Lens Wide Open: Adam Nayman Presents The Films of Stanley Kubrick at the Miles Nadal JCC

Director Stanley Kubrick is one of the more paradoxical of major filmmakers. A photographer who became a self-taught movie maker in search of a realist style (Killer's Kiss), Kubrick would eventually become a dedicated formalist making epics (Barry Lyndon). Although he was an American director who began by shooting in real locations (The Killing), he spent most of his late career in a self-imposed hermitage in England inventing locations for his pictures (Full Metal Jacket).While Kubrick is an acclaimed auteur (2001: A Space Odyssey), his films rarely got good reviews when they were released (Eyes Wide Shut). Controversy continually followed him (Lolita, A Clockwork Orange), too. 

Given the perplexities of Kubrick's relatively small body of work, Cinema Scope and Grid Weekly film critic Adam Nayman, who has previously lectured on other controversial directors such as Paul Verhoeven and Catherine Breillat at the JCC Miles Nadal in Toronto, tonight begins a fascinating epic exploration into the long contradictory shadow that Kubrick has cast over the last half-century of American film-making. The Kubrick series is being held every Monday night until June 25th from 7-9pm. Adam and I recently had the opportunity to talk about the series and why he believes that Stanley Kubrick's work still continues to matter thirteen years after his death.

Supermassive: Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar

Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, and David Gyasi in Interstellar

I might not be the best person to review Interstellar. I'm fascinated by our universe and deeply moved by its scope and mystery. I think most people, if they take the time to look up from their smartphones into the sky, also know this special feeling of humility and wonder – I simply tend to indulge in it more often. So I am sorely tempted to heap platitudes and justification upon Chris Nolan’s latest (and arguably greatest) effort, because – while hardly a perfect movie – I think its power to remind us of these feelings can be understood by anyone. So meet me halfway: check your cynicism at the door, and I'll do my best to abandon purple prose for sober consideration.

Neglected Gem #49: Mission to Mars (2000)

When I saw Brian De Palma’s Mission to Mars in 2000 with a heckling, pre-release audience, I didn’t think much of it. A year later, though, the American Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria screened it on a double bill with The Fury as part of a month-long De Palma retrospective, and a group of former students who took me out there to see The Fury persuaded me to stay and take a second look at Mission to Mars. Perhaps it was the juxtaposition of the two movies that made me look at Mission to Mars with new eyes, but the second time around I fell in love with it. The Fury has an almost insane narrative, but it’s a work of such visual inventiveness and emotional potency that, if you connect with it, the story is no obstacle; its excesses serve the movie just as equally ridiculous stories serve Jacobean tragedies and nineteenth-century operas. And though Mission to Mars has a much simpler silly plot, it too is a kind of outline – you might say a metaphor – for De Palma’s ideas about the tension between technology and humanity and the nature of loss, his two favorite subjects.

Mastery of the Art: Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity

Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity

Alfonso Cuarón has made only seven full-length movies in twenty-two years, and his latest, Gravity, is the first he’s released since Children of Men in 2006. Gravity justifies the long wait. It’s exquisite and terrifying, a journey through space at 0G, or zero gravity, that Cuarón, the production designer Andy Nicholson, the editor Mark Sanger (co-editing with Cuarón himself) and his favorite collaborator, the cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, have made simultaneously abstract and grippingly real. (This is one of those rare films that demands to be seen in 3D.) Visually it’s as breathtaking as Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, but without that movie’s self-consciousness or ersatz philosophizing. The film I thought of more often while I was watching was Brian De Palma’s unjustly maligned Mission to Mars from 2000.

He's Not Dead Yet!: Harlan Ellison's 7 Against Chaos

Writer Harlan Ellison’s not dead yet. In a piece I wrote about Ellison last year in Critics at Large, and in reference to his statement in September 2010 that he was dying, I speculated, only half jokingly, that he was still alive because the Angel of Death was scared to try and take him. The truth, as indicated in a recent interview on the cultural Vulture web site, entitled "Harlan Ellison Isn't Dead Yet," turns out to be somewhat more prosaic. Harlan, who is now 79, has been suffering from some physical ailments and emotional ones, too, which had laid him low for a long while, with only the odd short story (the Nebula ward winning "How Interesting: A Tiny Man") to his credit. But fans of the man and his work can rejoice. His first full length work since his fine short story collection Slippage (1997) has surfaced, in the form of a graphic novel. Harlan Ellison’s 7 Against Chaos (DC Comics) is an often riveting tribute, in many ways, to his formative influences as a writer.

Floundering: Why Can't American Cinema Get SF Right?

A scene from Never Let Me Go (2010)

If literary science fiction, which I read regularly, tends to be better at bringing ideas and concepts to life than it is at evoking memorable characters, science fiction movies tend to do the opposite. They often deliver strong characterization and vivid protagonists but generally falter at inserting those people into an imagined future or alternate world that functions logically and believably.

Take Never Let Me Go, the highly critically acclaimed 2010 British film based on a dystopian novel by Kazuo Ishjguro. Admittedly, I haven’t read the book, but the film makes no interior sense whatsoever. The movie’s opening crawl indicates that in 1952 breakthrough scientific experiments cured most diseases and by 1967 the average lifespan was over 100 years old. Yet the inhabitants of that different world use the same technology – radios, cassette tapes – in the same time-frames as we do. That’s simply ridiculous considering the remarkable dramatic medical advancements of Never Let Me Go, which we still haven't achieved in 2011. Should they not have matched their medical breakthroughs by equally great leaps in technological know-how, especially because mankind would have been spared the need to find the cure for cancer and other illnesses and thus had more time to innovate in other fields? A world where illness has been largely eradicated by the '50s is one where DVD players and computers would have been common by the '60s and astronauts would likely have landed on Mars by the '80s. To postulate that the England of Never Let Me Go would look and feel the same as our own is nonsense. Similarly, the movie’s revelation that its main characters – SPOILERS FOLLOW – a trio of young people (beautifully acted by Keira Knightly, Andrew Garfield and Casey Mulligan) were actually clones that were only being kept alive until their vital organs were needed for transplant to their ageing/dying humans is also illogical. (Director Mark Romanek doesn’t do a good job of springing that news on the viewer, I figured it out pretty early on.) If their world was so cruel as to use them for this purpose – and remember they assumed they were fully human – why give them lives, an education and jobs before yanking it all away from them? It would be far more realistic if their 'world' was just made up of false memoires implanted into their brains while they lay in suspended animation or something along those lines. 

The Age of Coming: The Criterion Blu-ray release of Alfonso Cuarón's Y tu mamá también (And Your Mama Too)

No one has ever fused the indissoluble relationship between sex and death in a coming of age story quite like the wildly gifted Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón does in his 2001 Y tu mamá también (And Your Mama Too). Recently re-released on DVD in a sparkling new Blu-ray print by the Criterion Collection, Y tu mamá también boldly plumbs the depths of adolescent eroticism, where sexual surrender brings one in touch with the primal terrors of loss and separation, with a refreshing and shocking candidness. It immediately calls up Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris, which examined with equal frankness the turmoil of sex and death from the vantage point of middle age. After charming audiences with the sophisticated fairy tale A Little Princess (1995), and the sumptuously expressionistic Great Expectations (1997), Cuarón returned to his Mexican homeland to make a sexually rowdy and wildly funny road movie, where two teenage boys, who are best friends in Mexico City, hit the road with the runaway wife of one of their cousins while their girlfriends are away in Italy. Armed with a juvenile code of conduct that is quickly undermined and rendered inadequate by the older woman they journey with, Cuarón unveils with buoyantly sportive humour the unacknowledged homoerotic bonds of male companionship – while also confronting the desperate need one has for sexual satisfaction when mortality looms large in the future. Y tu mamá también, which won the Best Screenplay Award at the 2001 Venice Film Festival, has virtually nothing in common with the more conventional coming of age stories like Rob Reiner's Stand By Me (1986), which sentimentalizes death by using it to reinforce the dubious virtues of staying young, or the Harlequin romanticism of the early Seventies hit, Summer of '42, where sex becomes a tender awakening that makes one forget the finality of death. The more welcoming sensibility that informs Y tu mamá también is alive and anarchic, much like sex itself, and suggests a delinquent version of Truffaut's Jules and Jim (1962) coupled with the rough house friskiness of Bertrand Blier's Going Places (1974).

Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol and the Current State of the Thriller

As a genre, whether in books or films, the thriller is in a terrible state. And no, it's not all Dan Brown's fault. Over the last 20 years, the thriller has devolved to the point where it is often just this side of science fiction. I love good science fiction, so this is certainly no diss of that genre, but when thriller writers and filmmakers feel compelled to produce more and more outlandish plots just to get attention, you know something is wrong in the state of Denmark (and yes, I would consider Hamlet a thriller, one of inaction perhaps, but still a thriller).

Herewith are some of the basic plots of a few thrillers in the last 30 years: a group of former Nazis clone Hitler (Ira Levin's The Boys From Brazil – 1976); a group of scientists raise the Titanic to obtain a rare mineral that the US government can then use to create a sound wave to knock down Soviet missiles (Clive Cussler's Raise the Titanic – 1976); Hitler's right-hand-man Rudolph Hess has survived the war and is now a super villain in South Africa attempting to launch a nuclear device at Israel (Greg Iles' Spandau Phoenix – 1993); a virulent form of the Ebola virus is stolen by an evil group planning to let it free on the world (Ken Follett's White Out – 2004); a plan to destroy the Vatican with antimatter is hatched by a madman who also wants to be Pope – and, oh yes, the novel's hero jumps out of a helicopter using a tarp as a parachute! (Brown's Angels and Demons – 2000); a group of people over centuries try to hide the fact Jesus married and fathered children after his crucifixion – the Catholic Church does everything in its power to eliminate those who know (Brown's The Da Vinci Code – 2003); a madman tries to show that a plan to keep The Word from the whole world is the result of a conspiracy by the Masons – many of whom are at the top of the US government (Brown's The Last Symbol – 2009, just released in paperback in October 2010). 

I could go on, but my point is that even though many of these books are pretty terrible and generally poorly written (and yes, I admit over the years I've read all of these), it just doesn't seem to matter. All of these writers (except Levin, who died in 2007) continue to write and frequently make it onto the bestseller lists around the world. And one, Dan Brown, as we all know, became a phenom because of The Da Vinci Code. I know I'm not going to convince anybody that this genre is bereft when the plots have become this idiotic because these books continue to sell and sell and sell. (Want proof? Look at the New York Times Review of Books Fiction Bestseller List for Sunday, December 12, 2010 – nine of the fifteen listed are thrillers.)

Identity Crisis: The Source Code Switcheroo

“It was a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen.”

That’s the opening line in George Orwell’s classic book, 1984. Here it is once more the “cruelest month,” as poet T.S. Eliot contended in The Waste Land, and a similarly bright cold day. Not so sure about the clocks, but the foreboding in those 20th century literary works surely resonates today. The 1949 novel concerns a totalitarian dystopia where the term “memory hole” refers to enforced amnesia and “Newspeak” is language dumbed-down to foster lack of logical thought. Eliot’s twisty 1922 verses include “I will show you fear in a handful of dust,” “One must be so careful these days” and other despairing observations.

Two new films, The Adjustment Bureau and Source Code (released on April 1st), suggest Big Brother-like societies. In the former production, adapted from a Philip K. Dick short story, Matt Damon plays a politician who encounters the unseen forces – all wearing fedoras! – that manipulate our lives. Source Code, cleverly written by Ben Ripley and smartly directed by Duncan Jones, is a sci-fi thriller starring Jake Gyllenhaal as U.S. Army Captain Colter Stevens. His last memory is of flying a helicopter mission in Afghanistan when he’s suddenly transported onto a commuter train heading for Chicago with a bomb onboard.

The Mozart of Mayhem: Spike Jones and His City Slickers

While re-watching The Marx Brothers in Monkey Business (1931) last week on TCM, I was trying to think of who might possibly be their musical equivalent. (Of course, The Marx Brothers had their own fair share of musical absurdity in their comedies.) Ultimately, I didn’t have to look too much farther than Spike Jones and His City Slickers. From the early forties to the mid-fifties, Spike Jones and his group tore into the pomposity of high culture with a savage intent. Jones implemented a storehouse of rude sounds that made composer Erik Satie’s experiments in Parade (1916) seem polite.

Jones turned musical history into a broadly satirical farce. He made a mockery of honoured classics like Rossini’s William Tell Overture, which he recast as a ridiculously hysterical horse race. The unbearably dippy standard “Love in Bloom” was torn to shreds in much the same manner that The Marx Brothers laid waste to Il Travatore in A Night at the Opera (1935). Johann Strauss’ delicate Blue Danube waltz was transformed into a drunken brawl (in contrast to the lame reverence shown by Stanley Kubrick in 2001: A Space Odyssey). In their assault on Bizet’s Carmen, the group’s “messy-soprano” Eileen Gallagher is heard frightening off three bulls with the mere shriek of her opening aria. Michael “Cub” Coda, of The Brownsville Station (who once sang about "Smoking in the Boy's Room"), remembers his father seeing Spike Jones at the Michigan Theatre in Detroit back in 1945. “They were crazy,” he recalled his dad telling him. “The stage went black and all these sirens and gunshots started going off. Then the stage lit up and it was Spike Jones and His City Slickers…They had a guy playing a toilet seat with strings on it, people onstage wearing wigs and crazy outfits – oh geez, they were nuts.” This nutty group spent their career blowing raspberries at High Art. And they did it with an all-American gusto.

Spike Jones & His City Slickers

Hailing from Long Beach, California, Jones first put together a college dance band that he patterned after Red Nichols’ Five Pennies. But performing standards bored him to pieces. When he met the multi-talented Del Porter, who played xylophone, violin, sax, and clarinet, and had hung out with the great impressionist Mel Blanc, Jones saw the possibility for integrating a little mayhem into the mix. They began as the Feather Merchants, but by the end of the thirties, they became Spike Jones and His City Slickers and their distinct lunacy caught the attention of RCA Records. By this time, the group included violinist Carl Greyson, whose tenor vocal style displayed a twisted grin in songs like “Cocktails For Two”; Red Ingle, who mutilated the sentimental weepie “Chloe,” turning it into a beautiful act of desperate desecration; Winstead “Doodles” Weaver, a former comedian who created the droll voice of the race-track announcer on the William Tell Overture; Freddie Morgan, a goofy-faced, mad banjo player; “Babyface” George David Rock, a trumpet player with the sweet kid voice in “All I Want For Christmas”; and Dr. Horatio Q. Birdbath (a.k.a. Purves Pullen) who contributed mightily to the massacre of “Love in Bloom.” Sir Frederick Gas (a.k.a. Earl Bennett) provided ample demonstrations of his peculiar emissions on songs like “Happy New Year” and “Knock Knock.” The City Slickers dressed like inebriated renegades out of a Preston Sturges comedy, with loud clothes and goofy hats. Their stage presence was a dada explosion from Dogpatch.

Malfunction: Spike Jonze’s Her

Joaquin Phoenix and Scarlett Johansson (on table) in Her

He’s only directed four features in all since his 1999 debut with the startling and brilliant Being John Malkovich. But nothing in Spike Jonze’s oeuvre, which also includes the clever and witty Adaptation (2002) and the moving Where the Wild Things Are (2009), prepared me for his latest film, Her (2013), a failure on pretty much every level but also a science fiction movie singularly lacking in originality, thought or vision. Considering it’s Jonze's solo debut as a screenwriter, he may want to consider letting others write his movies for him. He certainly displays no facility for crafting screenplays on his own that entice and reward the viewer.

Set in the near future, Her revolves around one Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Pheonix), an introverted man still reeling from the breakup of his marriage to his childhood sweetheart Catherine (Rooney Mara). He spends his days in a job that involves writing love letters for people who lack the facility or time to do so but he is lonely himself, resorting to Internet porn to get through his nights. But one day, he’s told about a new invention, a particularly intelligent Operating System (OS) that is all the rage. He buys one and soon the OS (voiced by Scarlett Johansson, Don Jon), who has chosen her own name, Samantha, becomes a permanent fixture in his life, first as a friend and then as something much more, a girlfriend with whom he falls deeply in love. It’s not the worst idea for a movie but it’s also not the revelatory concept Jonze and many critics – the film has (inexplicably) received its share of awards, including being picked best movie of 2013 by the National Board of Review – seem to think it is.

Nothing but Vacancy: Room 237

“I’m not saying we didn’t go to the moon. I’m just saying that what we saw [of the moon landing] was faked, and that it was faked by Stanley Kubrick.”

– some lunatic in Rodney Ascher’s documentary Room 237

In 1980, Stanley Kubrick released his first film in five years, a horror movie based on Stephen King’s bestselling novel The Shining. At some point in the late ‘60s, Kubrick entered a phase in his career where every new project was a huge effort, drawn out over several massively hyped years, to top everything he’d done before, and everything that anyone in movies, and maybe popular culture itself, had done in that vein before. So, just as Dr. Strangelove was taken for the ultimate black comedy of the anti-nukes, antiwar era, and 2001: A Space Odyssey the ultimate sci-fi head trip, and The Shining’s immediate predecessor, Barry Lyndon, was supposed to be the most painterly, lavishly costumey costume drama of all time, The Shining arrived in theaters with the expectation that it would be the greatest horror movie ever made; anything else would be a letdown. The early returns pointed to it being a letdown.

Shot Through with Greatness: Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate

A scene from Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate

Reading the various comments on my Critic at Large’s colleague David Churchill’s evisceration of Michael Cimino’s 1980 epic western Heaven’s Gate proves one thing. Filmgoers are not indifferent to the film, either hating it with a passion or loving it equally intensely. My own view has always been somewhere in the middle, but having now seen the officially approved (by Cimino) 216-minute director’s cut of the movie, stunningly transferred to DVD on the Criterion label, I find my view has shifted somewhat from when I first saw the shortened version of the film more than 30 years ago. (The studio brass forced the director to cut it by more than an hour, destroying it entirely.) Then, I felt the movie was quite impressive but I was most disturbed by all the dramatic licenses it took with history (the lead characters from the movie, Ella Watson (Isabelle Huppert) and Jim Averill (Kris Kristofferson) were killed before the main events of Heaven’s Gate ever took place and didn’t even practice the professions the film had them doing). I had only been reviewing movies for a few years then and still perhaps had something of a naive belief in the ‘truth’ of films based on facts. (I know better now, of course.) But even then, for all my doubts and concerns, I could tell there was something more to the film than the infamous disaster it was supposed to be – and that was even before seeing the (then pre-restoration) full version (219 minutes) of the movie. (Unlike David Churchill, I’ve only ever seen the movie on video or DVD or TV because the one time it played in Toronto on the big screen after its initial disastrous opening, I was not able to go. My loss.) What I sensed and later came to believe and still do, is that Cimino’s epic, like Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (which came out a year earlier and had similar issues concerning length and hubris and controversy), was that it was not at all a great movie but a movie with greatness within it.

2019 in Games: Babies, Bushido, & Belligerent Geese

Like most years, 2019 was a parade of dizzying highs and disappointing lows for the video game world. Join me, won’t you, as I hand out some oddly specific awards to the games that entertained, enlightened, frustrated, and fascinated me most.

Seismic Cinema: Gareth Edwards’ Godzilla

Hollywood loves a mulligan. Spider-Man was only given five years to settle in our collective consciousness before his series was rebooted – but Godzilla, dormant for sixteen long years, has had more than enough time to gestate. Roland Emmerich’s regrettable 1998 bomb is long (and mercifully) forgotten. The time is ripe for the Japanese icon to stomp through cinemas once more. But what kind of beast will emerge this time? I can tell you first-hand: a frightening one.

A Beginner’s Guide to The Shining (or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Listicle)

The impossible path travelled through The Overlook Hotel by Danny (Danny Lloyd) and his Big Wheel is one of the many puzzling features of Stanley Kubrick's classic, The Shining (1980).

It’s that time of year again. The leaves are starting to change colour, everything you never wanted now comes in a “Pumpkin Spice” option, and many of us are beginning our month-long horror movie binges in honour of Hallowe’en. Maybe this is your first year participating in this ritual and you’re not sure where to start. Maybe you’re trying to impress some new friends with your carefully honed critical eye (read: ability to read Wikipedia). Or maybe, like me, you’re feeling the itch to have a horror movie night but you’re lacking the time, energy, or desire to actually get dressed and entertain people so you prefer to connect with like-minded strangers on the internet. Whatever the case, I’ve got you covered with everything you need for a satisfying critical viewing of Stanley Kubrick’s iconic 1980 horror film, The Shining. 

The Empty Place Inside: Alex Garland’s Annihilation

Natalie Portman in Annihilation.

I enjoyed the hell out of Jeff VanderMeer’s novel Annihilation, but I was skeptical it could be effectively translated to the silver screen. Big surprise, I know, but this particular story, in its abstract, expressionist horror, seemed like it would be uniquely difficult to adapt. Unless, of course, there was a great sci-fi craftsman like Alex Garland at the helm. That would change things.

And change things Garland did, making choices in writing and directing a film version of Annihilation that clarified the novel’s abstractions, crafting a story (which, at its heart, is itself about the agony of change) that is very different from its original form, partly to appeal more to a broad audience, and partly because a good deal of interpretation is required in order to bring VanderMeer’s oppressively vague prose to a more concrete visual medium. Annihilation is not going to appeal to most audiences, but then, neither did the novel. I think what Garland achieves with his adaptation far surpasses his source material, as he finds a way to take a gloomy Lovecraftian horror story and mine it for a shattering emotional payload.

The Fog of Film: Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life

Though it’s been a decidedly lacklustre summer at the movies, there’s one film that’s a must see, if you are to believe its almost uniformly rapturous reviews. Apparently, The Tree of Life, the latest opus from Terrence Malick (The Thin Red Line, The New World) is one for the ages, a masterpiece equivalent to any of the great movies, such as, I suppose, Citizen Kane, The Rules of the Game, The Seven Samurai, The ‘Apu’ Trilogy, M*A*S*H and The Godfather, Part 1 and II, to name a few important milestones in world cinema. Well, I can’t concur with that view. The Tree of Life is actually pretty mediocre; a movie that traffics in indulgent, pretentious and often empty (albeit) beautiful imagery. It's a film most defined by the word meretricious: …"apparently attractive but in reality has little value:” That evaluation, too, pretty much sums up Malick’s career.

In many ways, and not just because they share similar eccentricities, Terrence Malick reminds me most of Stanley Kubrick, another genuine American talent who, after a strong film-making debut, pretty much flamed out, delivering mostly wretched, excessive movies in his late career. Kubrick, after offering up such gems as Paths of Glory (1957), Spartacus (1960), Lolita (1962) and Dr. Strangelove (1964), then trailed off and dove relentlessly into a sea of forgettable mediocrity. Excepting his fine A Clockwork Orange (1971), his second half, much less prolific, oeuvre included the nonsensical and loopy science fiction epic 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968); the vapid Barry Lyndon (1975), starring a woefully miscast Ryan O’Neal in what is surely the most tedious costume drama ever made; the (deliberately?) botched adaptation of Stephen King’s fine horror novel The Shining (1975); Full Metal Jacket (1987), an incoherent war movie to rival Malick’s own The Thin Red Line (1998); and, of course, Kubrick’s final movie, the ridiculous Eyes Wide Shut (1999), which transposed a 1926 novella by Arthur Schnitzler to the end of the 20th century while pretending that its themes of sexual jealousy, wherein the woman merely contemplates an affair, would be reacted to in the same fashion nearly a hundred years on.

Richard Gere and Brooke Adams in Days of Heaven.

Malick, for his part, after a stunning, powerful debut with Badlands (1973), loosely based on the life of thrill killer Charles Starkweather, followed up with Days of Heaven (1978), a beautifully shot, somewhat affecting love triangle set in depression-era America. Though I enjoyed that movie, despite the miscasting of Richard Gere as a manual laborer, it was also laden with a distinct lack of narrative flow and a disinterest in strong characterization. Nevertheless, being a departure from his first film, I felt it was a forgivable deviation and I looked forward to what he would do next. However, after a twenty year hiatus, the Malick who returned to film-making, pretty much stood still as a director, continuing to make movies such as The Thin Red Line and The New World (2005), which, even more so than Days of Heaven, concentrated almost solely on forming pretty pictures, eschewing in the process any vestige of flesh and blood emotional dramas, stories that would have left a lasting impact. The Tree of Life, unfortunately, is more of the same.

Power Overwhelming: Marvel’s Doctor Strange

Benedict Cumberbatch as Dr. Stephen Strange in Doctor Strange.

Something I'll call "power balancing" is always a problem for writers working on fantastical fictional stories. How do superpowers stack up against, say, mutant powers? How does a universe like the Marvel Cinematic Universe continue to function with even a shred of internal logic when you throw magic into the mix? According to Doctor Strange, the answer is: you work according to formula.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing. Marvel has had over a decade of practice refining this particular formula, and they're damn good at it by now. Audiences know what they're in for, and the studio has become extremely adept at delivering exactly that (sometimes, if we're deserving, with a little extra on the side). Moviegoers know to expect a hero like Dr. Stephen Strange (an Americanized Benedict Cumberbatch), the goateed egotistical millionaire genius who learns to fight for something greater than himself. They know to expect underwritten and uninspiring villains like Kaecilius (Mads Mikkelsen), who pay lip service to having three-dimensional personalities but always devolve into comically evil archetypes. They know to expect passive, uninteresting love interests like Christine Palmer (Rachel McAdams). They know to expect huge, gut-punching climactic setpieces in which a portal opens above a massive city centre and threatens to swallow up all the normies. (If they're paying attention, they may even expect supporting players like Chiwetel Ejiofor's Mordo and Tilda Swinton's Ancient One, who elevate the material just by being there, punching way above the weight of the movie they're in.) But there's a comfort and a stability in this; these Marvel movies are becoming almost as episodic as their Saturday afternoon source material. Comic book movies are getting ever more, well, comic-book-y – and it's taken almost 20 years for audiences to adjust, but I'm chuffed that we've finally arrived at a general acceptance of how weird and goofy and light and fun this material should be.

Time Waits for No One

Coming back to Ryerson University to teach a film course for the first time since being diagnosed with cancer over a year ago, I decided to start with a class about the nature of time. Even though I had had the idea shortly before I became sick, it had acquired some poignancy during the months of treatment. Time wasn't just the philosophical exercise I first considered, but a tangible entity that I was growing quite intimate with. I came to see that you can't beat time because – to paraphrase George Harrison – time flows on within you and without you. We may try to organize time through our calendars and appointment books to construct a linear path of going forward through the weeks, months and years. But we can run out of time despite what our daytimer tells us. When we are awake, we are conscious of time passing. Yet we sleep for eight hours a night and it never seems like eight hours when we open our eyes to the morning.

Time is independent of our existence whether we are conscious of it or not. It may be one reason why some of us fear going to sleep at night because it's then that our futile control over time slips out of our grasp. As we enter the world of dreams, time shifts into realms of abstract reality. It's movies that allow us to experience time in that abstract reality, as if we were to find ourselves in a waking dream. Perhaps that's why some people fear movies and choose to attend only some pictures, while avoiding others that may disturb their sense of order. Unlike in the other arts such as literature, theatre, opera and the visual arts, where we can experience a work in linear time – giving us full control of what we read, watch and hear – movies are about surrendering our control to the eye of the camera and the sensibility of the person behind the lens.