Disappearing Act: Cindy Sherman at MoMA

"Untitled #92" - Cindy Sherman, from Centerfolds, 1981, chromogenic color print

The Cindy Sherman retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, on view through June 11, surveys 35 years of work by a master of postmodern photography. Throughout her career, Sherman has steadily mined photographic portraiture for its feminist subversions of how we look and what we take for truth. Her pictures are performances: with the exception of two mid-career series, all of her photographs are portraits of herself in disguise, reflections on gender and stereotype, voyeurism and fantasy, in the era of Hollywood and mass culture. From her groundbreaking Untitled Film Stills, the series that launched her career in the late 1970s, to her 2008 society portraits, Sherman has distinguished herself as a kind of ventriloquist of image and identity, for whom popular and consumer culture are not the subject of her works but the raw material of her perpetual self-transformation.

Not all of this work is equally powerful. The Cindy Sherman of Untitled Film Stills quickly became a celebrity herself – and celebrity, so often the tipping point between the avant-garde and the status quo, seems to have dulled the sharp edge of Sherman’s aesthetic, as well as her social critique. The irony of the retrospective is precisely that it cashes in on the art world celebrity of an artist who became famous for her critique of popular culture. But Sherman has made herself an easy target for such irony. Her early work, singularly haunting and unshakeable, used photographic self-portraiture as a kind of disappearing act: she made herself so visible she disappeared into the work completely. After 1985, her work took on the sickly sheen of a magic trick performed self-consciously, one too many times. It grows cynical about illusion: the mechanism by which the trick was performed became the subject of the art.

When Movies Still Mattered: 1970s American Cinema

Al Pacino and Marlon Brando in The Godfather

Years ago, I remember watching Rancho Deluxe (1975) – a modern day comedy western starring Jeff Bridges and Sam Waterston – and marveling how this rather middling, but entertaining, Hollywood movie was still smart, adult and honest. In fact, even a second-tier movie, such as Rancho Deluxe, from 1970s American cinema (the last Golden Age of American movies) was considerably more worthwhile than almost anything coming out from Hollywood, or American independent cinema, in the 21st century. As I prepare to teach a course on this decade in cinema history, it’s worth speculating on why movies turned out so consistently good and gratifying during that time.

Much has already been written, and showcased, about the era in documentaries such as Easy Rider, Raging Bulls (2002, based on Peter Biskind’s provocative 1998 book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and Rock N’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood) and A Decade Under the Influence (2003). Both looked at how the younger set of Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma, Peter Bogdanovich, Francis Ford Coppola and Steven Spielberg, as well as their elders Robert Altman (who didn’t begin his movie career until he was in his 40s) and Paul Mazursky were given the filmmaking reins in a failing and geriatric Hollywood that was out of touch with '60s American culture. Fearing complete failure, the ageing Hollywood had no choice but to take chances with whom it allowed to make movies. Also remarked upon was how a new breed of (often identifiably ethnic) actors and actresses (ordinary looking folk, and not gorgeous looking movie stars: Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman, Barbra Streisand, Jack Nicholson) were allowed to play front and centre in movies that worked off of their eccentricities and plain appearances. But I’d argue that the dominant factor in why the movies were so good and relevant in the '70s was trust. The studio executives generally trusted (to a point) that these maverick moviemakers would still make films that had cachet and appeal and, more significantly, audiences could be expected to follow them in whatever endeavours they undertook in that regard. (The '30 and '40s movies, the last Golden Age before the '70s, did the same in an assumption of literacy on the part of the filmgoing audiences.)

Deceits and Deceptions: Linden MacIntyre's Why Men Lie

Why do we lie? Is it to make ourselves look better? To reinstate emotional boundaries? To hide secrets? To protect ourselves? To protect others? More importantly why do we tend to tell the greatest lies to those closest to us? And, given that this is true, do we ever really know someone? The theme of deception, among other affairs that tend to complicate personal relationships, is deftly explored through Linden MacIntyre’s latest novel Why Men Lie (Random House Canada, 2012). Why Men Lie is the the third installment in a trilogy beginning with his 2006 piece The Long Stretch. (His last book, The Bishop’s Man, won the Scotiabank Giller Prize. MacIntyre is also the co-host of the CBC’s flagship news documentary program the fifth estate.)

Why Men Lie examines the life of Fay (Effie) MacAskill Gillis, originally from Cape Breaton Island, now longtime Toronto resident, professor of Gaelic Studies, and department head at a major university. She is the ex-wife of John Gillis, protagonist from The Long Stretch, and sister to Duncan MacAskill, the priest from The Bishop’s Man. (Both characters appear in the third installment.) As an independent, confident, and successful middle aged woman, Effie is well aware of disappointments that accompany romantic relationships. She is also attuned to the innate ability of men to lie. When Effie is introduced she is writing off her second (and most philandering) husband Alexander Sextus Gillis after she hears of his latest illicit liaison. This fallout is diverted by a chance encounter with a handsome, seemingly well-adjusted, old acquaintance JC Campbell. JC and Effie begin, what seems like, a healthy, mutually respectful relationship. The novel becomes an open examination of her three past relationships and a dissection of her most recent romance with this gentleman from her past.

The Deep Blue Sea: Reduced Rattigan

Tom Hiddleston and Rachel Weisz in Terence Davies’ The Deep Blue Sea

Among the various revivals staged to pay tribute to the English playwright Terence Rattigan around his 2011 centenary, possibly the most unwelcome is his countryman Terence Davies’ film of Rattigan’s 1952 play The Deep Blue Sea. Davies is a pictorialist, not a dramatist; the movies that made his reputation, Distant Voices, Still Lives in 1988 and The Long Day Closes in 1992, were art-house chotchkes, with images that looked too much like tableaux and characters he hadn’t bothered to fill in. You could see the influence of the Brechtian-Freudian writer Dennis Potter (Pennies from Heaven, The Singing Detective), especially in Distant Voices, Still Lives, which contained a number of pub sing-alongs, but he didn’t move through his ideas to any sort of life underneath. Davies is the filmmaker equivalent of the Robin Bailey character in John Boorman’s Catch Us If You Can, who collects pop mementos that, lovingly preserved in an airless setting, removed from any context that might have given them meaning, have become a kind of living dead.

Davies moved on to adaptations with his 2000 version of the Edith Wharton novel The House of Mirth, and Gillian Anderson’s portrayal of the tragic heroine, Lily Bart, gave that movie a raison d’être. But except for her and a few of the supporting players (especially Eleanor Bron and Elizabeth McGovern) it had no more life in it than his previous efforts. You watched the actors parading around in impeccable costumes against impeccable sets, and you didn't believe who they said they were or that they represented the society Wharton wrote about. Most of the actors seemed miscast, and implausible in an early twentieth-century setting, and since Davies encouraged them to read their dialogue with a mannered crispness, you got the sense that he didn't want us to believe them in period. The movie came across as a semi-post-modern take on the novel – which really deserved better. (And it had already received it, in a 1981 television edition starring Geraldine Chaplin.)

When I'm 24: HBO’s Girls Brings A Smart New Voice To Comedy

Jemima Kirke, Lena Dunham and Zosia Mamet star in Girls on HBO

I recently sat down and watched the first two episodes of HBO’s much-publicized new comedy series Girls. Since I had been studiously avoiding most of the press, all I knew going in was that people were excited by it. I didn’t really know why, and I honestly did not know what to expect. Earlier this year, HBO cleared the way for Girls and for Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s Veep by letting go of How to Make It in America and Bored to Death, two other Brooklyn-centred comedies which I already miss dearly. But if Girls is really the result of those casualties, it is just possible that those serious losses may not be quite the end of television as we love it.

Agony over the Script, Ecstasy over the Performance: Halifax's Shakespeare by the Sea’s production of Mike Daisey’s Steve Jobs

Jesse MacLean in Shakespeare by the Sea's The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs

A one-man (or one-woman) show has its unique challenges – depicting conflict using often one character, keeping the audience engaged with only one actor, and keeping the one actor from exhausting himself. Halifax's Shakespeare by the Sea’s (SBTS) production of Mike Daisey’s controversial The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs does a superb job of alluding all these common pitfalls – through innovative use of technology, copious F-bombs (some contextually necessary, most not) and dynamic acting by Jesse MacLean. From the moment I took my seat in the dim 20 member audience, I was listening intently, cackling intensely and sending knowing looks to my theatre companion.

For those who have seen the production, you know that the title is somewhat misleading. While Steve Jobs is the context, Apple’s industrial practices are the story. And ultimately this play is a story. Unlike the original, SBTS’s version is portrayed as a fictionalize narrative, not a documentary. This takes the pressure off what ultimately doesn’t matter (the ambiguous logistics of Daisey’s trip to China) and places it on what does (the unfair trade practices of Foxconn). SBTS ended the show by justifying their narrative interpretation of The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, claiming that if we (the audience) leave the theatre challenged and motivated, they’ve done their job as story-tellers. At the time I thought they’d taken the lazy route, but after researching the history of the Daisey script, I respect their choice.

Jolting the Horror Genre Back to Life: The Cabin in the Woods

Fran Kranz, Chris Hemsworth, and Anna Hutchinson in The Cabin in the Woods

Of all the movie genres, horror has probably been the most debased in recent years. From the highs of films like Robert Wise’s The Haunting (1963), George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975), Brian De Palma’s Carrie (1976), through to Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead (1981) and Evil Dead II (1987), many practitioners of the scary arts have been interested in frightening audiences in a smart and savvy manner. But, of late, the genre has been taken over by the barbaric Visigoths, the makers of ‘torture porn’ films like the Saw and Hostel, movie franchises that exist merely to put their characters (though there’s not much characterization involved) through the paces solely so horrible things happen to them in slow, gruesome and highly explicit ways. Subtlety was out, and gore for the sake of just being gross was in. The Haunting eschewed all explicit horror and implied everything, which is what made it so highly effective; I still consider it to be the best horror movie ever made. (There are worthwhile gory horror movies, like George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978) and Peter Jackson’s Braindead, aka Dead Alive (1992), but not many.) I’ve never seen a whole Saw or Hostel movie – just enough to be immediately turned off – but I’ve been suckered in by exploitative art house European derivations of those films, such as The Descent (2005) and A L’interieur (Inside) (2007) that have been let into film festivals. Since those needed to be reviewed, I had to sit through the damned things. I was also offended by the empty, glib Shaun of the Dead (2004), a zombie movie which tried to have it both ways: gratuitously and jokingly killing off its characters, then asking us to care about their deaths afterwards. Once in awhile, a worthwhile horror film like Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2004) came along, a well done albeit conventional movie that didn’t break the mold, but intelligently respected horror conventions and added some decent characterization in the process. And the sensational, gripping opening of Zack Snyder's 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead (2004) showed the heights of what the genre could attain, even though the film settled down and became rather dull after its prologue.

Mostly though, I’d given up ever expecting to see a horror film with brains or originality – until The Cabin in the Woods. Finally, we have a horror movie that actually reworks the clichés and tired tropes of the genre in a unique fashion. Not surprisingly, the brains behind it is Joss Whedon, whose myriad credits – TV’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel and Firefly (and its film incarnation Serenity) and his viral video Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog – have all successfully played with genre conventions, be they horror, science fiction, westerns or musicals, and made something fresh and complex out of them. (His cinematic take on Marvel Comics’ The Avengers, which he wrote and directed, and which opens next week, will likely be typically innovative.) In Whedon’s welcoming universe, genre is respected, gently mocked and twisted into new permutations. He acknowledges and spoofs its conventions without losing sight of why they worked in the first place, perhaps never more so than in The Cabin in the Woods.

A Gentle Rebellion: Moyra Davey at Murray Guy

Moyra Davey's Les Goddesses

We are pleased to welcome a new critic, Amanda Shubert, to our group. 

Moyra Davey’s small, unprepossessing gallery show at Murray Guy in Chelsea, New York City, on view until May 6, is hardly the art event of the season. Toronto-born, Davey now lives in New York, where her steady production of photographic and video work, astonishingly lyrical and persistently feminist, is dwarfed next to the conspicuous spectacle and titanic scale of much postmodern photography. (Davey’s gallery show coincides with a major retrospective of the work of Davey’s better known contemporary in feminist photography, Cindy Sherman, at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.) All the same, the exhibition afforded me more pleasure, visual and intellectual, than any installation of contemporary work I’ve seen in years. Entitled Spleen. Indolence. Torpor. Ill-humour – a phrase taken from the journal of one of Mary Wollstonecraft’s rebellious daughters, whose stories are one dimension of the thrillingly multi-faceted video installation, Les Goddesses, at the heart of the exhibition – the show pairs two new gridded photographic series, “Trust Me” (2011) and “Subway Riders” (2012), with a sequence of Davey’s earliest photographs from the late 1970s. 

The eloquent counterpoint of these pieces is terrifically complex. The web of visual relationships within the photographic works is mirrored in the allusive, essayistic narrative Davey delivers in Les Goddesses. The 61 minute video installation, with voice over by Davey, draws together the biographies of Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughters Mary Shelley, Claire Clairmont and Fanny Imlay, the travel diary of Goethe, and the cinematic philosophies of Louis Malle and Jean-Luc Godard with fragmentary portraits of family members and friends, all set against stunning views of Davey’s apartment with all of its everyday dust and clutter suffused with light from open windows. It is as though we were looking into one of her photographs, perfectly still yet shot through with passing time.

Staying the Course: First Position

Rebecca waits in the wings, in a scene from Bess Kargman's First Position

There appears to be no end to the public’s fascination with what goes on behind the scenes at the ballet. Witness the success of Darren Aronofsky’s feature film Black Swan whose lurid backstage view of the ugliness often lurking behind the beauty of the classical dancer had audiences everywhere riveted. If you were to ask Bess Kargman, she might tell you that a lot of what is depicted in Black Swan is true – the dagger-like competitiveness, the eating disorders and above all the sacrifice executed on the altar of perfection. Kargman knows because she was once a member of that perilous pointe shoe world herself, having studied at the School of Boston Ballet, the academy that made headlines in 1997 when one of its young dancers dropped dead as a result of complications brought on by anorexia.

Kargman never went the full course to become a professional ballerina, having understood only too well the level of commitment involved. (She actually went on to play hockey.) Instead of a stage career, Kargman turned eventually to journalism, specializing in fact-driven projects for National Public Radio. She never lost her own fascination for ballet, however, and believed it would be a meaty topic to tackle having seen for herself that it represented a world more complex and nuanced than what often is presented before the footlights. A chance encounter with legions of ballet students on the streets of New York in 2009 eventually showed her the right approach to take, involving her once again in dance but from the perspective of a newly minted documentary filmmaker.

Remembering Levon Helm (1940-2012): Then and Now

In light of Levon Helm's passing last week from cancer at 71, Susan Green and John Corcelli recall moments from his musical life – then and now.

The audience at 1969 Isle of Wight music festival

While thumbing my way from London to Edinburgh on the A1 Motorway, I met a British fellow hitchhiker named Christopher who was only going as far as Sheffield. When we’d driven that distance aboard a clotted cream lorry that stopped for us, he more or less invited himself along on my already scheduled jaunt to the 1969 Isle of Wight music festival a week later. We also discussed issues of war and peace.

"I'm sort of fed up with being American,” I told Christopher. “Vietnam and violence on our streets and police brutality. Over here, you seem so much more..."

"Civilized?"

Clybourne Park and Race in America

The cast of Clybourne Park (All photos by Joan Marcus)

Bruce Norris’s brilliant Clybourne Park – which just opened on Broadway in the first-rate production, directed by Pam McKinnon, that originated at Playwrights Horizon two years ago – begins as what seems like a satirical take on 1950s America. Daniel Ostling’s set reproduces a staid mid-century interior design; the locale, which the title identifies, is a middle-class neighborhood in central Chicago in 1959. But the backdrop beyond the front door, which we can glimpse through a stage-right window, has a touch of artificiality about it, and it feels as if there’s a film of gray over everything. The inhabitants, Bev (Christina Kirk) and Russ (Frank Wood), are moving out, so the living room is crowded with piled-up boxes and rolled-up rugs, but the sense you get of remoteness, transience, alienation go deeper. (Allen Lee Hughes did the lighting.) The opening conversation between these middle-aged people is mostly a meaningless disagreement about capital cities. Bev has a smiley-face quality, like that of a camp counselor committed to teaching a group of eight-year-olds the rules to a new game. She has a bit of a baby-talk sound, and a habit of buckling at the knees and rolling her eyes when she wants to make a point, and she waves her hands around to underscore her words, so we seem to be getting the Classics Illustrated version of everything she says. She’s set on getting her husband moving: he’s still in his PJs, and she wants him to get a footlocker out of one of the upstairs rooms but he keeps putting her off. Russ, who is reading a National Geographic in his easy chair, is agreeable enough, but as playful as his tone is, his replies sound like evasion tactics. When the local minister, Jim (Brendan Griffin), enters with a football in his hands – and golden-haired Griffin looks like a college football star – the number of motivators on the stage doubles. He chatters to the couple in wobbly clichés, his tone relentlessly upbeat. Then there’s the African American maid, Francine (Crystal A. Dickinson), whose husband, Albert (Damon Gupton), has arrived to pick her up. These two are like savvy domestics on an antiquated TV sitcom.

Nothing in Bev or Russ’s demeanor suggests they are people who have been through a tragedy except perhaps (if we’re looking for clues) Russ’s determined immobility. But Jim, who came by because of Bev’s concern over her husband, brings up the verboten subject of their dead Korean War-vet son, and Russ shuts him up by telling him to go fuck himself. Griffin’s Jim blinks and stares into space, disoriented, as if he’d suddenly found himself in the wrong play, and we wonder, too, as what we’ve been watching jogs for an instant into the kind of modern family drama where characters don’t feel the need to mind their language. Albert, who’s been standing around on the periphery of the action waiting for his wife, ducks out in embarrassment. We think we’ve been pulled back on course when another neighbor, Karl (Jeremy Shamos), shows up with a pregnant wife, Betsy (Annie Parisse), and a terrible sidewall haircut that makes him look as if he’d stepped out of a comic strip of the period. But Betsy’s deafness sets off her sweetness and cuteness so that they seem manufactured, and you register that you’d never find a hearing-impaired character rippling the perfect surface of a fifties TV show.

Love and Revenge: The Blu-ray DVD Edition of Dangerous Liaisons

Choderlos de Laclos's 1782 novel, Les Liaiasons Dangereuses, is a diabolically unique book, a sly narrative about devious sexual games and merciless erotic warfare, told in the form of highly confidential letters between two French aristocrats – the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont – former lovers turned wicked schemers who set out to wreck the love lives of others just for the sport of it. The letters read like a series of confessionals where the artifice of their style carries the sharp pungency of juicy gossip, cadenced whispers delicately perfumed in malice. Les Liaiasons Dangereuses peeks under the accepted customs of the aristocracy only to uncover the latent sexual aggression, an arousal of decadence, that ceremonial behaviour masks. Naturally, the novel ended up condemned, banned and burned over the years as if the French aristocracy set out to destroy traces of themselves tucked away in those exchanges.

Director Stephen Frears's Dangerous Liaisons, the 1988 film adaptation of Christopher Hampton's Tony Award-winning stage play based on the de Laclos's novel, was never in danger of being condemned, banned, or burned. But it sure does full justice to the book's wickedness. Perhaps, since Frears (having already directed My Beautiful Launderette and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid) is a true modernist, he goes beyond providing a cleverly detached voyeurism and reaches instead for the emotional and erotic power buried in the material. Most period costume dramas linger on the decor so we can swoon over all the pageantry, or they take the moral high road of Peter Greenaway's The Draughtsman's Contract which dispenses with the impacted eroticism in sexual gamesmanship in exchange for cerebral muscle-flexing (to paraphrase the critic Terrence Rafferty, Greenaway is the beach bully as aesthete who kicks art in our faces). Frears, however, shows far more daring, setting up the combatants and their rules of engagement so that we can watch their masks melt away. We ultimately come to feel the full consequences of their carnal games. The artifice gives way to real flesh and blood, blood that even literally spills by the end, as Frears cuts the chords that hold the characters aloft.

Bread and Circuses: Battle Royale, The Hunger Games and the Public's Bloodlust

A scene from Battle Royale (2000)

In the lead up to the release of The Hunger Games, many commentators repeatedly mentioned that the book and film were derivative of the Japanese book and film, Battle Royale (the book came out in 1999; the film in 2000), and its sequel Battle Royale II (2003). Having now watched the two Japanese films (but not The Hunger Games itself), the comment, though basically true, is completely beside the point. None of these films are terribly original, since their conceit – the spectacle of citizens watching or following for the purposes of entertainment the slaughter of a specific group of people – is as old as the Ancient Romans' gladiatorial games, and probably much older.

Although I know what my colleague Steve Vineberg meant in his review of The Hunger Games when he said he thought Battle Royale was loathsome, but I don't completely share that view. From a North American perspective, there seems to be no point to the slaughter that takes place in Battle Royale. For those who are unfamiliar with the plot: in an unspecified future, Japanese society has come unstuck with children rebelling against adult rules. As a result, the government passes the BR Act to try to bring the children back under control (and by extension, society). Once a year a middle school class is selected. On what they think is a field trip at the end of the school year, the children (or rather teens on the cusp of adulthood, as all are around 15 years of age) are knocked out by gas, kidnapped and awaken in a military camp on an island. They are told by their former teacher that they have been selected for the annual Battle Royale contest. The contest is simple. The children are released on the island, with various weapons, and, given only three days, must kill each other until only one is left alive. The survivor will be celebrated and revered by the rest of society. Needless to say, after much resistance, they are convinced that it is either play the game, or be executed right then and there (they all have a device around their necks that can be made to remotely explode at any time). So the game begins.

Pseudo Swindler: Ray Wylie Hubbard's The Grifter’s Hymnal

Some songwriters improve with age and experience. In the case of veteran Austin musician Ray Wylie Hubbard, the evidence is heard on his new release, The Grifter’s Hymnal (Bordello Records 2012), one of the finest albums of the year. It’s a testament to his excellent ability, through song, at storytelling. All of which is shaped by a career and life that’s had some interesting turns, both artistically and personally.

Ray Wylie Hubbard is originally from Oklahoma born 65 years ago. His first album was released in 1971 joining a new mix of Alt-Country singers such as Guy Clark. He’s also been associated with the so-called, Outlaw Country performers like Waylon Jennings, Steve Young or Willie Nelson. But unlike those hugely successful artists, Hubbard has been more of a journeyman, quietly recording whenever he can and maintaining his craft playing local venues in Austin, Texas, where he lives. In the past ten years he’s released five albums, The Grifter’s Hymnal, being the most recent.

Outlier: Paul Goodman Changed My Life

2011 was an exceptional year for documentaries about outliers: Bill Cunningham New York, William S. Burroughs: A Man Within, Magic Trip (about Ken Kesey), Public Speaking (about Fran Leibowitz), The Man Nobody Knew: In Search of My Father, CIA Spymaster William Colby. One of the most fascinating is Jonathan Lee’s Paul Goodman Changed My Life, a study of the prolific anarchist Paul Goodman. Goodman has now been largely forgotten but in the early and mid-sixties his 1959 Growing Up Absurd – one of Lee’s many interviewees, the Esalen Institute president Gordon Wheeler, assures us – could be found on the book shelf of every dorm room in every liberal arts college across the country. (By the time I attended one, in 1968, it had vanished: warmly embraced by the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, Goodman was démodé by the time campus protest turned uglier and more chaotic in the Nixon era.) Growing Up Absurd is part sociology, part philosophy and part politics. Its thesis is that young American men in the Eisenhower years were growing up cognizant of the corrupted state of their institutions – education, government, business, law – and in increasingly hopeless and desperate rebellion against them. It still makes compelling reading, and despite the selectivity of Goodman’s subject matter (he doesn’t address the condition of young women, writing as he does a decade and more before the women’s movement, and out of a peculiarly old-fashioned sensibility about gender politics), the bulk of his observations still seem relevant more than half a century later.

Wizard World Toronto Comic Con: Where Subculture Becomes Community

Comic Cons: fun for the whole family (Photo by Krystle Burkholder)

I’ve long wanted to attend a Comic Con, but the prospect of going to San Diego has always been too expensive, and Toronto’s epic Fan Expo runs in late August when I am invariably out of town. So when the opportunity came to attend Toronto’s Wizard World Comic Con this past weekend, I jumped at the chance. But I have to confess that – despite my long-standing desire – I had little idea of what the event might actually be like.

When I first found out that I was going to Wizard World, a friend of mine described to me his experience of Fan Expo as being like “a party at the end of the world.” I haven’t had the chance to ask him precisely what he meant by this, but the description immediately called to mind the last episode the most recent season of Doctor Who which aired this past September. In that episode, we find The Doctor stranded on Earth at a point when time itself has collapsed and flattened, resulting in a scenario in which all of history is essentially happening at once: Winston Churchill and Cleopatra hold high-level summits and Roman centurions have to negotiate with flying dinosaurs. In my mind, this is what the Con promised – a world without boundaries, a place of all things and all times, all at once. And on that level Wizard World didn’t disappoint. I wandered the floor of the Metro Toronto Convention Centre amidst Imperial Stormtroopers having cigarettes with Warrior Princesses, Ghostbusters and pirates standing in line for pulled pork sandwiches, and an array of tiny Darth Vaders and Iron Men drinking apple juice from their sippy cups. The feel on the floor – among the kiosks selling an endless assortment of Big Bang Theory t-shirts, Star Wars figurines, graphic novels, and medieval weaponry – was of an unapologetic and unselfconscious celebration of all things nerdy. Fandom, without prejudice. And, to be honest, it was awesome. After all, how many places are there in the world where you can bring young children and buy a broadsword?

Photo by Mark Clamen

But in one significant way my friend’s description didn’t quite hold, and my weekend was all the better for it: this convention – unlike the 80,000-plus population of Fan Expo – was less like a party at the end of the world than a "meet and greet" at the end of the world. There was all the content but little of the overwhelming chaos I actually expected to find, and which I honestly wasn’t looking forward to. (I’m no fan of crushing crowds, and even less of interminable lines.) And if the experience didn’t rise to that intensity, it is to Wizard World’s credit. They organized an event large enough to do justice to the full scope of all the overlapping subcultures (from comic books, to classic television, video games, and film; from the subtle and elegant artistry of the comic industry, to the giddy pleasure of faux medieval battles and pillowed swordplay) without losing the humanity of all involved. There was an intimacy to this weekend’s event that was as much a draw as the celebrity headliners.

Once and Next to Normal: Words and Music

Steve Kazee and Cristin Milioti star in the stage production of Once

The Broadway musical Once is an adaptation of the enchanting Irish not-quite-romantic musical film from 2007 written and directed by John Carney, with songs by the two stars, Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová. Carney used to be the bassist for the Irish band The Frames, and Hansard was its lead singer. (He also played the guitarist, Outspan, in the congenial 1991 movie The Commitments.) Hansard has a long, woebegone face pebbled with a rust-colored beard; his eyes are immense, with the peeled look of billiard balls. In Once he plays The Guy, a Dublin busker who holds down a day job at his dad’s vacuum cleaner repair shop and plays guitar and sings when the work day is done and there are still crowds on the streets he can entertain with popular standards. At night, when there’s hardly anyone around so he’s usually entertaining himself, he performs his own compositions, poignant ballads of romantic masochism delivered in a startlingly impassioned style that quavers into an expressive falsetto in the most intimate sections. During one of these twilight interludes he meets The Girl (Irglová), who hears one of his tunes, “Say It to Me Now,” and intuits that it was written for an ex-lover he hasn’t gotten over. The Girl is a Czech émigré who lives with her mother and her young daughter, sells magazines and roses on the street, and occasionally lands a job cleaning houses. But more importantly she’s a musician herself: she can’t afford a piano of her own but a congenial music-store owner lets her come by and play one of his models. When she and The Guy become friends she takes him by the store and plays a little Mendelssohn for him. He can see she’s the real thing – just as she could when she heard him on the street. So they play a duet, a song of his called “Falling Slowly,” harmonizing on the vocals. They sound so heavenly together that you’re sure they belong together, not just as musicians but as a couple, like Joaquin Phoenix’s Johnny Cash and Reese Witherspoon’s June Carter in Walk the Line.

Lens Wide Open: Adam Nayman Presents The Films of Stanley Kubrick at the Miles Nadal JCC

Director Stanley Kubrick is one of the more paradoxical of major filmmakers. A photographer who became a self-taught movie maker in search of a realist style (Killer's Kiss), Kubrick would eventually become a dedicated formalist making epics (Barry Lyndon). Although he was an American director who began by shooting in real locations (The Killing), he spent most of his late career in a self-imposed hermitage in England inventing locations for his pictures (Full Metal Jacket).While Kubrick is an acclaimed auteur (2001: A Space Odyssey), his films rarely got good reviews when they were released (Eyes Wide Shut). Controversy continually followed him (Lolita, A Clockwork Orange), too. 

Given the perplexities of Kubrick's relatively small body of work, Cinema Scope and Grid Weekly film critic Adam Nayman, who has previously lectured on other controversial directors such as Paul Verhoeven and Catherine Breillat at the JCC Miles Nadal in Toronto, tonight begins a fascinating epic exploration into the long contradictory shadow that Kubrick has cast over the last half-century of American film-making. The Kubrick series is being held every Monday night until June 25th from 7-9pm. Adam and I recently had the opportunity to talk about the series and why he believes that Stanley Kubrick's work still continues to matter thirteen years after his death.

Commemorating the Centenary of the Titanic Disaster

The sinking of the Titanic on April 14/15, 1912, may not have the emotional resonance for us here at Critics at Large that the 9/11 tragedy did, if for no other reason than none of us were alive at the time of that horrible accident. Still, it has implications that affect us all to this day. So, today and tomorrow, we have decided to commemorate the 100th Anniversary of the sinking of that great ship in eight pieces that look at the tragic event from a cultural point of view. Ranging from an appropriate opening musical “overture” as selected by Kevin Courrier; to a combination memoir and critical overview of films and documentaries by David Churchill; to insightful commentaries on a variety of other films and music from Steve Vineberg, Mari-Beth Slade, John Corcelli, Andrew Dupuis, David Kidney, and finishing with a discerning look at the broader implications of the Titanic’s sinking from Shlomo Schwartzberg, we think you will find our overview fulfilling as we struggle to come to terms with what this disaster means and has meant. So, to our registered followers, whether via Facebook, Twitter, or email, please note you will be receiving eight notifications beginning with the first piece that will be posted at 11:40 p.m. EDT (the exact moment the Titanic hit the iceberg), and proceeding once an hour until 6:20 a.m. (we switch the post time at 2:20 a.m., to acknowledge the exact moment the great ship sank). As with all works on Critics at Large, the pieces are as individualistic as the people who crafted or selected them. Please let us know what you think by adding your thoughts to our comment section.

– The writers of Critics at Large

Titanic Overture

– Kevin Courrier is a writer/broadcaster, film critic, teacher and author (Dangerous Kitchen: The Subversive World of Zappa). His forthcoming book is Reflections in the Hall of Mirrors: American Movies and the Politics of Idealism. With John Corcelli, Courrier is currently working on another radio documentary for CBC Radio's Inside the Music called The Other Me: The Avant-Garde Music of Paul McCartney.