London Calling: Curtain Up in the UK

Matthew Fox and Olivia Williams, “In a Forest Dark and Deep”

Six plays in nine days proved to be a brilliant means of ignoring royal wedlock during a recent trip to England, while also fulfilling a longtime dream to immerse myself in London theater – or theatre, as the locals prefer. April was sunny in the often rainy city, enhanced by a sudden heatwave that felt more Mediterranean than Thames. But I enjoyed the resulting lush vegetation primarily en route to sit in darkened venues, watching four grim dramas, one partially comedic take on serious global tensions and a single farce.

Buried Treasure: Bob Dylan in Concert: Brandeis University, 1963

Considering the long list of performance recordings, Bob Dylan in Concert: Brandeis University, 1963, is fresh, vibrant and engaging. Sung from the stage of the gym, he performs seven of his own compositions all of which are heard for the first time anywhere outside of Greenwich Village. Captured on tape by Ralph J. Gleason, the performance lay hidden in his house for 50 plus years only to be discovered by Jeff Gold in 2009. Gold is a collector and he found the tape box simply marked "Dylan Brandeis" among the late music critic's belongings. What a find!

The concert was recorded just 10 days before Dylan's 22nd birthday and even though it clocks in under 40 minutes, it represents a breakthrough for the artist. It captures the young Dylan exuberantly channeling Woody Guthrie while still in the process of developing his own voice. The evidence is stronger on this recording than on Live At The Gaslight 1962 where Dylan's set consisted of traditional music with a couple of originals. The Brandeis concert features seven original tunes and not what could be considered standards like "Blowin' in the Wind." That song is noticeably absent from the set. Instead, Dylan lays out three talking blues songs, plus "Masters of War," "Bob Dylan's Dream" and "Ballad of Hollis Brown." Consequently, what we get is a blend of Guthrie inspired numbers and new songs that prove Dylan was no fluke when it came to songwriting. (Just check out the Witmark Demos from last year.)

Talking Out of Turn #17: Timothy Findley (1988)

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 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 (i.e. Margaret Atwood sitting alongside Oliver Stone). Another publisher curiously chose to reject it because, to them, it appeared to be a book about me promoting my interviews (as if I was trying to be a low-rent Larry King) rather than seeing it as a commentary on the decade through the eyes of the guests. All told, the book soon faded away and I turned to other projects. However, when recently uncovering the original proposal and sample interviews, I felt that maybe some of them could find a new life on Critics at Large.

In one particular chapter of Talking Out of Turn (Landscape and Identity), I wanted to feature artists whose sense of self seemed to grow out of the place in which they lived. For writers like Richard Ford (Rock Springs), Canadian poet Daphne Marlatt (What Matters) and Timothy Findley (The Wars, Famous Last Words) portraits of lives lived seemed almost inseparable from the lives of the people who created them. In the case of Findley, who died in 2002, he had written towards the end of the eighties a book of short stories called Stones that explored both the emotional and physical geography of Toronto, Canada. It is a city that we both grew up in that, by the eighties, was undergoing a dramatic change with the beginnings of a massive urban sprawl. That growth would cause Findley to leave for more rural surroundings. While I think some of what he predicted in 1988 didn't come to pass, the interview did indicate how the climate of commerce, the elevation of taxpayer over citizen, did reflect a city losing sight of itself. What Findley, I fear, saw coming was a Toronto where its inhabitants lived to work rather than work so they could live.

Yoga is as Yoga Does

For a word that means “union,” yoga can be incredibly complex. In North America, our relationship with the ancient Indian practice has been influenced by everything from Scandinavian gymnastics to colonialist Indian politics to how amazing Lululemon’s Groove Pants make our butts look. Indeed, for such a solitary practice, modern yoga seems to attract exhibitionists. Undoubtedly you’ve spotted a self-important yogi on a subway platform, unaware (or uncaring) that the mat they have fashionably strapped to their back could push fellow citizens into oncoming trains. Ah, inner peace.

Tradition & Transcendence: The Royal Wedding

On the days leading up to the momentous occasion of Friday's Royal Wedding, if you were to frequent your favoured news outlet for updates on anything relevant: our country’s election, political unrest, nuclear meltdowns and ongoing economic woes, you may have had your patience tested. The royal nuptials seemed to take precedence over all other news and continued to captivate over a third of the world’s population up to, and after, the ceremony. Frustrating for many, yours truly included. However, as the day drew nigh, I found myself drawn to the new couple.

Love it or loathe it, the wedding of Prince William to Catherine Middleton went off without a hitch. The grandeur began shortly after 8am London time when the first of the guests arrived at Westminster Abbey. Soon many of the world’s societal elite – among them queens, kings, dukes, emirs and Sir Elton John – all decked out full regalia filled the seats under the magnificent gothic interior. In time for the 11am ceremony, the stunning bride pulled up with her father. In a magnificent white dress - designed by Sarah Burton of Alexander McQueen – Catherine walked down the maple tree lined aisle to her Prince. After the signing of the registry the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge bowed to the Queen and departed toward Buckingham Palace in a 1902 State Landau Carriage. They smiled and waved at the crowd of 750,000 cheering onlookers. Finally, they wrapped up a perfect wedding with a perfect balcony scene for the, estimated, three billion viewers.

Despite my best efforts to not care about the Royal Wedding; despite how irrelevant I find the monarchy; despite the fact that I have a doctor’s note confirming my serious allergy to weddings in general, especially anything with gag-worthy fairy tale features; I couldn’t help but let some information seep in these past few months. Touching personal portraits of the Prince and his lady led to not only tolerance, but appreciation of why so many couldn’t help but take a peek at royal vows.

Larger-Than-Life: Paul Taylor Dance Company

 "Polaris" Photo by Lois Greenfield

The wonderful thing about well-trained dancers? Just how wonderful they are. You can’t take your eyes off them, or stop marvelling at their ability to seem larger-than-life and super-human, creatures propelled into greatness by the strength and skill of bodies leashed to the hand of an expert teacher and choreographer. Such was the thought inspired by watching members of Paul Taylor Dance Company perform earlier this week at the Markham Theatre, located north of Toronto, as part of the New York’s troupe’s recent, four-city Ontario tour.

As soon as the curtain rose on Polaris, the first of three works choreographed by the masterful Paul Taylor, a one-evening-only program, it was evident that the dancers, posed like statues inside Alex Katz’s box-like set, were beyond the norm, even by their own modern-dance standards. To begin with, these barefoot dancers dressed in skimpy black-and-white bathing suit costumes (Katz did the costumes too) were super-muscular. No waif-like ballerinas, here. As if to emphasize that point, Taylor, the now 80-year old choreographer said to be one of the fathers of American modern dance, showcased them in a work he originally created in 1976 celebrating the interpretive and inspirational powers of dancers’ bodies. Divided into two parts, Polaris, with a commissioned score by Donald York, featured an exact sequence of movement that is repeated in the second half by a different cast of performers who are quite distinct from the first. At Thursday night’s performance, the second group looked angry where the first cast looked happy, their movements correspondingly staccato where the first group's were smooth. Call it a study in dynamics. Or, as Taylor stated in his program notes, “An opportunity ... to observe the multiple effects that music, lighting and individual interpretations by the performers have on a single dance.”

White Face, Black Shirt/White Socks, Black Shoes: Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll (2010)

I was not a child of Woodstock; I was too young. Sure, I loved the music of The Beatles, The Byrds and The Who, and many others, but it didn't define me. Instead, the music of my formative years was the music from 1976 to 1984 that is known as New Wave – particularly from Britain and Ireland. New Wave encompassed a vast array of musical styles, including rock, post-punk, ska, reggae, jazz, music hall and others. Bands like Elvis Costello and the Attractions, The Clash, Nick Lowe, Joe Jackson, Dave Edmunds, Ultravox (pre-Midge Ure), Joy Division, The Cure, Wreckless Eric, The Specials, Madness, English Beat, The Stranglers, The Boomtown Rats, Graham Parker and the Rumour, and Ian Dury and the Blockheads, were some of the ones that captured my ears. The music of these bands was a response to the blotted excesses of the just-passed prog rock (think Emerson, Lake and Palmer; or Rick Wakeman), but it was also an answer to the thrash and bash of punk, personified in bands like the Sex Pistols and The Damned (The Clash were punks at first too, but quickly abandoned the style). Instead of bashing away and ranting at the world, à la the punks, the New Wave artists wrote short, punchy pop, rock or ska songs played with a modicum of skill. They were equally angry (Costello's “(I Don't Want to Go to) Chelsea” and The Clash's “London Calling” were signature songs of the movement), but the melody and musical skills were far more appealing to me than the scream of punk. Many of the performers I'd admired got their start on a rebellious label Stiff Records, whose motto was “If It Ain't Stiff, It Ain't Worth a Fuck.” And of these bands, the one I held closest to my heart was Ian Dury and the Blockheads. Songs like “Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll,” “Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick,” “Sweet Gene Vincent” and “Wake Up and Make Love With Me” still play 'in heavy rotation' in my listening universe.

Making it Real: Three Strong Documentaries From Hot Docs 2011

When I was growing up in the late sixties, not only were good documentaries rare, there was very little difference in style and form to distinguish them. At times, with the exceptions of Robert Flaherty (Nanook of the North), Marcel Ophuls (The Sorrow and the Pity) and Frederick Wiseman (High School), they resembled magazine or newspaper articles with moving pictures added. We've obviously come a long way in both the diversity of content and the aesthetics of documentary style. But sometimes that ambition gets misplaced when the aesthetics overwhelm the content (The Thin Red Line, Manufactured Landscapes), or when directors break faith with the audience by becoming disingenuous in order to stir a partisan viewer's passions (Fahrenheit 9/11). But judging by what's being unfurled this year at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival in Toronto, which opens tonight with Morgan Spurlock's POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold and runs until May 8th, the wide range of fascinating subjects suggests a cornucopia of pleasures to behold. In particular, there were three very distinctly provocative films that immediately caught my attention.

Planetary Puzzle: Will the Circles Be Unbroken?

The Barbury Castle Crop Circle in Wiltshire – July 1991

While I’m vacationing in the United Kingdom this week, I hope to spot a gigantic crop circle or two – and visit Stonehenge, if the Druids will let me. But there might be a curse, something that dates back to a particular September day in 1970 when my husband and I woke up to rain outside our cozy Salisbury bed-and-breakfast. Just a typical English drizzle, though wet enough to make the morning’s planned trip to the fabled stone circle much less enticing. Married for three weeks, Bob and I had envisioned this trek as a centerpiece of our honeymoon in Europe.

We spent thirty minutes trying to hitch a ride, but finally gave in to the lure of bus that would take us to Amesbury, a town two miles away from Stonehenge. En route, I caught glimpses of the glorious Wiltshire countryside through befogged windows. About halfway there, we noticed smoke emanating from the vehicle’s muffler. Bob promptly alerted the driver. After pulling into a breakdown lane, he left the bus with the two of us on his heels. What we discovered was not only smoke, but flames shooting from the exhaust system. He went back to summon his other passengers with polite understatement: "I’m afraid we have a serious problem. Please file out in an orderly fashion."

A Better Scream: Criterion's DVD release of Brian De Palma's Blow Out (1981)

Contrary to popular opinion, there have been far too few good political conspiracy thrillers over the years. Most, like The Parallax View (1974), are so content creating faceless and sinister cabals that we become helpless pawns in a predetermined chess match. While there have been some imaginative and daring experiments like John Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate (1962), or fast-paced exciting melodramas like Costa-Gavras' Z (1969), none have had the prescience and the personal obsession of Brian De Palma's consummate thriller Blow Out (1981). Released today by Criterion (on both regular and Blu-ray DVD), in a sparkling new digital transfer supervised by the director, Blow Out is the sharpest, most devastating, American conspiracy picture. It's also one that audiences and critics either ignored (or dismissed) when it was first released thirty years ago.

Although Brian De Palma was part of the American film renaissance of the seventies, which brought us such gifted and original directors as Martin Scorsese (Mean Streets, Taxi Driver), Peter Bogdanovich (The Last Picture Show), Hal Ashby (The Landlord, Shampoo), Francis Coppola (The Godfather I & II), Steven Spielberg (Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind), he never quite achieved the critical (or audience) acclaim that his peers did. People weren't exactly indifferent to him. Often he would inspire scorn. Even violence. When I took a good friend on opening night to see Blow Out, at its conclusion, when I asked him what he thought, he took a swing at me. Luckily, I was quick to duck.

Director Brian De Palma.

Throughout his career, De Palma has had to do some ducking of his own. From his earliest underground political and social satires (Greetings, Hi Mom!) to his expressionistic horror thrillers (Carrie, The Fury) and the sexual reveries (Dressed to Kill), De Palma (unlike his contemporaries) presented himself sardonically as an ironist. Where Martin Scorsese treated violent dramatic subjects with a reverence for the art form, De Palma chose a more irreverent attitude. He treated film history as a form of farce pulling the rug out from under our more hopeful expectations. But unlike Michael Haneke (Caché), who plays intellectual abstract games with the audience (while emotionally distancing the viewer), De Palma brought a sweeping emotional intensity to his work that seductively drew you in. When he sprang sublime jokes in the climax, he cleverly implicated us in our very basic desire to watch, to indulge our forbidden desires.

Searching for the True Places: Clare Vanderpool’s Moon Over Manifest

We are pleased to welcome a new critic, Mari-Beth Slade, to our group.

I spent the past week visiting my in-laws in Myrtle Beach. Amid copious outlet shopping and chain restaurant overindulgence, I assumed there was no less intellectually inspired or engaging place on earth – until my mother-in-law handed me Wednesday’s paper. In the centerfold was a children’s newspaper. What a fabulous way to get children engaged in reading, current events and culture! To celebrate National Library Week, “The Mini Page” interviewed this year’s Newbery Medal winner, Clare Vanderpool, author of Moon Over Manifest (Random House, 2010). I confess I’ve not given children’s literature much thought lately, but thinking back to the emphasis my mother placed on the luxurious gold sticker than adorns Newbery Medal winners, I couldn’t wait to get to a bookstore and pick it up. I read it for nostalgia; I read it for fun; I read it because there is always a didactic element to children’s literature and I wanted to learn something; I read it because I am sick of pronouncing culture with a capital C.

Moon Over Manifest is the story of a preteen girl and her search for her home and family history. Both seem to elude her at the beginning. Her dad has just been sent to Manifest, Kansas, to live with old friends and once again, Abilene must make new friends for herself. But that doesn’t prove to be a problem for the curious and outgoing Abilene, who quickly finds her life full of people who have firsthand knowledge of both her father and the town secrets. Abilene’s self-directed quest is to uncover the truth about both.

A Platform For Sandals

Alexander Wang Platform

As the weather heats up, so does my craving for sandals. Like most women, I rejoice in the packing away of the ugly winter clunkers and slipping into thong flip flops and sleek open-toe stilettos that bring so much pleasure to both their owners and their admirers. This spring was no different, or so I had thought. Whether flipping through magazines, window shopping or browsing online, this year’s footwear options make any pair of chunky, salt-stained, winter boots seem sexy. The platform shoe and its contemporaries, the flatform and the wedge, have once again reared their ugly heads (or feet?) as a mainstream trend.

Just to give you a little history on the evolution of this footwear. Platform shoes were allegedly used in Ancient Greek theatre to help the actors appear taller. They were also a hot commodity among high brow sixteenth century Venetian prostitutes (I believe it was important to leave in the “high-brow” part, as these shoes need all the credibility they can get). Platforms have reappeared on and off again throughout history mainly in show business or among upper crusts who did not want to get their feet dirty. A particularly strong reappearance of the platform, for fashion rather than form, was in the 1970s when they were better known as their pseudonym: disco boots. Thanks to Elton John and a few other flamboyant performers, the platform crossed gender boundaries. There were also less flashy versions available for the more “rugged” types.

Taking Chances: The Red Bird Label Story

Record labels used to have a certain cache in the days before corporate takeovers and media-mergers began to happen in the eighties. To put it in contemporary marketing lingo, the labels once “branded” their music. Consider Motown: a distinct sound and style that stood for high quality performance and catchy pop R&B. Another might be Elektra records, the West Coast label featuring folkie Judy Collins and The Doors. Sun Records had Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins. What would jazz be without Blue Note, Impulse and ECM, each featuring their own distinctive styles? Labels meant something in the middle of the last century before larger companies scooped them all up. Their interest was more in profiting from sales rather than promoting the art form. But there was one label, Red Bird Records, that understood the relationship between good music and the profit motive.

In 1962, American songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, authors of hits for Elvis Presley ("Jailhouse Rock") and The Coasters ("Searchin'"), were ambitious businessmen eager to earn more money for their work. At the time, they were songwriters for Atlantic records earning 2 cents for every single sold of one of their songs. By forming their own company, they would earn 21 cents a record. So they decided it was in their best economic interests to form Red Bird records. Having their own company allowed them to take more risks with their music.

Neglected Gems #2: Watermarks (2004)

It’s a funny thing about movies. They may get critical acclaim, even score some box office success and years later they’re barely mentioned by anyone or even remembered. And there’s often no discernible reason for their fates. I really can’t tell why Neil Jordan’s terrific and accessible heist movie. The Good Thief, which got good reviews when it came out in 2002, has pretty much vanished into the ether. Or why Steve Jordan’s powerful documentary Stevie (2002) failed to match the impact of his earlier 1994 doc Hoop Dreams. Or even why impressive debuts like Jeff Lipsky’s Childhood’s End (1997) didn’t get half the buzz that considerably lesser movies (Wendy and Lucy, Ballast) have acquired upon their subsequent release. In any case, here is the second in a series of disparate movies you really ought to see.

Watermarks is the inspiring story of Hakoah Vienna, a Jewish athletic club formed in 1909 as a reaction to anti-Semitic policies that kept Jews out of gentile clubs in the country. The documentary, which is available on DVD, traces how some 65 years after they were forced to leave Austria, a group of Jewish women athletes return to where it all began. The goal of Hakoah (which means “strength” in Hebrew) was to prove that Jewish athletes could hold their own against their Christian counterparts, dispelling stereotypes of the weak Jew in the process. Hakoah succeeded in spades, with many of its members, in particular the women's swim team, dominating Austrian sports competitions in the 1930s. But the Anschluss, the Nazis' annexation of Austria in 1938, ended all that and forced the Hakoah members to flee for their lives.

Reuniting seven of the women swimmers, all in their 80s, Watermarks, which is directed by Israeli filmmaker Yaron Zilberman, lets them tell their history and that of their tumultuous era, illustrated with archival clips, interviews and footage of them revisiting their old haunts in Vienna. Watermarks succeeds in bringing a forgotten part of history to life. But best of all, it introduces us to some genuinely remarkable individuals who made a significant difference in their time and place.

– Shlomo Schwartzberg is a film critic, teacher and arts journalist based in Toronto. He teaches courses at Ryerson University's LIFE Institute.

The Process of Mourning: Conor McPherson's The Eclipse (2010)

Iben Hjejle and Ciarán Hinds in The Eclipse 

A few months before my Dad passed away last year, he was in the hospital recovering from a serious infection. On strong painkillers, he kept telling my sister to let “Uncle Maurice know” about something which I don't quite recall. Shortly after, he said something about 'seeing' Uncle Maurice. Uncle Maurice is my Mom's brother, and my father and he had a long, somewhat difficult, relationship. So why, while hallucinating from the painkillers, did he think he saw, or needed to tell Uncle Maurice something (whom he hadn't seen in about seven years)? We had no idea. A handful of days later, I received a phone call that my Uncle had died suddenly. I have always believed that certain people are 'visited,' shall we say, by those who are about to die, or have just passed. Why, nobody can tell, but it seems to happen again and again. This is the one of the ideas percolating in Conor McPherson's fine, neglected/ignored 2010 Irish film, The Eclipse.

A Long, Strange Trip: Life Among The Dead

It’s no coincidence, of course, that The Grateful Dead Movie will screen at more than 500 theaters across America on the night of April 20. That’s 4/20, dude! The cannabis holiday is celebrated every year throughout the continent. The Toronto festivities, with a march ending at Queen’s Park Circle, drew some 30,000 participants in 2010. The counterculture event is even more significant on Hippie Hill at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. The City by the Bay is where the Winterland Ballroom hosted the October 1974 concerts that are in this 1977 rockumentary, now being re-released with additional footage: never-before-seen interviews with Jerry Garcia, its director, and Bob Weir.

I haven’t caught either version, but did spend some time with the Dead in May of 1978 on assignment for a Vermont daily newspaper. Although backstage access had been arranged by some well-connected music business person, a big part of our plan was upended when a photographer named Charlie and I got to the Thompson Arena at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. Told no cameras, notebooks or tape recorders would be allowed, we were journalists without the necessary tools who managed to persevere. My memorization skills had to kick into high gear. Here’s what happened:

Louise Lecavalier: Still Crazy (But More Glorious) After All These Years

We are pleased to welcome a new critic, Deirdre Kelly, to our group.

Louise Lecavalier & Keir Knight (Photo : Massimo Chiarradia)

Dancer Louise Lecavalier's new company is Fou Glorieux, which roughly translated as "glorious craziness." And the craziest thing about it? How mind-blowingly good it is. Fou Glorieux is contemporary Canadian dance at its most kinetically expressive, if not poetically potent. The reason is Lecavalier, the diminutive dynamo whose kamikaze dance style helped make Édouard Lock's La La La Human Steps an international cause célèbre throughout the 1980s and 1990s when she was the Montreal choreographer's hard-bodied, platinum blonde star and muse.

More than a decade after breaking with Lock, the fiftysomething mother of nine year old twin girls is today using her energies to propel her own engine forward. As such Fou Glorieux, which she founded in 2006 to enable her to collaborate with a new and rotating crop of international choreographers, represents her comeback, and with a bang. Her company's Toronto debut last week at the Fleck Dance Theatre, as part of Harbourfront Centre's ongoing World Stage series, was greeted by capacity crowds that erupted in standing ovations for each night of the four-performance run. Their enthusiasm was understandably directed at Lecavalier, a dancer of incomparable style and presence – a true original – whose physical prowess, not to mention unstoppable energy, kept the eye riveted.

When Andre Met Shawn: A Meal To Remember

Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory in My Dinner With Andre (1981).

Have you ever been in a restaurant and tuned out your companions in order to eavesdrop on a more interesting conversation taking place at the next table? Such behavior is taken for granted by the late director Louis Malle in his eloquent My Dinner With Andre (1981), which remains an appetizing treat. Three decades later, the talk is still illuminating as playwrights Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn, also an actor, portray some semblance of themselves when they discuss everything from the universal to the intimate. Permitted to listen in, the audience can satisfy its nosiness while being nourished by the encounter.

There is virtually no physical activity in the 110-minute film, generating the satirical collection of My Dinner with Andre action figures in Christopher Guest’s Waiting for Guffman (1996). After an initial journey from New York City’s Lower East Side on the subway, Shawn arrives at a posh eatery (actually shot in Virginia!) to meet Gregory. The two men just sit, savor the food, drink wine and chat, with a few brief interruptions by a slightly disdainful waiter (Jean Lenauer). What keeps it all lively is the sparkle of the dialogue, written by the duo and culled from hours of their taped discussions. 

Always With a Little Humour: Tina Fey’s Bossypants

I think Tammy Wynette phrased it quite well when she said that “sometimes it’s hard to be a woman.” Despite of how far we’ve come and how some insist that the war on sexism is over, it’s still hard out there for a chick. (Perhaps on planet Margaret Wente it’s already won, but the rest of us are still huddled in the trenches.) In her recent memoir Bossypants (Reagan Arthur, 2011), Tina Fey brilliantly explores how many battles still exist and proves that it is sometimes hard to be a woman. But with the right mind set, it can also be downright hilarious.

In Bossypants, the former SNL writer, actress, and creator of 30 Rock, confronts the trials, tribulations and hilarities of growing up, going for it, getting it, and dealing with the consequences of getting it, in the male-dominated world of comedy-writing and show business. Each of her challenges is approached with a combination of dignity, toughness and, of course, humour. When having to answer those who asked her “Is it hard for you, being the boss?” Fey points out that Donald Trump is probably never asked that same question. Bossypants is part memoir, part self-help guide, and part satirical retort to the absurdities that still exist in gender politics. And Tina Fey rolls it all up into one package. She shows how many of the struggles faced by women can still be dealt with, and overcome, by applying just a little funniness.

Love and Fame: Country Strong

Just about the easiest thing to do is create melodrama out of country music. It's built right into the songs. Breaking hearts, lost families and wounded pride are about as common to the genre as the soft crying twang of a steel guitar. In Country Strong (Sony, 2011), which was just released on DVD earlier this week, writer/director Shana Feste (The Greatest) tells a typical story of the price of love and fame in the world of country music, but she distills the melodrama of its tabloid fascination. Feste instead develops an openly relaxed approach to the material which brings us closer to the essence of the music and how its stars cope with the cynicism of the industry.     

Gwyneth Paltrow as Kelly Canter.

The movie begins as country star Kelly Canter (Gwyneth Paltrow) is recovering in a rehab clinic from alcohol abuse which led to her falling off stage during a show in Texas and having a miscarriage. While drying out, she is being cared for by Beau Hutton (Garrett Hedlund), a country singer who wants no part of stardom. But he loves both her and her music, which leads to them carrying on an affair. Her husband, James Canter (Tim McGraw), meanwhile wants her out of rehab so that she can pick up her career. So he books her into a three-show tour which includes an opening act featuring both Beau and a young, aspiring singer, Chiles Stanton (Leighton Meester). The tour not only unravels Kelly's own demons (including the dissolution of her pained marriage), but also the end of her affair with Beau who becomes romantically drawn to Chiles, the talented ingénue who hasn't yet been corrupted by the industry.