation so richly played out in the classical period.

It then became clear that they were all “painters,” of course, because only painters among all icon makers have been awarded a fugitive status rare in aesthetics, and only because of the insistent glare of the present digital domain. Both the notion of the "fugitive status" and also the notion of the archive of collected artists’ musings on "impossible to realize" Utopian visual projects, emerged as a result of ongoing triadic conversations among the art critic, the curator and the artist.

In the shadow of the ghost of history, while pondering these relationships, it suddenly occurred to me that perhaps extinction is only an intermission, an interruption, an ellipsis between one stage of our cultural narrative and another. It was at this point that I became accidentally familiar with the seductive faux-archival work of Benny Profane.

Podcast: Interview with Poet Patrick Lane (1987)

Patrick Lane giving the Convocation Address at the University of Victoria in 2013. (Photo courtesy of UVic Photo Services)

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 writers and artists from all fields. In 1987, I sat down with Canadian poet and novelist Patrick Lane.

Over his 50+-year career, Patrick Lane has published more than two dozen books of poetry. In 1978, he won the Governor General's Award for Poetry, and has since been nominated twice again for the same honour. In 2014, Governor General David Johnston inducted him into the Order of Canada for his contributions to Canadian poetry and literature. When I sat down with Lane in 1987 his book Selected Poems had just been published. His most recent book of poetry was Washita, in 2014. In two weeks, on February 13, his much-anticipated second novel Deep River Night will be published by McClelland & Stewart.

– Kevin Courrier.

Here is the full interview with Patrick Lane as it aired on CJRT-FM in 1987.

Farinelli and the King: Identity as a Straitjacket

Mark Rylance (with Melody Grove) in Farinelli and the King. (Photo: Marc Brenner and Simon Annand)

Farinelli and the King, currently on Broadway, marks the seventh time I’ve seen Mark Rylance on stage. In the play, written by his wife Claire van Kampen, he plays Spain’s King Philippe V – bipolar according to historical record but mad as a hatter in the stage version – who is cured, more or less, when his second wife, Isabella (Melody Grove) persuades the gifted castrato singer Carlo Farinelli (Sam Crane) to abandon his London career and move to the Spanish court in Madrid. Rylance may be the funniest comic actor I’ve ever seen live (in the all-male Shakespeare’s Globe production of Twelfth Night, where he played Olivia, in David Hirson’s La Bête, and especially in Matthew Warchus’s 2008 production of the farce Boeing-Boeing), but I’m not always as enthusiastic when I see him in straight roles. He was certainly effective in a supporting part in Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies, for which he won an Oscar last March, but the problem with his grandiose, scenery-chewing “straight” appearances, as Richard III (which he played in rep along with Twelfth Night) or as Philippe V, is that if you see several of them you get hip to his trademark affects – the stuttering, the interpolated “uhs” and “ums,” the brusquely cut-off phrases, the flattening out of questions so they sound like statements of fact, the deliberate end-line drops, and so on. Part of Rylance’s vocal genius is that he’s witty enough to employ for ironic effect what would be merely bad habits in most actors, like the end-line drops and refusal to put question marks at the end of questions, but what can be endlessly amusing in a comedian can become tiresome in a dramatic actor. And I’m afraid that, early in Farinelli and the King, I ran out of patience for his bag of tricks.

We Migrants: Mohsin Hamid's Exit West

Author Mohsin Hamid. (Photo: Ed Kashi)

Mohsin Hamid's most recent and timely novel Exit West (Riverhead Books, 2017) is set in a nameless, besieged country likely in the Middle East where Saeed and Nadia, the book’s protagonists (and the only two characters named), meet in an evening class and embark on a courtship. Initially, they reside in "a city swollen by refugees but still mostly at peace, or at least not yet openly at war." That is soon to change as their tentative, gentle relationship contrasts with their country teetering on the lip of a precipice as it disintegrates into war.

In the first half of this remarkable novel, Hamid charts their growing relationship amid the backdrop of a city spiralling out of control, requiring the young lovers to leave. Although the graphic details he provides feel authentic, Exit West is not a realistic novel à la Jenny Erpenbeck's Go, Went, Gone. There is an abstract quality about the vagueness of its setting, its characters, and its narrative that Hamid renders in exquisite prose with occasionally longish, orotund sentences. He is primarily focused on highlighting the universality of societies at war with themselves and how civilians respond to the chaos closing in on them.