A Contemporary Classic: David Bowie's The Next Day

Not too many years ago David Bowie was the artist to watch. His dynamic musical career continually offered listeners something different at almost every turn. Not content to just release “yet another record,” Bowie always challenged his audience. We never knew what to expect from album to album, each as unique as the last. Every fan eagerly awaited his next move and then, after a world tour called Reality, he decided to call it quits in 2004. Afterwards, he made the occasional surprise appearance with the band Arcade Fire, or turned up at some fashion show. But the fans were still watching, just not necessarily expecting a new album any time soon.

All that changed on January 8^th, 2013, Bowie’s 66^th birthday with the surprise release of a new single called “Where Are We Now?” a moody ballad that walks us nostalgically through the streets of Berlin, circa 1977. To me it sounded like “Thursday’s Child” from the album, hours (1999). But with the release of the single and an album to follow, Bowie was clearly back in the music business once again. Foregoing any auto-tuning, Bowie’s vocal on “Where Are We Now?" is a little raw. He sounds older and I respect the fact that he’s not hiding behind the mask of Ziggy Stardust or the Thin White Duke. This is Bowie in 2013, after some health issues, quietly revealing him in the first of many songs written over the last couple of years.

Kansas Flatlands: Oz the Great and Powerful

James Franco stars in Sam Raimi's Oz the Great and Powerful, now in theaters

There is no good reason why a fresh movie spinoff of The Wizard of Oz shouldn’t be an eminently doable proposition. The new Disney film Oz the Great and Powerful – a “prequel” directed by Sam Raimi and starring James Franco as a two-bit carny magician who is whisked away to the magical land of Oz and, after proving himself through a series of heroic challenges, installs himself as the Wizard – has inspired a fair amount of anticipatory derision, and even some horrified shudders, as if it could only be an act of sacrilege, ever since it was announced. While the 1939 movie starring Judy Garland is rightly considered a classic, its status as a holy relic, like that of It’s a Wonderful Life and A Charlie Brown Christmas, has less to do with its inherent virtues than with the saintly reverence a lot of people seem inclined to feel towards anything they watched on TV ten times when they were kids. Years ago, this kind of living room repeat-viewing exposure was a rare phenomenon, but now that cable movie channels and home video have been a fixture of American life for so long that people who grew up on them are reaching maturity and getting jobs writing about movies, we’re seeing beloved-classic status automatically assigned to some real pieces of shit: movies from Top Gun, Caddyshack, Three Amigos, and even Sneakers. 

How would L. Frank Baum, the author of the original Oz books, feel about the idea that his masterwork was something more fragile and delicate than another potential franchise tent pole? He’d probably feel that he worked his hands to the bone to grow that tree and he didn’t need anyone getting in the way of it being properly sapped. Baum was an aspiring actor and playwright whose dreams of the stage had ruined him financially before he finally sat down and started writing children’s books. He wrote fourteen Oz books in all – the first great, long-running modern franchise of children’s fiction.  Baum charmed readers partly by using a theatrical ham’s instinct for showmanship as a substitute for the “mythic” qualities of European fairy tales. (Once Baum struck gold, he was quick to adapt his own work to the stage, and toured with a show that utilized film, slides, and live performers that promised a “travelogue” of Oz.) 

Judy Garland and Ray Bolger, off to see the Wizard in 1939

Pauline Kael wrote of the 1939 movie that Bert Lahr and Ray Bolger were so memorable as the Cowardly Lion and the Scarecrow because they understood “that the roles are vaudeville-comedy turns." The characters, and what the right kind of performers can bring to them, are at the core of Oz’s appeal, but every screen attempt to recapture that appeal – the 1978 movie of the Broadway musical The Wiz, Disney’s previous attempt to reboot the franchise with the 1985 Return to Oz, and the 2007 TV miniseries Tin Man – have gone big on concept at the expense of the characters. Much the same thing happens in Oz the Great and Powerful, but where some of the previous Oz films at least counted as honest failures by talented people committed to something they’d overthought, this movie doesn’t really have a concept so much as a marketing plan. It has a flat, defeated, half-hearted feeling that’s a little reminiscent of David Lynch’s Dune – another case of a gifted, idiosyncratic director “adapting” unusual material for a film that he has been made to understand isn’t really his project.

Critic's Notes & Frames, Part III

The Rolling Stones often had great B-sides on their singles ("Sad Day," "Long Long While," "Who's Driving Your Plane?"). "Child of the Moon," which backed "Jumpin' Jack Flash," is a particular favourite. It was their last bit of psychedelia before heading into the harder rock and country blues of Beggars Banquet. A contemporary band, Radon Daughters, have done the song justice by turning its acid tinged balladry into a tough piece of baroque pop.

Stompin' Tom Connors: An Appreciation

When Stompin' Tom Connors died last Wednesday at the age of 77, just about every Canadian could quote one of his songs. That reward alone was enough for Connors whose final statement, issued March 7, 2013, thanked the fans not just for his success but also for his identity. "I want all my fans, past, present, or future, to know that without you, there would have not been any Stompin' Tom." Ironically, in the first volume of his autobiography published in 1995, Connors states, "I didn't set out to create a special image. It was created for me, partially by the media. And, to be honest, I have sometimes enjoyed playing along."

Image aside, Connors had a unique ability to write songs about ordinary people and make them extraordinary. He wrote about miners, bus drivers, tobacco pickers and hockey Moms. He wrote about small town Canada as if he was born in the very city or town he sang about, ("Sudbury Saturday Night") or he could express in no uncertain terms the pain of picking tobacco ("Tillsonburg"), a job he actually held for a couple weeks when he was a teenager. For a musical map of Stompin Tom, click here.

Staging Dementia: MTC’s The Other Place

John Schiappa and Laurie Metcalf in The Other Place, at the Manhattan Theatre Club (Photo: Joan Marcus)

Putting us in the perspective of a character whose point of view is skewed in some way by radical physical or psychological distress poses a tricky challenge for playwrights and directors. (It’s the motivation for the first experiments in expressionism in the movies: the plot of the first expressionistic film, Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, turns out to be a paranoid fantasy concocted by an institutionalized madman.) Arthur Kopit tried it back in the seventies with Wings, which attempted to sketch the world as a woman who’s had a stroke experiences it, and both he and the actress, Constance Cummings, received rave notices – though the fact that the play is revived so seldom suggests that it wasn’t as successful as critics believed at the time. (I didn’t think Cummings was very good either.) Playwright Sharr White and actress Laurie Metcalf have received the same kind of praise for The Other Place, which closed two weeks ago at the Manhattan Theatre Club’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre. The play concerns Juliana, a woman in her early fifties with a rare kind of dementia that not only causes paranoid outbursts – the first occuring at a medical conference where Juliana, a research scientist for a pharmaceutical company, is (ironically) pitching a new neurological drug – but also provokes her into believing that her husband, Ian (Bill Pullman, in an extraordinarily sensitive performance), is cheating on her with a younger woman and planning to divorce her and, most dramatically, that their teenage daughter, who disappeared a decade ago, has contacted her.

American Composer: Frank Zappa's Understanding America

“It's all one album,” Frank Zappa once told journalist Jerry Hopkins in characterizing his work during an interview for Rolling Stone magazine in 1968. With only three releases to his credit, and long before he'd come to accumulate close to 100 records of satirical rock, orchestral, ballet, electronic and jazz scores, Zappa already fully grasped the “conceptual continuity” of his project/object. “I could take a razor blade and cut them apart and put it together again in a different order,” he said. “It still would make one piece of music you could listen to.” In 1993, a couple of years before he would die from prostate cancer, Zappa followed through on that suggestion. He took a razor blade to his back catalogue with the purpose of creating a caustic, but passionate musical portrait of the nation that produced him. Understanding America is a two-CD musical anthology unceremoniously put out last fall by Zappa Records through the distribution of Universal (who recently re-released, with huge sonic improvements, his large body of work). But given the little fanfare provided its arrival, you might as well call it The Mystery Disc. The CD comes with a stark 1975 black-and-white photo of the composer on the front cover, a didactic title, no track listing on the back cover, no accounting of the various musicians who play on it, no background notes on the songs (including which year they were recorded and what albums they first appeared on), and scant explanation concerning the context of the new album except for cryptic pronouncements that it's a record about “love, peace, justice and the American way.” (Its very design prompted a friend of mine who saw it to ask: “Is this a bootleg?”)

If the proposed audience for Understanding America is the Zappa fan, it might make sense to avoid redundancies by leaving out information that's already been absorbed into the DNA of the initiated. But what will the uninitiated make of this release? Some fans have already panned the album on websites and chat rooms complaining that it uses the old reverb-drenched digital mixes instead of the new cleaner and dryer ones (but what other mixes would he use since Zappa sequenced this release while he was still alive?). They're also arguing about the inclusions of some songs and the omissions of others (as if this were yet another 'greatest hits' package). How about the new listeners to Zappa's music? Since it's unlikely to get reviewed by contemporary pop critics, Understanding America not only doesn't stand a chance of being understood, it likely won't be realized either. And that would be a huge loss. Drawing from a vast and varied selection of Zappa's compositions, Understanding America is a musical jig-saw puzzle piecing together a political heritage embroidered with assassinations, deep racial divisions, religious zealotry, cultural elitism, and witch hunts. (The album traces chronologically – with a couple of detours – the dramatic changes in the political and social landscape from the era of Lyndon Johnson to the end of the first Bush presidency.) It also provides a unified field theory of Zappa's disparate selection of songs. Understanding America gives listeners a perceptively potent framework; one in which to examine the conflicting characteristics of American life, as well as providing a completely new contextual ground in which to experience Frank Zappa's music. One of the great ironies of Understanding America, however, is that the work included on it ended up embraced more by dissidents behind the original Iron Curtain (who even did prison time for embracing it) than by Americans deprived of his music by radio stations who censored it. Understanding America sets out to test the strengths of American democracy, too, by holding the country to the promises held in its founding documents by primarily shedding light on its failings. And because of Zappa's openness to such diverse musical genres, he draws from a huge storehouse of self-expression to do so.

Subterranean Mysteries: Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache Procedurals

Some feeling that had once between human and natural had twisted. Become grotesque. Had turned sour and corrosive until its container had eaten away. Until the human barely existed.

– Louise Penny, The Cruellest Month.

Louise Penny is a master at articulating and exploring corrosive emotions – jealously, bitterness, hatred and revenge – as well as joy and grief. The resolution of a murder by Chief Inspector of Homicide, Armand Gamache and his team, which she expertly accomplishes, is what garners to Penny legions of readers. What I find most compelling about her work is not discovering the identity of the murderer but how she explores the range of emotions in the character of the empathetic Gamache. She goes even further in examining the emotional dynamics between him, his team and his superiors, and the captivating denizens of the hamlet of Three Pines in the Quebec Eastern Townships. They feature in all of Penny’s eight novels except her most recent, The Beautiful Mystery (Minotaur, 2012).

In her debut novel, Still Life, Penny reveals a piece of information about Gamache that powerfully reverberates throughout the subsequent novels. He broke rank by investigating a senior officer in the Sûreté du Quebec who had ordered the murder of natives. The officer was convicted and he and his friends on the force are determined to destroy Gamache. Although Gamache has achieved an almost perfect record in solving homicides, he will never be promoted and has been excluded from the confidences of the top inner circle, something that Gamache fully understands given that actions have consequences. Nonetheless, he is a contented man, happily married and maintains a good relationship with his adult son and daughter. Penny hints in the first two novels that there may be agents de provocateurs in Gamache’s team who are working to undermine him. By the third novel, The Cruellest Month, I found the tension so gripping that I skipped ahead not to find out the identity of the killer but to those passages about how this subplot would play out. Then I was able to return my attention to murder investigation itself.

Being Woody Guthrie

Woody Guthrie gets a shoe shine, 1943 (Photo: Eric Schaal/Time & Life Pictures)

When I was a boy, I got a guitar. My Mom took me to Viola Music Centre and paid for lessons. They sold her a cheap acoustic sunburst that looked nice but had neck problems. No kid should ever have to learn on a guitar that would be better used in an archery competition. I think it was called a Capri. It may even still be in the basement of my Mom’s house, but it’s not good for much. I learned very little from the lessons. I wanted to play folk music, and they taught me “When the Caissons Go Rolling Along”. I wanted to sing Peter, Paul & Mary songs, and they taught me how to pick one-string melodies from a book that I don’t ever want to think about. I wanted to be Woody Guthrie, but I didn’t know it yet.

After hearing Peter, Paul & Mary’s version of “Blowin’ in the Wind” we tracked down the original. I well recall stopping at a music store in some small Bruce County town and when we walked in, the song playing was “To Ramona” and Dylan’s voice disturbed my Grandfather: “Ramona / Come closer / Shut softly your watery eyes…” When he got back to the car he teased and mocked that voice. Little did he know that the LP he’d helped me pick out was by the same singer. He’d hear a lot of that voice for the next few years. I didn’t want to be Bob Dylan, but it turned out he just wanted to be Woody Guthrie too. 

Getting Un-Surrounded: Glenn Frankel on The Searchers

Jeffrey Hunter and John Wayne, in a scene from John Ford's The Searchers

Among the autuerist critics who re-evaluated the reputations of American studio directors in the 1960s, and the new generation of filmmakers who created a renaissance in American moviemaking in the 1970s, no Hollywood film casts a more intimidating shadow than John Ford’s 1956 Western The Searchers. Legend has it that the movie was overlooked in its time, only to be rediscovered by a discerning group of artists and movie lovers as, in the words of J. Hoberman, one of the “few Hollywood movies so thematically rich and so historically resonant they may be considered part of American literature.” As Glenn Frankel acknowledges in his fine new book, The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend, the mythology around the film’s rediscovery is a little overblown. No, it wasn’t nominated for any Oscars, if that’s your idea of the true credit due a work of film art. But it wasn’t a flop; it did pretty well at the box office, and the reviews were mostly good. If there’s anything scandalous about the response to the movie when it was new, it’s only that critics and audience seemed to regard it “merely” as another John Ford-John Wayne Western, albeit a good one with an epic scope. The general consensus among those who came along to acclaim the film ten or fifteen years after its initial release is that it is so much more.

Ripper Street: A Fresh Take on Old Crimes

Jerome Flynn, Matthew Macfadyen and Adam Rothenberg star in Ripper Street

You can’t swing a remote control these days without hitting a period drama. From Downton Abbey, to Mad Men, to Copper, it seems that TV producers and TV audiences are interested in stories that happened ‘back then.’ The dividing line of these period offerings is whether the television produced mobilizes feelings of nostalgia and wants us to long for those times, or whether the stories are told precisely to disturb that warm and fuzzy feeling for the days of hats, cigars, and clear social structures. The new BBC/BBC America co-production, Ripper Street, falls firmly into this second category. The Victorian-era crime drama opens a door into a distinctly gruesome version of Conan Doyle’s London: a re-imagining which upsets and reconfigures our set notions of the past. It is easy to imagine Holmes and Watson moving about in hansom cabs, solving their own mysteries just five urban miles west of Ripper Street's Whitechapel district. Mind you, I was inadvertently well-prepared to imagine just that, having recently finished Anthony Horowitz’s novel The House of Silk, a faithful and gritty take on Conan Doyle’s characters and setting. Horowitz tells a dark story perfectly in sync with the spirit of Richard Warlow’s Ripper Street – both tell period stories geared towards an audience willing to glimpse just a little deeper in the depths of human depravity than previous generations.

It’s 1889, and London’s East End is still reeling from the effects of the grisly Jack the Ripper killings. Jack has gone silent, but the repercussions of those murders are still emerging: both for a traumatized population and for the policemen who failed to catch him. Such is the setting of Ripper Street. And it is gripping stuff.

Bad Things Happen: Arnaldur Indridason’s Black Skies

Nothing comes without consequences - Charles Ferguson's 2010 Inside Job.

In a 2008 interview with the CBC’s Michael Enright, the Swedish novelist, Henning Mankell, commented that the vast majority of lawbreakers are not evil but that they get caught up in evil circumstances. I thought about Mankell’s musing while reading the Icelandic novelist, Arnaldur Indridason’s most recent police procedural (published in English) Black Skies (Harvill Secker, 2012) since greed, fear of public disgrace and revenge for a terrible injustice committed years earlier provide the motivation for the murders committed. In Arnaldur’s (in Iceland everyone is known by his first name) oeuvre, he is primarily concerned about domestic and social issues, and how the harsh Icelandic climate can affect people. Bad things happen when people make ill-considered decisions. He does feature psychopaths but they are frequently murdered, sometimes decades later, as a result of their incessant abuse of others.

From Jar City (2004) to Hypothermia (2009), Arnaldur’s brooding but resourceful loner, Erlander, is the senior member of the police investigation team. Burdened with guilt because of an incident in which he lost contact with his younger brother in a storm, compounded by having abandoned his wife and two young children years later, he tries in Silence of the Grave to explain to his almost comatose drug-addled daughter who has tracked him down after over twenty years that “he had been battling against that blizzard for all his life and all the passage of time did was to intensify it.” Yet in his professional life, Erlander draws upon that pain to crack open cases that were perpetrated years earlier in Silence and The Draining Lake or relive his personal tragedy in Voices so that he can salvage his daughter’s life in the present. He is assisted by the capable Elinborg, who successfully juggles her career with managing a family, and by Sigurdur Oli, a graduate of criminology from an American university, even though he is hampered by a stiff-necked personality with rigid attitudes. When Outrage begins with the murder of a young man with a rape drug in his possession, Erlander is on leave to wrestle with personal demons and the case is assigned to Elinborg, who is particularly astute in investigating cases of sexual abuse. At the same time that she is working on that investigation, Sigurdur Oli is at the centre of two cases that are the focus in Black Skies.

A Puzzle of a Play: The Glass Menagerie at American Repertory Theater

Zachary Quinto, Cherry Jones, and Celia Keenan-Bolger in The Glass Menagerie (All photos by Michael J. Lutch)

The audience stood and cheered at the end of the performance I attended of The Glass Menagerie at Cambridge’s American Repertory Theater, and a few weeks later Ben Brantley in The New York Times made it sound like one for the ages. I wish I could echo that proclamation of greatness and the sentiments expressed in that ovation. This production of Tennessee Williams’ beloved play, directed by John Tiffany (represented on Broadway last season by Once, which began at A.R.T.), is performed with tremendous fervency by the four-person cast – Cherry Jones as Amanda, Zachary Quinto and Celia Keenan-Bolger as her children, Tom and Laura, and Brian J. Smith as the Gentleman Caller. Nico Muhly has supplied lovely incidental piano music, Natasha Katz’s lighting is gorgeous, and the non-realist set design by Bob Crowley (who also did the costumes) is lyrical and evocative. An abstracted pyramid of scaffolding stands in for the fire escape attached to the Wingfields’ Depression-era St. Louis apartment, and a reflecting pool with a quarter-moon dipped in it provides a downstage frame for the action. I have no idea what that pool is supposed to signify (Brantley’s explanation, that it’s “the abyss of being lost,” doesn’t make sense to me in terms of the text, and it isn’t even good English), but every now and then one or another of the characters wanders to the edge and sways toward it, as if in danger of tumbling in. That’s one example of the movement provided by Steven Hoggett, who collaborated with Tiffany on Once as well. I loved the strangeness of the movement in Once, but it was really choreography; here it intrudes on the play, and the actors are so obviously not dancers that it feels awkward, even occasionally embarrassing. I felt the same way about some of the staging, too, like the way Laura enters at the top of the play and exits at the end through the back of the living-room couch, and the miming of the meals. It’s OK, I guess, that Tiffany wants to do without silverware, but it’s absurd to imagine Tom would eat with his fingers or lick up the last traces of food on his plate. This is nonsense of a specifically A.R.T. brand. And it’s less forgivable that there’s so little on stage in the way of furniture and props that we don’t get to see the photograph of the absent Mr. Wingfield that Tom repeatedly draws our attention to, or that all we’re shown of Laura’s titular glass collection is a single figure.

Love Letter to Days Gone By: Dave Grohl's Sound City

Sound City is a very sentimental look at one of L.A.’s most successful recording studios. It was established in 1969 and became famous for recording some of the best known and biggest selling albums in rock. For Director Dave Grohl it was his connection to the human-side of the recording process, a point that he repeatedly makes throughout the movie. In 1991, his band Nirvana made the trip from Seattle to Van Nuys, California, to record their second album, Nevermind, over a period of 16 days. The result was a smash hit for the band and the studio, which had fallen on tough financial times. For Grohl, who learned that the studio was closing in 2011, it was the last straw. Somebody had to tell the story of the studio and the people behind it, before it was permanently closed. The result is Sound City, a slick, yet informative documentary that covers everything you need to know about the recording business from the technical to the creative.

Sound City, the studio, ranks with some of the most important and beloved recording facilities in music. Considering the history of music, studios often take on a status of importance that is as significant as the music it documents. When you think of Sun Studios for instance, you think of Elvis Presley or Carl Perkins. When you think of Abbey Road in London, you automatically think of The Beatles or Pink Floyd who recorded their best work there. So it is with Sound City whose wide-ranging facility was the home of the Nirvana’s Nevermind, and Fleetwood Mac’s self-titled recording in 1975 with Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks. In fact, Mick Fleetwood met Buckingham just after the release of Buckingham Nicks their acclaimed debut.

For a list of Sound City recordings, click here.

Neglected Gems #35: Soapdish (1991)

The 1991 Soapdish is consistently inventive and high-spirited. The script by Andrew Bergman and Robert Harling takes us into the world of daytime soaps – a delectable subject for burlesque that Tootsie (released nine years earlier) didn’t come close to exhausting. Soapdish lacks Tootsie’s polish and style, and it doesn’t offer the same kind of emotional satisfaction, but it has its own teeter-totter, whirligig pleasures.

Sally Field, parodying herself good-naturedly, plays Celeste Tolbert, the reigning – and grasping – queen of the soaps. Star of The Sun Also Sets for the last couple of decades, she wins the daytime Emmy years after year (yes, the script includes a Sally Field acceptance speech, though it’s tamer than you’d hope). But her love life is going to pot. And though she doesn’t know it, she’s in danger of having her throne usurped by Montana Moorehead (Cathy Moriarty), who plays “Nurse Nan” on the program and is fed up with being stuck in the background. Holding sex at arm’s length like the fruits the gods tempted Tantalus with, Montana entices the show’s horny young producer, David (Robert Downey, Jr.), into helping her oust Celeste. Working around the head writer, Rose (Whoopi Goldberg), who’s also Celeste’s best friend, he dreams up a scheme for having “Maggie,” Celeste’s character, stab a homeless person, assuming that act will lose her the audience that adores her. His plan is short-circuited, however, by Celeste’s discovery, on the set, that the extra cast as the homeless woman is her own niece, Lauren (Elizabeth Shue), who ends up joining the show as a regular. So David casts around for alternative attacks and decides to unseat Celeste by hiring the last person she’d want to play opposite: her one-time lover, Jeffrey Anderson (Kevin Kline), whose character she had written out of the show nearly twenty years ago.

Finally, Just Another Example of Israel Bashing: Dror Moreh’s The Gatekeepers

At first glance, Dror Moreh’s The Gatekeepers, his seemingly probing interview documentary with the six living former heads of Israel’s internal security service Shin Bet (roughly akin to the FBI), all besides its current head Yoram Cohen, would seem to make for startling revelations as he goes behind the scenes of an agency few know much about. (The famed Mossad, Israel’s equivalent to the CIA, with its rescue of the Jewish hostages at Entebbe or the capture of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann and other such remarkable feats of derring-do usually gets all the international headlines.) But gradually, one begins to notice a sameness to all the interviewee’s political views and, more significantly, an agenda held by the filmmaker which ultimately holds his country up to the worst possible light. It’s not that Israel should be immune to criticism, even from its highest placed civil servants. It’s more that a look at the complexities and nuances of Israeli life and actions should reflect that complexity, instead of coming across as an excuse to beat up on the country to an unbalanced degree. But The Gatekeepers, which lost out to Searching for Sugar Man for the Best Documentary Feature Academy Award, refuses to do that, preferring to place all the blame and onus on the Palestinian-Israeli impasse or the fraught relationship with Iran, among other issues, on one side instead of examining how we got here from there. That blinkered, myopic and highly biased point of view ultimately dooms The Gatekeepers to mere propaganda and polemic instead of its being crafted as the powerful, informative documentary it ought to have been.

Stay Up Late: V/H/S, The ABCs of Death, John Dies at the End

Chase Williamson, as Dave, in John Dies at the End

One of my favorite movie books is J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum’s Midnight Movies, which was first published in 1983 when the midnight movie as countercultural phenomenon was about to go the way of all flesh, displaced by the convenience and insular charms of home video. Hoberman captured the special appeal of midnight movies when he wrote of “epic, environmental films – really crazy ones,” that “instead of dreaming, you could spend the night with these visions.” One of the earliest and most prolific creators of midnight hits was George Romero, whose Night of the Living Dead came out in 1968 and played the international midnight circuit for years, and who followed it up with both the sequel Dawn of the Dead and his riff on vampire mythology, Martin. And the midnight horror movie reached an apotheosis in 1985 with Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator, which, like Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark, was probably ultimately seen by far more people who caught it on video than in a theater. Not all the major midnight hits were horror movies, but most of them – Eraserhead, El Topo – were nightmares of some kind, and even the congenial, geek-show vaudeville of early John Waters and the communal-utopian The Rocky Horror Picture Show, drew much of their appeal from their fans’ sense that they were identifying with people who could have starred in their parents’ nightmares.

Even without an actual, theater-going subculture for the movies themselves to tap into, there remains a special, hip allure to a horror or fantasy picture that can generate a plausible “midnight” vibe – that seems as if it would be a natural to tap into that audience, if it still existed. The Toronto International Film Festival, which has managed for years now to cling tight to a reputation as the premiere film festival for that select group that actually attends film festivals to see movies, still programs its “Midnight Madness” lineup every year, and now that several of last year’s entries have trickled into theaters (and onto Video On Demand), civilians and people who couldn’t schedule their vacations for September can get a taste of what passes for hip horror these days. The ABCs Of Murder and John Dies at the End, and another recent horror picture, V/H/S, may provide some hints about the current state of the midnight movie gene and how today’s indie-genre filmmakers are trying to tap into it.

The Murder Gene: Defending Jacob, We Need to Talk About Kevin and The Good Father

There is a general belief that having a genetic predisposition for violent behaviour and growing up in an aggressive environment can be lethal. In the novels Defending Jacob by William Landay (Delacorte Books, 2012), We Need to Talk about Kevin by Lionel Shriver (Counterpoint 2003) and The Good Father by Noah Hawley (Double Day 2012), the second condition is absent yet horrific crimes are perpetrated. The mystery is not about the identity of the perpetrators – in two of them the reader is informed at the outset and in the third, early on he has a sneaking suspicion – but rather why these murders were committed, to what extent genes play a role and, perhaps most interesting, the response of the fathers when their sons are charged with murder.

The science of behavioral genetics is most explicitly raised in Defending Jacob when the fourteen year old son of the Assistant DA, Andy Barber, is accused of knifing a classmate to death. Although Andy is a successful lawyer, who with his wife, Laurie, and their son, Jacob, enjoys a comfortable suburban lifestyle until the son’s arrest, he harbours a secret that he has never told his family. His own father, whom he has not seen since he was a child is serving a life term for murder, and his grandfather and great-grandfather were violent men, both incarcerated for many years. With Jacob’s trial approaching and the possibility that his family history will be raised, he has no choice but to inform his family. They visit a scientist, who, while assuring them that “predisposition is not predestination,” solicits a DNA test from the three generations to determine whether their genes might be encoded for violence. Although Andy considers this “junk science,” he accedes to the request even though he insists that he has never been violent at any time in his life. That may or may not be true but in his understandable belief that Jacob is innocent, he will do anything to prove it. 

Keeping Promise: Emmylou Harris & Rodney Crowell's Old Yellow Moon

Confidence and a refined sense of music making is the foundation of Old Yellow Moon (Nonesuch, 2013), this superb new album from Rodney Crowell and Emmylou Harris. It’s a welcome return for these musicians who first collaborated on Elite Hotel (1975), one of Harris’ most popular and familiar albums. Crowell was a member of the Harris’ Hot Band in the mid-70s and oddly enough this is their first album. Old Yellow Moon is a no-nonsense country music record from start to finish. It features the busiest fiddler in music, Stuart Duncan and some members of the original Hot Band. The production values are strong and the song selection is mix of new and old with just a dash of nostalgia to keep everybody honest. And honesty is a key value to this record and for these two experienced artists.

I first heard Emmylou Harris on Elite Hotel and her stand out version of the Lennon/McCartney ballad, “Here, There and Everywhere.” It was one of those songs that crossed over into pop with just enough Nashville twang to gratify the purists. Since that release, and some 26 albums later, Emmylou Harris has been one of the most interesting vocalists in music. Her unmistakable voice is a sweet, earnest sound makes you sit up and take notice. But she’s no pushover because she’s rocked with the best of them. Consider her work with Lucinda Williams, Little Feat, or Steve Earle. Not to mention her electric band with Buddy Miller, called Spyboy, Harris has been successful at blending the edgy side of rock 'n' roll with the sweeter, gentler sounds of country.

Caesar Must Die: Shakespeare Behind Bars

Giovanni Arcuri (centre) and members of the cast, in a scene from Paolo and Vittorio Taviani's Caesar Must Die

“That was amazing,” the woman next to me at the New York Film Festival screening of Caesar Must Die last fall said to me as the lights came up. The new film by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani is the kind of experience that makes speaking acquaintances out of strangers. It was shot in Italy’s Rebibbia Prison, a maximum-security facility that houses mostly Mafiosi and drug traffickers, some of whom have been sentenced to “life meaning life,” a colorfully insistent Italian idiom meaning life without parole. At Rebibbia, Fabio Cavalli conducts a theatrical workshop that produces classic plays performed by prisoners, who audition just as they would in any other theatre. The show the Tavianis depict is Julius Caesar, in a free-form translation that Cavalli coaches his actors to read in their own regional accents. But Caesar Must Die isn’t exactly a documentary. The Tavianis apply their trademark expressionism: we hear the thoughts of the prisoners as they lie on their cots, sometimes in that overlapping concatenation we associate with the brothers’ masterpieces, Padre Padrone and The Night of the Shooting Stars, and Simone Zampagni has lit the film, which is mostly in black and white, expressionistically. Only a few sequences are shot in the rehearsal hall or in performance. (We see only the last few scenes and the curtain call of the actual performance: shot in color, they bookend the picture.) Mostly the actors perform in the corridors of the prison, in the yard or in other common spaces, or else in their own cells, so the reality of the prisoners’ lives bleeds into Shakespeare’s narrative – which is, of course, about violence and power, betrayal and vengeance, ideas that, as we don’t need to be told, have peculiar resonance for these men. Sometimes they’re clearly prisoners acting roles and commenting on their meaning, as when Salvatore (Sasà) Striano, playing Brutus, explains to his cellmates what happened in Rome after Caesar’s death and one of them, a Nigerian, relates it to his own country’s history. At other times they seem indistinguishable from the characters they’re portraying, partly because there’s no stylistic discrepancy between Shakespeare’s scenes and the private (and clearly scripted) exchanges among the prisoners. The movie is simultaneously expressionistic and Pirandellian.

Pure Liquid Sunshine: Grupo Corpo at Harbourfront Centre

Members of the Brazilian dance company Grupo Corpo, performing Imã (All photos by José Luiz Pederneiras)

Dance to blast away the February blahs. Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre is not marketing it as such. But there’s no question that the two hours recently spent in the presence of Brazil’s dynamic Grupo Corpo dance company, a feature of Harbourfront’s ongoing World Stage series at the Fleck Theatre, instantly lifted the spirits. The dancing by the 22-member ensemble is bouncy, bright, infectiously happy – pure liquid sunshine. The dancers themselves appear loose limbed, even rubbery, propelled by a love of dance which makes them a true delight to watch. The movement is mostly the message, and it’s physically daring and expressive, fantastically athletic and sensual all at once. Nothing appears capable of stopping the forward-motion drive. Whether pirouetting, leaping or doing a samba on the spot, the dancers are nothing but remarkable specimens of human achievement: the survival of the fizziest.