Podcast: Interview with Filmmaker Mira Nair (1988)

A scene from Mira Nair's Salaam Bombay! (1988).

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show On the Arts, at CJRT-FM (today Jazz 91.1) in Toronto. With the late Tom Fulton, who was the show's prime host and producer, we did a half-hour interview program where we talked to artists from all fields. In 1988, one of those people was film director Mira Nair.

When I sat down with Nair, her debut feature film Salaam Bombay! was winning her praise worldwide. (In 2011, the film was included in The New York Times' s list of "The Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made.") She would go one to direct many more popular and acclaimed films, including Mississippi Masala (1991), Monsoon Wedding (2001), and most recently Queen of Katwe (2016).

– Kevin Courrier.

Here is the full interview with Mira Nair as it aired on CJRT-FM in 1988.

 

Love Craft: The Big Sick

Kumail Nanjiani and Zoe Kazan in The Big Sick.

The Big Sick, which chronicles a barely fictionalized version of the real-life romance between comedian Kumail Nanjiani (playing himself) and therapist/writer Emily V. Gordon (played by Zoe Kazan), has to be one of the best romantic comedies I’ve ever seen. Applying the label of that genre, and all the baggage that comes with it, feels wrong in this case, because part of what makes The Big Sick so brilliant are the ways in which it subverts and elevates the genre it belongs to. It’s a romantic comedy in the sense that it’s hopelessly romantic and ruthlessly funny, but it’s also much more than those surface-level elements, so I’m not sure what else to call it. I guess it’s enough to say that it’s one of the more finely crafted films, full stop, that I’ve seen all year.

Tomorrow Never Knows: The Private Music of Paul McCartney

Be prepared to be shocked. Paul McCartney considered as an avant-garde musician? As usual, truth is stranger than fiction, and certainly more interesting than myth. Thrillington, recorded in 1971, was merely the second of several secret identities that McCartney cleverly used to further his creative ambitions while still delivering the bright and shiny pop goods we have all come to identify with his illustrious name. The first persona was the world famous Sergeant Pepper, the second was Percy Thrillington, the third was the relatively unknown and more recent Fireman: all are reflections of the complicated artistic world of this highly innovative and experimental musician. Yes, that’s right, Paul is experimental. Even Thrillington, an orchestral concurrent rendition of his complete 1971 Ram album under a completely fictional composer’s name, is, in its own quirky way, a totally avant-garde experiment in anti-pop.

In a Groove: Revisiting High Fidelity (2000)

John Cusack as vinyl collector Rob Gordon in High Fidelity 

Chances are, if you've ever spent a great deal of time in a used record store (in the days when there were used record stores), you will probably recognize the crackpot characters that populate Stephen Frears's frisky comedy, High Fidelity. I would also venture to guess that you might see something of yourself in the adolescent obsessions on display – especially if you are a music enthusiast. Based on Nick Hornby's delightfully funny novel, High Fidelity is about how pop music might sow the seeds of love but can't bear the fruit to nourish and sustain our relationships.

Didacticism and Virtue at the Shaw Festival

Shawn Wright and Jeff Irving with the cast of Androcles and the Lion at the Shaw Festival. (Photo: David Cooper)

At every performance of the Shaw Festival’s production of Androcles and the Lion, George Bernard Shaw’s 1913 dramatization of the Aesop fable, a member of the audience is picked to play the lion. Other theatregoers who have been handed colored balls before the play begins are invited to throw them onto the stage at will, interrupting the dramatic action and prompting a variety of responses from the actors, who have to tell an anecdote or recite a section of Shaw’s preface to the play or share any thought that pops into their heads. This process is in the service of what Tim Carroll, the Shaw’s new artistic director, calls “two-way theatre,” which is intended to break down the barrier between the actors and the audience. Carroll directed Androcles, but his mission is visible in the productions he didn’t stage, too. In Wilde Tales, the lunchtime show, adapted by Kate Hennig from four Oscar Wilde fairy tales and directed by Christine Brubaker, children from the audience sit along the sides of the Court House stage with signs and other props; their participation is encouraged at certain points in the action. In Alan Bennett’s The Madness of King George, directed by Kevin Bennett (who trained with Carroll during his tenure as associate director at Shakespeare’s Globe in London), the house lights remain on during the performance and the cast interacts with members of the audience – especially those who are sitting right on the stage of the Royal George – just as actors at the Globe play up to those groundlings who have found standing room right below the thrust, within easy reach of the performers. Five of the six plays I saw at the Shaw began with a member of the staff – an assistant stage manager or head dresser or what have you – addressing the audience and providing some tidbits of information about his or her job.

Living Spaces: The Family Camera at Toronto's Royal Ontario Museum

The Dewan family visiting Niagara Fall, August 1980. (Photo courtesy of Deepali Dewan)

There is a fascinating photography exhibition at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) this summer with a partner site at the Art Gallery of Mississauga (AGM). The Family Camera is based on the premise that family snapshots play a key role in defining, celebrating and memorializing the idea of family, even if some of those photographs are missing. Many of them record the migration process to Canada of a wide variety of families, and the photographs have been taken not only in Canada but in countries from which the families have migrated. This is an exhibition that is rich in storytelling and history, large and small.

Nothing To Be Afraid of Here: Ben H. Winters’ Underground Airlines

The recent furor over HBO’s announcement of a proposed TV series to be called Confederate that imagines a world where the South seceded from the Union and has kept slavery as an institution to the present day is puzzling for any number of reasons. The objections seem to be to the very concept of the show, created by David Benioff and D.B. Weiss (Game of Thrones), that it would be offensive to black viewers and exploitative of the subject of slavery. (Black writer Roxane Gay labelled it "slavery fan fiction" in a New York Times op-ed.) But that argument ignores the obvious fact that the idea is not exactly a novel one in fiction. Science-fiction writer Harry Turtledove wrote an epic ten-book series on this very subject in his Southern Victory series (1998-2007). Kevin Willmot’s CSA: The Confederate States of America was a 2004 film mockumentary which posited a British-made documentary examining the present-day CSA, an empire that spans Cuba, Mexico and Central America, and the realities of its racist culture, complete with a revised history of America. (In the film's imagined history Mark Twain, Ralph Waldo Emerson and others left to go live in a free Canada and President Abraham Lincoln also ended up there after being free from imprisonment by the Confederacy.) And last July saw the release of Ben H. Winters’ similarly themed novel Underground Airlines (Mulholland Books). So why the fuss about an idea that is hardly a radical departure from the literary or visual norm? The answer might be because it hits too close to home.

Maudie: A Window on the World

Ethan Hawke and Sally Hawkins in Maudie

The unassuming bio Maudie by the Irish director Aisling Walsh is a small-scale beauty about the Nova Scotia folk artist Maud Lewis (Sally Hawkins) and her relationship with her husband Everett (Ethan Hawke). Maud, crippled by juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, goes to live with her grim, puritanical Aunt Ida (Gabrielle Rose, in a finely sketched performance) in Digby after her brother Charles (Zachary Bennett) sells the house they grew up in. (In the Depression-era Canadian Maritimes, the son gets the inheritance.) Finding her new environment unendurable, Maud answers Everett’s ad for a live-in housekeeper and, though he’s an ornery loner and sometimes a brute, they become lovers and finally – at Maud’s insistence – they marry. It’s an uphill odd-couple romance in which her spirit and humor and common sense slowly bring out unexpected sensitivities in him. And her whimsical nature-inspired art, with which she decorates his ramshackle house – a single room with a sleeping loft – becomes an additional means of income for them (he makes a meager living peddling fish) after an American, Sandra (Kari Matchett), who summers in the area starts to purchase her little homemade cards and then commissions her to make paintings. Over time Sandra becomes her best friend.

Inventory Management, Vol II: The Splattening

Splatoon 2 was released by Nintendo, for Nintendo Switch, on July 21.

"Inventory Management" is the period of rest and thoughtfulness that occurs during breaks in the action, in which we organize and clear out all the unnecessary clutter we've accumulated during our adventures. This column, like its sister column Critic's Notes & Frames, embraces this spirit of enjoyable tidying up by acting as a receptacle for all the reviews, thoughts, and musings about games and gaming culture that wouldn't fit anywhere else. – Justin Cummings

Splatoon 2 – which, if we lived in a just and proper world, would be called “Spla2n” – is Nintendo’s second swing at one of its first new IPs in decades, building on the promising but undercooked foundation of squooshy, gooshy fun from the first Splatoon (2015) for WiiU. I tried the original when it came out, but never owned it; it was a game I appreciated more for philosophical and aesthetic reasons than as an actual experience. I loved that Nintendo had taken a chance on a new and unproven brand – something that the company’s risk-averse executives had avoided for years. I loved that they created a sort of development incubator for younger talent, and that the ingenuity and flair of those voices was allowed to come through in their first product. And I loved many of the things the game itself achieved, with its weird, unique, family-friendly shooter gameplay.

But I didn’t love it enough to buy it.

Come from the Heart – Without Getting Killed or Caught: The Life and Music of Guy Clark by Tamara Saviano

(l.to r. Townes Van Zandt, Susanna Clark, and Guy Clark.)

Guy Clark (1941-2016) may not be a household name, but in many circles he is considered one of the greatest songwriters in American music. Author Tamara Saviano goes to great lengths to tell us so in her important biography of the singer-songwriter, Without Getting Killed or Caught: The Life and Music of Guy Clark, recently published by Texas A&M University Press. Saviano is the perfect choice to tell Clark’s story because she’s been writing about him for several years at Country Music Magazine. She's also interviewed him several times. One of her best essays about Clark appeared in the 2014 issue of The Oxford American featuring the music of Texas. Her sentimental memoir about Clark’s 1975 release Ole No. 1 provided fresh insights about the album. So I was genuinely enthused about this biography and its author. Unfortunately, due to an overuse of facts and anecdotes, Clark’s story gets a little lost in the narrative.

Podcast: Interview with Novelist Martin Amis (1981)

Martin Amis, in 1981.(Photo: Martin Lawrence)

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show On the Arts, at CJRT-FM (today Jazz 91.1) in Toronto. With the late Tom Fulton, who was the show's prime host and producer, we did a half-hour interview program where we talked to artists from all fields. In 1981, one of those people was British novelist Martin Amis.

When I sat down with Amis, his fourth novel, Other People: A Mystery Story, had just been published, with his best-known books – Money (1984), London Fields (1989), and Time's Arrow (1991). the last short-listed for the Booker Prize – still to come. Other People was Amis's first published novel after he had made his transition to becoming a full-time writer.

– Kevin Courrier.

Here is the full interview with Martin Amis as it aired on CJRT-FM in 1981.

George Bernard Shaw, Lillian Hellman and Paula Vogel: Issues

Andrew Lawrie, Sara Topham and Jim Mezon in the Shaw Festival's production of Saint Joan. (Photo: David Cooper)

This article contains reviews of Saint Joan, The Little Foxes, and Indecent.

George Bernard Shaw lays out the argument of Saint Joan with unerring precision. Joan is a French peasant, a teenager, unwavering in her Catholic devotion yet possessed of a country girl’s common sense; when she hears the voices of saints in the church bells, urging her to lead an army to throw the English out of France, she accepts them without doubt or hesitation and her no-nonsense certainty that she is doing the right thing convinces one man after another, right up to the Dauphin, whom she dreams of helping to crown King Charles VII. But as soon as she wins the war for him she finds herself mired in political turmoil that she doesn’t understand and that will end inevitably with her being burned at the stake. She has run afoul not only of the English (obviously) but of the church, represented by the Archbishop of Rheims and the Inquisition, who find in her intimate relationship with God a threat to the Catholic hierarchy. Even the Dauphin, now the monarch, is put off by her arrogance, which earlier he, like the officers she kicked into battle, found inspiring and sensible. The more she insists on being true to the simple faith that got her there in the first place, the more she damns herself in the eyes of the church, which forms an unholy alliance with its secular arm (and the English) to execute her.

Dark Mirrors: Get Out and Race in America

Daniel Kaluuya in Jordan Peele's Get Out (2017).

“The truth is, they don’t surround us. We surround them. This is our country."

– Glenn Beck, Fox News Channel, March 13, 2009.

Jordan Peele’s gripping film, Get Out, which explores contemporary race relations on a micro-level through the prism of horror comedy, has received considerable attention from critics, including this site’s Justin Cummings and Kevin Courrier. Among other films, they have rightly pointed out its cultural markers as Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and The Stepford Wives. In both versions of the latter, wives are reprogrammed into robotic doppelgängers, and Get Out can be viewed as a sinister version of Dinner. But Sidney Poitier’s other 1967 film, In the Heat of the Night, also comes to mind. His role as the urbane cop who encounters southern redneck racists finds its mirror image fifty years later in Get Out, in the black photographer Chris’s unease with the seemingly polite but cringe-inducing patronizing of white liberals, a veneer that covers their malevolent and dangerous presence. I would add two fictional progenitors to Get Out: H. G. Wells’s early science-fiction novella, The Island of Doctor Moreau, about a physician who experiments on animals to turn them into human-like hybrids, and Stephen King’s End of Watch, which posits the idea that the consciousness of a comatose psychopath can be transferred to the minds of others who become the agents of his nefarious plans.

Voices from the Grave: George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo

Author George Saunders (photo by Alex Garcia / Chicago Tribune 2013)

Tibetan theology and the private grief of Abraham Lincoln might not seem like two subjects that naturally go together, but George Saunders masterfully interweaves them in his stunning novel Lincoln in the Bardo. The sixteenth president of the United States has fascinated writers and artists ever since his emergence on the national stage, leading most recently to films such as Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, best-selling nonfiction such as Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals, and shlock like the “mashup novel” Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter and its movie adaptation. However, in this case the titular Lincoln is not Abraham, but rather his son Willie, who died in February of 1862, when the Civil War had been raging for less than a year. Interred in his grave, Willie finds himself in bardo, a liminal state between life and death that features in some Buddhist interpretations of the afterlife. Here, he encounters a panoply of strange new neighbors, such as the naked Hans Vollman and the youthful Roger Bevins III, who sprouts a multitude of eyes and arms whenever he begins rhapsodizing about the beauty of the world that he’s left behind, as if trying to adequately appreciate the entirety of creation. Willie and his companions don’t know that they’re dead, and in large part their ignorance propels the plot of the novel. They’re joined by a wide cast of characters that peoples (or haunts) the graveyard, ranging across every conceivable social, racial, and moral division within their society and often replicating those same hierarchies in death as in life.

High Stakes: Netflix’s Castlevania

Trevor Belmont (voiced by Richard Armitage) in Netflix's Castlevania.

That video game adaptations are generally awful is pretty much a matter of public record. The bad – your Resident Evils, your Tomb Raiders, your Max Paynes – are too numerous to count, and the good – your Wreck-It Ralphs, your Scott Pilgrims, or even The Wizards – usually earn that distinction by not actually being adaptations of a specific game at all. I don’t need all the digits on a single hand to list the adaptations I genuinely like, and they all come with an asterisk anyway.

So the bar is, and has been, set very low for decades now. We’ve all been waiting for something to come along and raise it, demonstrating to a disbelieving non-gamer public that there’s rich fiction to be culled from these sources and reimagined in a cinematic context. I’m not saying that Netflix’s new Castlevania series, written by Warren Ellis, is that adaptation – but it’s damn close.

Sometimes The Remake Is Better: Panique vs. Monsieur Hire

Michel Simon in Panique (1946).

Note: The following contains spoilers for Panique (1946) and Monsieur Hire (1989).

TIFF Bell Lightbox, the Toronto International Film Festival’s year-round screening centre, is presenting French classic cinema this summer in Toronto, as it often does during the warm months. One highlight -- or, at least, they think it is --  in their series Panique: French Crime Classics, is the revival of Julien Duvivier’s 1946 Panique (Panic), a dramatic film starring Michel Simon as Monsieur Hire, an unpopular man who is suspected of murdering an elderly woman and whose presumed innocence is quickly thrown by the wayside as his neighbours hound him to a tragic fate. Usually these neglected films, revived for audiences who may not know of them, turn out to be worth your time but Panique, though not entirely devoid of interest, isn’t one of them. It’s a movie whose lofty ambitions aren’t quite reached. But you can catch a variation on the same film in Patrice Leconte’s 1989 Monsieur Hire, also based on Georges Simenon’s 1933 short novel Les Fiançailles de M. Hire (Monsieur Hire's Engagement), a movie that is Panique’s superior in virtually every way. (Any number of other films in the French crime series, including The Wages of Fear [1953], Rififi [1955] and Touchez pas au grisbi (Don't Touch the Loot, 1954] as well as in the related film series centered on filmmaker Jean-Pierre Melville [Army of Shadows, 1969] can make that claim, too.)

When We Dead Awaken: George Romero (1940-2017)

Filmmaker George A. Romero died this past Sunday, July 16, at the age of 77.

Everyone who has had a nodding acquaintance with the popular culture of the past quarter-century or so knows what zombies are. Zombies, which are often called “walkers” or “the infected” or just anything but “zombies,” are people who have died only to be resurrected as inarticulate, humanoid beasts. Decaying but still animate, they are ferociously hungry, and they feast, cannibalistically, on those still living. If they kill someone and leave enough of the corpse intact to rise and stagger about, that person too becomes a hungry zombie. Once a zombie plague has begun, either because of a new fast-spreading virus or a scientific experiment gone wrong or for no detectable reason at all, the countdown to apocalypse is well under way; as the Lord of the Underworld puts it in one of William Messmer-Loebs’s graphic novels about the Greek philosopher Epicurus, when the dead and the living go to war, the living always lose. Once transformed, zombies may make a beeline for those they loved in their former lives, either because of some innate tracking system or just because of their close proximity, but they cannot be reasoned with and have no sentimental feelings, or any feelings of any kind except hunger; the living are nothing but a food source to them. And they can be deterred only through complete physical annihilation – the destruction of their brains, along with as much else of them as possible – which can make for some pretty gory filmmaking. We know all this thanks to Night of the Living Dead, a 1968 horror movie made in Pittsburgh by the director George A. Romero and his screenwriting partner, John Russo, on a budget of $144,000.

Elephant in the Room: The Mystery of Jack White

“Nothing is improbable until it moves into the past tense . . . ” – George Ade

As a member of The White Stripes, The Raconteurs, The Dead Weather and the Rome project (with Danger Mouse, Norah Jones and Daniele Luppi), Jack White III has certainly proven himself as a songwriter, singer, performer and musician. But it's also an impressive list when you add up White’s own production work with his bands, as well as producing other stellar artists like Loretta Lynn, Wanda Jackson, The Greenhornes, Dexter Romweber Duo, his wife Karen Elson and even his pal Conan O'Brien.

White also oversees the record label he founded, Third Man Records, where his productions are released and where occasional live concerts are captured on analog tape in the back room. But the real action has always been taking place on 8-track, 2-inch tape in his self-designed, private studio in Nashville, where he's been busy at work since September 2009 on many diverse projects, including Wanda Jackson's excellent album, The Party Ain't Over, and the launch of his publishing enterprise, Third Man Books.

Berkshire Report: Where Storms Are Born and Baskerville

LeRoy McClain and Myra Lucretia Taylor in Harrison David Rivers’ Where Storms Are Born. (Photo: Daniel Rader)

There aren’t any startling surprises in Harrison David Rivers’ Where Storms Are Born on Williamstown’s Nikos Stage, but it has a dramatic arc and it was written with actors in mind – Rivers has given the ensemble of six plenty to play. And it has patches of sharp, lyrical writing; I think Rivers has talent. (This is his fifth play but the first I’ve encountered.) Its high point is the climactic monologue by Myles (Leroy McClain), whose death at thirty-one in prison, where he was serving a life sentence for murder, is the starting point of the play. Myles appears in flashback at different points but this speech is a dramatization of the letter he wrote his kid brother Gideon (Christopher Livingston), the protagonist of the piece, revealing the truth about the murder. It’s his way of reconciling with Gideon, who has refused to visit him in jail, and of giving him something to hold onto, and as both a descriptive piece and a confessional one, it’s vivifying and affecting. (McClain reads it with brio.)

Who Watches the Watchers: Sepinwall and Seitz's TV (The Book)

A scene from The Sopranos, one of more than 100 shows discussed in Alan Sepinwall and Matt Zoller Seitz's TV (The Book).

“When you hear the words The Dick Van Dyke Show, imagine the gears of a Swiss watch ticking.”

– Alan Sepinwall and Matt Zoller Seitz, TV (The Book).

The best criticism, whether it is of the written word or flickering images on a screen, isn't tempered by love – it is fuelled by it. TV (The Book) (Grand Central Publishing, 2016), by television critics Alan Sepinwall and Matt Zoller Seitz, has the stated ambition to present an established TV canon, to boil down decades of television and take a first crack at providing readers with an "essential viewing list." Substantial television criticism is as new as TV's still-recent surge in ambition and quality, and popular book-length studies of any comprehensive nature are rare (Sepinwall's own 2012 The Revolution Was Televised and David Bianculli's 2016 The Platinum Age of Television are among the few). Sepinwall and Seitz shared a TV column in New Jersey's Star-Ledger in the late 90's and, though this is their first collaboration in two decades, the dialectical spirit of that relationship marks the text as a whole. With TV (The Book), Sepinwall and Seitz offer an appropriately down-to-earth reflection on an art form that is populist par excellence, a book that is more conversation than classroom.