Shining On: Celebrating John Lennon's 70th Birthday

It was the most perfectly hallucinogenic day of my life. I had been more stoned on previous occasions – it was the 1960s, after all – thanks to a variety of experiments with consciousness. In early April of 1969, however, magic mushrooms and a certain song transformed my world while tripping in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “And we all shine on/ like the moon and the stars and the sun...,” John Lennon was singing in the headphones covering my ears. I had ingested two little brown, wrinkled pieces of fungus that rendered the music extraordinary. The lyrics were speaking to me; I suspected they might contain the most important message of the 20th century: “Instant karma’s gonna get you/ Gonna knock you off your feet/ Better recognize your brother/ In everyone you meet...” Although I easily could have continued listening to Lennon again and again, my three similarly wasted friends persuaded me to accompany them on a walk. Outside, everything looked even more beautiful than could reasonably be expected. I smiled at every stranger we passed and they all appeared to smile back.

Empathy: Jeffrey Friedman and Rob Epstein's Howl

When Allen Ginsberg wrote his epic poem “Howl” in 1955, after being encouraged by the anarchist scribe Kenneth Roxworth to free his voice, it was an attempt to recreate the spontaneous prose that his friend and novelist Jack Kerouac accomplished in On the Road (1951). “I thought I wouldn’t write a poem but just write what I wanted to without fear, let my imagination go, open secrecy, and scribble magic lines from my real mind – sum up my life – something I wouldn’t be able to show anybody, writ for my own soul’s ear and a few other golden ears,” Ginsberg once said about his famous ode.

The new film, Howl, by Jeffrey Friedman (The Celluloid Closet) and Rob Epstein (The Times of Harvey Milk), sets out to get inside those “magic lines” to illuminate how Ginsberg’s poem, with it’s free-form jazz rhythms, worked its hoodoo on an awakening audience of American bohemians seeking cosmic freedom in the mid-fifties. Howl, which stars James Franco as Ginsberg, is a film of bottomless empathy for its subject. The movie examines how Ginsberg’s “Howl” provided a framework for the acceptance of his homosexuality, as well as a vehicle for coming to terms with his mother’s death from mental illness. (The poem itself was written for Carl Solomon whom he met in a mental institution.) Yet “Howl” would also go on to ignite an obscenity trial in 1957 once San Francisco poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, owner of City Lights Books, published the work in 1956 as part of a collection titled Howl and Other Poems. While celebrating the quest for spiritual freedom in Ginsberg’s work, Friedman and Epstein successfully get at the irreverent roots of Ginsberg’s rebellion and why “Howl” became such a passionately impish and angry sonnet.

From Jackal To Weasel: The Legend of Carlos

Sure, Carlos chronicles the rise and fall of an extremist, but the brilliant Olivier Assayas drama also is very much about the wages of personal decline. Shot as a three-part French television miniseries, the picture profiles a Venezuelan named Ilich Ramirez Sanchez who reinvented himself as the dreaded Carlos. (It was a British newspaper that later added “the Jackal” to his nom de guerre.) Periodic archival footage serves as a reminder that this account is more or less how it all went down; additional truth emerges from magnificent writing, photography, editing and acting.

By the time he appears on screen at age 23, in the early 1970s, the arrogant idealist (portrayed by Edgar Ramirez) has honed the Marxist views inherited from his parents and furthered by studies in world domination at a Moscow university. There’s also been some training in Jordan as a fighter for the anti-Zionist cause. While many of his American contemporaries are demonstrating against the Vietnam War, Carlos chooses a path far more insidious than that of the Weather Underground. “I don’t believe in protests,” he says at one point. “Words get us nowhere … Behind every bullet we fire, there will be an idea.”

The Eclectic and Provocative World of Olivier Assayas

Of all the many talented filmmakers working in France today, none is as eclectic and adventurous as Olivier Assayas. From his 1986 debut film, the psychologically daring Désordre / Disorder) (1986), wherein a group of musicians accidentally commit a murder and then try to cope with the stark reality of what they’ve done, to his superb ‘romance’ about young star crossed lovers,  1994’s L’eau froide / Cold Water, Assayas quickly staked out a terrain where you could be sure of only one thing: he would not make the same movie twice. His oeuvre includes genre exercises that pay tribute to Hong Kong and French cinema (1996’s inventive Irma Vep), descents into horror (2002’s disturbing Demonlover), provocative intellectual dramas (1998’s Fin août, début septembre / Late August, Early September), emotional elegies (2008’s L'heure d'été / Summer Hours), a story about a junkie trying to kick her habit (2004’s gritty Clean) and even a lush costume epic (2000’s Les destinées sentimentales). In his career, Assayas has displayed an unique breadth and range of filmmaking styles and genres, with possibly only Briton Michael Winterbottom (Code 46, Genoa, The Road Trip) rivaling him in that department.

That decision never to repeat himself is a deliberate one, he said, during a wide-ranging interview in Toronto to promote his latest film, Carlos, the true story of the infamous terrorist known in the West as Carlos the Jackal.

Two Excerpts: David Churchill’s Novel, The Empire of Death

In July 2008, I’d been working on an idea for a novel set in Jazz-era New York City. The research was intense and the project was daunting. Since it was to be my first novel, I gradually came to see that I wasn’t ready for something that complex. I hadn’t yet set the idea completely aside when I settled onto my couch one very rainy Sunday to watch a little TV. I turned on the History Channel and watched a show called Cities of the Underworld. This American documentary series, hosted in 2008 by Eric Geller, examined the underground realms of cities around the world. On this afternoon, it was about the 280 kilometres of abandon limestone quarries beneath the city of Paris. By the late 1700s, these tunnels were collapsing, toppling city buildings into the underground. At the same time, the city’s cemeteries were full to bursting. During the rainy season, cadavers would get washed out of the cemeteries and end up in people’s basements. 

The government decided to do two things: one, send men into the underground to build support pillars to prevent further collapse; and two, move the six million skeletal remains from the city’s cemetery into the underground. Henceforth, this world would be called the catacombs. Only one 1800-metre portion of the catacombs contains the skeletal remains. It is now one of Paris’ oddest tourist attractions. The bones are all piled up neatly. Most of the bones are held in place by a wall made up of tibias, femurs and skulls. Every few years, the walls start to collapse. The exhibit is closed for several months as workers go in and rebuild these bone walls to prevent further collapse. As I watched this, I had a ‘what if’ moment. My 'what if' moment became the starting point for my novel, The Empire of Death. My protagonist, Martin Maxwell, is one of those people who, every three or four years, is brought in to rebuild those walls in the catacombs.. 

The first excerpt is from part way into Chapter One. Martin Maxwell is out on the town with his friend, Calandra Smith. He is about to return to Toronto after working in the catacombs for the previous five months. Unfortunately, due to the intensity of the work, this was his only chance to get together with the Paris-based Calandra. In a mostly deserted restaurant, La Marlotte, Martin and Calandra observe a couple coming in and, over the course of an hour, breaking up. The woman abruptly departs, leaving the man alone at his table:

Whatever LoLa Wants: The New Face Of Law & Order

The familiar cha-chung sound is there to accompany the inter-titles that separate scenes, but Law & Order: Los Angeles, which premiered September 29 on NBC, seems to be a breed apart in the pantheon of creator Dick Wolf. This certainly is not a carbon copy of the groundbreaking original show -- just plain Law & Order -- now gone after 20 years on the same network. For one thing, composer Mike Post’s distinctive theme music over the opening credits is missing. Ditto for the ubiquitous verbal introduction. And the look of LoLa, as it has been dubbed, is almost shocking. Longtime fans of the Mother Ship, which is what everyone calls the now-defunct drama, and of the two New York City spin-offs, Special Victims Unit and Criminal Intent, may need to wear shades. Tinseltown is a place of bright sunlight and spacious homes in fashionable hues unknown to the gritty five boroughs, where cramped apartments, dark alleyways, shadowy streets, vacant buildings and menacing parks have been a mainstay of all three prime time cops-and-courts series. Unlike the dingy digs in those L&Os, the LA squad room is disconcertingly sleek and modern.

Unfulfilled Potential: Remembering Arthur Penn and Tony Curtis

Director Arthur Penn and actor Tony Curtis passed away one day apart last week: September 28 and 29. Both talents, it can be argued, were never truly fulfilled. At the very least, they never achieved their possible greatness. Considering Curtis was acting in films and TV from 1949 until 2008 (and was rumoured to be up for another role when he died), his reputation rests on very few projects: The Sweet Smell of Success, (1957), The Defiant Ones (1958), The Vikings (1958), Some Like It Hot (1959), Spartacus (1960) and maybe The Boston Strangler (1968). Except for The Defiant Ones and Some Like It Hot, the pictures he's remembered for are ones where he was not the lead. Was he ever a great actor? Probably not, but when he was good, he could be very good. Yet, due mostly to his own choices in life (he was more interested in jumping the bones of, supposedly, 1000 women and living the Hollywood life, than in really practicing his craft), Curtis never thrived as perhaps he should have.

Hasta La Vista, Gringos: Oliver Stone Goes South

Talk about verisimilitude! Oliver Stone’s first crack at capitalism run amok was Wall Street, in 1987. That hit film came out one year after Salvador, his feverish drama about a boozy photojournalist covering war-torn Central America. This month, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (read Kevin Courrier's review here), a sequel that’s also raking in big bucks at the box office, is hot on the heels of his 2009 examination of a region closer to the Equator than El Salvador: Latin America. South of the Border, a documentary, travels with him through six countries as he interviews democratically elected leaders whose left-leaning perspectives probably alarm the U.S. government.

A Comedy of Malice: David Fincher's The Social Network

David Fincher’s new movie, The Social Network, gives off an exhilarating buzz. With a tip-top script by Aaron Sorkin (The West Wing, Charlie Wilson’s War) that goes snap, crackle and pop, the picture has some of the razor-sharp timing of classic screwball comedy. But you’ll never make the mistake of confusing this movie for a romance. The Social Network – which is the story of Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) the billionaire founder of Facebook, the on-line social network that currently boasts over 500 million active users – is a movie about mercenary genius nerds. While the movie doesn’t celebrate their unethical guile, it does pretty far into the scheming brains of social outsiders who find devious ways to get on the inside. Just imagine Budd Schulberg’s What Makes Sammy Run? (1941) for the computer age.

Fincher and Sorkin aren’t out to make any claims about the value of Facebook; they’re more interested in the motivations of those who could have imagined it. Basing the story loosely on author Ben Mezrrich’s The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal (2009), the biggest irony Fincher and Sorkin present is how Zuckerberg, who had but one friend – his Facebook business partner, Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield) – and made many enemies (too numerous to count), could possibly set up such a social phenomenon. The irony is so rich and woven into the texture of the story that Fincher and Sorkin wisely let it simmer.

Looking Back: Summer Movies at the Rep Cinema

The advent of DVD has been a mixed blessing when it comes to the patterns of film releases at second run, or repertory theatres. Because the window from theatrical to DVD release has been consistently narrowing, the process of a movie going from first to second run has been accelerated as well. Most films, including hits like Inception, are getting to the reps a mere few months after they open commercially. The problem, however, is that with these quick DVD releases, films end up playing only one or two months at the rep house before they disappear for good. Most repertory cinemas are loath to screen a new film when it’s already on DVD, presuming (probably correctly) that too many patrons won’t want to see it on screen if they can rent it for less money at their video shop. All this serves as a prelude to my review of some summer movies that I caught at my local rep house, the venerable, 105 year old Bloor cinema, in September. One of those films, the disappointing The Kids Are All Right, was covered off by Critics at Large’s Susan Green. Here are four more films to consider (though one of them should be avoided) when they get to DVD. But if you can, try to see them on screen. That’s still the best way to appreciate movies.

Essential Cinema: Dreyer's La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc/The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)

As part of the grand opening of the TIFF/Bell Lightbox facility in Toronto, they compiled a list of the 100 most essential films of all time. Over the course of the next few months, these films will be screened in pristine prints, at one of their five cinemas. Screening tonight is the second showing of what I consider one of the greatest films ever made – and named number one on the Essential Cinema list – Carl Theodor Dreyer's La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928). But there is a caveat. The reason it became one of my favourite films is a bit convoluted.

Knocked Out Loaded: Neil Young’s Le Noise

Neil Young’s Le Noise is a centered, focused and authentic recording designed to both inspire and knock you on the head. Young has also knocked himself on the head. Le Noise features the kind of raw ambience that he hasn’t achieved since Ragged Glory (1990). And he’s served it up with some serious lyrical content. Young has had a career of tripping up his muse to continually stir up his creativity. In fact, looking over his long body of work, he’s spent decades shifting both his and our expectations of where he would go next. Freedom (1989), which contained electric and acoustic versions of “Rockin’ in the Free World,” dipped into a variety of musical styles. That album led unexpectantly to the quietly conceived best selling Harvest Moon three years later. Next, he rocked out with the members of Pearl Jam on Mirror Ball in 1995 before following that with the under-recognized country/roots record Silver & Gold (2000). Five years later, he returned with the beautifully rendered and reflective Prairie Wind.

Nowhere Land: "Heartbreak Hotel" and "There's a Place"

On the 40th Anniversary of the release of The Beatles' Let it Be album, here is a lengthy excerpt from my book Artificial Paradise: The Dark Side of The Beatles' Utopian Dream (Greenwood-Praeger, 2008):

When rock 'n' roll first began its promise was pretty basic: good times lay ahead. With that primary assurance, a captivating pact was also struck with listeners. The world was going to be a different place than it was today. As early as 1954, Bill Haley's simple pledge told us we'd find our freedom by putting our glad rags on and rocking around the clock. But the song did more than just rock around the clock. Youth riots broke out in movie houses after it was featured in the opening credits of The Blackboard Jungle (1955), an otherwise cautionary story about juvenile delinquency. In the same year as Bill Haley, The Penguins, a quietly graceful doo-wop group with ultimately only one hit up their sleeve, promised us a world of feasible pleasures when they asked us in "Earth Angel": Will you be mine? In answer, people danced with their hips moving just a little bit closer to their partners'. When Elvis Presley first decided to shake his hips on national television, nations of eager teenagers were given permission to do likewise -- and shake them they did.

Enigma: Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (Free Press, 2009)

After spending 14 years researching and writing Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (coming out in paperback in November 2010), Robin D. G. Kelley was probably surprised that the book received limited acclaim. As an academic whose written many books about the African-American experience (Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics and the Black Working Class), I believe Kelley wanted to get this story right by working hard at researching the details of Monk’s life from the time he was born until he died. But I think he would have been more successful if he approached the life of this groundbreaking jazz pianist through his art rather than as a subject for biographical study. Consequently, Kelley fails to generate enough critical ideas of his own other than what he learned from all of the facts, interviews and tapes that he accessed. Kelley’s impressions of Monk and his music become stifled in sluggish linguistics with only a few bright lights of analysis and opinion.

A Change Is Gonna Come: The Life and Music of Bettye LaVette

Imagine growing up with a jukebox and a future music legend in your living room. That was a typical evening in the childhood of Betty Haskins, who would go on to become acclaimed rhythm-and-blues singer Bettye LaVette. Employees at a General Motors factory, her parents moonlighted in the 1950s by selling barbecue sandwiches and corn liquor at their Michigan home. This attracted touring African-American gospel groups, such as the Blind Boys of Alabama and the Soul Stirrers, featuring a then-unknown vocalist named Sam Cooke. They could eat, drink and listen to tunes there; nightclubs were off limits for them during the era of segregation.

Snoozer - Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps

I doubt if there could be a timelier sequel, given the recent economic meltdown, than Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. But timing is pretty much all it has on its side. Director Oliver Stone returns to the Machiavellian world of high financing that he first examined in Wall Street (1987), but the new picture is enervating and more dramatically conflicted than the original. It’s a snoozer.

Stone had a huge hit with Wall Street, and not just because it neatly reflected the yuppie obsession with junk bonds and insider trading. In his previous films (and screenplays), Stone revealed a split personality. Pictures like Salvador (1986) and Platoon (1986) may have shown Stone to possess a more left-wing perspective on American foreign policy, but the guy who also wrote Midnight Express (1978) and Year of the Dragon (1985) seemed to simultaneously hold some of the same right-wing macho attitudes of John Milius. That split added tension to Salvador (still his best movie) and most of Platoon, but in Wall Street, Oliver Stone smoothed over the cracks in his polemics. He created an American fascist of the financial world in Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas), an amoral predator, who wrecks companies to score millions as easily as a child dissembles building blocks. But Stone took it an extra step: He cleverly turned his adversary into an appealing character, a reflection of himself, by having his critiques of capitalism cozily couched in Gekko’s swagger. That’s why Wall Street became such a big success with Michael Douglas earning for him an Oscar.

The Gloriously Flawed Jane Tennison: Prime Suspect 1-7

Helen Mirren as Inspector Jane Tennison, in Prime Suspect 2 (1992).

It was with great sadness that I watched the last few minutes of Prime Suspect: The Final Act in 2007 because it meant that I would never again see any new material featuring the character of Jane Tennison – one of the finest character ever created for television. Now that the entire series has just been released as a DVD box set, it's a perfect time to look back at this landmark program. Over the course of 15 years (1992-2007), in seven miniseries, Helen Mirren played Tennison as a work-driven woman who pushed back societal barriers of sexism, misogyny and finally ageism to become a Detective Chief Inspector at a London police division. Later in the series, she became Deputy Superintendent in Manchester and finally ended up back in London. Unlike most shows that would be happy just dealing with the uplift of an independent woman proving her chops amongst the men, Tennison was a deeply flawed woman who paid an expensive price for her ambitions. Prime Suspect never condemned her for her drive, but rather looked compassionately at the high cost of it: failed relationships, alcoholism, unwanted pregnancies, ridicule, petty jealousy and loneliness.

Remembering Claude Chabrol: La Cérémonie

I’ve been thinking of Claude Chabrol ever since news of his death, at age 80, was announced about a week ago. And it occurred to me that like fellow New Wave filmmaker Eric Rohmer, who also died this year (but from the opposite end of the emotional spectrum), Chabrol successfully carved out his own specific niche in a corner of world cinema. Whereas Rohmer, like Mike Leigh, offered up generous portraits of (mostly) middle class people he liked very much, Chabrol used his cinematic canvas to excoriate those he didn’t like at all, namely the bourgeoisie from which he sprung. His films were almost always about the evils and wickedness emanating from the monied classes but he didn’t assail them in a simplistic manner nor did he pretend that the lower classes were paragons of virtue, either. Usually, the downtrodden ‘victims’ of the rich were able to match them when it came to guile and venality, perhaps never more so than in one of his best films, La Cérémonie (1995).

The Sum of its Parts: Contact's Five On One

Sometimes playing music isn’t about proving anything or making a social statement, it can just as much be about ebb and flow and being sensitive to the emotional nuances asked for by the composer. For jazz musicians, particularly as they age, it is less about ego and more about listening and contributing to the larger, musical picture. For Contact, a new band led by American Dave Liebman, the whole is definitely the sum of the parts.

Five On One is a new album of music featuring Liebman on soprano and tenor saxophones, John Abercrombie on guitar, Marc Copland on piano, Drew Gress on Bass and the remarkable Billy Hart on drums. Recorded in two days last January, Five On One is a sonic pleasure to the ears. The blend of sound is strong here because each musician is listening hard to what their fellow players are doing and having great ears, as I’ve written before, is the real key to making great music. The album opens with a very simple, yet direct 2-bar lick by Abercrombie called, "Sendup." But as usual (with the wry Abercrombie humour) the music is anything but parody. It’s a framework for the players to improvise and draw the listener in and it works immediately.

The Big C Gets a C+

It is no longer necessary to make the point that television is currently a lot better than film. TV series are drawing not only A-list actors (Glenn Close and William Hurt on Damages, Sally Field in Brothers and Sisters, Holly Hunter on Saving Grace, to list just a few), but also A-list directors (Agnieszka Holland has directed episodes of The Wire and Treme, and most recently, Martin Scorsese directed the pilot of the much-anticipated Boardwalk Empire, which premiered last night). Television has come a long way, and TV viewers are richer for it.

To a large degree, the increasing richness of television can be traced to its overall honesty – television’s willingness to show us things which are uncomfortable or ugly, and its ability to illuminate the details which make the lives of our favourite characters so intriguing. But there are shows with all the right ambition, shows which, despite their potential and intriguing subject matter, fail to live up to their own promise. The Big C is one of these shows.