A Guide for the Homesick: Buddy Melodrama

Samuel H. Levine and McKinley Belcher III in the Huntington Theatre's A Guide for the Homesick. (Photo: T. Charles Erickson)

In Ken Urban’s new play A Guide for the Homesick, which the Huntington Theatre is producing in its South End space at the Calderwood Pavilion, two young Boston men meet at an Amsterdam bar and wind up in a hotel room. For Teddy (McKinley Belcher III), the encounter is a pick-up, but when he hints around, Jeremy (Samuel H. Levine) assures him that he’s misread the signals – though we’re not so sure. The set-up is familiar: this is a strangers-with-secrets play. Teddy has been vacationing with a work friend who’s about to get married, and for some reason his traveling companion has disappeared and his fiancée keeps calling Teddy’s cell phone. Jeremy went to Africa as a medical aid worker after graduating from Harvard and something went disastrously wrong, prompting him to return – reluctantly – to the States.

Leading with Love: Reflections on the End of Survivor’s Remorse

Mike Epps, Tichina Arnold, RonReaco Lee, Jessie T. Usher,  Teyonah Parris and Erica Ash in Starz's Survivor's Remorse.

Deshauwn: When Cam hit and all the big agency vultures started circling, how'd you keep your boy?
Reggie: I did my job.
Deshauwn: That's it?
Reggie: That's it.
Deshauwn: I feel like I should be paying you or something for dropping all these gems, man . . . You want some cocaine?

– Survivor’s Remorse, “One-Love” (Season 2, Episode 5)

Last Sunday, Starz aired the final two episodes of the fourth season of Survivor’s Remorse – five days after the cable network announced the show’s cancellation. After four increasingly strong seasons, the LeBron James-produced and Mike O’Malley-created rags-to-riches pro-basketball dramedy came to an abrupt end. The series premiered in 2014, but chances are that you have never heard of it – or, if you have, you may have (like myself) been long put off by its unrevealing title. But if you have been watching, news of its cancellation will have gutted you – and not only because the ad hoc series finale left numerous storylines hanging. Ballsy, insidiously provocative, and philosophically inclined, Survivor’s Remorse just may have been the smartest show on television.

Fashion Down Under (Why It’s On Top)

“The assumption that Australia is a season behind is no longer relevant,” says Dion Lee,
one of several Australian designers taking the country's fashion global.

Australia is known for many things, most of them rooted in the natural world – koalas, kangaroos, kookaburras and Crocodile Dundee types strutting across the Outback when not surfing the waves of the country’s incredible beaches. Fashion has never been one.

But that perception is changing thanks to a growing number of Aussie designers turning Down Under into a top player in the global apparel industry. The past year has seen a greater number of Australian fashion brands leap from relative obscurity to international cachet, led by such trailblazers as Zimmermann. The flirty swim and ready-to-wear label has 25 boutiques across Australia and another eight internationally, including a first in London’s prestigious Mayfair district and East Hampton in Long Island. In Canada, the brand is sold through Holt Renfrew.

“We’re not trying to be like anyone else,” says Simone Zimmermann, who founded the namesake brand with her designer sister Nicky Zimmermann in Sydney in 1991. “We are always trying to be the best at what we do, and that’s made us different.”

Podcast: Interview with Wendy Hughes (1984)

Wendy Hughes and John Hargreaves in My First Wife (1984).

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 writers and artists from all fields. In 1984, I sat down with Australian actress Wendy Hughes.

With an acting career spanning four decades, Wendy Hughes is probably best known to North American audiences for 1979's My Brilliant Career and for her recurring role as Dr. Carol Blythe on Homicide: Life on the Street. In 1984, she was in Toronto promoting the film My First Wife, part of her long collaboration with director Paul Cox. Their most critically acclaimed film together was Lonely Hearts (1982), and their last was Salvation (2008). Wendy Hughes passed in 2014, at the age of 61.

– Kevin Courrier.

Here is the full interview with Wendy Hughes as it aired on CJRT-FM in 1984.

Victory Vindication!: Studio MDHR’s Cuphead

Cuphead was released by Studio MDHR on September 29.

I had been hotly anticipating the release of Cuphead, the debut game from independent Canadian developer duo Studio MDHR, since its very first reveal trailers. I mean, how could you not? At a glance, it’s abundantly clear that the game offers something that has literally never been seen before in gaming: a vibrant visual style modeled after the Disney and Fleischer cartoons from the 1920s and 30s. Cuphead’s animation – and its general sense of polish and pizzazz – is so jaw-dropping that it almost didn’t matter what the game actually was. I didn’t care if the thing was going to be any good or not; I just wanted to bask in its aesthetic.

I was delighted to discover when it finally released last month that, in spite of my low expectations, there is indeed more to Cuphead than meets the eye, and that its pleasures in terms of gameplay precision, retro mechanics, and difficulty are a match for its visual (and sonic) delights. Much ballyhoo is being made about its level of challenge, and whether or not it may be prohibitive to those who just want to enjoy its unique style, but I think the way Cuphead handles its difficulty is exemplary. It’s the same type of punishing, balanced, satisfying design that I find so compelling in some other very different games that are also infamous for their difficulty.

Into That Good Night: The Image of Mortality in Art and Culture

Dylan Thomas.

In 1952, one year before his untimely passing at the far-too-young age of 39, Dylan Thomas wrote one of his most famous poems, "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night," in which that repeated chorus followed observations on why mortality seemed to bug him so much. “Old age should burn and rave at close of day; / Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” Ironically, in 1936, when he was younger and less literally at the doorstep of that diminishing light, Thomas had written a different but equally arresting poem, "And Death Shall Have No Dominion," which optimistically celebrated the fact that we could never be vanquished by that damn light switch. Oh, what a subtle difference one’s proximity to the darkness can make.

Such deep poetic insights into the human condition invite us to consider the importance of three key subjects and themes that have recurred throughout human history: the fact of our mortality, the potential for immortality, and the opportunity for transcendence. Art and cultural history are both replete with a perpetually challenging wonderment relating to these basic human subjects, whether it is in the form of poetry, philosophy, religion, mythology, painting, sculpture or movies. In addition, these themes are explored equally through liturgical and sacred as well as secular and entertainment formats. In a sense these themes are tied to the elemental subjects expressed in art throughout its long history from the cave wall to the computer screen: the mysteries of the self, of society, of nature and of the spiritual.

Critic's Notes & Frames Vol. XXIV

Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers (photo by Mary Ellen Matthews)

I didn’t realize how much I had taken for granted my love of Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers. While I have collected and enjoyed Petty’s music for years, I’ve never taken the time to contemplate why his best songs (and there are many) have always brought me such happiness. But for the last 40 years, Petty and The Heartbreakers helped keep some of the idealistic dreams of the sixties alive. They didn’t, however, do it by showing a nostalgic reverence for the era and its music. Rather they captured the music’s urgency, its uncompromising demand for freedom which lies right at the heart of all rock & roll. Whether it’s in an anthem like “I Won’t Back Down,” a plaintive ballad like “Southern Accents,” or a scorching rocker like “You Wreck Me,” Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers created an immediacy that made each song sound both fresh and fully alive with possibility. For those who remember the joy they felt when a great song came through their tiny earphone on their transistor radio, Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers brought that instant delight to the music they played. I think critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine nailed Petty’s appeal and longevity perfectly when he said that he and The Heartbreakers "didn’t break from tradition the way their punk contemporaries did. Instead, they celebrated it, culling the best parts of The British Invasion, American garage rock, and Dylanesque singer/songwriters to create a distinctly American hybrid that recalled the past without being indebted to it.”

Time and the Conways: Time Lost and Found

Elizabeth McGovern, Matthew James Thomas, Cara Ricketts and Anna Camp in Time and the Conways. (Photo: Jeremy Daniel)

The English playwright and novelist J.B. Priestley was fascinated by time and wrote a series of plays about it, though only one, An Inspector Calls, has tended to get performed on these shores. But now Roundabout Theatre has elected to open its 2017-18 season with his Time and the Conways. First produced in 1937, the play was inspired by J.W. Dunne’s theory of time. It’s set shortly after World War I, at a 21st birthday party for Kay Conway, one of six siblings in a moneyed British family, and nineteen years later, when the Conways have fallen into financial disaster and personal unhappiness; act three – performed, in Rebecca Taichman’s production, after the sole intermission – is continuous with act one.

Enigmatic Reunions: Linden MacIntyre’s The Only Café

Author Linden MacIntyre.

Ari Folman’s animated 2008 quasi-documentary Waltz with Bashir is the filmmaker’s cinematic effort to address and perhaps atone for his complicity in the 1982 massacre of thirty-five hundred unarmed Palestinian civilians in the West Beirut refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. Folman was a nineteen-year-old Israeli soldier at the time and he repressed almost all memories of the events until, twenty years later, a friend recounted a recurring nightmare of a pack of ravenous, fanged dogs running through the streets of Tel Aviv before stopping at an apartment building and snarling up at a silhouetted figure in a window.

This visceral nightmare is the opening scene in the film and the effect is electric and immediately engages the viewer. Both Folman and his friend are convinced that the dream is related to what happened in Beirut years earlier because the dreamer recounts how he killed twenty-six watchdogs during the war. Folman seeks out friends and compatriots to interview who recall their experiences, which often bleed into fantasies of that surreal time. The animation is particularly effective in visualizing these fantasies. The interviews became the film’s fulcrum as animated versions of likely very real people speak about their memories with Folman’s avatar. With the assistance of one of his own recurring dreams, Folman is able to piece together what did happen when a Christian Phalangist militia committed these atrocities with the unwitting assistance of the Israelis, including his personal role in that massacre. At this point, the animation gives way to actual footage of the slaughter's aftermath and its effect is extremely powerful.

Neglected Gem # 108: The Clock (1945)

Robert Walker and Judy Garland in Vincente Minnelli's The Clock (1945)

When it was released in 1945, The Clock was a moderate box-office success. But most people wouldn’t recognize the title today unless they’ve happened across it on Turner Classic Movies, where it’s a perennial. The plot is simple. Corporal Joe Allen (Robert Walker), a soldier on a forty-eight-hour leave in New York before departing for the front falls in love with Alice Maybery (Judy Garland), a secretary he encounters by chance in Penn Station – she trips over his foot at the bottom of an escalator and loses her heel. Drawn to her immediately, he asks her to show him the sights of the city; surprising herself, she agrees, and they spend the afternoon at the Metropolitan Museum. He asks her to meet him that night, and they spend the entire evening together, into the small hours of the morning, when they are befriended by a milkman and wind up making his deliveries for him when he gets hurt. By now Alice and Joe are deeply in love. They decide to get married before he returns to camp, but obtaining a license and getting to the justice of the peace by the end of business hours present challenges they almost fail to overcome. They do overcome them, however, and spend their wedding night in a hotel before Joe has to leave Alice. That’s the entire story.

The Clock gave Garland her first non-musical role, and it was the first non-musical project for its director, Vincente Minnelli, whom she requested as a replacement when the original director, Fred Zinnemann, didn’t work out. Both star and director had just come off Meet Me in St. Louis, an unqualified triumph, and they married as soon as The Clock wrapped; their feelings for each other surely leaked into the picture, which is one of Hollywood’s loveliest romantic dramas. No one ever shot Garland as exquisitely as Minnelli – or lit her like George Folsey, the cinematographer on both movies. (Minnelli directed her in only one subsequent film, The Pirate, and he was behind the camera for her numbers in Ziegfeld Follies and Till the Clouds Roll By as well.)

Infinite Regress: David Foster Wallace & Writing About Writing and Not Writing

David Foster Wallace giving a reading at San Francisco's All Saints Church in 2006 (photo by Steve Rhodes)

It has recently come to my attention that the meaning of life can be found in the 1996 novel by the late American author David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest. I can indeed confirm this, even though it is a delayed realization of some fifteen perplexed years. There are a number of explanations for why it took so long to realize that the meaning of life is easily found in Infinite Jest (page 492, to be exact) but those would not add anything salient to this basic empirical fact. The meaning of life recurs on page 997, as if for some sort of echo effect that manages to reassure the astute reader that, indeed, he or she is on the right track after all. But just where does that track lead? Did DFW find out? If so, after visiting us from 1962 to 2008, he is regrettably no longer able to file his remarkable reports from the front. Or has he only gone on to the actual front? “One never knew, after all, now did one now, did one now did one,” as he himself said in the “radically condensed history of post-industrial life” from his Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, 2007. Late late Wallace.

If one could envisage a large balcony jutting off a big old ornate building somewhere in the Swiss Alps (SA in Wallace-speak), with obscurely wounded inmates lounging on large deck chairs bundled in thick blankets and conversing about the meaning of life in their own distinct accents or dialects, then one could probably see that Harry Haller is there from the novel Steppenwolf, Hans Castorp is there from The Magic Mountain (he is their genial host, in fact), Ulrich is there from The Man Without Qualities, Gwyon is there from The Recognitions, Benny Profane is there from Pynchon's V  Should Salinger or . . . God, no, who wants to listen to Holden with his constant cringing and whining? Certainly not gentlemen of the caliber of Haller, Castorp and Ulrich. Old-world, you know. He could always sit with Profane, I suppose. After all, it’s a community of shadows of their former selves, or of their creative authors. And Wallace’s Hal Incandenza IJ character is sitting there quietly in the corner, seemingly lost in a private reverie, or maybe he’s just pouting, thinking about Norman Mailer.

Cells Within Cells, Interlinked: Blade Runner 2049

Ryan Gosling in Blade Runner 2049. (Photo: Stephen Vaughan)

Note: This review contains spoilers for Blade Runner 2049.

I have a . . . complicated relationship with Ridley Scott. I’m skeptical enough of his work, both old and new, that the prospect of a sequel to one of his better-loved films – directed by another filmmaker, to boot – was less than appetizing to me. I simply didn’t agree that the world needed more Blade Runner; Scott’s visually gorgeous 1982 tone poem was a sumptuous enough meal for me (if not a very nutritious one), whose working elements felt like they would be next to impossible to recreate. Learning that Denis Villeneuve, one of my favourite filmmakers, was the one being tapped for the sequel only served to complicate my feelings further. The casting of Ryan Gosling as the new blade-running protagonist boded well; the inclusion of Hollywood’s chief aging grumpypants, Harrison Ford, did not. It was nearly impossible to calibrate my expectations, so . . . I chose not to. I tried to ignore the marketing campaign for Blade Runner 2049 (except for the tie-in short films, which I thought were brilliant). I went to see it with very little idea of what I was in for.

Battle of the Sexes: The Limitations of Decency

Emma Stone as Billie Jean King and Steve Carell as Bobby Riggs in Battle of the Sexes.

Emma Stone is one of the greatest pleasures to be had at the movies these days. The spark she sets off comes simultaneously from braininess and personal warmth, and in movie after movie she pulls off the trick of suggesting sophistication without a trace of affectation; she’s an old-world Hollywood star with a distinctly twenty-first-century hipness and sexiness. You may think of Jean Arthur or Margaret Sullavan with just a hint of Katharine Hepburn, but it’s emphatically the contemporary world of experience that she inhabits. As Billie Jean King in Battle of the Sexes taking on Bobby Riggs (Steve Carell) on the tennis court in their historic match, she’s playing a story set nearly half a century ago, but it’s a modern breakthrough story, about a superlative athlete who proved, in the early days of the women’s movement, that women could be the equal of men in the sports realm and deserved the same respect (and the same monetary rewards). It’s also the tale of a young woman – King is twenty-nine, the age Stone herself will be in a few weeks – who confronts a gay sexuality concealed under the surface of a superficially happy but dispassionate marriage. Stone gives a beautifully understated performance in which her character’s struggles, disappointments, discoveries and triumphs register as glimmers of emotion in a pool of practiced calm. It’s a perfect intersection of instinct and technique.

Podcast: Interview with Poet Phyllis Webb (1982)

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 writers and artists from all fields. In 1982, I sat down with Canadian poet Phyllis Webb.

At the time of our conversation, Talonbooks had just released The Vision Tree: Selected Poems, which collected selections of her work from 1954-1982. The collection would go on to win the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry later that same year. Over her long career, Webb has also worked for CBC Radio where, in 1965, she created, with William A. Young, the long-running radio program Ideas. Her most recent book of original poetry was 1999's Four Swans in Fulford Harbour.

– Kevin Courrier.

Here is the full interview with Phyllis Webb as it aired on CJRT-FM in 1982.

 

Gaslight: Stage and Screen

Kim Stauffer and Mark H. Dold in Barrington Stage Company's Gaslight. (Photo: Scott Barrow)

The 1938 British chestnut Gaslight is seldom revived; most people know it – if at all – by the 1944 George Cukor movie, which won Ingrid Bergman her first Oscar. (A previous version, made in England in 1940 with Diana Wynyard, shows up on Turner Classic Movies every now and then.) Barrington Stage has chosen the play to close its 2017 season, and it’s the first time I’ve seen it live since another regional group nearly three decades ago produced it under its original Broadway title, Angel Street. Gaslight is a psychological melodrama, set in London in the 1880s, about a woman whose husband is slowly driving her to madness by convincing her that she loses or hides objects in their home and then can’t remember she’s done it, and that, moreover, the footsteps she hears over the ceiling at night and the inexplicable dimming of the gas lamps are all in her mind. Jack Manningham is two kinds of villain: a sadistic domestic tyrant of the Victorian variety as well as a psychopath who killed the previous owner of their house to rob her of some priceless rubies that he was never able to unearth. The murder remained unsolved, and now, fifteen years later, he’s returned with a bride whose fortune he uses to buy up the property so he can continue his search. Driving her into an asylum is his way of getting rid of her. But Bella Manningham is the play’s protagonist, though she’s able to triumph over her husband only with the unlooked-for help of Inspector Rough, a Scotland Yard detective who was a novice on the original investigation and who recognizes Manningham (though he’s changed his name) when he passes him in the street after he and Bella have moved into the murder house.

Just Possibly: ABC's Kevin (Probably) Saves the World

Chloe East and Jason Ritter in ABC's Kevin (Probably) Saves the World.

Yvette: In every generation since the dawn of man, there are 36 righteous souls in the world. And they protect humanity by merely existing. Now there's only one. You, Kevin . . . you are the last of the righteous. 

Kevin: Cool.

The last network series Michele Fazekas and Tara Butters brought us was Reaper, in 2007. Telling the story of a slacker-turned-devil’s helper, Reaper was a blast for the two seasons it ran on the CW. It was cartoonish, noisy, and profane – and hardly had a redemptive bone in its body. Fazekas and Butters’s new fantasy series, Kevin (Probably) Saves the World, premiered on ABC last Tuesday, and one thing needs to be said right off the bat: it is nothing like Reaper. Beyond the broad plot of a sad-sack man-boy given a tacitly epic mission that shakes up his mundane existence (a thumbnail that could just as easily describe Chuck), Kevin is as earnest as Reaper was caustic – and, moreover, comes with an unapologetic and often compelling message of hope.

Wait and See: Fox’s Ghosted and ABC’s The Mayor

Adam Scott and Craig Robinson in Fox's Ghosted.

I think I like Ghosted –  though, to be honest, I’m not sure. Even though I’ve watched roughly 22 minutes of Fox’s new paranormal comedy, I have no idea if I’ve seen anything that will be representative of the kind of show that it will eventually become. It’s a dilemma that’s inherent to any attempt to critically evaluate the sort of serial storytelling that’s central to how television currently functions, and one that initially put me off shows that would later become favorites of mine, most notably Parks and Recreation. For a number of reasons, this problem seems particularly acute in the case of Tom Gormican and Kevin Etten’s sitcom version of The X-Files.

Stories and Voices: Richard Wagamese's The Medicine Walk

author Richard Wagamese

I had never heard of Richard Wagamese until earlier this year when his untimely and sudden death at the age of 61 was announced. Over the summer I read his novel, The Medicine Walk (McClelland & Stewart), published in 2014, and I so valued it that I have read three more of his books since.

Wagamese was an Ojibwe from the Wabaseemoong Independent Nations in northwestern Ontario. He was a prolific writer. He wrote 6 novels, a book of poetry, and five non-fiction titles. He is best known for his novel, Indian Horse (Douglas & McIntyre, 2012), which won the Burt Award for First Nations, Metis and Inuit Literature. This story has now been made into a film that was premiered at TIFF this past September. Wagamese was also an award-winning journalist and producer. He was the recipient of the National Aboriginal Achievement Award for Media and Communications, the Molson Prize and the Canada Reads People’s Choice Award.

His writing addresses the psychological impact of residential schools on those who suffered through that experience as well as how those events continue to impact their families and communities. His novels also deal with the racism directed at indigenous people, while describing strong relationships between indigenous and non-indigenous characters. His books are imbued with a sense of hope.

A Cry to the Silent Heavens: Darren Aronofsky’s Mother!

Javier Bardem and Jennifer Lawrence in Mother!

Note: This review contains spoilers for Mother! 

Mother! must have been as painful to make as it is to experience. It’s a brutal expression of faith, misanthropy, and the cycle of creation and destruction, as abstract as it is harrowing. It’s a film that both invites and scorns interpretation, using its broad metaphor and overt symbolism in ways that feel extremely personal. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen in a cinema setting. It terrified me.

Jennifer Lawrence is “Mother,” and Javier Bardem is “Him.” He struggles to write while she labours to meticulously rebuild the house they share, his childhood home, which was lost in a fire. They are alone in this house in the middle of an endless wilderness – until a houseguest (Ed Harris) drops by, eventually bringing his wife (Michelle Pfeiffer) with him. Bardem invites them to stay. They encroach, ever more boldly, upon their hostess’s patience and hospitality, while the film builds aggressively towards a shocking, shattering climax. This is not reality. This is a living nightmare, a parable of impotence and fear and ego, whose scope expands and contracts sickeningly from the incredibly personal to the vast and unknowable.

Gestures in the Dark: The Abstraction of Bianca Biji

Trying So Hard by Bianca Biji,. (2015, 31 x 44 cm.)

"The minute atom has as many degrees of latitude and longitude as the mighty Jupiter."

– James Lendall Basford

Two forms of human communication immediately come to mind when viewing the incisive and dramatic abstract paintings of the Belgian artist Bianca Biji: sign language and calligraphy. In their deft command of a strong but silent gestural language that is both classically modernist and cheekily postmodern at the same time, her paintings summon what Harold Rosenberg in the late '40s and '50s called “action painting.” But they breathe new life into the visceral theatricality of her legitimate precursors, Kline, Tobey and Miró, by injecting fresh fuel to the ongoing fire – especially the sublimely smoldering embers of Franz Kline. It is not at all a negative thing to say that her work engages in a striking visual conversation with Kline in the best possible way: as optical poems.