Hearing History: Peter Whitehead's Charlie is My Darling

Toward the end of Charlie Is My Darling – Peter Whitehead’s documentary of the Rolling Stones’ 1965 Ireland stopover, recently recovered, restored, and released on DVD – bassist Bill Wyman is informed that a young female fan fractured a leg in the mob rush that followed that night’s show. “Oh,” he sighs, appearing as genuinely distressed as it is possible for someone as inexpressive as Bill Wyman to appear. His response calls back the moment in Gimme Shelter (1970), chronicle of the group’s 1969 US tour, when Mick Jagger, after viewing footage of the murder that occurred while the Stones performed at the Altamont festival, murmurs, “Oh. It’s so horrible.” From a fractured leg to a knife in the back: the arc of the ‘60s is there, if you are into arcs. Other moments in the Whitehead film likewise seem ripe for omen-spotting – like the interview with Brian Jones, his speech articulate but his eyes gazing from some decadent darkness to the drugged and drunken ending he met in his swimming pool less than four years later; or the little riot that devastates a Dublin concert stage, as neatly-dressed lads and lasses maul their idols in a grade-school run-through of uglier scenes to come.

Many of us enjoy reading history backward in this way, and investing innocence with auguries of corruption. Maybe these moments aren’t really there. Maybe Charlie Is My Darling is only what it seems – an unlikely retrieval from the period just before rock ‘n’ roll celebrity collided with general apocalypse, and glimpsed its true soul in Keith Richards’s rotting tooth.Yet Whitehead too is clearly tempted to see a dark future foretold in his footage. The Charlie DVD contains three separate versions of the film – a new, 65-minute cut; the director’s original cut (35 minutes); the producer’s original cut (49 minutes) – and the Dublin fracas climaxes all three; but it is most lengthy in the newest, post-Altamont cut. And Wyman’s suggestive sigh is missing from the two earlier iterations.

Goin' Down the Road, Feelin' Numb: Two-Lane Blacktop

Laurie Bird, James Taylor, and Dennis Wilson in Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop (1971)

    After the Altamont concert disaster in December 1969, when a fan was killed a few feet from the stage where The Rolling Stones were performing, psychedelia lost its middle-class appeal. More unpleasant news followed in 1970 – the Kent State and Jackson State shootings, the Manson Family trials, the deaths by overdose of famous rock stars. And even more quickly than it had sprung up, the media fascination with the counterculture evaporated. 

    But the counterculture, stripped of its idealism and its sexiness, lingered on. If you drove down the main street of any small city in America in the 1970s, you saw clusters of teenagers standing around, wearing long hair and bell-bottom jeans, listening to Led Zeppelin, furtively getting stoned. This was the massive middle of the baby-boom generation, the remnant of the counterculture – a remnant that was much bigger than the original, but in which the media had lost interest.

 – Louis Menand, “Life in the Stone Age” (The New Republic, 1991)

A few years ago, the Criterion Collection came out with a box set devoted to the movies produced by Bert Schneider, Bob Rafelson, and Steve Blauner’s BBC productions in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, including Easy Rider, Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces, The King of Marvin Gardens, the Monkees vehicle Head, and Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show. The set established that the ‘70s renaissance in American movies resulted in a fair amount of unwatchable slop – both Henry Jaglom’s debut film A Safe Place and, for anyone not enjoying an acid flashback, most of Easy Rider qualify – but, taken as a whole, those movies represent a thrilling moment in popular culture, a time when a group of people who’d been excited by the French New Wave and other breakthrough European films in the ‘60s tried to bring something new to American movies, while keeping one foot in the studio system.

There might be another box set waiting to be assembled from the product of Universal’s “youth division,” which was set up in direct response to the success of Easy Rider and other counterculture hits that the studio bosses of the time simply found bewildering. Under the supervision of youthful studio executive Ned Tannen, a motley assortment of filmmakers, including two heavy hitters from Easy Rider, were basically given about a million dollars apiece and instructed to go nuts. The results – including Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie, Peter Fonda’s The Hired Hand, Milos Forman’s Taking Off, Frank Perry’s The Diary of a Mad Housewife, John Cassavettes’s Minnie and Moskowitz – were, again, a mixed bag, but they add up to a snapshot of a fascinating time in American history and movie culture.

Laurie Bird and Warren Oates

The experiment also yielded one strange, near-masterpiece: Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop, which Criterion brought out in a gorgeous two-DVD set in 2007, which has now been upgraded to Blu-ray. The movie looks great. That said, I discovered Two-Lane Blacktop in the ‘80s, when the local CBS affiliate in New Orleans, which started showing all-night late movies back when round-the-clock TV broadcasting was still a novelty, used to run it in the late-late night, early-morning hours, its final moments leading directly into Sunrise Semester. I was living in Mississippi then, and the movie, snippets of which were jammed in between commercials for Al Scramuzza’s Seafood City and PSAs for animal adoption and those little informative booklets from the U.S. government, used to get fuzzier and fuzzier as dawn approached and the signal began to die. A part of me will probably always feel that this was the ideal way to see Two-Lane Blacktop, and not just because the movie ends with the film appearing to catch fire in the projector, so that it ends by literally burning itself out.

Conversations in Color: French and Japanese Prints at the Smart Museum of Art

Kanae Yamamoto, Bathers in Brittany (1913)

When Japan re-opened trade routes to the West in 1854 after two centuries of economic seclusion, the influx of Japanese art into Europe and the United States was transformative. You can hardly look at the major Western painting and printmaking movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries without factoring in the influence of Japanese woodblock prints; Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Symbolism, Art Nouveau and Cubism all took inspiration from the forms, styles and techniques of ukiyo-e, or “pictures of the floating world,” adapting the new possibilities these prints provided for color, space, decoration and illusion to startlingly different effects.

France was the cauldron of artistic innovation during this period, and Japonisme was everywhere in the culture. The canonical nineteenth century writers and literary critics Edmond and Jules de Goncourt were avid collectors of Japonaiserie; so was the composer Claude Debussy, who reproduced a detail from Hokusai’s famous print “The Great Wave” from the series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji on the 1905 cover of the sheet music for his symphonic work La Mer. The ukiyo-e-inspired lithographs of artists such as Edouard Vuillard and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec were commissioned for the playbills and posters of Parisian theaters, cafes and cabarets. The exhibition Awash in Color: French and Japanese Prints, which was on view this fall at the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art, looks at the conversation between French and Japanese prints during this decadent period of artistic flowering. 

Interview with Matt Dusk and Steve Macdonald

Singer Matt Dusk's new disc is called My Funny Valentine: The Chet Baker Songbook

Talented singer Matt Dusk continues his exploration of the great songs of a bygone era with his new disc, out today, My Funny Valentine: The Chet Baker Songbook (EOne Entertainment). Dusk doesn't call the album a 'tribute' record, which would suggest a copy or aping of Baker's soft singing style, something that Dusk accurately maintains would not fit his crooner voice. Rather, he takes on Baker's catalogue, and finds a happy ground between how he normally swings and how Baker sings. Dusk sat down with Critics At Large's David Churchill to discuss extensively the making of the CD. David also wanted to look a little behind the scenes of how the live performance side of Dusk comes to fruition, so he asked for Steve Macdonald – Dusk's sax player, musical director and “wing man” – to sit in and offer his insights into that side of putting out a disc like this, and ultimately performing the material live.

Picnic: Sexual Confusion in a Small Kansas Town

Sebastian Stan, Maggie Grace and Ellen Burstyn (back) in Picnic (All Photos by Joan Marcus)

William Inge was a medium-range playwright with a talent for getting at the way sex makes people of all ages restless and sometimes desperately unhappy. That was his subject, and he explored it in different forms in Come Back, Little Sheba and the movies The Stripper (fashioned on his failed play A Loss of Roses) and Splendor in the Grass. But he never got closer to it than in Picnic, which was a hit on Broadway in 1953 and again two years later as a movie starring William Holden and Kim Novak. (Joshua Logan directed both, but his inexperience behind a camera gives him away in the movie, which is clunky and overwrought.) Picnic, which is currently enjoying an engrossing revival, directed by Sam Gold, at the Roundabout Theatre, is set on Labor Day (the occasion of the annual local picnic) in a dead-end Kansas town where the dry laws and the banning of “degenerate” books like The Ballad of the Sad Café from the local library reflect the repressed, restricted lives of the disappointed characters. The play is about sexuality in the days just before rock ‘n’ roll and Elvis Presley brought it to the surface of American culture. A twenty-ish Arkansas-born drifter named Hal Carter (Sebastian Stan, who played Bucky Barnes in Captain America) wanders into town, hoping he can land a job with the help of his moneyed college roommate, Alan Seymour (Ben Rappaport, in the role that Paul Newman originated, in his stage debut). Alan was the only person who ever treated him decently at the fraternity that only admitted him to benefit from the prestige of having a gifted athlete on its roster. Hal immediately draws the attention of Alan’s girl friend, Madge Owens (Maggie Grace, of TV’s Lost). She’s working-class and she’s employed at the five-and-dime, but she’s the prettiest girl in town, so – as her mother, Flo (Mare Winningham), understands – she has a ticket into the local aristocracy if Alan marries her. (The play’s secondary subject is class.) But Alan doesn’t turn her on the way Hal does.

Ellen Burstyn, Ben Rappaport and Maggie Grace

The cast of characters in Picnic is mostly female, and Hal’s appearance sends all the major ones into a tailspin; he’s like a rock that cracks the surface of a serene-seeming pond, sending ripples all around it. When Flo’s next-door neighbor, Helen Potts (Ellen Burstyn), hires him to clean her yard for the price of a home-cooked breakfast, she’s dazzled by the sight of his glistening torso as he works bare-chested in the sun. (Stan mines the comic possibilities of the scenes where he gets to show off his muscles.) Helen lives alone with her nagging invalid mother – a voluble offstage presence – whom she’s never forgiven for wrecking her one chance at happiness, when she had Helen’s runaway marriage annulled. But she’s not a bitter woman; she enjoys the presence of young folks without resenting them for reflecting her own dashed hopes. Her opposite number is Rosemary Sydney (Elizabeth Marvel), who teaches secretarial skills classes at the high school and boards with the Owens family. Rosemary’s good-time-gal humor and forthrightness mask – not very well – her terror that, at about forty, she’s let romance pass her by. She makes self-deprecating jokes about being an old-maid schoolteacher and crows that she sends her beau packing as soon as they get serious. But when, in a holiday mood, Hal starts to dance with Madge, Rosemary gets so furious that he’s not paying attention to her that she paralyzes the boy with a vicious tirade, oiled somewhat by the illicit booze her shopkeeper boy friend, Howard Bevans (Reed Birney), has smuggled in.

A Walking Museum of the Blues: Dave Van Ronk Remembered

As music luminaries prepare to strut their glitzy stuff at tonight’s Grammy Awards, I am thinking back to a 20th-century hopeful who was the antithesis of glitz and who died on this date in 2002....

Why now, in particular?” a bewildered Dave Van Ronk asked rhetorically, a few days after learning about his Grammy nomination for a 1995 album titled From...Another Time & Place. “I made something like 26, actually closer to 30 records but nobody noticed before.” Well, hardly nobody. The blues performer had been in the game for four decades at the time of our January 1996 pre-Grammy interview. He was a legend whose career had returned to the kind of cutting edge made possible by that curious what-goes-around-comes-around law of the universe.

Ironically, the Brooklyn native, a grizzled guy with a gravelly voice, found himself in the same awards category – Best Traditional Folk Album – as a longtime colleague from the same New York City borough, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. “That puts me in a helluva position,” Van Ronk quipped. “If I win, I’ll feel guilty. If I lose, I’ll tear his throat out.” Elliott won for South Coast but still has his throat intact at age 81. Van Ronk succumbed to complications from colon cancer treatment when he was 65. Both men gained fame, if not fortune, back in the salad days of the folk revival during the early 1960s, when Greenwich Village musicians were doing the hootenanny thing. Elliott, a self-styled hobo of the Wild West in cowboy garb, and Van Ronk, never a slave to fashion, were pals with a younger talent who went by the name of Bob Dylan.

The Alternative World in Stephen Carter’s The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln

One of the most popular leitmotifs of the what-if alternative historical novel focuses on delineating an imaginary world had the Nazis won the Second World War. Two outstanding examples are The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick set in 1962 America and Fatherland by Robert Harris set in 1964 Germany. In the former, most of America is living under fascist rule, most American Jews have been murdered and the main characters gladly embrace the new reality. (A compelling subplot is about a banned underground novel reputedly written by an individual in a fortified castle who writes an alternative history about the Nazis losing the war. Readers are entertained but consider it farfetched.) In the latter, the Nazis, who are in perpetual war with the hordes of Russia are preparing for the visit of the American President, Joseph Kennedy, and an agreement that would signal a rapprochement between the world’s pre-eminent powers.

Another leitmotif is how would America be different had the South won the Civil War. One gem for this alternative history is the 1953 publication of Bring the Jubilee by Ward Moore. In the novel’s first sentence, the narrator states, “Although I am writing this in the year 1877, I was not born until 1921.” It must be one of the strangest sentences in American fiction. But it makes sense when the novel is mainly set during the first half of the twentieth century. Moore’s conjured America is one of bleakness and of hopelessness with a hobbled economy and heightened social tensions. Confederate citizens rule over Northern subjects. Blacks, Asians and Jews are pressured to emigrate and indentured servitude prevails in the industrial centres. The major character, Hodge Backmaker, is fortunate to spend seven years living in a communal haven of creative people who would have been regarded as pariahs in the coarser society beyond its confines. As a history scholar specializing in the “War of Southrun Independence,” Hodge is given the opportunity to time travel to the site of the Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863, the decisive battle that, in this alternative history, ensured southern victory. He is, however, warned that he must remain an observer. Inadvertently, he does become involved and with one altercation he wipes out his own personal history and changes the course of the war. Unlike the protagonist school teacher in Stephen King’s 11/22/63 (Simon & Schuster, 2011), who is able to retreat from 1963 America to the present, Ward’s time traveller cannot return to his former life living with his wife and fellow intellectuals. He is destined to live out his life in an America that resembles the historical reality of the late nineteenth century but one wherein he feels estranged and is regarded as an oddball eccentric.

author Stephen L. Carter

With the caveat that The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln: A Novel (Alfred A. Knopf, 2011) is not about the south winning the Civil War, it does follow in the tradition of writing an alternative history. Its premise is that Lincoln recovered from his wounds inflicted by John Wilkes Booth but his vice president Andrew Johnson did not. Failing to become a martyr, Lincoln becomes politically vulnerable. Like his weaker successor, the historical Johnson, Carter’s Lincoln becomes the target for an impeachment trial led by the Radical Republicans who contend that the “tyrant” did not sufficiently protect the freedmen and that he intended to usurp the powers of Congress. As he did with his previous four novels, Carter combines a murder mystery, a spy thriller and a courtroom drama. Part of the trial itself adheres to the historical record of Johnson’s impeachment trial, and sometimes the novel feels weighted down by the rules of evidence and the minutia of the court proceedings that Carter as a Yale law professor intimately knows.

Coming Full Circle: Richard Thompson's Electric

The "Melancholy Galliard" of the 21st Century has to be Richard Thompson. His latest release, Electric (New West, 2013) features the troubadour in great form with songs about love and loss, broken relationships and heartfelt soul-searching. It's a record full of Thompson's first-rate guitar playing and arrangements, but what is most noticeable is the pathos in Thompson's vocals, a subtle device that truly defines his distinct baritone from the rest of the pack. Electric is Thompson's 42nd release in a long career that marks his place in 2013: present but mirroring the past as only he can see it. Perhaps it's because he's never been afraid of expressing himself regardless of age, or because his prolific songwriting is finely tuned, he's never lost touch with his muse. Regardless, this new album finds his songs matching his style, wit and technical skills. It's an excellent album without clutter and that clarity of purpose is the key to the success of Electric. Produced by Buddy Miller, at Miller's house/studio in Nashville, the album features a trio setting (Michael Jerome, drums; Taras Prodaniuk, bass guitar) and this smaller band seems to have lifted Thompson's performance immeasurably. It’s also his touring trio and he specifically wrote the songs on Electric for the band.

Damp Squibs: Parker and Bullet to the Head

Jason Statham stars in Parker

Movie lovers can spend the first couple months of a new year scanning ten-best lists and catching up on recent films they’ve missed, or reviewing the classics, or tinkering with their DVD libraries, or, if they don’t mind giving their loved ones cause for concern, get involved in the Oscar race. (They can even spend January happily wallowing in Turner Classic Movies – although in February, the channel limits itself to movies that were nominated for Academy Awards, and tumbleweeds blow through its schedule for days at a time.) One thing they can’t do very often is have a good time checking out new movies; long ago, a shared understanding developed between the studios and the audience that January is dumping ground for movies nobody has much hope for, and the dumping period keeps getting extended, in the same way that the start of the summer blockbuster season keeps getting pushed up earlier and earlier every year. At some point, the two periods will meet, and whoever can tell the difference between the last movie that the studios want to wash their hands of and the first one that everyone’s beach house is riding on will be officially recognized as the Antichrist, or at least the editor-in-chief of Entertainment Weekly. In the meantime, people desperate to get out of the house currently have their choice of some expertly gummed-up little action movies that give the frustrated film freak a chance to at least commiserate with talented directors who are stuck in the dumping season of their careers.

When We're Older Things May Change: Janis Ian's "Society's Child" (1966)

In 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech, declaring that children wouldn't "be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character." The Freedom Movement, which fought the early battles for desegregation in the South and voter registration for black Americans, was extending a call for a shared vision of interracial harmony. King, the political and spiritual leader of the civil rights struggle in the United States, called for the country to abandon the bitter legacy of slavery. King's speech, that hot day in August, hit like a bolt of lightning, and suddenly a vision of hope and possibility spread throughout the country. Critic Craig Werner persuasively describes that promise in his book A Change is Gonna Come: Music, Race & the Soul of America. "For people of all colours committed to racial justice, the Sixties were a time of hope," he writes. "You could hear it in the music: in the freedom songs that soared above and sunk within the hearts of marchers at Selma and Montgomery; in the gospel inflections of Sam Cooke's teenage love songs; in Motown's self-proclaimed soundtrack for 'young America'; in blue-eyed soul and English remakes of the Chicago blues; in Aretha Franklin's resounding call for respect; in Sly Stone's celebration of the everyday people and Jimi Hendrix's vision of an interracial tribe; in John Coltrane's celebration of a love supreme. For brief moments during the decade surrounding King's speech, many of us harboured real hopes that the racial nightmare might be coming to an end."

Deliriously Inventive: Leos Carax’s Holy Motors

Denis Lavant in Holy Motors

There’s a scene in Leos Carax’s enticing Mauvais Sang (Bad Blood) (1986) that still resonates for me more than 25 years later. The film, a futuristic fable about a disease that is transmitted when people make love without actually feeling love, has a young man, played by Denis Lavant, express his love for a young woman by dancing to David Bowie’s "Modern Love." Lurching down the street, in a spastic manner reminiscent of Joe Cocker, and clutching his stomach as if he’s ill, he suddenly breaks out in a full run before just as quickly stopping as the infectious song is suddenly truncated, an abrupt conclusion to a man gripped by the fever of love.

Earlier, he and the girl, played by Mireille Perrier, pass by a disco but we only see the patrons’ feet moving frantically on the dance floor.  Working simultaneously as science fiction, romance and drama, Mauvais Sang was a perfect introduction to Carax’s off kilter, unique and highly inventive mode of filmmaking. Holy Motors (2012), his latest film and only his fifth feature since his  impressive1984 debut with Boy Meets Girl, is a timely reminder of how strikingly original Carax is. It’s also the most exciting movie I saw last year, proof positive that there are still a few directors out there who know how to use the medium in clever and imaginative ways. For the most part, Holy Motors is like nothing you’ve ever seen before.

Family Happiness: Tolstoy on the Rack

Ksenia Kutepova and Alexey Kolubkov star in Family Happiness” (Photo: A. Sergeev)

Whatever has secured the reputation of the Moscow Theatre-Atelier Piotr Fomenko as one of Russia’s best theatre companies certainly isn’t in evidence in Family Happiness, which I caught on the Boston leg of its American tour. The production, which premiered in Moscow in 2000 and is performed in Russian with English supertitles, is an adaptation (no playwright is listed) of Tolstoy’s beautiful novella tracking the arc of a marriage between a recently orphaned eighteen-year-old girl, Masha, and Sergey Mihailovich, her neighbor and guardian. The marriage begins in a kind of other-worldly bliss but reaches a point of crisis when, after they have begun to raise children, Sergey takes Masha to St. Petersburg and reacts with revulsion as she gets caught up in the social whirl that their provincial home has denied her. The story is about the way the cracks in a relationship that have been covered up by romantic optimism can suddenly appear, focusing the partners on incompatibilities they’re shocked to discover have been in place since the outset. Masha and Sergey’s marriage somehow endures the crisis and passes into a third, compromised phase that Masha (who is the narrator) sees as true “family happiness”:

That day ended the romance of our marriage: the old feeling became a precious irrecoverable remembrance; but a new feeling of love for my children and the father of my children laid the foundation of a new life and a quite different happiness; and that life and happiness have lasted to the present time.

Rod, The Autobiography: He Wears It Well

A year and a half ago I reviewed a biography of the [Small] Faces entitled Had Me a Real Good Time. It told the story of a bunch of wild English boys living the dream in the 60s and 70s (and 80s, 90s and on) drinking, singing and shagging their way to the top of the charts. Rod Stewart was just one of these lads, and now he tells his own story in what really appears to be his own words. And it seems that the previous book was no exaggeration whatsoever.

2012 was a great year for rock music autobiography. Neil Young’s scattershot ramblings in Waging Heavy Peace led things off, and Pete Townshend’s intimate confessions in Who I Am certainly made clear just who he was, but neither of those volumes had the rock’n’roll swagger down as proudly as Keith Richards’ Life did in 2010. But if it’s swagger you want, Rod the Mod brings it in the plainly titled Rod: The Autobiography. The book could’ve been called "Blonde on Blonde" considering the number of fair-haired beauties Mr. Stewart has bedded, and wedded. Blondes were who he was looking for, he emphasizes, especially young blondes and preferably of the absolutely gorgeous variety. He found lots of ‘em.

Off the Shelf: James Toback's Tyson (2008)

Boxer Mike Tyson didn’t have the rhythmic swing of Muhammad Ali, or the dazzling force of Joe Frazier – he was instead a powerfully built blunt instrument. But because of that imposing physique, it was assumed by some that Tyson was illiterate, that all he could do was fight. In his documentary film, Tyson, director James Toback (Fingers, Black and White) delivers a surprising and fascinating account of this troubled fighter’s life by allowing Mike Tyson to speak for himself. And it turns out, he is anything but illiterate. For the full length of the movie, Toback simply places Tyson in front of the camera and (with the occasional inclusion of archival footage), we hear the story from this troubled boxer first-hand  Toback's choice of subject is hardly surprising; he has always been something of an enigmatic and unpredictable talent himself. Most of his movies, good (Two Girls and a Guy) and bad (Harvard Man), approach movie-making as if they were tests of character, where his streaks of reckless improvisation could add this element of danger to the dramatic tension in the story. With Tyson, he sublimates his usual improvisational style and lets Mike Tyson seize the moment to nakedly reveal himself.

Kirk Wallander’s Last Hurrah: Henning Mankell’s The Troubled Man

"The genre is often misunderstood. It is not just about finding out whodunit, it is about understanding the world through the lens of crime and justice."

- Henning Mankell as reported by Alison Gzowski in The Globe and Mail, March 28, 2011.

Kurt Wallander is a forty-year-old police detective whose personal life is unravelling: his marriage is over; he is estranged from his daughter, Linda, and his visits to his curmudgeonly father, who has never forgiven him for joining the police force, are fraught with tension. Wallander drinks too much, a condition that puts his professional life in jeopardy. His mentor on the police force is dying. Moreover, he is convinced that Sweden is changing for the worse. It is becoming more violent: a group of youths set fire to a refugee camp, a Somali refugee is murdered and an elderly couple is tortured to death. Before the woman dies, she utters one word “foreigner.” Wallander believes that the official asylum policy is a mess as opportunists are conflated with bona fide refugees; the absence of any distinction makes it easier for nationalists and racists to tar all foreigners.

The foregoing is the gist of Faceless Killers, the first of ten Wallander novels (excluding those in which Wallander is a minor character) culminating in The Troubled Man (Alfred A. Knopf, 2011) that has deservedly earned vast international critical acclaim and commercial sales. Besides his lucid writing, two reasons may explain why Henning Mankell, particularly his Wallander novels, is the most widely known Swedish writer since August Strindberg. As suggested above, Mankell believes that a once homogeneous society of civic minded citizens, who supported its once humanitarian ideals and progressive social policies, proud of being the moral conscience on the international stage, was disappearing before an increasingly multicultural society in which violent crime had connections with growing globalization and the seismic changes resulting from the dissolution of the Soviet Union. 

In The White Lioness, the murder of a Swedish woman is linked with killers who were former KGB officers, and South African apartheid supporters are using Wallander’s homeland as a base to prepare for an assassination of Nelson Mandela to incite a civil war in South Africa. Sweden is chosen because as the fascist Boer explains, it “is a neutral insignificant country...[where] the border controls are pretty casual.” (Some of the action occurs in South Africa which Mankell knows well since he divides his time between Sweden and Mozambique where he heads the national theatre.) In The Man Who Smiled, he investigates a powerful businessman, regarded as a pillar of the community, who may be involved in the transplant of body organs from individuals specifically killed for that purpose. No wonder in One Step Behind, Wallander muses: “Irrational violence was almost an accepted part of daily life these days….Bosnia had always seemed so far away, he thought. But maybe it was closer than they realized.” Mankell is superb in the manner with which he demythologizes Sweden, the benign liberal country.

That's a Wrap: The Past and Present State of Post-Apocalyptic Cinema

Bruno Lawrence in The Quiet Earth (1985)

Last month, Turner Classic Movies – after almost 19 years on the air, still the best friend a movie freak with a cable box has ever had – had a witty idea for breaking up its holiday schedule of shoving candy canes into viewers’ stockings. On December 21, 2012, the date enshrined in urban myth as the Day of Judgment as predicted by the Mayan calendar, TCM filled its daytime schedule with movies about the threat of the end of the world, or its aftermath. Watching a slew of them served to underline how much the post-apocalypse genre has changed since it ceased to be a vehicle to address nuclear anxieties. Post-apocalyptic films and TV shows now have an angry, fatalistic, nihilist attitude, with costume and set designs out of a survivalist training manual. That may sound like a no-brainer, but during the Cold War, post-apocalyptic science fiction was largely a humanistic genre. The end of the world isn’t what it used to be.

Love in Excess: Joe Wright’s Anna Karenina

Keira Knightley stars in Joe Wright's adaptation of Anna Karenina

If you’d asked me last year which contemporary director I’d most like to see adapt Anna Karenina, I would have named Joe Wright. David Yates, who made the last four Harry Potter movies and directed the majestic BBC miniseries of Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now, would have been a close second. Yates has a magical feel for the epic scope of Victorian fiction – a quality he excavates out of J.K. Rowling’s already Dickensian material – and perhaps more than any other recent director he has succeeded in transmuting the addictive pacing of the capacious novel form to the seriality of television and the film series, capturing the velocity of the novels rather than trying to outdo them. But it’s Wright’s films that distill and remediate the pleasure that novel reading can give us. In Pride and Prejudice (2005) and Atonement (2007), the experience of reading as both subject and visual motif suffuses the movies with a gently expressive awareness of the translation from page to screen.

Down the Rabbit Hole: Welcome to Utopia

Fiona O’Shaughnessy as Jessica Hyde, in Channel 4's Utopia

A mysterious and possibly prophetic graphic novel, two brightly-dressed killers armed with small gas canisters and bottles of bleach, the suggestion of an ever-diminishing global food supply, four unlikely allies thrust into a worldwide conspiracy because of an online comic book forum: welcome to Channel 4’s Utopia – a pre-apocalyptic conspiracy thriller from the pen of playwright and TV writer Dennis Kelly.

Writing about television comes with its own unique challenges: the best TV shows tell long, even open-ended stories, and it is often difficult to assess them while they’re still in progress.  As I sit down to write this, I’m still questioning whether it would perhaps be better to wait until Utopia’s full season has played out in its entirety. (It’s now aired only two of its promised six episodes, after all.) Waiting however comes with its own risks: I already regret, for example, not writing immediately about the first episode of ABC’s now-cancelled Last Resort. (To be candid, I have also regretted weighing in too soon. See A Gifted Man, where almost everything that was so impressed me in the pilot episode made the series frustrating and tedious by the middle of its first, and thankfully only, season.) Sometimes, as with Last Resort, a first episode is so unprecedented, so “fall off your seat” shocking, that you can’t stop talking about for the rest of the week. Visually arresting, unrepentantly violent, and darkly funny, Utopia is like nothing else currently on television. From its opening scene, you already know you’re seeing something entirely new.

Marry Me a Little: The Sondheim Jukebox Musical

Phil Tayler and Erica Spyres in Marry Me A Little at the New Repertory Theatre (Photo by Andrew Brilliant)

A jukebox musical is constructed around the pre-existing catalogue of a composer or a songwriting team or a musical group. The English phenomenon Mamma Mia! popularized the genre – and it remains the prime example of all that’s wrong with it. The plot, a loose reimagining of an Eduardo De Filippo comedy that also had a brief life as an Alan Jay Lerner-Burton Lane Broadway musical called Carmelina, is gathered around hit songs by the rock group ABBA; you could say the songs are thumbtacks holding up the story. But since they weren’t written to express the emotions of the characters or to define them – the two main purposes of songs in a conventional musical – the show lurches every time it comes to a stop at a number because the lyrics don’t really fit the dramatic situation. For that reason the most successful jukebox musicals are revues like Smoky Joe’s Café (which features the songs of Leiber and Stoller), where the book doesn’t have to justify the songs. (Jersey Boys has mistakenly been called a juxebox musical; in fact, it’s a particularly uninspired version of the musical biography that we’re familiar with mostly through movies like Lady Sings the Blues, The Buddy Holly Story and Ray. Musical bios are backstage musicals – that is, the songs are performed by characters who are professional musicians, so they aren’t meant to stylize the feelings of those characters.)

The little-known 1981 Marry Me a Little is the earliest jukebox musical I’m aware of, and its musical selection is unorthodox. So is its form: it’s a revue with a narrative; that is, there’s no dialogue. (You might also call it a through-sung jukebox musical.) Craig Lucas and Norman René raided Stephen Sondheim’s songbook for obscure tunes that had been cut from his shows or that he’d written for projects that never got off the ground, and split them between two characters (played by Lucas and Suzanne Henry) exploring their mostly romantic feelings as they sit alone in their separate Manhattan apartments. Revived off Broadway last fall with one new addition to the score – “Rainbows,” which Sondheim wrote for an intended movie version of Into the Woods – Marry Me a Little no longer had the cachet of bringing to light unknown Sondheim songs, since so many have been recorded since and included in revues; it’s safe to say that no musical theatre composer’s oeuvre has been so thoroughly mined for hidden treasures since Cole Porter’s or George Gershwin’s. And “Happily Ever After,” one of Sondheim’s two discarded efforts to find a finale for Company before he hit on “Being Alive” (the other being “Marry Me a Little”), has been restored to the score in recent revivals.

Inspired Flight: Cylla von Tiedemann's What Dances in Between

Fire Bird, by Cylla von Tiedemann (Ink Jet Print, 2012, 22” X 33” Dancer’s name: Anastasia Shivrina)

What Dances in Between, the title given to Toronto-based photographer Cylla von Tiedemann’s exhibition of dance images at the Al Green Gallery through February 9, captures the essence of the quasi-retrospective as having no strict beginning or end: a creative journey that, like the dancers in her kinetically charged photographs, is caught in mid-flight.

In this presentation of both old and new images – 55 in total dating from the mid-1980s to the present day – the German-born von Tiedemann, a recipient of a Canada Council-issued Jacqueline Lemieux Prize for her contribution to dance in Canada, appears herself as an artist in flux. The work ranges from photography created from film and assiduously applied dark room techniques to imaginative experiments with digital photography and image manipulation using collage. One wall of the show which opened January 10 shows the now 59-year old photographer more recently pirouetting back to her roots, shooting dancers again with film in the outdoors. The energetic Fire Bird, a 2012 ink jet print showing the dancer Anastasia Shivrina looking as if she is leaping into the branches of a tree, is one of the most recent photographs in the show – a dancer, befitting the context of this show, captured between earth and sky.

Photographer Cylla von Tiedemann

Shooting dancers beyond the artificial setting of a theatre or studio is challenging because the backdrop itself becomes a moving target, changing focus and direction depending on shifting weather patterns and the transition of day into night. The resulting images represent a balancing act combining inspiration and a mastery of technique, two distinct prongs of the artistic process which this show, in its entirety, has brought to together in the work of a particular artist.