Neglected Gem #53: Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist (2008)

Kat Dennings and Michael Cera star in Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist (2008)

I recently finished teaching a class on iconic cinema and iconic actors, such as Casablanca, Gone with the Wind, Greta Garbo, Charlie Chaplin and John Wayne, among many others. One of my lectures, the last of eight, was devoted to youth culture, examining the iconic nature of everything from A Hard Day’s Night (1964) to The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), to the films starring Saturday Night Live alumni – National Lampoon’s Animal House (1978), The Blues Brothers (1980) and Ghostbusters (1984) – and, of course, the popular films of John Hughes – Sixteen Candles (1984), The Breakfast Club (1985). The sleeper of the bunch however is the little known Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist (2008), a teen romantic comedy that is more authentic then Hughes’s contrived output (Sixteen Candles is a complete mess, actually). With its smart use of indie songs on the soundtrack, from the talented likes of Vampire Weekend and The National, and deft use of underground New York City locations, it’s a movie which packs an emotional, moving punch, albeit in a sweet, understated way.

The Unwatchable Watchable: Errol Morris' The Unknown Known

Errol Morris (and his subject) in The Unknown Known

Film director Errol Morris once worked as a private investigator and his best part is his investigative-journalist side – the muckraking detective. While planning a documentary about a forensic psychiatrist who became notorious for his “expert witness” testimony in capital punishment cases, he happened to come across a death row conviction that didn't smell right and made a film (The Thin Blue Line) that ended up getting an innocent man released from prison. But Morris’ reputation as one of the greatest living filmmakers, and very likely the greatest living specialist in documentary feature filmmaking, isn't based mainly on 25-year-old headlines generated by his breakthrough movie. It’s based on his being a “stylist” – on his artistic pretensions and the easily recognizable visual and aural tics that make up his style.

Morris has been known to reject the term “documentary” in favor of “nonfiction film,” because he feels that having his movies called documentaries lumps them in with films shown in classrooms and on public television. Frederick Wiseman may well be the most important documentary filmmaker of the past fifty years, but if you happened to walk past a TV set while High School or Basic Training was showing, you could take a glance for a few random seconds and mistake them for a clip from any old TV news show. Morris’ movies look and sound like Errol Morris movies. How impressed you are by the fact that, more and more, they all look and sound like the same Errol Morris movie may depend on whether you use the word “auteur” in casual conversation.

Taking Nothing For Granted: The Holmes Brothers' Brotherhood

The Holmes Brothers have just released their 11th album and these veteran musicians keep getting better with age. For the record, there are only two Holmes brothers, Sherman and Wendall. They grew up in a musical house in Christchurch, Virginia, nurtured by their parents who were schoolteachers. The boys took an interest in music beyond the Sunday morning Baptist hymns and spirituals by tuning to blues artists such as Jimmy Reed and B.B. King. Those influences took a creative hold of Sherman and Wendall who make a beautiful sound deeply rooted, but not confined to, gospel music.

Ebony Sails: Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag (Freedom Cry DLC)

Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag (Freedom Cry DLC)

Downloadable content (DLC) has been an inherent function of the video game industry for over a decade now, and it’s become both a blessing and a curse: it allows us to dive back into the virtual worlds we love and live in them for that much longer, but this comes at the risk of being nickel-and-dimed to death. Some unscrupulous video game developers have been known to split a full product apart and sell you the smaller pieces after the initial release, as though they were designed as "additional" content. The scrupulous ones, on the other hand, invent all-new content which enhances and builds upon the original experience, but instances of this kind of craft are rare in the industry. The Freedom Cry DLC for Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag would have no place in the narrative of its mother game (simply because there just isn’t enough room), and so it sets out to justify its existence through a strong standalone story and engaging new mechanics. Black Flag was the story of Edward Kenway, legendary pirate, and this plays almost like a fan fiction set in that world – it’s a rich enough realm that it feels natural to visit it again through a different character's eyes.

Mr. Vaudeville: Remembering Mickey Rooney

When Mickey Rooney died on April 6 at the age of ninety-three, he’d been in show business for a surely unprecedented ninety-one years. (He was shooting not one but two movies at the time of his death, including the third in the A Night at the Museum series.) His parents were vaudevillians who introduced him into their act when he was seventeen months old; he started making film shorts in 1926, first as Mickey McBan and then as Mickey McGuire. He was all of fourteen when he played Clark Gable’s character as a boy in Manhattan Melodrama, the earliest of his many movies at M-G-M that film buffs are likely to have seen. (It’s a famous picture, though not because of its cast; it acquired instant notoriety when John Dillinger was shot down as he emerged from a Chicago movie house playing it.) A number of film personalities in the early days of the talkies began in vaudeville (Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor, Fanny Brice, The Marx Brothers), but Rooney retained a special connection to it because the musicals he and Judy Garland made in the late thirties and early forties – Babes in Arms, Strike Up the Band, Babes on Broadway and to a lesser extent Girl Crazy, which was the best of them – were imbued with the vaudevillian spirit. They were about brave, persistent adolescents who want to put on shows and usually have to fight authoritarian adults with sticks up their asses who try to get in their way. In Babes in Arms, the flagship musical in the series, which was adapted from a hit Broadway show by Rodgers and Hart, Rooney and Garland and their cohorts are also the children of vaudevillians who are on the road, fighting the Depression in order to put bread on the table, and the success of their kids’ musical revue keeps the do-gooding locals from farming them out to orphanages. The message of all four of these movies was the same: talent will out. And though Rooney also starred in the fantastically popular homespun Andy Hardy series (twice opposite Garland), it was in these musicals that he truly made his mark.

When the Political is Personal: Borgen

Sidse Babett Knudsen and Pilou Asbaek in TV's Borgen

Note: Spoiler alerts.

“Nearly all men can withstand adversity, 

but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.”

- Abraham Lincoln

This aphorism appears at the beginning of the final program in the superb Danish television blockbuster Borgen, which is the brainchild of Adam Price who both produced and was a major writer of the consistently intelligent scripts over three ten-program seasons. (The title refers to the Christiansborg Palace, where the Danish Parliament, Prime Minister's office and Supreme Court reside.) Every episode begins with an epigraph that ranges from Machiavelli to Churchill; a casual viewer might not realize how astute it is until he or she watches it twice, which I highly recommend. Along with The Killing and The Bridge, Borgen has been an overwhelming popular and critical success in the UK, and the trio of shows are beginning to make inroads in North America, primarily through libraries, independent video stores and specialized American channels. Since television viewers on this side of the pond seem to be put off by reading subtitles (although the actors all speak excellent English when speaking to any foreigner), the two police procedurals have been remade for North American audiences with at best mixed, and in my opinion inferior, results. Apparently, HBO is considering a remake of Borgen, but I am not certain how American audiences will respond to a series that deals with coalition politics involving eight political parties, a process likely alien to many of these viewers.

Harmony in Motion: Contemporary Dance in Toronto

Aleatoric Duet No. 2 from he/she

Three different programs of contemporary dance by three different companies took place within days of each other in Toronto at the end of March: Dichterliebe, a revival of a 2012 suite of 16 dances set to 16 sung sections of Robert Schumann’s same titled song cycle (the lyrics are by the late-Romantic German poet Heinrich Heine) which Coleman Lemieux & Co. presented at their Citadel theatre and studio complex in Regent Park; he/she, an evening of new and revised work by Peggy Baker Dance Projects at the Betty Oliphant Theatre, and Around, a new 60-minute work by Dancemakers artistic director Michael Trent which the company, this year celebrating its 40th anniversary, performed as an ensemble at its Distillery District-located Centre for Creation.

Art vs. Propaganda: Bethlehem and Omar

Tsahi Halevi and Shadi Mar’i in Bethlehem

It’s always been highly illuminating to compare Israeli and Palestinian films about their intractable conflict. While I’ve never seen an Israeli film – from Cup Final (1991) to The Bubble (2006), The Syrian Bride (2004) to The Band's Visit (2007) – that has failed to humanize the Palestinians, Israel’s Arab neighbours or its own Arab citizens (and I’ve seen many Israeli films, as a film critic and chief programmer for the Toronto Jewish Film Festival), the Palestinian record is much spottier in that regard. Rashid Masharawi’s Palestinian film Ticket to Jerusalem (2002), a documentary-fictional hybrid, presented a fair, even sympathetic view of young Israeli soldiers, as did Michel Khleifi’s acclaimed Wedding in Galilee (1987), at least until its 360-degree turn into a strident vilification of the same. (It’s as if someone told the filmmaker that he was being too kind to his Israeli characters and needed to adjust the picture.) But otherwise, the norm is more along the lines of Hany Abu-Assad’s Palestinian film Paradise Now (2005), about a pair of would-be suicide bombers setting out to wreak havoc in Tel Aviv. At best, Abu-Assad could only bring himself to condemn suicide bombings as counterproductive and harmful to the Palestinian cause and not as the moral failings or criminal acts they actually are, and he showed not the slightest interest in the possible Israeli victims of the film’s planned terror attack. (The most notable exception to this traditionally myopic view of Israel is Ziad Doueiri’s The Attack (2012) wherein an Arab-Israeli surgeon discovers that his wife committed a suicide bombing and must come to terms with the truely heinous actions of his spouse. Startlingly, Doueiri, a Lebanese filmmaker, spent almost a year living in Israel in order to better understand his country’s “enemy”.) Abu-Assad’s latest film, the 2013 Oscar-nominated Omar, about a young man coerced into becoming an informant for Israel’s security services, is likewise spun out of that one note. Fortunately, we also have Yuval Adler’s similarly-themed Israeli cinematic counterpart Bethlehem (2013) as a provocative point of comparison. It’s a superior film in every way: nuanced, complex and empathic to both sides of the political and human equation in a way Omar doesn’t even attempt to be.

Neglected Gem #52: BBC's Gormenghast (2000)

Jonathan Rhys Meyers in BBC's Gormenghast

2001 was a good year for epic film adaptations of classic fantasy literature. It was the year that the first installment in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy premiered, but it was also the year that the BBC series Gormenghast first aired in the U.S. (It had played in the U.K. the year before.) Directed by Andy Wilson and adapted by Malcom McKay, Gormenghast is based on novelist Mervyn Peake’s trilogy – a “fantasy of manners" – set in an isolated earldom called Gormeghast. (Peake envisioned a longer series of books but died before he could get past the third, Titus Alone. The TV version sticks to the events of the first two, the 1946 Titus Groan and the 1950 Gormenghast, which was very sensible.)

The story begins with the birth of the seventy-seventh Earl of Groan, Titus. (Ian Richardson plays his father, a melancholy bibliophile whose spirits and sanity do not survive the destruction of his library.) All the inhabitants of Castle Gormenghast seem to be mad, yet most of them have style, and Gormenghast is an entertainment for those able to set aside 21st-century attitudes towards democracy and royalty, or at least bend them a little, for the sake of a wallow in pure style. Although the cast is packed with comic monsters, the villain is the lowly born boy who would tear it all down and incite revolution: Steerpike, “a diabolically clever little monster” played by that specialist in louche dandies, Jonathan Rhys Meyers.

Return to Frantic City: A Conversation with Teenage Head and Geoff Pevere's Gods of the Hammer

Teenage Head in 2008: (from left) Frankie Venom, Jack Pedler, Steve Mahon, Gord Lewis (Photo by Stephanie Bell)

The last time I saw Teenage Head, Frankie Venom was swinging from the pipes over the stage, and Gordie Lewis’s guitar sound was circumnavigating my eardrums. Now here we are in the pristine white event space of the Art Gallery of Hamilton, sitting in civilized rows around a raised platform (call it a stage) on which sat four current (or ex) members of the band along with pop critic Geoff Pevere, the author of the new book on the band, Gods of the Hammer, and Hamilton Spectator columnist Graham Rockingham waiting for A Conversation With…Teenage Head. “A Conversation”! Who would've thought? 

Look around. The crowd is here, black leather jackets have given way to wool overcoats, and Converse All Stars have been replaced with loafers. The ladies look good, high heels, black stockings, short skirts, very sophisticated. Wait, there’s a guy in denim, wearing a baseball cap, he’s carrying an armload of old Teenage Head paraphernalia. Oh good, we’re not completely civilized. Someone in front of us accidentally kicks over her glass of dry white wine. Oh good, the floor’s sticky. Sure in the old days it would’ve been a bottle of beer, or even a tableful of draft, that was dumped, and for sure we wouldn’t have wiped it up carefully with polyester napkins, and paper serviettes, we would've simply waited for it to evaporate. The event is part of Hamilton’s GritLit Festival. Now ten years old it celebrates the work of Canadian writers (in general), and Hamilton writers particularly. Peter Robinson (creator of Inspector Alan Banks) was here Thursday, Emma Donoghue (Room and Frog Music) stopped by Friday, and Michael Winter, Catherine Bush and a host of others have participated through the weekend. Tonight though, it’s Geoff Pevere and everybody’s favourite punk band Teenage Head.

Cold Conflict – Captain America: The Winter Soldier

Chris Evans and Samuel L. Jackson in Captain America: The Winter Soldier

The pantheon of superhero films from the last decade that have dominated and defined global box offices often feel bloated with a sense of self-importance, despite their ludicrous premises (see: Man of Steel, The Dark Knight Rises, etc). Captain America: The Winter Soldier is as modest as its protagonist, Steve Rogers, at least as far as such a thing is possible in a blockbuster superhero action feature, and this makes for a refreshingly sober, unaffected entry into the ever-growing Marvel film canon.

As a Canadian and an X-Men fan, I’ve seldom been compelled by Captain America’s character. He’s one of the less “super” superheroes and feels irrelevant to today’s pop culture zeitgeist. This is of course addressed with the fish-out-of-water humour from The Avengers, which depicts Cap’s difficulty integrating into modern society after having been frozen in stasis since World War II. The Winter Soldier takes place two years after the events of that film, and drops this “Can Cap Adapt?” arc in favour of a more relevant and topical story. Cap no longer labours to fit in; he’s now concerned with aligning his 1940s sensibilities with a world of modern conflict, in which the moral boundaries are far less clear, and this existential grappling makes him suddenly much more interesting.

A Threepenny Opera Con Brio

Photo by Kevin Thomas Garcia

Productions of The Threepenny Opera usually stumble over the paradox that though it’s a great play, technically it’s not a very good one. The script by Bertolt Brecht is massively overwritten, with long passages of dialogue that no translation from the German (I’ve encountered several) has succeeded in rendering without awkwardness. The comic scenes may have been partly improvised in rehearsal when the show was first mounted in Berlin in 1928, or else Brecht may have built them around the vaudevillian talents of his cast; now the exchanges between the gangster Macheath (Mack the Knife) and his gang, Mackie and his pal, Chief of Police Tiger Brown, Brown and Jonathan Peachum, the ruthless boss of all of London’s beggars, and Peachum and his equally devious wife just sit on the page, challenging actors to figure out how to make them funny. Yet the play, a raucous social satire that updates John Gay’s eighteenth-century satirical burlesque The Beggar’s Opera, is vibrant, theatrical to the gills, and every time the action pauses for one of Brecht and Kurt Weill’s songs, you know you’re watching and listening to one of the signal achievements in modern theatre. Weill’s music is thrilling: glittering and acid, robust and plaintive, simultaneously redolent of the music hall, the salon and the jazz club.

The Other Hugh Bonneville: Twenty Twelve and W1A

Hugh Bonneville stars as Ian Fletcher in Twenty Twelve and W1A, on the BBC.

As Downton Abbey fans worldwide eagerly await the popular ITV period drama's fifth season, it is a good time to point viewers to W1A, a new BBC comedy series whose brief first season will conclude this Wednesday April 9. W1A stars Downton Abbey's Hugh Bonneville as Ian Fletcher, the new-minted Head of Values for the BBC. Bonneville is returning to a character made famous (at least for British audiences) on BBC's Twenty Twelve, where Ian Fletcher was Head of Deliverance for the London 2012 Olympic Games. Both series not also demonstrate Hugh Bonneville's talent in a contemporary setting – far removed from his gracious, and sometimes other-worldly turn as Lord Grantham in Downton Abbey – but also put Bonneville's quiet but immense charm and comic ability on display.

Time, Power and Song: Time After Time, The Seduction of Joe Tynan and Hair

It's still difficult, if not impossible, to comprehend that we lost our dear colleague and Critics at Large co-founder David Churchill a year ago today. For David was not only my best friend, he was also my counsel. If I tried to recall the number of times this past year I wanted to pick up the phone to get his advice on a piece, request an idea for one, or hear him come up with a brainchild for a series to run, I would quickly lose count. Never mind that every day I went to edit and post a piece, I would look at our homepage and be reminded that he was here and not here. 

I've been wanting to keep his presence on Critics at Large continuous despite mortality making that task next to impossible. Fortunately, his wife, Rose, lent me a box of his writing – both published and unpublished – that allowed me to at least try the impossible. And it was quite a trip dipping into the volume of his work and going all the way back to his film reviews from his university days. Perhaps the bonus was finding in the box the notebook he kept in the mid-Eighties. In it, I discovered handwritten comments he had compiled at a number of screenings we went to together. Sometimes he even had very precise notes to counter my own opinions on pictures we would ultimately disagree on when we finally reviewed them on the radio at CJRT-FM's On the Arts. Reading them today quickly stoked those moments on air when I heard those views for the first time. Reading his quickly scribbled assertions had an alchemical way of bringing his voice back into the present. 

Today I want to reach back to his university reviews where I found it bracing (and not terribly surprising) to discover that David's conversational voice was indeed as recognizable as it became years later on Critics at Large. Last week, Rose commented to me that David was all there right from the beginning. She was saying that he didn't grow into his voice. Judging by the pieces below, I would have to agree. To prove the point, I've decided to include film reviews first published in 1979 from the newspaper, one of the University of Toronto's journals at that time. David's temperament and wit are easily recognizable to anyone who knew him. Since I also want to treat these pieces as if they were copy he just e-mailed me this morning, they are presented as edited from their original source.

Kevin Courrier,
Editor-in-Chief.

The Latest Great Expectations

Ralph Fiennes as Abel Magwitch in Mike Newell's Great Expectations

It would never have occurred to me to cast Ralph Fiennes as Charles Dickens, but he’s superb in The Invisible Woman,which he also directed. And you can scarcely recognize him in the opening scenes of the latest version of Great Expectations (2012) where he plays the convict Abel Magwitch, who alters the life of the protagonist, Pip, bankrolling his ascension to the life of a London gentleman in payment for the boy’s kindness to him during his attempted escape. Fiennes’s performance is small-scale – as readers of the novel know, Magwitch drops out of the story early on, not to return until the final act – but he’s as good as Finlay Currie in the classic David Lean film from 1946 or Robert De Niro in the underappreciated Alfonso Cuarón remake from 1998, which updates the story to contemporary Florida and Manhattan. David Nicholls, the screenwriter (he wrote When Did You Last See Your Father?,which I liked, and One Day, which I didn’t), and Mike Newell (Four Weddings and a Funeral, Donnie Brasco), the director, focus the first part of the movie on the mistreatment of Pip (Toby Irvine) at the hands of most of the adults in his life.

Last of the Great Gadflies: Remembering Lorenzo Semple Jr.

Screenwriter Lorenzo Semple Jr. (1923-2014)

There are two kinds of legendary screenwriters: the folks on Olympus, who (like Robert Towne) pen masterpieces on subjects that are important to them, with every word in perfectly in place, and the gadflies, who live on the money they get for bringing some wit and craftsmanship to commercial assignments and eat out on their collection of great stories. (There is considerable overlap between the two camps.) Citizen Kane was written by a gadfly, Herman J. Mankiewicz; part of Towne’s legend is how much time he’s spent away from his own dream projects to parachute into film sets and work as a script doctor, sometimes on such projects as The Godfather and Bonnie & Clyde, more often on a vast wasteland of junk. Towne once tried to work out his feelings about his career as a much-sought-after, richly paid writer-for-hire, but he needed to assign the protagonist a profession that would reflect what he himself felt about the work but that seemed to him more glamorous, and maybe less morally reprehensible, than trying to tone up the screenplays of Orca and 8 Million Ways to Die. This is how he came to write and direct the 1988 Tequila Sunrise, a movie whose hero is a drug dealer.

Lorenzo Semple, Jr., who died last week at the age of 91, may have been one of the last of the great gadflies. A nephew of Philip Barry, Semple wrote plays and short magazine fiction when he was young, but he found his niche in his forties, when the producer William Dozier hired him to “create” the Batman TV series. Semple had previously worked with Dozier on a series spin-off of Charlie Chan called Number One Son, which was set to go into production when ABC decided it didn’t want a show with an Asian-American hero; according to Semple, the Batman job was Dozier’s way of making it up to him. Semple wrote the first four episodes and the screenplay for the 1966 Batman movie, and stayed on as “Executive Story Editor” throughout its three seasons on the air. He devised and and maintained the poker-faced, Pop Art campiness of the show—the mock-stolid Batman of Adam West pitted against the hamminess of the guest villains, the fight scenes punched up with written sound effects flashing on the screen. All of which is to say that he played an enormous role in making self-aware pop irony mainstream—a accomplishment that it’s easy to have mixed feelings about today, though it must have been fun and refreshing at the time.

The Art of Contemplation: The Seagull at The Huntington

The cast of the Huntington Theatre Company's production of The Seagull, in Boston, MA. (Photo: T. Charles Erickson)

Of his four dramatic masterpieces, Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull is the most autobiographical. It’s a transparent wrestling match in which he works through his personal issues: the tortured experience that is writing, the frustrations of practicing rural medicine, the tragic conflict between artistic purity and celebrity vanity. The Huntington Theatre Company’s current production, starring Kate Burton and her son, Morgan Ritchie, illustrates how the play is itself a contemplation of life. And its singular feature--its unique conceptual vision--is to highlight how this rumination takes place in a meditative milieu. The tragicomic melodrama – the interpersonal conflicts the characters experience – occurs within a sublime pastoral atmosphere, one that gives the audience its own taste of the good life. That the characters can’t access that beauty, though, only reaffirms our inability to live it fully.

A Flawed Theory: Particle Fever

The CERN Large Hadron Collider, in Mark Levinson's documentary Particle Fever

The challenge of Particle Fever is to distil a hugely complex subject into something we can grasp and appreciate: the hunt for the elusive Higgs boson particle, and through it a deeper understanding of the fundamental laws of the universe. It rises to the challenge, presenting a deeply momentous scientific undertaking with passionate clarity. But I’m not sure it will convert those who are not already scientifically-inclined. For those of us who retain the thirst for knowledge we cultivated as children, however, it’s an exciting ride. The film focuses on the theoretical and experimental physicists who gather at Europe’s CERN from all corners of the globe in 2008, before the switch was first flipped on the Large Hadron Collider – a singular moment in the history of science, where literally everything we thought we knew about the universe and how it worked was up in the air. These scientists were buzzing with excitement at the prospect of gathering some truly unprecedented data, using the largest and most complex tool ever designed by human hands. As one physicist remarks, it’s “history happening right before our eyes.”

The Cocoanuts: Marx Brothers Redux at OSF

Harpo (Brent Hinkley), Chico (John Tufts) and Groucho (Mark Bedard) in The Cocoanuts (Photo: Jenny Graham)

When The Marx Brothers came to Hollywood in the late twenties, their first two movie projects were adaptations of hit musical comedies they’d starred in on Broadway, The Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival had a big success with Animal Crackers two years ago, so this season they've included The Cocoanuts in their schedule, and it’s driving audiences into a state of sublime lunacy. I had a good time at Animal Crackers, though it was a bit of a mess. (Friends report that as the run went on it grew crazier and more unhinged.) But you’d have to be a curmudgeon to register a complaint about The Cocoanuts, which Mark Bedard has adapted from the 1925 script by George S. Kaufman and (uncredited in the OSF program) Morrie Ryskind, with songs by Irving Berlin.

Bildungsroman: The Criterion Collection Blu-ray DVD Release of Blue is the Warmest Color

When Steven Spielberg awarded the Palme d’Or to Blue is the Warmest Color – released on DVD this year by the Criterion Collection – last May, he remarked that the jury had taken the exceptional measure of bestowing it not upon one artist but three: Adèle Exarchopoulos, Léa Seydoux, and Abdellatif Kechiche. Directed and written by Kechiche, who adapted it from Julie Maroh’s graphic novel of the same title (with the help of his regular collaborator Ghalia Lacroix), Blue is a coming-of-age story of startling intimacy. At its core is a love affair between two women, Adèle (Exarchopoulos), a high school girl whose deep appetite for sensual experience is flared by a momentary chance meeting with a blue-haired stranger on a city street, and Emma (Seydoux), the punkish art student who captures Adèle’s curiosity and then her passion. This picture is as entirely a collaboration as Richard Linklater’s Before movies, which he co-created with his stars Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, or as My Dinner with André and Vanya on 42nd Street were between Wallace Shawn, André Gregory and Louis Malle, but Blue is the Warmest Color is yet more electrically and originally sensual and more philosophically capacious. It reminded me of at least a dozen pictures I love, but it’s not quite like anything I’ve seen before: it’s a groundbreaking erotic drama.